In a place too cold for humans to live unaided, people survive by becoming bound up with one animal that serves as food, clothing and transport all at once. The bond grows so close that the herders even come to look and smell like their herds. Losing the animal would mean losing the possibility of living there at all.
A state that forces a people to give up moving freely and to merge their herds into giant collectives also leaves them relying on its support. When that state collapses, the support vanishes, but the old self-sufficiency it replaced does not come back. The people are left stranded between two ways of life.
A people's language grows dense around whatever their survival hangs on. Herders are said to have some 1,500 words for their animals' colours, shapes, body parts, harnesses, illnesses, diets and moods. Even in herds of thousands, each animal gets its own name, drawn from its looks or its character.
Once a community's old way of life has been weakened, traders selling alcohol find easy customers and deepen the damage. On each return visit, the observer finds that yet another person he thought would never give in has done so. This pattern is not special to one region; it shows up wherever a culture is unravelling.
Traditional herding peoples now face several pressures at once: the weight of past state policy, oil pipelines cutting across their land, and a warming climate. Each one shrinks the room for the old life. Together they raise a real question of whether that life can last at all, and whether these peoples can keep their culture while adapting enough to survive.