Send message to Contributor

Short abstract

What do I have to give to my interlocutors? As a non-White scholar who sees herself positioned somewhere in between her interlocutors from Mongolia and the anglophone academy, I am keen to discuss how anthropologists make and cut relations on both professional and personal levels.

Long abstract

My currently research surveys the field of contemporary art in Mongolia, while enquiring about Mongolia's contemporary condition. For this project, I conducted 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork mainly in Ulaanbaatar with occasional trips to rural Mongolia. Contemporary arts practitioners constituted the core of my interlocutors. I lived, interacted, and conversed with these people, many of whom have become personal friends, on a daily basis. As part of our ordinary interactions, I had accompanied and supported my interlocutors in organising and preparing for a range of art exhibitions, sometimes involving labour-intensive tasks such as mopping the floors of an industrial building and lifting heavy objects. A fundamental yet unresolved anthropological question nagged me constantly during and after fieldwork: What do I have to give to my interlocutors, whose contributions and life stories make the content of my intellectual project? How I give back, if I now hold the spirit of their gifts? As a non-White scholar who sees herself positioned somewhere in between her interlocutors from Mongolia and her academic institution (and the broader institution of anglophone academia), I am keen to discuss how anthropologists make and cut relations with our interlocutors, on whom we often depend during fieldwork, on both professional and personal levels. Being a young woman and a first-time fieldworker, solitary research also involved a constant negotiation of social relations that involved both expanding and cutting networks. These questions, I suggest, are important to put on the table of methodological discussions.