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ABSTRACT
What happens to the relations involved in ownership when faced with new claims and challenges? This article looks at three examples of the way in which Mongolians are managing claims to resources and responding to new regimes of ownership. In each case, recourse to models of ownership based on masters and custodians are marshalled and extended to suit new contexts. I suggest that these should not be viewed as modern responses to the inequalities of current economic and social life [cf. Comaroff and Comaroff. 1999, May. Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony. American Ethnologist, 26(2): 279–303], nor should they be viewed as a historical remnant from some previous social life. Rather, and here I follow Tsing [2004. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press; 2015a. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press; 2015b. Salvage Accumulation, or the Structural Effects of Capitalist Generativity. In Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology Website, March 30, 2015. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/656-salvage-accumulation-or-the-structural-effects-of-capitalist-generativity], they may be viewed as an outcome of an innovative ‘friction’, or ‘salvage economy’, between global and local realities that gives rise to what Gibson-Graham [2006. A Postcapitalist Politics. Minnesota: Minnesota University Press] argues is a heterogeneous capitalist landscape, here manifested in Mongolia’s dramatically rising and falling mineral economy.
Acknowledgements
My sincere thanks to Nils for assisting with the final publication (the article was originally due for a special issue on the topic of ‘cosmoeconomics’, a special issue which was ‘in the making’ for several years), and to Giovanni for organising the AAA panel on which we initially presented some of the ideas. I thank the Emerging Subjects Project at UCL and MNU including Bumochir Dulam, Lauren Bonilla, Hedwig Waters, Rebekah Plueckhahn, Liz Fox, Joseph Bristely, Hermione Spriggs, Tsetsegjargal Tseden, Byambabaatar Ichinkhorloo, Bayartsetseg Terbish, Munkh-Erdene Gantulga, Tuya Shagdar, Narantuya Chuluunbat, Marissa Smith, Sanchir Jargalsaikhan, Badruun Gardi, Haltar Batsuuri, Uranchimeg Ujeed, and Erdenezaya Batbayar for crucial discussion and debate. Thanks also to Mette High, Byambajav Dalaibuyan, and Joe Ellis for their inspiring ethnographic accounts that I draw on here. The gap between writing and publication has been a long one and things have changed in ethnographic reality and my intellectual thinking since this paper was first drafted. Research for this paper has been funded by ERC-2013-CoG, 615785, Emerging Subjects.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 This quote is from her online article, which can be found here: Tsing (Citation2015b).
2 This quote is from their online article, which can be found here: Bear et al. (Citation2015).
3 Usufruct is a term from European civil law, where the person has a right to enjoy the use and fruits of a property but not own it. ‘Usufruct’ means ‘use of the fruit’ (i.e. one has a right to enjoy the profit from land or capital, without legal title to the land or capital itself).
4 Also referred to as ‘erleg elch’, ‘lus khangai’, ‘lus avdag’, etc.
5 Here we see that ‘[…] the land is not merely a national territory, a physical backdrop for human activity, or an enabling ecology. It is also a dynamic constituent in what makes people human. Recognizing the physical environment (baigal) as having life, feelings and agency, elaborate taboos inform people’s engagement with the land (High and Schlesinger Citation2010: 290).
6 The date for the ceremony is often determined by astrological calculations, but if there is a drought, forest fires, or some adverse weather conditions, people may bring the date forward.
7 Worship at ovoos takes different forms according to the location of the ovoo and the type of deities attended to. In each smaller sub-district, there are several different ovoos. Some ovoos attract worship by men, others by local families or individuals, and some are places where the whole community gathers. Once a year, at the beginning of the summer, when people have settled at their summer pasture, people gather together for a ceremony at their local ovoo and offer dairy produce to honour masters of the land for the prosperity needed in life. The day is an occasion for those who share the same summer pastureland to meet and exchange news.
8 In 1889, the Qing government established its first state-run gold mine in Northern Mongolia, and the prohibition on mining gold ended in 1899 with the rights given to the ‘Mongolor’ mining company (High and Schlesinger Citation2010). It is worth noting at this point that gold mining was something highly monitored during the Qing period. Then as now, mining sparked a fear of the purity of land and the fear of incoming miners’ intrusive behaviors. Miners were punished, often violently, and there was intense anger against outsiders mining in Mongolia. This, and other activities that involved digging into the ground, could take away the ‘luck’ of the land or ‘curse’ the land and people (High and Schlesinger Citation2010: 292). Indeed ‘failing to act respectfully, curses were unleased and misfortune was immanent’ (Citation2010: 292). Mongolian places known to contain gold were designated ‘restricted areas’ where mining and even trespassing was forbidden (High and Schlesinger Citation2010: 294). Very much as now, there was a concern with the idea that the land was to be kept clean (ariun) and protected from disturbing foreign presences. This relationship might provide echoes of similar cosmologies elsewhere (particularly as highlighted by one reviewer in Indonesia or Southeast Asia more generally), so that while there is no single kind of capitalism (or animism, for that matter), in their confrontation and merger with particular cosmological relations familiar tropes and arrangements arise.
9 Elsewhere, I have documented the way in which the landscape may be damaged through human interaction, but then ‘healed’ through further interactions (Empson Citation2011). The importance of human-nonhuman relationships is thus different from the kind of exclusionary logic of the environmental movement where places are separated off from human interaction and made into ‘parks’ to ‘preserve’ the environment.
10 However, Byambajav (Citation2012) notes that many protected lands have been mined despite the law meant to preserve the integrity of Mongolia’s environment.
11 This is a practice held to date back to the period of Chinggis Haan (e.g Burkhan Khaldyn).
12 See also High (Citation2016) who highlights that when monks are miners the assumed opposition between traditional and extractive economies are very much tested and transcended.
13 It is possible that these were representatives of the 11 local River Movements who formed a trans-local coalition called the Homeland and Water Protection Coalition of River Movements in 2006 (see Byambajav forthcoming).
14 Several groups, including Tsagaan Khass, Dayar Mongol, Gal Undesten and Huh Mongol, have sought alignment with environmentalist agendas, particularly against foreign mineral extraction in Mongolia.
15 See, for instance, negotiations over the ‘Law with the Long Name’: https://medium.com/@FrontLineDefenders/mongolia-new-frontier-for-an-old-industry-e234d57202d5#.edfc45ae5.
16 This is not, as one reviewer of this article put it, to promote a kind of ‘ontological pornography of resilience […] while the landscape is being ruined, social relations thwarted, ownership alienated.’ It is to highlight the heterogeneity and difference experienced by people exposed to similar global processes and shifts associated with neoliberal practices the world over. Amplifying such difference is a political act on behalf of the people I work with as much as by myself as an anthropologist.