Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the mobility of a recent cultural heritage documentation project in Mongolia articulated with the mobility of nomadic pastoralist interlocutors, producing unanticipated negotiations, contestations, and exchanges in its wake.

Paper long abstract:

The Nomadic Material Heritage Project (2022-24) employed a mobile fieldwork strategy to document object biographies and craft practices in dispersed mobile pastoralist Kazakh communities in Western Mongolia. Local environmental and infrastructural conditions, as well as the array of social strategies that Kazakhs in Mongolia employ to manage them, affected how we approached our research and raised fundamental questions about what community-engaged scholarship means in practice. In this paper, I explore how our project's mobility, covering more than 250 miles over the course of two field seasons, impacted our relationships with interlocutors and produced unanticipated negotiations, contestations, and exchanges. Local Kazakh team members played a central role in shaping our mobility: our movements through space relied on and reinforced their positions in existing social networks and even brought new relationships of obligation into being. At times, other actors sought to control, manipulate, or make use of our mobility, shedding light on the politics of (im)mobility in a region where mobility has been construed as a liberatory force. Ultimately, the mobility of our project and how it articulated with the mobility of our interlocutors became as much an object of study as the material culture practices we'd set out to document.