Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to understand shifting ideas about property in Mongolia by situating them within contemporary disasters and, particularly, the impact of neoliberal reform on the experience of risk. These dynamics, I argue, harbor the potential for transformative change to a post-pastoral Mongolia.

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to understand shifting ideas about property in Mongolia by situating them within contemporary manifestations of dzud - a widespread, winter disaster in which livestock en masse. Through an exploration of a shift from the sudden embrace of land privatization in 2008 to its total rejection in 2014 in a small herding community in eastern Mongolia, I trace the insidious ways neoliberal reforms have fragmented community bonds and alienated households from one another resulting in the atomization of household exposure to risk and the proliferation of an exclusionary property politics. Additionally, through ethnographic explorations of household mobility and property-making, I demonstrate how the visceral experience of confronting dzud shapes the perception of risk and the ways in which herders conceptualize the relationship between risk and property. Following work on the "emotional ecology of risk" and the affective commons, I describe how the rejection of privatization in 2014 does not represent a resurgence of commons logics but rather a symptom of shortened temporal horizons for perceiving risk and limited capacity for social memory, key components of common property logics. These dynamics are significant in that, coupled with the explosion of post-disaster calls for land privatization following each successive dzud event and the increasing marginalization of pastoral identities and lifeways in the broader society, they carry the potential for transformative change. In this sense, dzud amplifies and accelerates a trajectory of unraveling, dispossession, and destruction in which urban political and economic forces seek to shape a new, post-pastoral Mongolia.