Herding Memories of Humans and Animals

The study of a herd marks the point where ethnography and ethology meet. In the midst of this shared phenomenon, versions of ‘the social’ hinge on relations between herders and herd. In this paper I consider how our understanding of a herd might be extended by an awareness of its diverse geographies. This is achieved by reconstructing the entwined biographies of human and animal subjects dating from the reintroduction of reindeer to Scotland in 1952. The first transportation of reindeer from Scandinavia to the Cairngorm mountains was orchestrated by Mikel Utsi, a Lappish emigré from northernmost Sweden, and Ethel John Lindgren, a social anthropologist from Cambridge, of American–Swedish descent. What began as an ecological–economic experiment would occupy the couple until their deaths: Utsi's in 1979 and Lindgren's in 1988. I draw on a ‘make-do’ methodology undertaken in collaboration with past herders and the scattered company of the present herd: walking a sentient topography of traditional grazing grounds; renewing encounters with charismatic animals through photographic portraits; consulting an archive of herding diaries; and mapping a hidden ecology of landscape relics. These different registers of memory are used to explore how day-to-day engagements between herders and herd were rooted in unconventional systems of ecological and cultural knowledge. By reanimating a local landscape, the resulting narrative works at an intimate scale, while simultaneously gathering momentum from transnational movements of humans, animals, and traditions. Here, salvage and exchange are possible between geography's heritage of landscape and folk study and the sculpting of contemporary research.