Contribution 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.

Contribution 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.