In-Between the Rural and the Urban: Skill and Migration in Ulaanbaatar’s Ger-Districts

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I describe the experience of rural-urban migration amongst herders to Ulaanbaatar’s ger-districts. I show how this problematises conventional notions of rural-urban migration and suggests a particular form of urbanisation in Mongolia. Following one particular household as they move from the countryside to the city, I show how for many new migrants adaptation to urban life is tied to the transposition of existing skills – and the learning of new skills – in the new urban context. I also show some of the more problematic aspects of life in the ger-districts, including the devaluation of herding skills and the existential impact of deskilment on gender and identity. In the process, I develop a phenomenologically-grounded political-economy of skill, whereby social, economic, and political change can be traced at the level of human embodiment and polydirectional experiences of enskilment and deskilment.

KEYWORDS:

• Rural-urban migration
• urbanisation
• skill
• herding
• Mongolia

Introduction

Although Mongolia conjures images of vast grasslands and mobile herding communities, urban settlements have been a feature of Mongol society throughout history (Sneath 2006: 140). The capital city, Ulaanbaatar, was founded in 1639 as a mobile monastic centre which moved frequently over subsequent decades, eventually becoming established as a permanent centre attached to the monastic core (Campi 2006: 20). Importantly, Ulaanbaatar included a ‘ger-district’ throughout its early history, specifically housing the city’s expanding sedentary population (Campi 2006: 21). This is signficant as it shows how the ger – as the archetypal dwelling of herding mobility – has a long history as an urban dwelling (Evans and Humphrey 2002: 189), which is important when considering urbanisation and the experience of rural-urban migrants today.

Since the collapse of state socialism in 1990, the number of herders that have migrated to Ulaanbaatar has increased significantly. Today, it is estimated between 5000 and 10,000 people enter the city each year in search of employment, education, and because of their inability to survive via animal herding (NSOM 2009). This is compounded by several factors. First, the closure of the negdels (state farms) has encouraged herders to move closer to Ulaanbaatar to access new markets, while growing unemployment in regional centres has also pushed migrants to the capital city. The collapse of state institutions following the end of state socialism also played an important role, as health care, education, and the provision of social services became compromised in rural areas (also see Brunn and Li 2006: 162).

According to conventional wisdom rural-urban migration is characterised by people seeking new opportunities for work, education, and improved living standards. Here the commonplace assumption is that this is a linear and permanent process, with people severing their links with the countryside as they move into urban centres (Eames and Goode 1977: 41; also see Jaffe and De Koning 2015). In fact, several studies have shown that the relationship between the rural and the urban is far more fluid: Goldstein (1984), for example, notes that return, repeat, and temporary migrations are also common; Bartle (1981) coined the term ‘extended community’ to refer to the cyclical migration pattern between rural and urban areas in West Africa; while Gugler (1991) described Nigerian migrants as ‘living in a dual system’ in-between the rural and the urban. Ferguson (1999: 42) has also shown the permeability between urban and rural livelihoods by emphasising how people move back and forth to the city (see also Geschiere and Gugler 1998). This is something similarly noted in the postsocialist context where Yessenova (2005) has shown the varying scales of rural-urban migration and their impact on Kazakh identity, while Flynn and Kosmarskya (2012) have described the divergent narratives of old and new migrants at different times in Kyrgyz history.

In this paper, I argue that rural-urban migration to Ulaanbaatar has taken a similarly complex form. I show that while in 2010 Mongolia officially became a predominantly ‘urban’ society for the first time, by 2012, 70% of Ulaanbaatar’s residents lived in the ger-districts: quasi-urban neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the city where ex-herders live in (now sedentary) gers (or in rudimentary wooden houses) and often keep herd animals. For many, moving to Ulaanbaatar is also often seen as a temporary strategy for coping with the postsocialist transition, with some moving back to – and almost all retaining ties with – their lives and networks in the countryside. I show how this problematises conventional conceptualisations of rural-urban migration as a unilinear process. I also show how this fails to capture the particular experiences of life among new migrants, particularly ex-herders whose skills and strategies blur the distinction between the rural and the urban.

Skill and Rural-Urban Migration

My theoretical approach to migration draws upon – and extends – the anthropology of skill. Here the majority of research has focused on the learning of craft skills and prioritised apprenticeships as a domain for conducting ethnographic fieldwork. This has led to important insights including skill as the locus of cultural transmission (Ingold 2000; Chaiklin and Lave 1996; Wenger 1999), apprenticeships as the basis for identity formation (Marchand 2008, 2013; Gieser 2008, 2014; Portisch 2009, 2010), and skill as the foundation for valuations of tradition (Grasseni 2009; Herzfeld 2004). I argue, however, that this relatively narrow focus on craft skills has to some extent limited the wider consideration of skill as a universal aspect of human Being (also see Ingold 2000). In other words, it has unwittingly reproduced a hierarchy between the so-called ‘high’ skills of the craftsperson, artist, and technical specialist and the ‘low’ skills of everyday life, such as those learnt in less formalised contexts such as living on the grasslands. After all, herders are specialists in their own lifeworlds and their skills are no less complex and deserving of attention than those in formalised work environments. Added to this, there has also been a relative failure to theorise the loss and transformation of everyday skills, their contestation in changing circumstances, as well as how they come to be transposed from one context to another. As I show below, anthropologists are ideally suited to describing the transformation of everyday skills and revealing – through ethnography – the existential implications that their adaptation, devaluation, and loss can have in times of social change.

This is something similarly noted by Harris (2005: 197) who sees much of the existing literature on skills as limited by their focus on craftwork and a weak contextualisation in relations of history and power. Such a view is shared by Grasseni (2009: 183–188) in her ethnography of the Italian Alps, where she prioritises the necessary sense of change and innovation behind her farmer interlocuters’ transmission of inter-generational skills. This points to a deeper consideration of skill in contexts of social, economic, and political change which will guide the present paper. It also highlights the relationship between skill and people’s existential sense of security, suggesting that a loss or transformation of one’s skills impacts the ability for meaning-making and thus notions of personhood and identity. To presage one of the dominant threads running through this paper: I ask what are the implications that a person, after becoming accomplished in a particular set of skills, is forced into a situation where those skills are no longer applicable, such as in rural-urban migration? How does this person transpose their pre-existing (‘rural’) skills into the new urban context while also learning entirely new skills when demanded? What are the existential effects of losing deeply meaningful skills such as those learnt from a lifetime living on the grasslands and how might we trace the impact of skill devaluation in contexts of radical change? In short, what can the anthropology of skill really do in practice?

I argue that rural-urban migration can be better understood from observing the transformation of people’s everyday skills. More specifically, I claim that by extending Ingold’s concept of enskilment – and developing a polydirectional approach to skill – one is afforded a useful lens for elucidating the nonlinear experiences characteristic of rural-urban migrants, such as in Ulaanbaatar. For Ingold, skills are ‘embodied capacities of action and perception’ that people learn in the course of handling everyday practical tasks throughout their lives (2000: 108). Here skill is approached not simply as a technique of the body (Mauss 1973) but ‘as part of a dynamic system in which the body actively engages with the affordances of its surroundings, the total field of relations constituted by the presence of the organism-person’ (Ingold 2001: 21). It is on this basis that Ingold discusses the transmission of skills between people and the generations. Traditional models of social learning, he notes, posit that cultural transmission occurs as a process of imprinting, in which so-called ‘rules’ and ‘representations’ are transferred from one person to another (Ingold 2001: 24; see e.g. Mackenzie 1991: 100). As Ingold notes (Mackenzie 1991), however, this reproduces the Cartesian dichotomy by assuming a division between the body and mind, when in fact skills cannot be reduced to rote learning of mental formulae but are generated processually by the whole body-person in articulation with his/her perceptual engagement with their surroundings: what Ingold terms enskilment. In other words, skills are learnt not simply by ‘reproducing’ them but by the person re-learning them ‘new’ for themselves. Now while Ingold’s approach provides much inspiration for thought, it remains a largely unidirectional model. That is to say, while it usefully describes the reproduction of skills it does not account for their transformation, the power relations behind their contestation, their loss or devaluation, or the changing political-economic contexts in which they come to be taught and learnt. In short, Ingold’s approach only tells one side of the enskilment story.

Building upon this, I argue that the concept of enskilment can be extended in a polydirectional way – to include not only the transmission of skills but also new skills learnt in articulation with change, as well as skills that are lost, forgotten, transformed, adapted, and transposed in relation to varying social, economic, and political situations. After all, if skills are transmitted not via the ‘passing on’ of a corpus of rules and representations (‘in the mind’) but regrown by people anew in the process of their own cumulative learning, then it goes to suggest that people will regrow their skills in articulation with the changing contexts in which they move through time. Thus, while some skills will be reproduced, new skills will be demanded, pre-existing skills will be transposed and adapated, and others might be lost, forgotten, or rendered obsolete. In order to better articulate this, I propose an extension of Ingold’s theoretical terminology: thus, accompanying the term ‘enskilment’ I suggest the inverted concept of deskilment to describe the loss or obsoletion of skills in articulation with processes of change. Concurrently, I propose the term skill transposition to capture the embodied movement or adaptation of a pre-existing skill from one context to another. In this way, I not only extend the conceptualisation of skill to consider its multiple trajectories, but also, I challenge the implicit teleology inherent within normative conceptualisations of change, such as in rural-urban migration. Here there is no presumption of a particular ‘direction’ (e.g. moving permanently to the city, people becoming ‘more urban’, cutting ties with rural areas) but a purposeful attentiveness to what Ferguson (1999: 42) calls the full diversity of co-existing variations. As I show below, this helps capture the ‘in-betweeness’ of life experienced by many ex-herders, who after moving to Ulaanbaatar reproduce and transpose certain (‘rural’) skills, while simultaneously learning entirely new (‘urban’) skills and losing or having other skills rendered obsolete through deskilment. Here the anthropology of skill is widened to become what I see as a political-economy of skill, an approach that accounts for the interdependence between minds and bodies – as explored so fruitfully in earlier accounts of craftwork – but placed more explicitly within a broader field of the changing environments in which people move through time.¹

In the sections below I describe the transformation of everyday skills from the perspective of one herding household who moved from the Shishged region of Northern Mongolia² to Ulaanbaatar. While the Shishged was one of the few places not to have experienced significant out-migration following the collapse of state socialism, by 2012 there was a net increase of people moving to the capital city.³ This was the result not only of new opportunities – both real and imagined – in Ulaanbaatar, but because of the 2011 dzud – winter conditions in which herd animals are unable to access the grasses underneath thick ice and snow.⁴ Here I describe how Baatar, his wife Gogi, and their two children – seventeen-year-old Chuluun and nine-year-old Narantuya – moved from the Shishged to Ulaanbaatar to start a new life. I show how life in the ger-districts is intertwined with the transposition of pre-existing skills – and the learning of new skills – in the urban context. I then consider some of the more problematic aspects of life in the ger-districts and their impact on skilled-practice, including people’s inability to adapt pre-existing skills and deskilment which result in existential dislocation, feelings of anomie, and alcohol abuse. In conclusion, I argue that skills should be seen not simply as practices which one comes to learn, transpose, or lose but as deeply meaningful embodied expressions of personhood. In this way, I emphasise the relationship between skills, people’s existential sense of security, and their capacity to hope, highlighting the experiential implications of finding that one’s skills are no longer relevant in the face of radical change.

From the Countryside to the City

In 2012 Baatar and Gogi lived in a steppe-forest region on the outskirts of Khatgal, a town of 7000 people connected by dirt road to the provincial capital of Khövsgöl province.⁵ Like many herders, their family had lost a significant number of animals during the 2011 dzud and, although Baatar rarely spoke about it, Gogi once confessed they had lost over 90% of their herd. This consisted mostly of the ever-important sheep and goats from which they acquired wool and cashmere to sell in Mörön market. By the time I arrived the family had only a handful of animals left and were visibly poorer than other households in the area.

It is commonplace for herders in Mongolia to not only share goods but also support one another in times of economic and ecological hardship. For Baatar and Gogi, this was complicated by the fact that both of their parents had passed away and, while Gogi had a younger sister, she lived some distance away in Bulgan province. As a result, the family did not have a strong support network, although importantly, Baatar’s elder sister – Uranchimeg – had moved to Ulaanbaatar in 2008. While Baatar had attempted to find work the family were still struggling and, in 2012, decided to follow his older sister to Ulaanbaatar in search of a new life.

There are different ways households can move from rural areas to Ulaanbaatar depending upon their location, economic situation, and embeddedness within networks of support. In the provinces of central Mongolia, it is comparatively easy as there is less distance to travel and a more established road network. It is for this reason why the majority of new migrants originate from the central provinces of Töv and Khentii (UNDP 2016), while travelling from remote provinces such as Khövsgöl is more complicated. Here the majority of people travel by a combination of public mini-bus and private vehicle. In Baatar and Gogi’s case, they first travelled in a jeep owned by a friend from Khatgal, who drove them 100km south to Mörön. There they met Gogi’s younger sister and her husband, who transported the family to their own home in Bulgan province 350 km from Ulaanbaatar. After staying several nights, Baatar then arranged to meet a driver with whom he had engaged in trade relations in the past. However, once in Bulgan this driver was nowhere to be found. After making numerous phone-calls Baatar eventually located another driver willing to take them into the city, but, at a significantly higher price. After travelling for three days the family finally arrived in Ulaanbaatar. As the vehicle approached from the northwest, the city revealed itself by the large concrete power stations situated on the edge of town. While Baatar had visited before he was still surprised by the dramatic transformations in the city, particularly the new commercial developments and ever-increasing sprawl of ger-districts. Gogi and the children, however, had never visited before and were clearly shocked by the sight, commenting that Ulaanbaatar looked very different to how they had seen it on television.

Ulaanbaatar is divided into nine districts, or duuregs, each of which is subdivided into sub-districts called khoroos. In 2007, there were 121 khoroos but, as a result of rapid urbanisation, the number was increased to 151 by 2012. Each khoroo has an identifying number, although some may also have a name (e.g. Narnii zam 13 or Rashaantiin 18). The city itself consists of a central district constructed in the 1940s and 1950s comprising both Soviet-style apartments and more recent residential blocks and office buildings (Byambadorj et al. 2011: 166). The ger-districts are situated on the outskirts of the city and literally expand on a daily basis, comprising rows of khashaa – or fenced compounds – of both stationary gers and wooden houses. Some of these are at a distance of up to fifty kilometres from the city centre, with people travelling for hours to make their way in and out of the city proper. As we shall come to see, this has important implications when considering opportunities for formal and informal employment (Meng 2001).

In 2000 Mongolia’s government conducted a nation-wide census which showed that Ulaanbaatar’s population had grown far quicker than anticipated. By 2012, 70% of residents lived in the ger-districts (also see Byambadorj et al. 2011: 167) which reflects an important economic division: while apartments are home to the more economically-advantaged the ger-districts are generally home to the economically-disadvantaged and new migrants from the countryside. In 2012, 80% of families in the ger-districts lived in gers all year-round, with no access to central heating, sewerage, or piped potable water. The remaining 20% lived in rudimentary wooden houses which also had limited access to infrastructure and services (NSOM 2012).

The expansion of the ger-districts is tied to Mongolia’s land policy as outlined in the New Constitution of Mongolia. This emphasised land privatisation but created two provisions: first, land ownership would only be limited to Mongolian citizens, and second, pastureland should never be privately-owned (Byambadorj et al. 2011: 170). As a result, land reform has been a largely urban process and thus differs from other postsocialist countries where primarily rural land has been the focus of privatisation (Verdery 2018). In Mongolia, privatisation in the ger-districts became a top priority given the high number of occupied plots, although by 2010 only 7.5% of Ulaanbaatar’s population had their land privatised (Byambadorj et al. 2011: 170). This has implications for migrants moving from the countryside as they are allowed to enter the city and erect their ger on any unoccupied plot of (‘pasture’) land provided it is not already privatised (Byambadorj et al. 2011: 171). It is for this reason why the majority simply arrive on the outskirts of a particular ger-district and over time construct wooden fences around their gers to claim a space.

Baatar’s sister had advised the family to travel to khoroo 17, a ger-district in the west of Ulaanbaatar where she and her husband also reside. This is in Songino Khairkhan düüreg, which is approximately 25 km from the city centre and positioned at the foot of one of Ulaanbaatar’s four mountains. After making our way through many unfamiliar roads, our vehicle eventually arrived at khoroo 17. Locating an empty plot of land – which is to say quite literally finding an unoccupied space along the current ‘edge’ of the ger-district – we disembarked the vehicle and began hauling out the household’s many belongings. Surrounding us on all sides were fenced compounds of gers and wooden houses which stretched off into the distance, although immediately to the back of the district was open (yet desertified) grassland. A number of herd animals were scattered across the area and even grazed in-between the ger compounds. As Gogi and the children set about unpacking their belongings Baatar walked over to the animals and looked closely at the ground. Rubbing his hand over the earth he returned with a smile on his face, commenting that the grasslands were actually in satisfactory condition and that perhaps he and the family could eventually obtain a few animals to provide milk.

After unpacking their belongings the family set about reconstructing their ger. Significantly, this followed precisely the same pattern as when moving between pastoral encampments, something which points to the specificity of rural-urban migration in Ulaanbaatar. In Mongolia, pastoral mobility is a regular and systematic process according to seasonal rotation, with all herders deconstructing and erecting their gers in exactly the same way.⁶ Just as in the countryside, Batukhan first laid the wooden pallets which make up the floor upon the ground, then placed the larger furniture items and central stove on top. He and Chuluun then surrounded these with the foldable wall of the ger known as the khaya, followed by the door and roof, and finally covering the dwelling with the iconic white canvas material. Just as in the countryside, they specifically ensured that the door of the ger faced south, which is considered locally to avoid misfortune and just so happened to afford a particularly expansive view of the city. The household then began putting their personal belongings away in strategic places around the ger which, in Mongolia, also follows a highly formalised structure, specifically according to the spatial organisation of the dwelling and cultural conceptualisations of gender and status (Sneath 2000: 221; Humphrey 1978). For example, higher-status objects (and people) are placed in the northern and most respected part of the ger, known as the khoimor, while more junior people and objects are place in the southern part closer towards the door (Sneath 2000: 221–223). At the same time, it is the male members of a household who generally occupy the eastern (zuun) side of the ger, which is reflected in the kind of objects stored there, such as saddles, bridles, guns, and other items typically used by men only. Similarly, as women spend the majority of their time in the western (baruun) side of the ger this includes the kitchen area and those things typically used by women only, such as storage cupboards, cooking and eating utensils, as well as the majority of foodstuffs. This division even extends to the storage of specific articles of food, with freshly slaughtered meat, for example, kept on the masculine side (while it bleeds) and all ‘white foods’⁷ (tsaagan idee) kept on the opposite female side (Sneath 2000). For herders, these conceptual divisions are taken-for-granted aspects of setting up the ger ‘properly’, just as it would be ‘impossible’ for someone to erect the dwelling without the door facing south.

These dimensions of pastoral mobility have important implications for understanding the cultural specificity of rural-urban migration. Indeed, unlike migrants in other cultural contexts Mongolian herders are already accustomed to moving as part of their livelihood strategies, a familiarisation embodied in, and expressed through, a series of skills and practical knowledge which can be easily transposed into the new urban context. This includes things such as transporting items in an efficient way to maximise space, knowing how to store foodstuffs so they remain fresh for as long as possible, as well as placing objects in their ‘correct’ position inside the ger. While I would not suggest that migrating to the city was, for Baatar and his family, ‘just like any other movement’, the fact remains they are already familiar with moving from a lifetime spent living on the steppes – and this fundamentally influences their experience of life after arriving in the city. As Pedersen (2016: 228) describes, herding life is characterised by a specific experience of temporality, whereby continuity is afforded through movement from one part of the landscape to another. By setting up the ger with the door facing south, erecting each component in a set order, and placing furniture and people in the same (‘correct’) position each time, households effectively transpose their lives ‘as if they had never moved’. As Humphrey agrees, pastoral mobility is perceived as ‘a spatial liminality, into and out of the otherness of ‘travelling that is not travelling’ – paradoxically an otherness which serves to reassert the nomadic way of life – thereby negating movement in the everyday world’ (1995: 142–143). While Batukhan’s household did not explicitly comment on this I myself could see the gradual reconstruction of everyday (‘herding)’ life in khoroo 17, which necessitated a sense of familiarity that came to manifest in various informal ways: Gogi sat on her stool in the kitchen area putting away her cooking utensils; Narantuya lay on her bed and played with her toys; while Chuluun sat on the opposite side relaxing and cleaning his boots. Of course, it would be apocryphal to state that Baatar and his family did not experience the first hours of life in Ulaanbaatar as if they had never moved; on the contrary, everyone commented on some ‘new’ aspect of their surroundings, including the noise from the nearby road, the pollution in the sky, and the lack of a clean river nearby. However, what was also clear was that as a result of the dwelling itself – and the transposition of certain skills – there remained an element of continuity, one that undoubtedly influenced their experiences over the coming weeks and months. Some things, however, had already changed: as Baatar had sold all of his saddles, bridles, and herding equipment there was a visible gap in the eastern (masculine) side of the ger. As I would later come to see, this not only signified a physical gap, but an existential one as well, specifically in the lifestyle and sense of personhood of Baatar himself.

Transposing Skills in the Ger-Districts

Baatar and Gogi spent their first few days in the city familiarising themselves with khoroo 17. The most important first step was to locate a regular supply of fresh water for washing, drinking, and cooking. Baatar approached a neighbour and was given directions to a communal water pump. As he, Chuluun, and I followed the neighbour’s instructions we passed through a maze of fenced compounds, divided by potholed roads and piles of rubbish strewn along the street. After walking for twenty minutes we became totally lost, until Chuluun spotted the road we had taken on the day of our arrival. As we continued walking both Baatar and Chuluun commented how different everything was compared with the countryside, including how complicated the network of paths were and how crucial it was that they learn their way around before nine-year-old Narantuya started school. After eventually locating the pump we found a large number of people waiting in line, all of whom were holding plastic containers, buckets, and trolleys to transport their water. For Baatar the idea of having to stand in line every few days to collect ones water caused him some concern, especially as the walk had already taken us thirty minutes.

Access to potable water has long been a problem in the ger-districts. Water delivery occurs in two ways: in the centre of town apartment blocks are attached to centrally plumbed supplies, while in the ger-districts people either collect water from water-delivery kiosks (via a pump connected to the central system) or from large water tanks that are supplied by trucks. In 2012 a network of almost 600 water kiosks had been established across the city. On average, each kiosk serves approximately 900–1200 people and government regulations seek to ensure that no household is ever more than half a kilometre away from one (UNDP 2016). As the population expands this becomes increasingly difficult and so there is often a rush to collect ones water before long lines begin to form. Coupled with this, conditions inside the ger-districts can make it difficult to transport ones water efficiently to and from the kiosk: for example, while the distance between Baatar’s ger and the pump was less than half a kilometre, the mazelike roads meant that the journey still took thirty minutes one-way. Baatar explained that since this was something one needed to do every few days and, no longer having the option of using animal transportation, the family would need to adjust their daily rhythm and also invest in a trolley.

As we joined the back of the queue we were surprised to learn that access to the water pump was not free, which of course also differed from the countryside. While residents in apartment blocks are charged a flat rate (or a metered rate in newer apartments), people in the ger-districts are charged a nominal fee each time they visit. In 2012, this cost 280 MNT ($0.1 USD) per litre which, although not a major expense for most households, nevertheless is a new change for those living in the city for the first time.⁸ This inevitably comes to manifest at the level of skilled-practice, as having to pay for ones water means it becomes essential to have regular income and thus integrates people into new market relations. On average Baatar’s household used 20–30 litres of water per day, which amounts to just over $2 (USD). For Baatar, seeing his household would have to pay for what had always been a free resource was a moment of realisation, stating that he and the family would very soon have to find work.

Knowing how to find, carry, and store water is a fundamental skill in rural Mongolia. As water is required for all drinking, cooking, and washing, as well as sustaining ones animals, herders must be able to locate fresh water, transport large quantities effectively, and know how to ensure it remains potable for as long as possible. These are skills that are easily transposed into the new urban context, even while they have to be adjusted. Upon returning to the ger Baatar and Gogi set about pouring their water into the same plastic storage containers as they had done in the countryside. They then placed these containers in the same key positions around the ger where they know the water will remain fresh, specifically along the lower portion of the ger wall which can be rolled up to allow air to flow through.

Travelling to the water kiosk became the household’s first regular activity and was carried out by Baatar and Chuluun four mornings per week. This gave the family the beginnings of a new routine and, by making the trip regularly, they also started learning their way around the ger-district, even finding new short-cuts when travelling back and forth. They also began speaking with neighbouring households who undertook the same journey, who not only shared important information (e.g. the location of shops and rubbish collection points) but instilled an emerging sense of community. This resulted in various practical changes: while they had initially carried the water by hand, Baatar started borrowing a trolley from one of his neighbours, which reduced their total number of visits per week.

Now while the collection of water might seem a relatively peripheral activity, it is precisely through such quotidian tasks that new migrants first experience – and adapt to – life in the city. This process of adaptation is fundamentally intertwined with the learning and transposition of skills, as people enter into new human-object and human-human relations (also see Sigaut 2002). Over time, and with practice, these become taken-for-granted aspects of daily life: I could see that for Baatar and the family what at first appeared as ‘new’ and ‘different’ (the roads, the rubbish on the street, the line of people waiting at the kiosk, the pump itself, etc.) gradually became familiar, sedimenting or, we might say, ‘entangled’ (Hodder 2011) into the activities of everyday life, even while they altered such activities at the same time. For example, Gogi knew on which days the water would begin to run out; Chuluun knew when he should ask the neighbour to borrow the trolley; and eventually both children started undertaking the water run themselves as they had met other youngsters who collected water on behalf of their families. Seen from this perspective, skill can be seen as the practical foundation of people’s adaptation to the new urban environment, growing familiar with new routes and spaces, meeting and interacting with new people and, to paraphrase Ingold (2000: 186), actively engaging with the affordances of their surroundings.

Of course, carrying out such quotidian tasks were not only essential for daily life but also played an important role in reaffirming people’s identities in the new urban space. This was visible particularly for Gogi who, over the following days and weeks, reproduced many of the same everyday activities she had done in the countryside, such as making tea, washing clothes, and preparing meals. In the case of the latter, she initially used the animal products and commodities brought from the countryside, such as flour to make noodles and dumplings, ‘white foods’ for breakfast and lunch, and dried meat boiled for dinner. Mongolian herders are highly skilled in not only making a variety of foods from animal products, but more specifically, preparing foods which are able to be stored for extended periods of time. Herders have also developed unique methods for processing milk, including boiling, adding bacteria from yoghurt, adding sugar, flour, and drying, which act as preservation techniques. As these can be easily transposed to life in the ger-districts they generate an important sense of familiarity, firstly for the household, and secondly, for mothers and wives such as Gogi. By reproducing familiar activities (and meals), this not only plays a part in reaffirming people’s identities but also re-establishes culturally-defined roles after migration. Particularly in the Mongolian context, the performance of everyday tasks – and the skills associated with them – are fundamentally tied to ones gender and relative positioning within a household. The Mongolian word yos (‘rules’ or ‘manners’) is indicative of this, referring not simply to social conventions but, when applied to persons themselves, indicates that they know how to perform certain activities ‘properly’ (Humphrey 1997: 25; also see Sneath 2000: 151). In other words, for a herder to learn the skills of making the morning tea, driving the animals out to pasture, or preparing certain ‘white foods’ are actually ways of learning how to be a female or male person as conceived in the Mongolian cultural imaginary. As Ingold notes: ‘By becoming ‘enskilled’ in intergenerational, customary learning, one becomes a person, to the point that the actual ‘objectives of production’ (are) the constitution of persons’ (1993: 439). Seen from this perspective, being able to maintain culturally-meaningful and gender-specific skills such as food preparation and working in and around the ger, enabled Gogi to reaffirm her role and social identity in the new urban space, specifically as a Mongolian woman, mother, and wife. As we shall come to see, this has important implications in contexts where skills are either lost or devalued and people are unable to adapt to life in the city, which often leads to existential dislocation, feelings of anomie and, in some cases, alcohol abuse and violence.

This is something which also calls to attention the specificity of rural-urban migration in the Mongolian context, as well as how the teleological narrative of a clear and linear transition from the rural to the urban fails to capture the lived-experience of new migrants. Indeed, for ex-herders such as Gogi, much of daily life in khoroo 17 actually remained quite similar to that in the countryside: although the position of the ger had changed, most of the activites inside the dwelling remained the same. Now again, this is not to suggest that life somehow remained ‘static’, but rather, that the transposition of certain skills afforded an important sense of experiential continuity. Here terms such as ‘urbanisation’, ‘urbanism’, and ‘rural-urban migration’ do not fully capture Gogi’s particular experience of life in the ger-districts, where the line between the ‘rural’ and the ‘urban’, the old and the new, is rather blurred, cut across by a series of skills and practices which transcend these boundaries. As I show below, this has important implications for people’s existential sense of security, particularly in the face of other changes such as seeking informal work.

Social Relations, Gender, and New Skills in the City

After several weeks in Khoroo 17 the family decided to contact Uranchimeg to help Baatar find work. Baatar’s sister was living 1 h walk away closer to the city centre, though her husband had a motorcycle and could reach the household in approximately 20 min. Cultural norms in Mongolia inculcate social relations of obligation to help one’s relatives and close friends (Sneath 1993: 193–194) and, as the eldest sister, Uranchimeg took a certain level of responsibility for the family after their arrival. This came to the fore over the following months as she assisted Baatar and the household in a number of ways: first, she took Gogi on a tour outside the ger-district and showed her the nearest (and cheapest) shops; second, she showed them how to use the city transportation system; and third, she took Baatar and Gogi to Narantuul – Ulaanbaatar’s largest open-air market – where Uranchimeg’s husband introduced Baatar to a number of retailers who could offer informal work. I also observed Uranchimeg give money to the household on a number of occasions, as well as household commodities such as flour, tea, and rice. This is significant as it reveals how the social relations of obligation connect with newer processes of change such as rural-urban migration. It also shows how new migrants become integrated into city life on the basis of existing social relations and networks of support. Indeed, I visited many households in the ger-districts and rarely encountered people who were ‘alone’: either they had friends and family living in close proximity or had established contact with people through friends and family from their rural provinces. This again problematises the strict division between the rural and the urban: here migration is not experienced as a process of diminishing ties to life in the countryside, but rather, life in the city is facilitated through the maintenance of such ties and their strategic deployment in the new urban context.

As I left the household in summer and returned in the middle of autumn, I could see that Uranchimeg had been a vital source of support. Gogi had settled in well and become familiar with her new surroundings. Uranchimeg had assisted enrolling Narantuya in a local school and by now everyone knew their way around. Their daily activities now included a range of new services such as rubbish collection points, communal latrines, and various shops and businesses. By autumn the ger itself also featured a far greater supply of food products, including large amounts of flour, oil, sugar, and tea, as well as a steady supply of ‘white foods’ that Gogi had prepared.

Several days after my return I noticed Gogi preparing urum, or clotted cream. This is a common ‘white food’ made by heating milk just below boiling point and, in regular intervals, scooping ladlefuls high into the air allowing it to splash back into the pot to create a bubbly foam. This ‘scooping’ technique has a specific term in Mongolia – sаmrakh – and is necessary because the shallow wok-like Mongolian pot makes regular stirring largely ineffective. At the same time, the technique has the quality of an embodied ritual and is a common sight across the Mongolian countryside, with daughters learning the technique by assisting their mothers and grandmothers. Once the foam begins to accumulate the milk is left to cool; it is then covered and left overnight, following which a skin of clotted cream (the urum) will have formed, which is scooped off and either stored or consumed fresh. Now in order to prepare urum one generally requires a fairly substantial amount of fresh milk and I was surprised that Gogi had at least ten litres bubbling away. As she explained, she had initially been forced to buy store-bought milk until Uranchimeg introduced her to a neighbour who had close ties with herding households immediately on the outskirts of khoroo 17 (‘in the countryside’). This neighbour delivered milk via motorcycle directly from the pastures and sold it to Gogi and others at a relatively low price. In general, I observed herders travelling frequently from outside the city into the ger-districts to sell milk and other animal products, which allowed residents to not only avoid buying store-bought items but also continue producing ‘white foods’ inside their urban gers.

This example further demonstrates the permeable relationship between the rural and urban sectors of life in the ger-districts. By being able to source milk directly from herding households, residents not only reduce their costs but also produce many of the same foods as prior to migration – and which again can be stored for extended periods of time. It also significant to note the implications of this with regards to the teaching and learning of skills. For example, I observed Narantuya assisting her mother in preparing a whole series of ‘white foods’ in the ger-district, including making urum and having perfected the same sаmrakh scooping technique she had learnt from her mother. Here I was reminded of Ingold’s (2001: 20) conceptualisation of skill as the locus of cultural transmission. For Ingold, what anthropologists typically call ‘cultural continuity’ or the ‘reproduction of tradition’ can actually better be seen as a process of enskilment. Importantly, enskilment here does not depend on the transfer of static rules and representations ‘in the mind’ but on what Ingold calls systems of apprenticeship – human relationships, such as that between Gogi and Narantuya – where more and less experienced practitioners are engaged in contexts of hands-on activity, and it is through the reproduction of these relationships that continuity of tradition depends (2001). What is interesting is how this continuity of tradition is transposed from the countryside to the ger-districts: what we might think of as a ‘traditional’ or ‘rural’ skill (including the sаmrakh technique) is easily reproduced in the city – specifically because the system of apprenticeship (between mother and daughter) is re-activated through the particular form of social life that has emerged in the quasi-urban environs of the ger-districts. This is something more broadly described by Brunn and Narangoa (2006: 14), who note that, despite the growing pace of change, elements of rural and urban lifestyles intertwine in Ulaanbaatar:

New habits, styles, and goods from the cosmopolitan city are adopted in rural culture as much as rural people move into urbanised areas with their animals and yurts. Thus, both persons and places transcend the distinction between the rural and the urban. Pastoral people in great numbers move towards the cities, without this necessarily resulting in general and permanent sedentarisation.

As noted above, Gogi had been the one person to have adjusted to life in the ger-districts most rapidly. Partly this was due to Uranchimeg’s help but also because of Gogi’s own ability to transpose pre-existing skills into the new urban context. This could also be seen as Uranchimeg organised for her to apply for a job in a local cleaning company. The position was relatively well-paid and based in the centre of Ulaanbaatar, from where cleaners were sent to work in various office building across town. Initially, Gogi was apprehensive because she presumed they would be looking for what she called a more ‘professional’ person. Also worrying her was the fact that she would have to attend an interview, the very prospect of which caused her much concern. In the lead-up to the interview she spent hours preparing with Uranchimeg, including holding a ‘mock interview’ and spending time washing her finest clothes so as to appear presentable. Interestingly, Uranchimeg advised her to wear ‘branded’ clothing so as to ‘appear more professional’, as well as purposefully ‘hide’ her Darhad accent so as not to appear ‘not too countryside’. A few days prior she also asked Chuluun to research the cleaning company on the internet and learnt the bus-route as she did not want to arrive late. After much effort Gogi finally headed off to the interview and, a few hours later, returned with the good news that he had been selected for the job.

On the one hand, it might appear that new migrants such as Gogi would be highly suitable for a relatively low-skilled position such as a cleaner. It must be remembered, however, that such positions are highly sought after not only by new migrants but unskilled urban workers as well. As Gogi explained, there were 10 candidates for just one position and she was surprised by her success. Over the course of the following months, Gogi clearly enjoyed working at her new job. Every morning, three times a week, she departed by bus to central Ulaanbaatar and was given the address of a location to where she would travel – expenses paid – and spent several hours cleaning. As she explained, it took time to get used to all of the specific rules and using unfamiliar products and tools. However, she gradually became accustomed and started enjoying her new work. Not only did it afford her a visible sense of pride but she also characterised her job as working to support the family.

Now Gogi is an apt example of the way in which some migrants arrive in Ulaanbaatar and actively harness the new affordances they encounter. It must be remembered that the kinds of skills which she learnt were not only those manifested in the interview setting, but a broader set of bodily skills such as moving through the city, taking public transport, and interacting with ‘professional’ Ulaanbaatar-based clients. This has interesting parallels with Ferguson’s (1999) discussion of skill amongst rural-urban migrants in the Zambian Copperbelt. He describes the way in which migrant workers adopt particular forms of embodied ‘style’ as they move back and forth between the countryside and the city. When speaking with rural age-mates, for example, they adopt a range of body-techniques which signify their ‘rural capital’, such as walking and dressing in a manner that is entirely different to that when seeking work in the city. Importantly, style here is, as Ferguson notes, a type of skill, one that is ‘neither simply received nor simply adopted: it is cultivated, through a complex and only partly conscious activity over time’ (1999: 101). This has close parallels with the description of Gogi above. New migrants in Ulaanbaatar also cultivate specific modes of bodily comportment in order to adjust to the urban context: dressing in certain ways so as to appear more ‘urban’, walking appropriately to exude confidence, as well as self-monitoring their accents to accentuate their urban capital. Of course as with any skill, while much of this is generated in an unconscious way, it is also actively cultivated, such as when Uranchimeg advises her sister-in-law to purposely wear branded clothing and mask her Darhad accent so as to ‘hide’ her rural background. Just as in the Zambian Copperbelt, therefore, the ability to ‘do’ a cultural style in Mongolia, and to ‘bring it off’ successfully, can thus be seen as an achieved performative competence (Ferguson 1999: 221).

Now this cultivation of style has important implications for understanding people’s experience of migration, as well as more broadly the ‘myth’ of teleological processes of change. In African ethnography, for example, cultural differences have, as Ferguson points out, insistently been tied to an idea of ‘transition’ – namely, between two types of society, one traditional and rural, the other modern and urban (Ferguson 1999). Ferguson disagrees. He develops the concept of style to explicitly fracture this dichotomy and prioritise instead the ways in which people actually experience everyday life and flexibly move back and forth between the (‘traditional’) rural and the (‘modern’) urban. In the process, he deconstructs the teleological narrative of African modernisation as a linear and permanent process: ‘The idea of style’, Ferguson remarks, ‘as a cultivated competence implies an active process, spread across historical and biographical time, situated within a political-economic context and within an individual life course’ (Ferguson 1999). This again has much relevance to Mongolia. Indeed, Mongolia’s own postsocialist transition has been described in very much the same terms – as moving along a linear path from the traditional to the modern, the socialist to the postsocialist, and from the rural (and pastoral) to the urban (and sedentary). As we have seen, however, such divisions are rendered permeable by the actions and experiences of many new migrants, who not only maintain connections with the countryside and move back and forth from the city depending on the economic situation, but also, continue living in their (‘rural’) gers and transpose multiple (‘rural’) skills which afford a high degree of social and existential continuity. Here a consideration of style as something skilfully cultivated helps capture this movement and permeability. In the process, it serves to deconstruct the teleology of the postsocialist transition itself – specifically as a linear and permanent process. Indeed, the reason why skill is so useful is precisely because it does not presume any particular ‘direction’ – for example, people moving permanently to the city, becoming ‘more urban’, cutting ties with rural areas, or more broadly, a singular experience of postsocialist change. Instead, it helps capture what Ferguson (1999: 42) calls the full diversity of co-existing variations, depicting new migrants as, first and foremost, human beings actively coping with the changing contexts through which they move – rather than as dictated by fixed and permanent oppositions such as rural and urban, mobile and sedentary. For new migrants such as Gogi, it is not enough to say that she experiences the postsocialist transition as a shift from the countryside to the city, because these categories are experienced in highly specific terms by ex-herders, new migrants, and other actors. Instead, the ‘age of the market’ is experienced in largely practical ways, as caught up in the necessity to reproduce, adapt, and transpose her skills as she copes with her changing world. Person and skill, in this regard, are inseparable because of the never-ending cycle of the need to learn new skills, transpose existing skills, and locate oneself in new conditions.

It is important to recognise, however, the limitations associated with this flexibility, for not all people are able to necessarily ‘pull off’ a certain style to the same extent. Indeed, throughout my time with Gogi and Uranchimeg they would often point out people who they could identify as ‘countryside people’, specifically on account of their perceived un-familiarity with – and lack of skills to cope in – the new urban environment. Not only does this capture the variability between different levels of enskilment and skill transposition in cultivating particular styles, but also, the self-application of the rural-urban dichotomy by the women themselves, as a means of differentiating them from other, ‘less experienced’, migrants. Seen from this perspective, while the boundary between the rural and the urban might be rendered permeable in various ways, it still clearly exists for those without the cultivated skills to succcessfully navigate life after rural-urban migration.

This is something which also points to a wider gendered dimension associated with the so-called ‘feminisation’ of skills in the context of rural-urban migration (Yanagisako 2002; Elmhirst and Saptari 2006; Man 2004; Attewell 1987). Here feminisation refers to the transformation of employment opportunities along gender lines and the increasing proportion of women occupying certain jobs. As Standing (1999: 583) puts it:

A type of job could be feminised, or men could find themselves in feminised positions; more women could find themselves in jobs traditionally taken by men, or certain jobs might change to have characteristics associated with women's historical pattern of labour participation.

This is something seen in the context of Ulaanbaatar and has both positive and negative dimensions. In general, migrant women find it easier to gain employment, though typically in low-salary (and often informal) jobs such as cleaning or textile production. This is because there has been a general decline in the proportion of jobs requiring specialist or craft skills since the end of state socialism, including those more formalised roles which traditionally prioritised men (also see Yanagisako 2002: 136–138). Here women are at an advantage because their particular skills are deemed more transposable in the new market economy, despite in some cases resulting in deskilling (Yanagisako 2002). It is interesting to note, though, that women often find even these deskilled jobs relatively attractive as they enjoy retaining a degree of control over their work and household incomes. This is reported elsewhere particularly in contexts of de-industrialisation, where women are economically empowered through the feminisation of skills while the demise of, for example factory work and mining, result in a loss of perceived masculinity and status (Glenn and Feldberg 1977).

This highlights another important dimension of skill in the context of rural-urban migration: the role of the imagination in learning entirely new skills and putting them into practice. Indeed, skills are often treated as somehow tied to ‘tradition’ – or reproduced merely on the basis of past practice. Although it is true that every skill has a precedent, one of the characteristic features of human existence is what Hannah Arendt calls natality – ‘the tendency of all human action not only to conserve the past but to initiate new possibilities’ (1958: 176–178). Of course, this can be seen in innumerable formalised contexts such as scientific invention and when craftspeople develop new techniques. However, it is also worth considering the generation of new skills in everyday contexts such as ex-herders moving to the city. In this way, we focus our attention on the active, productive, and imaginative capacity of human beings to not only maintain what already exists but to effectuate something new. This has important implications for generating meaning among migrants: by learning new skills people such as Gogi not only engage with the changing constituents of their environment but also generate a new (and potentially different) future. Here skill can be seen as the creative capacity through which to cope with ones changing world – harnessing the new opportunities afforded and embodying new identities in the process. This is something similarly noted by Mark Harris in his account of Ribeirinho fishermen in the Amazon:

Those fishermen who learnt to fish before relatively cheap nylon monofilament nets were introduced in the 1950s, were practiced in using less predatorial methods, such as hand lines, cotton hand-cast nets, rods, trot lines, bows and arrows, traps and harpoons. The senior generation did not adopt the newer and potentially more effective techniques associated with net fishing. They told me they could not get used to fishing with nets in them open river or lake, it was too different and it devalued their skills as fisherman. The younger fishermen only occasionally use the older techniques. The fish exporting factory rewards volume of catch not individual skill. (2005: 209)

Here Harris alludes to two important points: first, that certain kinds of skills change with seniority, whereby older people want to be respected and remembered for a particular ability; and second, the changing contexts which each generation faces, with fishing skills not just ‘passed down’ between senior to junior kin but re-embodied in relation to the new social and economic demands in which the younger generation find themselves: thus, ‘Ribeirinho survival depends on the successful implementation and adaptation of skills to changing market demands’ (2005: 207). This is precisely the extension of Ingold’s perspective I am proposing, whereby ‘change’ is experienced from within the interplay between people’s immediate social and environmental relationships, relationships which, of course, are never static, and which demand of people that they learn new skills when entering new contexts of relational activity. Much as in the example of Gogi, there is an allusion here to the fact that when the context surrounding the teaching and learning of skills change then the skills that constitute that activity are regrown in different ways: new skills are learnt, some skills are contested, and other skills are transposed from one domain to another. As I show below, however, some skills are also lost and rendered obsolete in the face of social change, which can have dramatic implications for people’s sense of existential security and personhood.

Struggle and Survival in Ulaanbaatar

I returned to Ulaanbaatar in the middle of winter when life in the ger-districts is most challenging. It had been 5 months since Batukhan and his family arrived and I was interested to see how they were coping. I called Bataar and, somewhat to my surprise, it was Chuluun who answered the phone. He told me that he was busy working in Narantuul market where he had secured a part-time job as a parking attendant. Arriving in Narantuul I enquired into how Chuluun and his family were doing and he explained that things had become more difficult since the start of winter. Although he had initially wanted to attend university he had been forced to look for informal work instead, specifically as the cost of living had risen and the household were forced to spend far more of their limited income on heating the ger. Initially Chuluun had found a job in khoroo 17 collecting scrap metal for recycling. This was very low paid and, as the cost of heating increased, he was recommended the parking attendant position by one of his neighbours. This was an informal job for which he was paid on a daily basis below the minimum wage, earning 1200 MNT per hour and working for approximately 6 h a day, 3 days per week, giving him a monthly income of 21,600 MNT (£8), which he contributed directly to the family.

With average winter temperatures ranging between −30°C and −40°C in Ulaanbaatar, it is essential for residents in the ger-districts to keep warm. All households keep their stoves burning throughout the day and night. However, while in rural areas herders can easily collect firewood or argal (dried sheep dung) free of charge, in the city they are forced to buy store-bought fuel. Given that winters last from September to April, residents spend a considerable amount of their income on keeping their gers warm. A World Bank report (Kamata et al. 2010) found that an average household spends upwards of 40% of their monthly income on heating. As Chuluun explained, this was by far the single most important factor which had problematised their situation. Connected to this, his family could only afford to burn the very lowest-quality coal, which produces high levels of air pollution across the city and has been shown to contribute to major health problems for residents in the ger-districts.

After making our way to khoroo 17 Chuluun and I were greeted by Gogi and Narantuya. As usual, Gogi prepared tea and invited me to sit down and keep warm by the stove. I immediately noticed the difference inside the ger in terms of air-quality: while in the countryside herders burn either wood or argal – both of which do not produce excessive smoke or have a distinct odour – the coal inside the stove was extremely dirty. Not only did it exude a toxic smell but it also produced a large amount of smoke, only a portion of which exited the chimney while the rest escaped from the sides of the stove and into the ger. I asked Gogi whether it had caused problems and she replied that everyone in the household had been coughing, and she was particularly concerned for Narantuya given that she was still young. However, Gogi reiterated Chuluun’s remarks that the household had little choice but to burn the lowest-quality fuel.

There are two types of coal available to burn in the ger-districts: nailakh and baganuur. With its more efficient burn rate the former is generally the preferred choice, although it is also more expensive. As Gogi described, people with a stable income are able to buy nailakh but, 15 kg of nailakh is 2500 MNT more expensive than baganuur, which costs only 3200 MNT for 50 kg. Being cheaper, baganuur is also far less efficient in terms of maintaining warmth and, while the household initially purchased the higher-quality fuel, the falling temperatures and difficult economic situation meant they were soon forced to switch to the cheaper and more damaging variety.

I stayed with the household for the next few weeks and, during this time, came to experience more of the problems associated with life in the ger-districts. One afternoon, I observed Chuluun carrying the household’s rubbish outside the ger and dumping it in the corner of their compound. This had caught my attention because the last time I visited they carried their rubbish to a collection point 250 metres away. Chuluun explained that it was all to do with what he called ‘Ulaanbaatar 2020’. This is an urban policy ‘master plan’ intended to improve the development of the city and, in particular, life in the ger-districts (UNDP 2016). One of the stated goals is to supply the ger-districts with a provision of basic infrastructure, including water supply, sewerage, roads, drainage, electricity, and rubbish collection, all by the (optimistic) target of 2020. As Chuluun explained, soon after I left the government ‘upgraded’ the rubbish collection point in their area by implementing what it called a more efficient system. While previously rubbish was collected once a month, now it was collected every two weeks. However, as part of this change households were now charged a monthly fee of 2500 MNT. As many households could not afford this, many simply began discarding (or burning) their rubbish within their compounds. This became a widespread issue during my stay in khoroo 17 as rubbish piled up and residents began to complain. Coupled with this, it came to the attention of local residents that the government was operating a cheaper rubbish collection system in the ‘wealthier’ residential areas of the city centre. It was reported that while in the ger-districts households were charged 2500 MNT per month to remove the rubbish twice a week, residents in newer apartment blocks were charged 2500 MNT once a week. Making matters worse was the fact that it is common knowledge that many people in socialist-era apartment blocks often do not pay utility bills, despite having access to electricity, heating, and hot water. I have visited a number of these apartments and many residents told me they had not paid for these services over several years, a remnant of the old socialist model. Residents of the ger-districts are aware of this and feel persecuted for having to pay more for what they consider a basic service.

Over the following weeks I stayed with the household and assisted them in any way I could. Although they were obviously struggling economically they continued to receive support from Baatar’s sister and from other households in the neighbourhood. Indeed, one of the most significant changes I observed was the expansion of the familys’ social network, with households sharing both commodities and services, including small items such as food and alcohol, as well as more essential things such as transportation or tips on finding informal work. For example, one of Chuluun’s friends had a motorcycle which came to play a central role in their daily lives, not only to travel more quickly to pick up supplies but also to transport Narantuya to school. Of course, given the cost of fuel there were many times when the motorcycle was not in use, and it was common for Chuluun to visit his friend and ask whether the motorcycle was ‘running’ or not.

As such examples make clear life in Ulaanbaatar’s ger-districts is far from easy. Although improvements have been made the large majority of people continue to have no access to infrastructure or basic services. While a number of districts have more recently been connected to the city’s electricity supply, many have no electricity and most are without running water or heating. According to a World Bank report (Kamata et al. 2010), 97% of households only have outside latrines, which has contributed to a series of health issues. The ger-districts also have the highest rates of unemployment, pollution, and crime than anywhere else in the country. Life expectancy is also significantly lower and instances of violence are far greater than in other areas. As I show below, this is something which comes to manifest at the level of skilled-practice, specifically as people experience these problems in articulation with their own inability to learn new skills and deskilment in the urban context. This reveals important insights into the limitations of enskilment in the face of radical change, as well as the correlation between people’s ability to maintain meaningful skills and their sense of existential security.

Deskilment, Existential Dislocation, and a Broken Soul

Following my return to khoroo 17 the one person I had not spoken with was Baatar. As the household’s economic situation had worsened he spent much of his time searching for work, leaving early in the morning and returning late at night. However, as time went on I noticed something more complicated was going on. As Gogi eventually confided Baatar was suffering from depression and spent much of his time drinking in a neighbouring ger-district. He initially found a job in Narantuul as a ‘transporter’ – carrying goods in and out of the market for settled retailers. It was during this time that he began feeling depressed about his family’s situation and, as they struggled to make ends meet, he took to drinking with another transporter from the market. After missing work several times and coming to work drunk he was eventually fired. For the next three days he went missing, although as I later heard he spent the entire time getting drunk in a neighbouring district.

It is difficult to watch ones friends in the field experiencing personal problems, particularly after seeing the suffering associated with the 2011 dzud. Anthropologists working in Northern and Inner Asia are acutely aware of the complexities of alcohol consumption. On the one hand, alcohol is related to violence, drunkenness, and mortality, and statistics show there are higher rates of alcohol abuse here than in many parts of the world (WHO 2006). Alcohol, however, is also a highly symbolic substance that has a particular place in the cultural lifeworld of local people, intertwined with social relations, gender constructions, and ontological presuppositions. As Williams (2002: 100–102) notes, the cultural dimensions of alcohol consumption are highly complex in Mongolian society, and can thus ‘neither be dismissed as commonplace pathology nor as quaint local culture’. Indeed, who you drink with (and how much you can drink) reveals considerable insight into your embeddedness within social networks, as well as your status and image amongst your peers. Alcohol also plays a key role in instilling a sense of intimacy between people and it is often during moments of drinking – and drunkenness – that close relationships are formed. This is true not only of local social relations but of those between the ethnographer and ones interlocutors as well. This is something I experienced when asked by Baatar whether I wanted to ‘have a drink’ (by which he meant get drunk with him) and, through this, he revealed his feelings of uncertainty associated with moving to Ulaanbaatar.

Baatar explained that he felt totally lost since his arrival in the city. As a Mongolian man and the head of a household, he had tried to be strong and set a good example for his wife and children. However, he now felt had made the wrong decision in leaving the Shishged. He told me that he missed the open space of the grasslands and felt restricted in the ger-districts. In particular, he explained that he hated the fact that he no longer had any herd animals, perceiving this to be a failure on his part. Sitting together all night and becoming quite drunk, Baatar revealed many of his fears and anxieties, as well as his own self-perception as being ‘unable to adapt to life in the city’. This is far from unusual in the context of rural-urban migration. As Sneath points out, Mongolian herders have long had an antagonistic relationship to urban centres, perceiving their lifeworld to be in opposition to that of sedentarised (historically agricultural) life (2018: 58–59). This antipathy continues to frame some people’s perceptions today, particularly ex-herders who recently arrived in Ulaanbaatar. This is the case, in particular, for men who have far higher rates of unemployment, alcohol abuse, and psychological problems. A report carried out by the Health Ministry of Mongolia noted that alcohol abuse amongst male migrants was Mongolia's biggest social crisis. The World Health Organisation (WHO 2006) similarly found that more than half of Ulaanbaatar’s male population admitted to using alcohol excessively, while 15% were dependent, and one in five binge-drink on a weekly basis. Rates of liver disease are especially high and the same survey indicated that 1000 people die per year because of accidents related to alcohol abuse, while 72% of serious crime – murder, violent robbery, and household abuse – were alcohol related (WHO 2006).

It is true that alcohol consumption is also relatively high in the Mongolian countryside and many urban Mongols characterise their rural counterparts as often drinking to excess. However, in my experience this is typically associated with people living in regional centres where unemployment is high, while herders must control their drinking in order to maintain their livelihoods in harsh ecological conditions. I met a number of individuals in Ulaanbaatar – all men – who expressed precisely the same concerns as described by Baatar: the things which mattered most to them no longer had relevance in the new urban context, such as herding animals, being able to move freely on the grasslands, and being in control of one’s life. This is a characteristic example of deskilment. As we have already seen, the embodiment of skills in Mongolia is tied to ones gender and relative positioning within a household, which give people meaning and forms the basis of their social identities. In the countryside herding life is characterised by specific relationships between human beings, herd animals, and the landscape. For herders, these relationships are not simply aspects of economic production but how people experience themselves as individuals: in this regard, the skills of herding life are fundamentally tied to people’s notions of personhood and thus their ability to generate meaning. For someone such as Baatar, who has spent his entire life living on the grasslands, migrating to Ulaanbaatar is not simply a movement across space but a shift between two lifeworlds. Here it is the inapplicability – and perceived devaluation of – his pre-existing skills which problematise his ability to adapt. In turn, deskilment inculcates experiences of loss, dislocation, and existential angst. As Baatar himself put it: ‘Men cannot do anything here so they just stay at home and drink’.

Importantly, Baatar not only explained his inability to cope in social and practical terms, but also, as something directly affecting what he called his süns (‘soul’):

In the countryside when I get up in the morning I always have things to do, but here it is totally different. Work here means to struggle (temtsel) and fight (tulaldakh). But I have never learnt these things: I cannot drive a car, I cannot calculate like the traders. In the countryside, you have your own animals and everything is up to you. But here everything is out of your control. Since arriving here I feel my süns (‘soul’) has been broken.

While the Mongolian term süns can generally be translated as ‘soul’ it has, in more recent years, become associated with a more specific, postsocialist meaning (Hojer and Pedersen 2008: 16–17). Indeed, many people in Mongolia speak of their süns has having been split or broken since the postsocialist transition: I heard people in various contexts describing their süns being ‘torn away’, ‘broken’, or ‘split in two’, for example as a result of cheating in family life or business, as well as from excessive drinking. This is revealing given that in Mongolia süns not only refers to the inner essence of an individual (as in the Christian ‘soul’) but as the totality of ones human existence in the world. Indeed, the way indigenous Mongolian belief systems conceptualise the ‘soul’ is very different than Buddhist, Christian or other conceptions. As Humphrey describes it, süns denotes ‘an overarching concept of the self that implies a human existence both in and beyond the confines of the body’ (1996: 213). In the context of the Shishged, specifically, I also heard people using the image of the split süns to characterise so-called agsan people, who are regarded as being to some extent ‘crazy’ and who have become more numerous since the collapse of state socialism (also see Pedersen 2011: 5). In this regard, when people describe their süns as being split or broken they are not referring to a metaphoric dimension but a concrete aspect of their embodied experience of self. Hojer and Pedersen (2008: 16–17) offer an excellent discussion of this in relation to another important concept, namely, süld (life force), which they point out is also often described as having been ‘lost’ or ‘diminished’ since the ‘age of the market’. What these examples reveal are the visceral impact of new postsocialist anxieties – not only on Mongolian notions of self and identity but on the very foundations of people’s existence itself. This has direct parallels to other ethnographic settings such as southern Africa, where experiences of uncertain social and economic change are articulated through the lens of witchcraft. For example, Peter Geschiere has shown in the context of Cameroon that witchcraft (djambe) often serves as a vital element in the discourses surrounding economic liberalisation, ‘despite modern processes of change (or perhaps because of them)’ (1998: 7–8), while Harry West (2005: 126) has similarly shown how witchcraft serves as a language for people in Mozambique to help make sense of their changing world. Similarly in Mongolia, terms such as süns should not be seen as metaphors but direct commentaries on the social, political, and economic transformations they experience. This helps capture the experiential dimensions of rural-urban migration as it is experienced by many ex-herders such as Baatar. It is also the reason why I purposefully connect the devaluation or loss of skills with an existential approach, specifically because it is impossible to separate the impact of deskilment from people’s capacity to cope and thus their experiences of identity, meaning-making, and self-worth.

Here the issue of gender once again plays a central role, as Mongolian notions of masculinity are rooted in attitudes of strength, autonomy, and bravery (Billé 2010: 192). The implications of this are that for male herders, a meaningful life is equated with the skills of working with one’s herd animals, spending time on the grasslands, riding and training horses, and hunting, and these are simply not relevant in the ger-districts. This is compounded by the fact that many migrant women adapt rather better, often finding work for the first time and, in some cases, replacing their husbands as the sole bread-winner in their families. This phenomenon has been reported by a number of NGOs working in the ger-districts. As one UNDP researcher explained: ‘These men are used to taking care of the household and having freedom on the steppe. When they come here they cannot use any of the skills which gave their lives meaning. It is a total transformation’.

Although anthropology has rarely focused on the loss or devaluation of skills in an explicit way (but see Harris 2005; Grasseni 2009), the subject has a long history in political-economy (Braverman 1998; Jaros 2008; Spencer, 2000; Wood 1982; Gallie 1991; Linhart 1981; Lee 1998). Particularly in the context of industrial work, studies have shown the impact of technological change on workers’ skills, out of which emerged the concept of ‘de-skilling’ (Littler 1982; Attewell 1987; Heisig 2009). This has been useful in linking the political-economy of industrial work with the transformation of skills over time. However, there have been limitations with this work and the concept of de-skilling in particular. First, there has been a tendency to focus only on industrial work and skills; implicit within this is the assumption that skills are ‘specialist’ practices associated with the world of formalised labour, hence the emphasis on ‘the workplace’, ‘the factory floor’, and specific employment categories such as engineers, miners, and textile workers. I would argue, however, that what is required of the anthropology of skill is to consider what I term deskilment – the loss or devaluation of skills in everyday contexts, such as herders moving to the capital city. Part of this is an exercise in broadening our own theoretical presuppositions, specifically deconstructing the hierarchy between ‘high’ and ‘low’ skills and prioritising instead the co-existing relationship between enskilment, transposition, and deskilment in everyday life. Anthropologists are ideally suited to broadening the scope of the study of skills in this way, presenting ‘thick descriptions’ of how skills come to be adapted, transposed or, as in the case of Baatar, lost and deemed no longer relevant.

Building upon this is another limitation: namely, the lack of attention to the existential impact of deskilment. Indeed, while many political-economists have focused on the impact of technological change on industrial work and production, the question of how do workers ‘feel’ and ‘experience’ the loss and transformation of their skills largely goes unanswered. Here we require phenomenological descriptions of deskilment based on what Wenger (1999) calls ‘communities of practice’ – social groupings of individual persons where enskilment (and deskilment) can be observed processually in their gradual making (and unmaking). As Harris (2005:207–208) puts it: ‘If we focus on the person we attend to the multiplicity of their skills and changes in life course … by focusing on this we see how different skills entail different experiences of learning and have their own histories’ (2005:207–208). As I have attempted to do here, ethnography enables us to see how skills are not only tied to people’s ability to generate meaning but are fundamentally intertwined with the construction of culturally-defined forms of social identity. In this way, we are able to prioritise the visceral aand existential impact of losing ones skills or having them devalued or deemed no longer necessary. In the case of Baatar, for example, it is not simply enough to state that his herding skills are no longer relevant, but rather, to connect the inapplicability of those skills to how he himself imagines them as part of his own meaningful existence. As I myself encountered time and again in the ger-districts, men in particular identify with the skills they had learnt in the countryside and which they ‘brought with them’ – in the form of complex assemblages of technical, material, embodied, practical knowledge and action – fundamentally intertwined with their deeply embedded senses of self. This is what has given their lives meaning and, faced with their devaluation and irrelevance, is why many encounter existential dislocation leading to alcohol abuse. Of course, this link between skills and the ability to generate meaning is not confined to rural-urban migration but would apply equally to other ethnographic contexts such as industrial work. After all, this is precisely what Marx himself referred to when discussing the de-humanisation of labour in the context of industrial capitalism: here the decline of skills was not simply characterised by the redundancy of certain types of work but the very devaluation of workers’ identities and senses of self.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have described the experience of rural-urban migration amongst herders to Ulaanbaatar. I showed how for many new migrants adaptation to urban life is tied to the transposition of existing skills – and the learning of new skills – in the new urban context. I also showed some of the more problematic aspects of life for new migrants, including the devaluation of herding skills and the existential impact of deskilment on gender and identity.

I argue that by pushing the anthropology of skill further, this approach might form the basis for a revised conceptualisation of change based on skilled-practice, whereby social, economic, and political transformations can be traced at the level of human embodiment and polydirectional experiences of enskilment and deskilment. I suggest that a phenomenological approach might be especially useful in contexts of radical change such as migration or forced relocation, specifically as these induce experiences that are not easily translated by normative anthropological theory. Indeed, it is here where people often apply ambivalent self-characterisations such as ‘in-betweeness’ and ‘loss’ to capture their shifting existential moment, articulated through culturally-specific repertoires such as the Mongolian ‘soul’. Such characterisations are apt examples of what Bourdieu termed conatus, ‘critical moments when the expectations that sustain people’s habitus are no longer available, when our illusio – our interest and investment in life (is) shattered’ (Jackson 2005: xxii). The impact of deskilment, for example, is not explicitly stated but emerges through everyday events and encounters, such as Bataar turning up to work drunk or feeling ashamed for having ‘let his family down’. Here I see a useful correlation between phenomenological accounts of change and the anthropology of skill to highlight the existential foundations of enskilment and deskilment and their role in meaning-making. As Merleau-Ponty remarked, being human is not only a matter of ‘’I think’ but ‘I can’’ (1962: 137). As Jackson adds, however, it is also frequently a matter of ‘I cannot’: ‘To be human is not only to have intentions and purposes, which one strives to consummate … it is to be thwarted, conflicted and thrown by contingency and circumstance’ (2005: xiii–xiv). Furthermore, I see a potential of linking the phenomenological approach developed here with the recent anthropology of hope articulated in other ethnographic contexts (Miyazaki 2006; Hage 2003; Crapanzano 2005). In particular, this would show the capacity to hope as something dependent upon the maintenance and successful transposition/adaptation of existentially-meaningful skills, which would help explain why some people fare better than others when encountering moments of radical change. In this way, the anthropology of skill might become an empirically-grounded political-economy of skill, which traces ‘change’ not in abstract terms but in people’s bodies and everyday lived-experiences, analysed through particular ‘communities of practice’ and articulated through their ability or inability to cope with – and thus hope for – a better future.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Dutch Organization for Scientific Research.

Notes

1 In Mongolian ‘skill’ is usually translated as chadwar or mergejliin. While in some cases my interlocutors would use these terms to describe particular skills such as horse riding or preparing certain foods, I adopt a wider definition of skill as assemblages of technical, material, embodied, practical knowledge and action. I am aware therefore that my approach exceeds activities identified by my interlocutors, but this is my intention: to deconstruct the hierarchisation between ‘high’ and ‘low’ skills and prioritise the co-existing relationship between enskilment, transposition, and deskilment in everyday life.

2 I carried out fieldwork in the Shishged Depression of Khövsgöl province (aimag), Northern Mongolia, between 2012 and 2013. The Shishged is located west of Khövsgöl Nuur – Mongolia’s largest freshwater lake - approximately 1000 km from Mongolia’s national capital and 200 km away from the provincial capital, Mörön.

3 Khövsgöl Statistical Yearbook (2012).

4 I began my fieldwork just several months after one of the worst dzud in living memory, where 10–15 million animals perished nationally and with households losing 20% to 100% of their herds, forcing many to abandon herding and move to the capital city.

5 Mongolia is divided into twenty-one provinces or aimags, each of which is subdivided into a number of sums. Each sum (district) is subdivided into a number of bags. Each aimag has an administrative centre and each sum has a district centre (sumin tov). Mörön is the administrative capital of Khövsgöl aimag, the largest province in Northern Mongolia.

6 There are various types of mobility in Mongolia. While some herders move relatively long distances between four seasonal encampments, others move only once or twice a year to retain proximity to regional centres where they can access markets and services. Nevertheless, the practical skills of moving and deconstructing/reconstructing the ger are virtually universal.

7 Milk products are known as ‘white foods’ in Mongolia and include up to one hundred different products, the majority made from cow and yak milk.

8 Mongolia’s Infrastructure System (2013).