Under the Same Sky: Science, Knowledge, and Modernization in the Kazakh Society of Altay

Abstract

Drawing on phenomenological anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS), this ethnography examines how modernization, state infrastructure, and digital networks are reshaping the local knowledge and everyday practices of Kazakh pastoralists in Altay, China. It begins by questioning the outsider assumption that nomadic herders use celestial bodies as abstract tools of navigation, and instead shows pastoral mobility as a form of "dynamic dwelling" grounded in embodied experience and everyday taskscapes. Through comparisons between traditional wooden yurts and standardized iron frames, experiential weather knowledge and algorithmic forecasts, and local healing practices and modern biomedicine, I argue that modernization does not simply replace local knowledge in a linear process. Rather, pastoralists selectively adopt, combine, and negotiate new technologies through processes of sociotechnical translation and ontological multiplicity, while traces of earlier practices and bodily memory continue to persist as "vestigial infrastructures." The study therefore questions technological universalism and argues for a more plural understanding of knowledge, in which scientific abstraction and situated mētis can illuminate different aspects of the same world and, in doing so, deepen human understanding of the cosmos.