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"Empson, Rebecca"
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Asset or Burden: The Ethical Calculus of Care in Ulaanbaatar’s Urban Margins
How do family relations change in the move from rural to urban living? What are the impacts of urbanisation on the domestic? Drawing on the ethnography of two families on the outskirts of Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar, this chapter tackles the intersections of urbanisation and intergenerational care, charting the effects of rural-urban migration on family lives. Although their family structures differ, Tuya and Duya each find themselves shouldering the burden of being urban female breadwinners. To navigate conditions of profound economic precarity, they approach their families through a lens of economic-cum-moral strategizing, which we term a form of ‘ethical calculus’. In the city, money becomes synonymous with care and family members are categorised according to a scale of asset-to-burden based on their capacity to support or increase the breadwinner’s load. A focus on the work involved in such forms of care reveals a qualitatively different approach to family ties in urban Mongolia that pulls people in two directions. The first is the reconfiguration of marginal populations’ relationship with the state to one that equates care with money. The second is the atomising pressure that life on Ulaanbaatar’s margins puts on the hopes and capacities of household members.
Journal Article
The Dangers of Excess
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.
Journal Article
Whose Land is it Anyway? Balancing the Expectations and Demands of Different Trusting Partnerships in Mongolia
This paper looks at the roles and interests that motivate different kinds of 'trusting partnerships' in Mongolia. Such partnerships are not only in marketing slogans that herald new private investment agreements, they also underlie the relationship between the Mongolian government and other governments (in the form of 'strategic partnerships') and even between the Mongolian State and its people. The concept serves as a framework for partners to achieve mutual ambitions, but is ambiguous and its content evolves through negotiation and cumulative articulation. We offer certain observations about the form of relationship between the Mongolian State and its people, drawing from fieldwork in 2012 on how loans are used and perceived, and suggest that this relationship is a fruitful lens through which we can observe vernacular attitudes to the economy and the State, and to the different kinds of relationships the Mongolian State maintains with outsiders. We conclude with an observation on the inter-related and at times conflicting 'trusting partnerships' to which the Mongolia government is party.
Journal Article
A Space That Will Never Be Filled
A disregard for human traditions, the brutality of predation, sacrifice, and sexual desire are ingrained in languages across cultures. This paper concerns a key linguistic feature reflecting this predicament: utterances that encapsulate their opposite and effectuate a U-turn in meaning. This mode of communication stands out as a representation of the friction between incommensurable worlds—conceived together. An enemy’s perspective or an unpalatable reality finds a host within language. I embark upon a multidisciplinary search for examples of such utterances and present an assemblage of five pertinent images. Each of these makes a distinct conceptual contribution. Vigilance and an awareness of other points of viewunderpin most of the utterances under study, which I propose to call “sharp communication” at the intersection of opposing perspectives.
Journal Article
Whose Land is it Anyway?
This paper looks at the roles and interests that motivate different kinds of 'trusting partnerships' in Mongolia. Such partnerships are not only in marketing slogans that herald new private investment agreements, they also underlie the relationship between the Mongolian government and other governments (in the form of 'strategic partnerships') and even between the Mongolian State and its people. The concept serves as a framework for partners to achieve mutual ambitions, but is ambiguous and its content evolves through negotiation and cumulative articulation. We offer certain observations about the form of relationship between the Mongolian State and its people, drawing from fieldwork in 2012 on how loans are used and perceived, and suggest that this relationship is a fruitful lens through which we can observe vernacular attitudes to the economy and the State, and to the different kinds of relationships the Mongolian State maintains with outsiders. We conclude with an observation on the inter-related and at times conflicting 'trusting partnerships' to which the Mongolia government is party.
Journal Article
Assembling Bodies
This chapter contrasts two distinct ways of seeing in museum exhibits and relates these to ideas in cubism and montage. While cubism makes multiple perspectives of a single object visible at once, montage juxtaposes partial “cuts” or “fragments” in a sequence, so as to reveal a new perspective. Each technique exposes different kinds of insight, but they are both concerned with challenging realism to reveal the “hidden” and “true” nature of things.¹ In relation to these ideas, I suggest that ethnographic objects in museum exhibits may be understood, not so much as something to be consumed by the gaze of
Book Chapter
Transacting Knowledge, Transplanting Organs
In the wake of many difficult and uncertain years of post-socialist transition, Mongolians are increasingly forming new kinds of partnerships with international collaborators in different spheres, including biomedical science. In this chapter I focus on the biography of a Mongolian transplant surgeon to examine the kinds of ethical constraints and knowledge relationships formed through different kinds of emerging biomedical collaboration. Attending to the kinds of collaborations fostered by a surgeon allows for insight into Mongolian concepts of collaboration and ideas about the role of the individual as a heroic exemplar for the nation. Alongside these concerns, the paper questions how
Book Chapter