On the 9^th of June, our project held a pre-fieldwork workshop entitled ‘Figuring out the Future: Emerging subjects and the flux of the economic present’ at UCL Anthropology. The day-long event, organized by Rebekah Plueckhahn and Pascale Searle, was attended by colleagues from Oxford and Cambridge, as well as UCL and other London Universities. It ended with a wine reception in our courtyard, kindly arranged by Christopher Kaplonski.

In the past year, our group has been reading assorted theoretical works together, allowing us to reflect on our individual ethnographic projects and discuss unfurling economic and political changes in Mongolia. The aim of the workshop was to introduce our ideas on a series of shared themes to a diverse audience, as well as present concrete ethnographic studies that will, it is imagined, investigate some of these themes.

The workshop was divided into two thematic panels: ‘Economic Subjectivities’ & ‘The Politics of Infrastructure’. In each session, the themes, and the questions or hypotheses arising from them were presented, followed by different research proposals. Within ‘Economic Subjectivities’, for example, we presented theoretical approaches to ideas about neoliberalism, state formation, and subjectivity in the social sciences. Individual research papers relating to these topics were then presented, including research on (economic) nationalism; the use of different ‘zones of experimentation’ like Facebook, loans and lifestyle centres; and small-scale female migrant traders. Within ‘The Politics of Infrastructure’, approaches to the study of temporality, the construction of resources, infrastructure and the larger perception of the environment (i.e. the emergence of the Anthropocene) were presented. Projects directly addressing these ideas included changing concepts of property and ownership in Mongolia, as well as examining the proliferation of dust – and its ability to suspend several ideas at once – through mining in the Gobi desert. Each session was chaired by a different person – Joseph Bristley and Tom McDonald – who guided the discussion and posed some important questions.

Two ethnographically-derived concepts shaped the over-all discussions – the idea of prefiguration and resilience. Without the capacity to envision and enact stable futures, individuals increasingly ‘prefigure’—act out hoped for or expected futures in the present. At the same time, recent economic, development and environmental discourses, have shifted the sphere of responsibility for economic, social and global environmental change on to subjects. As a result, subjects (both people and points of concern) and their communities have been encouraged to become ‘resilient’—i.e. adapt and overcome instability through their own endeavours. Focusing on practices of prefiguration and resilience allows us to explore how new subjectivities and forms of collective activity are emerging ethnographically in Mongolia.

Our concluding round table discussion was led by Allen Abramson, who contributed many astute comments and questions regarding the theoretical trajectory of our project. He noted that none of our projects focus on nomadism—a previous staple of Mongolian ethnography and wondered if we saw economic change in Mongolia as impacted by previous cultural tropes, or as engendering new forms of relationality. Where have the old subjects gone, if we are focusing on ‘emergence’?

As alluded in our title, our project provocatively uses the term ‘emerging’ to examine whether current local economic developments are in fact ‘new’, or another manifestation of constant cultural change. We draw inspiration from geographers (like J.K. Gibson-Graham) and anthropologists of financialization (like Bill Maurer and Caitlin Zaloom) by assuming that the economy is constantly changing and always spatially-variegated. In this vein, discussions explored the role of religion and nomadism in contemporary Mongolia with explanations that concepts of karma, fortune, space and time in Buddhism are important for understanding any unfolding changes. ‘Emergence’ evokes ideas about a progressive vision towards a better future—a perspective we will query through ethnographic documentation of Mongolian reactions to constant economic flux.

As a project on the nexus of anthropological and economic theory, our project garnered interest from different perspectives, which invited questions during the workshop as to our target audience and future goals. As anthropologists, we feel ideally placed to ethnographically depict realities on the ground that can contribute to wider debates. Through the simultaneous enactment of five individual research projects, we endeavour to create a temporal snapshot of the rich complexity of economic change and its engendered responses.

This post was written by Joseph Bristley, a UCL ESRC-funded anthropology PhD student affiliated to the Emerging Subjects project.  He recently gave a paper on ‘Temporality and Nationalism in a Mongolian Desert Economy’ as part of the Third Oxford Interdisciplinary Desert Conference.  This two-day international conference was held between 16^th and 17^th April 2015 at the University of Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment, and was organised by Dr Troy Sternberg, Ariell Ahearn, and Dr Henri Rueff.  The official conference programme can be downloaded here.

My paper was included in the conference’s panel ‘Pastoralism and the State in Inner Asia’, which also included presentations on camels and land use in Inner Mongolia; different rhetorics surrounding pastoralists in Mongolia and elsewhere; mining and risk in Mongolia; and the distribution of deer stones.

I give a brief summary of my paper here and a few reflections on the conference. My paper analysed ideas around the proposed Sainshand Industrial Park (Sainshand Аj Üildveriin Tsogtsolbor) in Dornоgobi province: a vast, unrealised project including industrial facilities such as copper smelters, coal gasification plants, and cement works. This site, it is envisaged, will be connected within a broader infra-structure development project linking Sainshand on the one hand to the Oyu Tolgoi copper mine and Tavan Tolgoi coalfields, and on the other to the city of Choibalsan in eastern Mongolia. Already a locus on the Trans-Mongolian railway between Ulaanbaatar and China, Sainshand’s status as a point on a large trade network will be significantly scaled-up by the construction of the Industrial Park. The Park’s aim is to diversify the Mongolian economy, produce processed minerals for export – currently, unprocessed minerals are exported to China on a large scale – and to create a large number of jobs for Mongolians.

Joseph Bristley presenting his paper on ‘Temporality and Nationalism in a Mongolian Desert Economy’ at the 3rd Oxford Interdisciplinary Desert Conference

Despite a number of reasons hampering the implementation of the Industrial Park it nevertheless has a kind of ‘spectral presence’ in Sainshand, being “already there without being there” (Derrida 1994: 98). In this sense, it resembles the un-built Power Station #5 in an eastern suburb of Ulaanbaatar, studied by Morten Pedersen, which “appeared to loom large in peoples’ minds” despite its “limited degree of physical materialisation” (Nielsen and Pedersen 2015: 253).

In fact, the lack of materiality of an operational Industrial Park, I argued, opened up a discursive and imaginative space for people living there in which the future of the city – and the country as a whole, which would benefit enormously from the completed project – could be imagined. It also cast perceptions of the future itself as particularly significant in framing peoples’ perceptions of their city and country. Thus Batsük, who moved to Sainshand several years ago, told me with some pride that the Sainshand Industrial Park would be the second biggest industrial project in the country after Oyu Tolgoi. Thinking about how work on the Park would unfold in the not-too distant future, he listed the number of ‘factories’ to be built, and the number of workers he expected to be employed at some of these. Batsük said that the population of the area – then at 22,000 for the district of Sainshand City – would surge as thousands of builders and industrial workers would work on the implementation and operation of the new Industrial Park.

The way perceptions of the future are mediated through as-yet un-built structures and unmade objects of the Industrial Park is mirrored in another area of Sainshand’s life: the rebuilding of Khamarin Khiid. This monastic complex, founded by the famous Buddhist poet Danzanravjaa from 1818 onwards, was a centre of Buddhist culture until its destruction by communist forces in 1938. It has been undergoing reconstruction since the fall of communism in 1990, with the aim of rebuilding its former temples, mediation caves, and ‘energy centre’. A number of its original sites – such as the ‘Energy Centre’ – have been restored to date, the former monastic complex providing a template for its own rebuilding by not being there.

Through these two examples, I argued that the Industrial Park and Khamarin Khiid project are conceptually suggestive of each other: both draw on absences in the present to open a particular vista onto the future, and articulate perceptions of the future as a background against which particular projects can unfold; and both do so through positing the construction of particular types of building whose significance runs beyond Sainshand (the Industrial Park is going to be of national importance exporting goods from Mongolia, whilst the monastery draws visitors from throughout the country, and from across its borders).

Both schemes aim to establish sites of transformation with a particularly national resonance. The Khamarin Khiid complex is the location of the world’s ‘energy centre’, a site of spiritual transformation where beneficial energy can be converted and harnessed by visitors from across Mongolia and beyond. The Industrial Park is a site of transformation in a different register, where national resources will be transformed in ways that will benefit Mongolia. Both suggest the ways in which beneficial transformations and the conversion of ‘raw’ materials lie within particular national contexts and temporalities.

My paper’s audience consisted of a number of researchers, and I was asked questions about the proposed funding of the Industrial Park, and the prominence of Buddhism in post-socialist Mongolia.

The Third Oxford Desert Conference was a two-day event, which drew together scholars from around the world to explore a number of desert-themed issues on an interdisciplinary basis. Panels included the topics of ‘Dryland Ecosystems and Water’, ‘International Development Perspectives on Drylands’, and ‘New Technologies in Desert Research’. The conference presented an excellent opportunity for scholars from different backgrounds working on deserts to exchange ideas.