Paper short abstract:

Mongolian insurances (daatgal) include shamanic and Buddhist practices as well as those of privatized state agencies. Intensified by development actors' reforms figuring climate change and loss as universal risk, daatgal remains concerned with the use of state-power to ensure continued production.

Paper long abstract:

In the Mongolian cultural region, daatgal refers to a person being "entrusted" by a lama or shaman to a particular powerful nonhuman for protection from catastrophe (Balogh 2011, Hangartner 2007, Humphrey and Ujeed 2013, Pedersen 2011). Daatgal also refers to car, health, and livestock insurance sold by companies and implemented by international development agencies and financial institutions. In 2011, while I was conducting fieldwork at the Erdenet Mining Corporation, the Mongolian government mandated that all personal automobiles be insured. Though we had had many conversations about how government officials channeled money into their own and their associates' businesses, my friends and interlocutors approved of the initiative, which they argued would force irresponsible citizens who caused damage to others' property to take responsibility, a key function of state power (tur) in the Mongolian context. Statistics demonstrate that car insurance was widely purchased in the first year after the law was passed, but steeply declined afterwards. By discussing this case, as well as videos produced by the World Bank about their index-based-livestock program in the Darkhad region where I conducted fieldwork in 2016, I explain how legitimate Mongolian governments (zasgiin gazar) are not provisioners of goods per se, but rather regulators of producers and their production. In contrast to the Western development agency and financial institution-led insurance initiatives, which are framed as hedging against inevitable climatic risks, and position relations between individuals as irrelevant, Mongolian insurances are about controlling relations among and between humans and nonhumans, an ability of state-power properly wielded.