Based on long-term fieldwork with herding families along the Mongolian-Russian border, this book examines how people tend to past memories in their homes while navigating new ways of accumulating wealth and fortune in the face of political and economic uncertainties. It is at this intersection, where the politics of tending to the past and the morality of new means of accumulating wealth come together to shape intimate social relations, that the book reveals an innovative area for the study of kinship in anthropology. It combines personal experience with ethnographic insight.
This article identifies relationships that dominate small and medium businesses in Mongolia. Unlike other parts of Asia, these relationships are not necessarily hierarchical, nor are they purely market-driven. Rather, they are characterized by groups of people who sustain each other's businesses and the social relations that hold them in place. In identifying such relations, we extend questions raised in the 'economy of favours' literature. If favours granted between known individuals are not simply about economic transactions, we ask, then what does this say about the kind of capitalist economy prevalent in Mongolia? Not simply an outcome of external forms of financialization, nor a remnant of the socialist planned economy, these relations open up the possibility for a range of ways of doing business in a climate that does not guarantee economic and social security in the sense that we may be familiar with. Attending to the way business deals and people are made and remade within networks and groups, capitalism is opened up to an economic diversity that shapes it from within.
This article explores practices concerned with the accumulation of fortune in present-day Mongolia. By contrasting practices associated with the accumulation of animal herds, children, and immovable property, we see how some are viewed as morally commendable while others are considered morally suspect. It is suggested that when people accumulate too much fortune, misfortune strikes, thereby ensuring the redistribution and release of fortune. By examining the different ways in which fortune and wealth may be released, harnessed, or contained, more general ideas about new ways of accumulating wealth and the dangers of excess in the market economy emerge.
List of figures vi Preface vii Acknowledgements xiv Note on transliteration xvii This book spans the 'Emerging Subjects' research project (ERC-2013-CoG, 615785, Emerging Subjects) based at UCL and NUM, from 2014 to 2019. I am very grateful to these institutions for hosting us and to the ERC for their generous funding, through which we were able to build a research community that has become an extended family over the past five years. This project began at a time when I was experiencing my own crisis of sorts as my personal life took an unexpected turn and I was forced to re-imagine the future in light of the present, just as my interlocutors were doing but on a different scale. Working on this topic with the people mentioned below has been a wonderful gift and hugely transformational in many different ways. My heartfelt thanks and gratitude to our wonderful group at UCL-Lauren Bonilla, Joseph Bristley, Bumochir Dulam, Baasanjav Dune, Liz Fox, Rebekah Plueckhahn, Hermione Spriggs and Hedwig Waters. Together, we developed and discussed many of the ideas presented here, in reading groups, on shared fieldwork with Chiara Goia, at writing retreats and Lunar New Year parties and through our exhibitions, workshops and public talks. At NUM, I thank Sarantsetseg Dugersuren, Officer of the International Relations Department, and Boldgiv Bazartseren, Taylor Family Chaired Professor of Ecology at the Department of Biology of the School of Arts and Sciences, for facilitating our partnership, and offer my sincere thanks to our brilliant paired researchers-Tsetsegjargal Tseden,
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