Hunting the wolf for «wind horses» among the Dörwöd Mongols, and revealing the individual

This presentation proposes an analysis of how a particular event, that is wolf hunting, is conceptualised in the Mongolian language. It aims at contributing to the ongoing debate about the interactions between potentially universal and language-specific features that shape the ways people relate to their natural environment. The analysis, which is based on ethnographic fieldwork, describes and explains how a Mongolian wolf hunter experiences two modalities of temporality: cyclical and ‘evenemental’. It shows how these two modalities are embedded into the Mongolian concept of ‘wind horses‘, hiimor’, in the context of wolf hunting. The actualisation of these temporalities reveals a particular perception of the environment as well as the singular moral position of an individual in it