This project documents the endangered mobile dairy preservation knowledge of the Bakarwal pastoral community in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. For generations, Bakarwal families have migrated seasonally with their goat and sheep herds across the Pir Panjal and Himalayan mountain ranges, producing butter, desi ghee, curds, and kalari using portable tools, animal-skin containers, open-fire techniques, and embodied sensory knowledge rather than written recipes.
These preservation practices from a sophisticated material knowledge system that is inseparable from seasonal mobility, landscape, and ecological conditions. Dairy processing is continuously adapted to changes in altitude, temperature, humidity, and available resources, making pastoral migration itself an essential component of the knowledge system.
Today, this tradition faces increasing pressures from conflict, militarization, forest regulations, climate change, pasture degradation, and shifting socio-economic conditions. Restrictions on migration routes, changing environmental conditions, and the growing move towards sedentarisation and wage labour are disrupting both the practice itself and the intergenerational transmission of knowledge, particularly that held by women.
Working collaboratively with Bakarwal community across their annual migratory cycle, the project will document dairy preservation techniques, tools, environmental decision-making, and oral histories through audiovisual recording, photography, interviews, and field documentation. The resulting archive will preserve an endangered body of ecological and material knowledge while highlighting the cultural intelligence embedded within mobile pastoral lifeways.
Project Goals:
This project aims to:
- Document the complete seasonal cycle of Bakarwal dairy preservation, recording techniques, tools, gestures, material processes, and and environmental decision-making through audiovisual, photographic, and written documentation.
- Record how ecological conditions – including altitude, weather, seasonal rhythms, and changing landscapes – influence dairy preservation practices throughout migration.
- Document the wider social, political, and environmental factors affecting the continuity of this knowledge system, including climate change, conflict, restricted access to grazing lands, and changing pastoral livelihoods.
- Recognise and foreground the knowledge of Bakarwal women, whose expertise in dairy preservation remains central to pastoral life but is rarely documented in heritage collections.
- Produce high-quality audiovisual documentation and detailed metadata compatible with the Endangered Material Knowledge Programme’s digital archiving standards, creating a lasting research resource for future scholarship and community heritage.
- Contribute to broader understandings of food heritage by demonstrating that endangered food knowledge is embedded not only in recipes or kitchens, but also in mobility, landscape, ecological adaptation, and everyday material practice.
PI: Sidra Wazir Khawaja
Collaborators: Javeria Masood; Jawad Ahmed Khokhar
Research Location: Pir Panjal & Himalayan Mountain Ranges, Pakistan-administered Kashmir
Host Institution: Maltfabrikken
Top Banner Image: Bakarwal woman milking the cow. Photo credit: Sidra Khawaja, 2024.