As historians move away from unreasonably anthropocentric history, they are exploring interspecies pasts more forcefully than ever before.¹ An important focus is on how relationships between humans and other animals have shifted over time. This article is intended as a small contribution to this discussion. It considers an animal habitat — “Mithun Country” — that straddles the boundaries of three world regions that scholars have long treated as distinct civilizational entities. The historiographies of these regions — “South Asia”, “Southeast Asia”, and “East Asia” — are separated by the academic conventions of “area studies”, which are hard to overcome.

Taking Mithun Country as our starting point, we can develop a historiography that takes human–nonhuman relationships seriously and questions the human-derived spatial and temporal constructs that underpin most conventional historical narratives. In addition, we can re-examine an entrenched dichotomy in the study of human–nonhuman relationships: the contrast between wildness and domestication.

I focus on the interaction between humans and the mithun, a bulky but little-known bovine endemic in the eastern Himalayas. The aim is to show how mithuns have long decisively shaped numerous human cultures, how intense mithun–human relationships metamorphosed over the course of the twentieth century, and how interspecies spaces and times cut across purely human ones.

Mithun Country

What is a mithun? It is a large bovine that is usually described as semi-wild (or semi-domesticated). First portrayed by Europeans in 1804, it is known to scientists as Bos frontalis (Figure 1).² Its origins have long been disputed, with many authors believing that the mithun was a domesticated form of the gaur (another wild bovine, Bos gaurus).³ However, new genetic research has confirmed that mithun and gaur are completely distinct species.⁴ The most recent study even rejects an earlier assumption that the two species “might have originated from the same wild bovine, which is now extinct.”⁵ The mithun is not a domesticate; it is a wild species that has sought limited intimacy with humans, on its own terms.

The mithun is quite distinct from the better-known gaur in its appearance, distribution, genetic make-up, and behaviour — and its habitat is far more restricted.⁶ Mithuns are mountain dwellers (at altitudes from 300 to 4,000 m) in the eastern Himalayas (Figure 2).⁷ They prefer deep forests in steep foothills and higher slopes, shielded from the sun, and near rivers and salt licks.⁸ Their primary food consists of tree leaves, shrubs, bamboo shoots, and herbs — not grass.⁹ They are found only in Mithun Country, which snakes through Bhutan, Northeast India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and China (Figure 3), thereby connecting the academically distinct areas of “South Asia”, “Southeast Asia”, and “East Asia”.¹⁰

Mithun Country is a spatial entity that we can use as a building block in environmental history because it is not only ecologically but also culturally significant.¹¹ The humans inhabiting the mithun habitat are culturally and linguistically extremely diverse, but these cultures share a remarkable regard for mithuns.¹² Linguistic evidence points to “the deep-rooted importance of mithun culture in the region” and to the mithun being seen as a “prototypical” animal. In some of the region’s languages, the names of all other animal species are even derived from its name.¹³

Mithun Cultures

The mithun is a rare occurrence in conventional archival records because most societies in this region did not use writing — nor were they part of larger states — in some cases up to the eve of the Second World War.¹⁴ As mithuns themselves left few traces, studying human–mithun relationships is methodologically challenging. Written sources began to appear in the nineteenth century, but they tended to represent outsiders’ (mostly travellers’ and British imperial officials’) views of the human–mithun relationship.

Emic perspectives can be gleaned from other sources, however. Megaliths, woodcarvings, and textiles are sources of evidence that can be understood as expressing human–mithun mutuality. Many local art practices featured the animal, especially its head, which was considered its sacred core (see Figures 4 to 6 for examples). In this dispersed archive, mithuns are anything but marginal or incidental.

Other rich sources of information are stories, songs, dances, rituals, and place names in the many languages of Mithun Country.¹⁵ In these sources, mithuns often play a crucial ontological role, connecting the deep past with living memories. This significance was unfamiliar to the outside world until anthropologists began to publish written versions of stories, revealing them to be rich and varied.

For as long back as we know, mithuns have been key to the lifeworlds of many humans across Mithun Country. They became the prime sacred animals in the region’s various and distinct religious traditions, which are often lumped together as “animism”.¹⁶ The ontological value of these bovines derived from the fact that they figured prominently in origin stories, played a pivotal role in mediating between humans and supernatural forces, and could act as guides to the afterlife.¹⁷

The cosmological significance of mithuns was underpinned by stories of their crucial role in the creation and maintenance of the world. Several stories spoke of the world originally being covered with water, until “a great mithun dug a pit into which the waters poured and allowed the dry earth to appear”.¹⁸ Another story held that “the only creatures in the early world were two spirits, one of whom had the form of a mithun and the other the form of an elephant. They fought and killed each other and from their flesh and bones the world was formed.”¹⁹ A third explained that the first mithun tossed the sky up with its horns, creating a living space underneath for humans to inhabit.²⁰ And there was another belief that a great mithun supports the earth on its body. Its regular movements produce the seasons. When it twitches its ears, it causes a small earthquake, and when it suddenly moves its whole body, a large earthquake occurs.²¹ The closeness of humans to mithuns was also expressed in numerous stories that portrayed mithuns as kin.²²

A Salt Partnership

Mithuns are free-roaming forest animals that do not depend on humans for food or procreation. Humans did not hunt them. Mithuns were not fed, kept in pens, worked, or milked. Placid and shy, they may over centuries have tolerated human company for a single reason: a mutual love of salt. In stories about human settlement in Mithun Country, a recurring theme is that mithuns pointed humans to saltwater springs in the forest, after which people moved and settled in the area.²³

Humans did not domesticate mithuns. These bovines remained forest animals with a friendly attitude to humans. They tended to wander and disappear into the mountains, so humans regularly searched the forest to entice them with salt.²⁴ Mithuns could also come near a human settlement once every few weeks to get access to some salt (Figures 7 and 8).²⁵ Either way, humans used salt to create and maintain a bond with mithuns. They fed baby mithuns salt to encourage loyalty to the person providing it. Humans could identify free-roaming individuals by bodily signs: the colouring of their coats, their body size, the shape of their horns, and the small slits that humans had made in mithuns’ ear lobes. Based on these signs, humans claimed ownership.²⁶ But mithuns defied this anthropocentric label. They remained semi-wild, challenging conventional categories of wildness and domestication.²⁷

Mithuns as Intermediaries

Remarkably, the significance of mithuns to humans had nothing to do with their livestock potential. First and foremost, they were seen as sacred animals — the only living beings capable of moving between the parallel worlds of the forest and the village.²⁸ They were thought to have a special relationship with the spirits of both forest and village, and humans needed them as intermediaries to communicate with these supernatural forces.²⁹ The form that this communication took was ceremonial sacrifice.³⁰

Mithuns were not the only sacrificial animals in Mithun Country, but they were by far the most sacred, topping a list of lesser sacrificial animals.³¹ Mithuns were enveloped in cosmological significance: spirits were known to dwell in and around their horns and around the rope with which they were led and tethered.³² As the highest-ranking nonhumans, mithuns even had chickens sacrificed to their souls:

Oh female mithun! May the villagers speak well of you. Don’t get hurt, don’t sprain your legs, be well, may your prosperity be manifold and assured […] and wherever you go, may your journey be good. I call your soul with a chicken.³³

Mithun sacrifices were at the heart of an elaborate system of ceremonial feasting.³⁴ The preparations and interactions surrounding this ritual varied between different human groups but all of them acknowledged the cosmological significance of the event. People would wear distinct dresses for the ceremony, and mithun remains could be wrapped in a specially embroidered blanket.³⁵ Afterwards, mithun meat was ceremoniously shared and consumed and each mithun skull was carefully preserved and displayed on a sacred skull rack (Figures 9 and 10).³⁶ The cosmological and social significance of these “feasts of merit” was underlined by lasting commemorative symbols: wooden sacrificial posts, carved ceremonial stones showing mithun horns, and decorative wooden “horns” on the roof of a feast-giver’s house (Figures 4 and 5).³⁷

Through these sacrifices, mithuns became powerful symbols of status and (among some groups) fertility.³⁸ Ceremonial feasting was concurrently individual, in that it offered prestige and power to the organizer, and communal, in that it distributed spiritual benevolence and wealth among a community.³⁹ Mithun sacrifices were “religious, social and economic action” that accompanied trade deals, peace treaties, friendship pacts, marriages or deaths, and times of illness or misfortune.⁴⁰ As many as forty mithuns could be lured from the forest to be sacrificed in a single ceremony but in most cases a single mithun sufficed.⁴¹ Human well-being across Mithun Country critically depended on these sacrifices, which showed that humans needed mithuns far more than mithuns needed humans.

Mithuns as Badges of Identity

In the twentieth century, the societies of Mithun Country changed, Christianized, and gradually became incorporated into contemporary nation states. The symbolic meaning of the mithun shifted.⁴² In many cases, the ancient religious significance of the animal faded away. But mithun-human intimacy persisted. This closeness was expressed in many ways — humans felt they could decipher non-verbal mithun signs such as twitching ears or swishing tails, and occasionally they channelled the mithun’s voice. In a nostalgic lament (written by recruits on their way to wartime France in 1917), the mithun spoke its mind: it “grunt[ed] not wanting to bid farewell”.⁴³

The spread of Christianity among the region’s mithun-oriented mountain societies occurred at different times, because their encapsulation into British India occurred at different times. For example, the British attacked and annexed the Chin and Lushai hills (today: Mizoram in India and the Chin State in Myanmar) in the 1890s, after which missionaries began proselytizing. A generation later, many inhabitants had become Christians.⁴⁴ In the Naga hills this process had started much earlier, and in the region south of the Lushai hills Christian conversion did not commence until the 1940s. The church did not allow animal sacrifices, and yet many Christians continued to “show their reverence for this traditional sacrificial animal”.⁴⁵ They slaughtered mithuns only for very special occasions — community celebrations such as Christmas and weddings — during which the meat was shared and consumed largely in the traditional manner (Figures 11 and 12).⁴⁶

With the passing of colonial rule, Mithun Country was administratively dismembered. As new nation-states were forged, mithuns became confirmed crossers of the new state borders. They also emerged as an eco-cultural resource that allowed the people of Mithun Country to emphasize their regional identity. Ideas of regional belonging (sometimes across new state borders), self-determination, and Indigeneity crystallized around the figure of the mithun. With the development of new ethnic categories all over Mithun Country, mithuns came to represent these categories and their boundaries.⁴⁷

During the closing decades of the twentieth century, the mithun motif was expressed with increasing intensity and defiance. It marked cultural opposition to nation-building projects, especially in the states of Northeast India. This could take the form of a nostalgic re-enactment, a festive dress, body art,⁴⁸ a warning, or a festival (Figures 13 to 15). The mithun has also appeared in modern literature.⁴⁹

In addition to these eco-cultural appropriations, the mithun also became a powerful eco-political resource. It signalled the political distinctiveness of the region. Two Indian states — Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland (Figure 16)⁵⁰ — adopted the mithun as their “state animal”, which is interesting because state animals are always wild species.⁵¹ Mithuns thus became overtly political animals. Various emerging counter-elites in Mithun Country embraced the mithun to express regional anger, (sub)national aspirations, and armed struggles against state forces and coercive extraction (Figure 17). The title of a book about one of these regional aspirations articulates these feelings well: The Raging Mithun.⁵²

The historical intimacy of mithuns and humans across Mithun Country continues today under vastly different circumstances. The sacrality of the animal as an indispensable go-between with supernatural beings has largely morphed into a new sacrality of place, ethnic identity, regional belonging, and resistance to state coercion. Mithun sacrifices dwindled with the spread of Christianity, but mithun imagery flourished.⁵³ And this imagery emphatically highlighted the mithuns’ wild, untamed, and self-reliant characteristics.⁵⁴

Mithuns as Livestock

At the same time as locals re-imagined the mithun as a wild animal serving as a new emblem of regional distinctiveness, policy makers and scientists imagined the animal in a diametrically opposed manner: as a domesticated animal with commercial potential.⁵⁵ To them, it was a potential economic resource. Claiming national intellectual property and state control over mithun bodies, they made them a target of “scientific husbandry” and trade. In Myanmar, government plans involved army-controlled wildlife smuggling: the military rounded up mithuns and exported them (or their excellent meat) from Chin State to India.⁵⁶ In India a “National Research Centre on Mithun” was set up in 1988, with a view to exploiting and “developing” mithuns for their meat, milk, and leather.⁵⁷ Similar but smaller initiatives were undertaken in Bhutan (1970s), Bangladesh (1990), Myanmar (1990s), and China (2000).⁵⁸ Mithuns proved difficult to manage, however, partly because they are prone to fall victim to disease and die when taken to livestock farms, especially in the lowlands, as was the case in Bangladesh.⁵⁹ Scientists considered free-roaming to be “suboptimal”, however, so they promoted “semi-intensive mithun rearing units”, in which mithuns would roam freely during the daytime but were brought back to pens at night.⁶⁰ Genomic sequencing, semen selection, and biomedical research sought to frame the mithun as domestic livestock to be “improved” and manipulated.⁶¹ This utilitarian approach marked a complete disregard for the mithun as a wild species, to be sustainably preserved and protected together with its ecosystem of broad-leaf (sub)tropical forests.⁶²

Meanwhile, the mithun population was declining because of habitat destruction, crossbreeding, and climate change.⁶³ Mithuns are sensitive to heat and sunshine, and they respond to rising temperatures by moving up the mountains into deeper, cooler forests close to rivers and salt licks. There are indications that this affects the traditional intimacy between mithuns and humans because mithuns now live farther from human-inhabited spaces and no longer respond to salt-offering humans who call them.⁶⁴ Thus, climate change may have the effect of making mithuns more “wild.”

Interspecies Space

What does this brief example tell us about imagining space and time in environmentally sensitive ways? By taking an animal habitat to work towards how humans have made their living in it, we may open our minds to hitherto neglected interspecies geographies and suggest new entry points into the past. The space of Mithun Country is relevant because it emerged from animals. Humans all over this area — and only this area — developed profoundly meaningful connections and affinities with mithuns.⁶⁵ They integrated these nonhuman animals fully into their cultures.⁶⁶ And mithuns similarly developed ways to open their lifeworld to intermittent contacts with humans.

Arguably, other animals were also significant for humans in Mithun Country. The tiger and the hornbill (a large forest bird) played important roles in regional cultures as well, but there were three important differences. First, only the mithun became an indispensable intermediary between humans and supernatural beings by means of communal sacrifices. Second, the tiger and the hornbill are not restricted to Mithun Country; their habitats spread far beyond it, affecting other cultures differently. And third, only the mithun straddles the wildness–domestication divide, producing an interspecies partnership that differs fundamentally from human–tiger or human–hornbill relationships. Uniquely, the mithun’s natural habitat became a well-defined human cultural space.

Practitioners of the environmental humanities ponder which spaces are relevant to which research questions. Mithun Country obviously does not follow human territorial boundaries (state borders, area studies, ethnic divides), but neither does it fit broad ecological spaces, such as watersheds, climate zones, ecoregions, or the “global biodiversity hotspots” that guide much current research. Mithun Country crosses the boundaries of nine internationally recognized terrestrial ecoregions.⁶⁷ It also straddles three global biodiversity hotspots: “Indo-Burma”, “Himalaya”, and “Mountains of Southwest China”.⁶⁸

These boundary crossings show that broadly drawn ecozones must be disaggregated to study specific interspecies histories effectively. Mithun Country is an example of an environmental zone defined by mithun–human reciprocity. The mithun is endemic in this space, and over time this space has become the home of a group of mithun-oriented human cultures.⁶⁹ A distinctive interspecies geography took shape, a vernacular corridor that defiantly wends its way through the eastern Himalayan uplands.⁷⁰

Generations of scholars have repeated the unproven view that the mithun is a domesticated form of the wild gaur.⁷¹ It might be closer to the truth to say that, historically, wild mithuns have approached human newcomers who entered their domain thousands of years ago, and that these mithuns thereby domesticated humans to become salt-dispensing partners, while keeping their own freedom to roam at will.⁷² In turn, humans acknowledged the might of mithuns by imagining them to be creators of the world and formidable mediators with supernatural powers on behalf of humans. Looked at in this way, the mithuns unintentionally led the way in creating a unique relationship between nonhuman and human animals that challenges the routine distinction between “wildness” and “domestication”, and between “nature” and “culture”. Evidence from Mithun Country shows that local thinkers did not make that distinction in quite the same way.⁷³ Rather, they saw an all-inclusive universe in which spirits, nonhuman animals and humans formed dynamic partnerships of respectful reciprocity. In this encompassing environmental space, mithuns acted as guides to humans, and as crucial go-betweens between humans and spirits.

Interspecies Time

The example of Mithun Country also alerts us to ways in which the narratives of the environmental humanities might deal with temporality. In Mithun Country, the conventional periodization that professional historians use to organize their narratives is of limited value. Anthropocentric, state-oriented periods (for example, “precolonial”, “colonial”, “postcolonial”, or “dynasty”) are inadequate. At best, they fit only parts of the mithun habitat, and they fit these at different moments in time.⁷⁴ Therefore, they fail to cover the historical development of human-mithun relations across the mithun habitat. And, crucially, they do not even correspond to how humans in Mithun Country have conceptualized time.⁷⁵

Human–mithun relations have their own timescales and these can be helpful in developing interspecies periodization. For example, after a long period of religious stability, in which mithun sacrifices were fundamental rituals that structured the annual cycle as well as human lifecycles, the cosmological landscape changed.⁷⁶ From the late nineteenth century, people in Mithun Country began to embrace new religions, notably forms of Christianity and Buddhism that frowned upon mithun sacrifice. This gradually altered the relationship between mithuns and humans, as mithuns lost much of their spiritual significance. But mithun meat retained its exceptional and revered aura; it was only shared and consumed during momentous community celebrations.

A further change occurred in the second half of the twentieth century, when humans native to Mithun Country began to use their historical connections to the animal to assert their sense of place, their ethnic and political identities, and their struggles against imposed state policies. As mithuns saw their forest habitat shrink, humans reinvented the mithun as an environmental badge of indigeneity, authenticity, anger, and defiance — a badge that underlined wildness and interspecies union.

A third shift took place in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, when scientists in the five states whose territories cover Mithun Country discovered the commercial potential of mithuns. They claimed mithuns as a national resource and attempted, with mixed success, to turn them into regular livestock whose meat and leather could be marketed.

We may use such human-nonhuman turning points to structure narratives of interspecies temporality. Historians are increasingly aware of the importance of more-than-human periodization to highlight our embeddedness in our ever-changing environment. In some historiographies, “catastrophic” interspecies periodization already trumps anthropocentric periodization — for example, in the study of pandemics, the Columbian exchange, mass extinctions, and global warming. But less spectacular and smaller-scale shifts in human-nonhuman relations can also contribute to much-needed guidelines for interspecies periodization. For example, Mithun Country — just one example of a specific regional space/time combination — suggests the salience of distinguishing between “eco-system-level” time (the temporality of the mithun habitat) and “single-interspecies-level” time (such as human–mithun temporality).⁷⁷

Conclusion

This brief exploration of Mithun Country suggests five issues to contemplate. First, by focusing on nonhuman actors, we can contribute to overcoming the parochialism of overly anthropocentric history. Whether we look at microbes, fungi, plants, nonhuman animals, or natural elements (rivers, swamps, forests, deserts, seas, storms, earthquakes, or mountain ranges), they all help us decentre humans and take nonhuman space and time seriously. The mithun case exemplifies how nonhumans co-produce human spaces and times, often without us realizing it. Over a long period of time, distinct societies in a large geographical region attuned their cultural sensibilities and cosmological assumptions to the same animal. This remarkable feat of cultural convergence attests to the unwitting power that a semi-wild bovine exerted over generations of humans. This is a valuable finding that environmental historians can incorporate into their analyses of interspecies agency. Animals that were once seen as silent bystanders, and as props, specimens, living machinery, and commodities in human histories, are better understood as historical partners.⁷⁸ This insight challenges the conceptual border between humans and nonhumans that inspires anthropocentric history — but it resonates strongly with customary worldviews in Mithun Country.

Second, environmental histories hardly ever coincide with contemporary or historical state and world-area entities. They disregard human-designed boundaries. Mithun Country straddles the national territories of India, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and China. In addition, it connects the academic templates of “South Asia”, “Southeast Asia”, and “East Asia.” It exemplifies how an environmental history approach can help us highlight complex connections between world areas. The concept of ecological “transregions” (which may overlap and change over time) has been suggested as a useful heuristic tool for crossing the notional borders of world areas.⁷⁹ The borders of such transregions may be understood as co-produced; for example, mithun foraging patterns may have determined human border making.⁸⁰

Third, spaces are always time-bound, so “mapping” and “timing” go hand in hand. The standard periodization of, for example, South Asian studies makes little sense in Mithun Country where diverse cultural traditions have constructed time differently, providing an opportunity to delve into the multiplicity of timing in South Asia and refine interspecies periodization.⁸¹ This is particularly relevant in the current era of rapid environmental change. As the landscapes of Mithun Country are degraded by human interference, and nonhuman habitats are shrinking, our mapping and timing must adapt accordingly.

Fourth, this tour of Mithun Country alerts us to a well-known, deep-seated problem: a fundamental distinction between the domains of “nature” and “culture” in the production of academic knowledge. Environmental history has long rejected this distinction — the environment is always a nature-culture amalgam. Put differently, the human touch is planetary, and it is a fallacy to think of humanity as existentially alienated from nature. The fantasy of an untouched, pristine, unspoiled nature produces problematic terms like “wildness” and “conservation”. The deep mountain forests that the mithuns prefer as their habitat are not pure or primeval in any sense. Like all other “natural” phenomena, they have long histories of human interference. As mithuns demonstrate by their behaviour, creatures can be “wild” and “domestic” at the same time. Domestication is best seen as a spectrum on which mithuns have never moved far, even though their intimacy with humans has deep roots.

And fifth, this case study nudges us towards studying unconventional sources of historical information (notably multilingual oral archives and material remains such as landscapes, forest habitats, megaliths, skull racks, bones, woodcarvings, and ceremonial posts) and reconsidering what constitutes relevant and reliable evidence about the past. To this end, academic historians should take locally-based, non-academic narrators of the environmental past more seriously than most of us have done. Indigenous forms of knowledge production, conveyed in local languages, are key to deciphering the Indigenous cosmologies of Mithun Country. These interpret the environment as an all-inclusive universe in which spirits, nonhuman animals and humans form dynamic partnerships of respectful reciprocity. This worldview — articulated in songs, stories, dances, rituals, material remains, dress, and sculptural art — shaped past attitudes and behaviour. And this worldview is still perceptible in modified form today.

So we, academic historians, need to distance ourselves more from that romantic figure of the lone heroic scholar ploughing endlessly through dusty records. Record-ploughing certainly remains extremely important (although increasingly on-screen). But as environmental historians have been demonstrating for years, there are essential sources beyond the archetypal archive. These have been called proxy records:

many of the questions asked by environmental historians cry out for reliable proxy records […] that may reflect, for example, deforestation, erosion, salinization, or changes in species compositions […]. While these disparate sources of data do not always combine as easily as we might like, the various material “proxy” records are an essential part of researching environmental history, even in very recent periods.⁸²

This is a crucial point for Mithun Country because here written sources are uncommon and proxy records are the main carriers of environmental historical information. The field of environmental history is only beginning to be developed in this region, so we can put its nascent historiography on a thoroughly interdisciplinary footing, overcoming academic silos. Theoretical insights and research methods from disciplines beyond the humanities and social sciences can assist in unlocking alternative interspecies ways of “mapping” and “timing” the region. In other words, we can take a cue from the mithuns’ wandering habits, by crossing disciplinary, national, and area-studies borders ourselves.