Subjective Lives and Economic Transformations in Mongolia by Rebecca M. Empson

Author:Rebecca M. Empson [Empson, Rebecca M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9781787351462
Google: B5fuDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: UCL Press
Published: 2020-06-01T04:17:52+00:00

Notes

1. The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 was banned from flights because it allegedly posed a fire hazard. See:https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/10/14/dot-bans-samsung-galaxy-note-7-flights/92066322/.

2. This, it appears, is ‘not how people classify [and arrange the world], but how they speculate about the universe and their place in it’ (Skafish and Viveiros de Castro 2016, 397).

3. This way of articulating new political ideals is reminiscent of how politics unfolds in Mongolia. Although there is a head who leads (an ezen), democratic politics continues because of the existence of ‘interlinked patronage networks’ that disperse political power (Radchenko and Jargalsaikhan 2017, 1035). In a similar way, Sara and her husband move between different groups, creating connections, developing new theories and ideas and formulating ideas of how they would like the future to unfurl.

4. In a symposium on populism in Economic Anthropology, Ho examines the content of populist critique in the US. She argues that populism here ‘deploys the rhetoric of reverse discrimination and scapegoating to galvanise political energy in the name of the “common man” [mainly white, male and heterosexual], within a context of intensifying socio-economic inequality’ (Ho 2018, 148). Those who have benefited most from such changes are the financial elite who frame this inequality as an outcome of ‘cosmopolitanism, meritocracy and multiculturalism’. Reactionary populism, such as that which led to the election of President Trump, arose, Ho argues, out of real grievances against these neoliberal forms of financialisation. However, it is unsound to conflate policies and practices that benefit the financial elite with the demands of marginalised and minoritised groups. Given the way in which narratives have been interpreted and reinterpreted and forms of explanation appear multiple and contradictory, Ho calls for ‘a critical form of economic anthropology’ (Ho 2018, 149). Such an anthropology would explore the social construction of particular markets that have created particular worldviews, sensibilities and prospects for many Americans. It would work to uncover and destabilise certain financial myths that have held the economy in place in a very particular way, mostly for the benefit of institutionally privileged white men. What she calls the burden and continual challenge of economic anthropology is to unpack these resentments and illuminate their relation to the financialisation of the US and global social economy in general.

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