Tværkulturelle og Regionale Studier > Forskning > Komparative > Igangværende forskningsprojekter > Uncertain Business

Uncertain Business. An Anthropological study of exchange, protection and insurance in Mongolia’s new trading culture

Research project by Lars Højer

Post doc supported by The Danish Research Council for the Humanities.

Mongolia is undergoing a period of rapid economic transformation after the fall of socialism in the early 1990s. Economic security is no longer provided for by the state, and many households are still facing severe economic hardship. In this socio-economic climate people have adopted various new strategies for survival. One such major strategy is the extension of exchange relationships to new partners or simply ‘trade’ (naimaa), a practice introduced by the Chinese in the 18th century, made immoral and illegal by the socialist regime in the 20th century, and now considered a ‘necessary evil’ often based on extra-kinship relations. Yet trade is an economic term that conceals as much as it conveys, because people’s engagements in new exchange relationships are firmly grounded in cultural understandings of agency, personhood and social relationships, and not only in clear-cut economic rationality.

Studying the cultural and magico-religious idioms through which business-like activities are mediated in Mongolia, this research shall make an ethnographic contribution not only to the understanding of Inner Asian social life, but also to the specific on-the-ground workings of emerging and existing ‘market economies’. As such, the present research will contribute to Inner Asian and postsocialist studies, as well as develop the field of economic anthropology by utilizing novel theoretical developments within the anthropology of exchange and sociality. Seeing economic agency as rising from a hybrid of economic and socio-cultural relations, the distinction between the rational market (‘the west’) and irrational socio-cultural relations (‘the rest’) can be transcended and findings in Inner Asia might in the future be extended to ‘western’ economic life as well.

There have been a number of anthropological studies of emerging socio-economic forms in postsocialist states and several studies on recent institutional transformations in Mongolian pastoral areas. However, no study has yet managed to link the recent small-scale entrepreneurial activity, concerned with exceedingly uncertain business in the not yet institutionalised market, to the cultural perception, production and management of uncertainty in exchange relations. This research aims to undertake such an in-depth investigation of the social and cultural space from which ‘the market’ materialises in Inner Asia.

In economic discourse, and within much economic anthropology, entrepreneurship is taken for granted as something which strategically transforms culture or – epitomizing homo economicus - ignored as a kind of agency which in itself is culturally constituted. Likewise, uncertainty is almost always considered a fact of environmental conditions or ‘investment’ life that people are faced with and re-act to. Thus, the anxiety of the unknown - in trading activity and elsewhere – is not attended to as something in itself produced, perceived and managed through cultural idioms. Indeed, trade – the economic and ‘uncertain’ terrain per se - has implicitly and explicitly been considered a domain of socially and culturally disembedded exchange, the opposite of a more genuine reciprocity. The novelty of this research is that I will seek to understand how the market from the outset, i.e. in the very trading activities from which it is believed to emerge (uncertain investment, entrepreneurship etc.) - where it is often considered to be most ‘purely economical’ - is constituted in specific and local socio-cultural forms and agencies, which just as much creates the uncertainty it faces, as it is simply re-acts to given uncertainty from the surroundings (climate, price fluctuations, political decisions etc.).