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- Convenors:
-
Eric Thrift
(University of Winnipeg)
Bum-Ochir Dulam (National University of Mongolia)
- Stream:
- Living landscapes: Nomadic and Sedentary/Paysages vivants: Nomadique et sédentaire
- Location:
- FSS 6032
- Start time:
- 6 May, 2017 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel will explore how "cultures of mobility" inform flows of people, resources, and ideas in Mongolia and Inner Asia.
Long Abstract:
This panel will explore how "cultures of mobility" inform flows of people, resources, and ideas in Inner Asia. The history of this region has often been written, drawing on Owen Lattimore's formulation, as one of interaction along nomadic/sedentary frontiers. Nonetheless, the contemporary experience of Inner Asian mobile pastoralists frequently ignores boundaries demarcating the "mobile" from the "sedentary". Pastoralists engage, for example, in a fluid range of economic and social activities, which may bring them into towns and cities for extended periods; they may practice circular migration involving regular stays with both urban and rural kin; and they may observe complex patterns of livestock ownership and management that traverse boundaries between "pastoral" and "urban" sites. Such flows, we suggest, are indicative of mobile lifeways that can extend into urban/settled domains -- or even incorporate such domains as their own -- rather than merely operating at their margins or frontiers. In this light, we hope to interrogate socio-economic, political, and demographic categories that are predicated on a presence or lack of mobility: "(mobile) pastoralists", "migrants", "urban residents", and the like. Seeking more ethnographically accurate alternatives to these terminologies, we intend to ask how better to acknowledge the diversity of standpoints within shared cultures of mobility -- encompassing the positionings of principally urban actors, and acknowledging the shifts involved in circular migration, for example -- in both theoretical and applied terms.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This article asks the questions: How do Mongolian pastoralist experiences enhance our understanding of the phenomenon of absence, the circumstances under which it is detected, and when it becomes meaningful for certain groups?
Paper long abstract:
Recent scholarship in geography has productively engaged with the concepts of absence to analyse spatialised social relations and their embodied, material and immaterial dimensions. This literature has largely focused on individual experiences of absence. I approach absence by examining experiences of the gendered nature of household absence amongst mobile pastoralists in rural Mongolia. In critical reflections on rural work, both male and female herders have stressed concerns around the absence of women in rural homes. Absence, however, has long been part of pastoralist livelihoods in Mongolia and different types of absence seem to register at different levels of "visibility." This article asks the questions: How do Mongolian pastoralist experiences enhance our understanding of the phenomenon of absence, the circumstances under which it is detected, and when it becomes meaningful for certain groups? In Mongolia, absence has different implications for men and women and gendered division of labour and social roles, which are tied to household economies and pastoralist work practices. Drawing from ethnographic field research, the cases contribute to understandings of the co-constitutive nature of space and society, and attempt to dislodge ideas about the fixed nature of households in rural Mongolia.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the relevance of circular migration approaches in analyzing rural/urban pastoral mobilities in Mongolia and Inner Asia.
Paper long abstract:
Pastoral mobilities have been conceptualized in a variety of ways: as regular circulation among seasonal camps, as "flows" within a landscape, as movements that follow or mimic animal migration patterns, or as unplanned responses to unpredictable conditions. While the mobility practices described in any of these categories may seem distinct and separate from rural-to-urban migrations, ethnographic evidence collected with Mongolian herders suggests, to the contrary, that urbanizing flows can also represent an extension of pastoralists' circulatory trajectories into towns and cities. Urban migrations are often neither permanent nor unidirectional, but can offer a tactical means for pastoralists to assimilate urban sites into mobile lifeways. In this context, I explore the relevance of theoretical approaches to circular migration in describing "post-pastoral" mobilities in Mongolia and Inner Asia. Noting the importance of the distinction between circularity and directionality, I underline several ongoing challenges in theorizing pastoral rural/urban circulation, reflecting the complexity of migration patterns and the absence of clear demarcations between "home" and "host".
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that mobility, as practice and as discursive referent, serves a tactical role in environmental and nationalist discourses in Mongolia.
Paper long abstract:
In the age of clash of global capitalism and local cultures, the destructive consequences of mining have made some herders (malchin) into environmental activists in Mongolia and China. Alternatively, some have decided to become herders or return to a herding life to become "authentic" environmentalists. This paper argues that the discourse of environmentalism is a political contest in which participants aim to manifest genuine and authentic environmentalist ideas and practices. According to the pastoral-environmentalists of river conservation movements in Mongolia, herders are the most authentic environmentalists due to their sustainable, mobile way of life. In this way the Indigenous culture of pastoral mobility enters into political ecological discourse. This is a Mongolian response to the stereotypical views of nomadism perceived to be held by foreigners, involving assumptions of barbarism, backwardness, and unsustainability. Moreover, this pastoral identity plays an important role in the construction of the national identity, as promoted by scholars aiming to develop the concept of "nomadic civilizations". Even though a majority of Mongolians today are not herders, this paper argues that the idea of nomadic civilizations serves a function of justifying and consolidating Mongolia's sovereignty and independence on cultural grounds, through establishment of distinctiveness from Russia and China. Therefore, mobility is not only a practical strategy as in the case of herders' environmental protest groups, but also an important cultural referent employed in the making of independence.
Paper short abstract:
This study is a descriptive qualitative as well as quantitative representation of the Tharu tribal woman in Behriach district on Indo-Nepal border. It projects a model of movement of change in the status of woman and challanges in the development process and the bipolar effect.
Paper long abstract:
This study is a descriptive qualitative as well as quantitative representation of the Tharu tribal woman in Behriach district on Indo-Nepal border, Uttar Pradesh, a state in the northern part of India. It projects a model of movement of change in the status of woman and challanges in the development process and the bipolar effect on the society could be analysed. This empirical study makes an effort to highlight a small tribal community in the region with a little different setup as a portrait of the subject.
Status of woman i.e. relative status of woman means the importance conferred on females versus males in a society, the amount of power and authority men and women relatively possess, and by what kinds of rights women and men possess to what they want to do. Since very long the question has been raised that why status of woman appears to vary from on society to another and why do woman have few rights and little influence in some societies and more of each in other societies. Question of variation in degree of gender stratification stands firm.
On the basis of ethnographic view on the status of Tharu woman of North India, my study shows that the Tharu womenfolk has eventually been negatively affected by the development activity of the population due to marginalization and cultural contrast. Details of the study has been incorporated in the present contribution.
Paper short abstract:
This paper describes the factors that underlie patterns of urban-rural mobility in contemporary Mongolia
Paper long abstract:
With the exception of areas where there has been a rapid scale up of extractive industry development, over the past two decades the remote rural areas of Mongolia have lost a quarter or more of their population to urban migration. In the capital of Ulaanbaatar these migrants settle in "ger districts" surrounding the city centre where they are blamed for a number of environmental and social problems. The typical narrative for this migration is that it is driven by increasingly frequent climate disasters; e.g., drought and severe winters. Drawing on several years of fieldwork across several regions of Mongolia, in this presentation I question this common narrative, suggest that the cause-effect relationships are far more complex, and argue that these must be understood in the context of how neoliberal reform and rural underdevelopment have affected the resilience and vulnerability of rural populations. I suggest that while climate change is perhaps a necessary cause of migration, it is alone insufficient to explain the full scope of rural-urban mobility.
Paper short abstract:
My paper analyses two consequences of the post-socialist changes since the 90's: explosion of alcoholism and the brain drain of women. In Mongolian traditions related to nomadic way of life, the contemporary demographic changes have opened new circulatory roads and international migrations.
Paper long abstract:
Since 1990, in Mongolia, the explosion of alcoholism affected mostly men than women. It belongs to the models of manliness, which knew an hyperinflation during the liberalization process of the last decades. Alcoholism also tends to increase gendered violence and explains the increase of divorces and single young. While partaking in social cohesion disruption, it plays a crucial role in nowadays women's emancipation process, occurring through sexual revolution, used as a tool for economic and social empowerment. Sexuality thus became the field of expression of sexual classes' domination relationships. Sexuality also tends to become a migratory tool for number of women, who use it for integrating globalized world. Indeed, many women take their future into their own hands while marrying with a foreigner and migrating in richer country.