A Flock of One’s Own: Nordic Human-Mountain Cattle Kinship-Making Practices

Abstract

Abstract This article employs critical cultural and anthropological perspectives to investigate the ways in which Nordic mountain cattle are kinned and become positioned as kin. It does so by empirically foregrounding photographic material, elicited from the 3MC Traditional Transboundary Cattle Breeds’ photo competition, along with photo elicited interviews with 13 of the participating photographers. Nordic mountain cattle become “kinned” as “mothers,” “family members,” “friends,” “colleagues,” and “pets” through a range of kinship-making practices such as naming, gendering, and anthropomorphizing cattle with distinct human-like personalities. The article concludes by turning to the affective values and cultural logics that situate mountain cattle as forms of Nordic cultural heritage. In these entanglements, mountain cattle resurrect Nordic cultural heritage and temporality facilitating new Nordic naturecultures in which humans are simultaneously (re)connected to nature and cultivated as future (new) citizens.