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- Convenors:
-
Eric Thrift
(University of Winnipeg)
Bum-Ochir Dulam (National University of Mongolia)
- Discussant:
-
David Sneath
(Cambridge University)
- Location:
- 302
- Start time:
- 18 May, 2014 at
Time zone: Asia/Tokyo
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel will explore the multiple standpoints from which mobile pastoralists interact with international development projects. We ask how, as anthropologists, we can contribute to explicating these standpoints though engagements with development discourse and practice.
Long Abstract:
Mobile pastoralism has undergone significant transformations worldwide in recent decades, often directed by interventions from international donor organizations. In spaces where "development" largely overlaps with "governance", we ask how pastoralists manage to navigate the diffuse, continuously changing institutional landscape of development projects, whose activities may overlap or conflict in a given site. In particular, we wish to consider how mobile pastoralists' adaptive flexibility--rooted in strategies of shifting resource use, fluid social organization, and fluctuating herd size and composition--may equip or predispose them to relate to development projects or institutions in innovative, potentially opportunistic ways.
This panel will explore and discuss the multiple standpoints from which mobile pastoralists interact with international development projects or organizations, and how development anthropology can contribute to explicating these standpoints. Drawing on our own engagements with development projects targeting pastoralists, we intend to discuss the priorities and pitfalls of practising development anthropology and institutional ethnography on behalf of development agencies or their stakeholders, and how our work can benefit mobile pastoralists.
This panel is organized by the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, National University of Mongolia within the framework of the Green Gold Sustainable Pasture Management Project funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Byambabaatar Ichinkhorloo (National University of Mongolia) Emily Yeh (University of Colorado Boulder)
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on how development projects have been implemented at local level through ethnographic in-depth studies in two different geographical locations and how this development intervention creates competitive power networks among herders through network studies.
Paper long abstract:
Number of Development agencies is targeting herders as vulnerable to natural and social risks such as winter snowstorms, droughts and pasture mismanagement, and try to help herders overcome these risks and perceived pasture degradation or mismanagement. The achievement of development projects at local level brought more power to local people who involved in the projects and created suspicion among the rest of people. For instance, detailed investigation of "development" small grants to herders and analyses of the impacts of Development projects on herders reveal hidden [to outsiders] reciprocal networks of herders and how these networks are competitive with each other and how they make their own boundaries. The competition of these networks is usually originated from local key officials, local politics and well-recognized herder families. These further influence herders to rely more on their own strength or networks and lead to disintegration of herder neighborhoods. For this reason I argue that Development intervention supports forming individualistic society overall and weakens herders' neighborhood trust while encouraging spatially dispersed reciprocal networks for short-term economic gains.
Eric Thrift (University of Winnipeg)
Paper short abstract:
Mobile pastoralism has been widely acknowledged as constituting a set of practices enabling adaptation to uncertainty and instability. In this paper I discuss evidence of how Mongolian pastoralists may subvert development agendas in order to maintain existing adaptive practices.
Paper long abstract:
Mobile pastoralism has been widely investigated by anthropologists in ecological terms, as a set of practices enabling adaptation to environmental uncertainty and instability. Flexible resource use, social organization, and economic production strategies continue to enable pastoralists' resilience to ecological variation, but also provide a basis for adapting to contemporary social or economic change and uncertainty. Yet development interventions targeting pastoralists may encourage investment in risk-mitigation strategies that reduce these forms of flexibility, introducing reliance on external markets, investments, or coordinating institutions. Drawing on ethnographic research in three regions of Mongolia, I discuss evidence that Mongolian pastoralists often subvert development agendas in order to maintain existing adaptive practices. I suggest that development projects themselves can be viewed as a form of uncertainty, insofar as they offer short-term funding for initiatives whose goals may remain opaque to herders.
Ariell Ahearn Ligham (Oxford University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the residential structures and investment strategies of herders in rural Mongolia in an effort to understand the nature of contemporary herding practice and decision-making in conflicting socioeconomic and environmental conditions.
Paper long abstract:
Mongolian herders are faced with a spectrum of decisions that require their response to environmental as well as socioeconomic conditions. This paper explores the seasonal residential structure and investment strategies of herding families in northern Bayanhongor province in an effort to understand the nature of contemporary herding practices and decision-making. It is found that traditional concept used by scholars to describe and understand residential structure, the hot ail, does not have a stable definition and is not part of the everyday practices of herders, while other structures that are often overlooked by scholars are more prevalent and part of daily discourse and decision-making processes. Additionally, socioeconomic factors have contributed to the formation of new residential structures, which may inform the direction of change in herding in contemporary Mongolia.
Tuya Shagdar (National University of Mongolia)
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores dynamics between state, development agencies and herders in relation to access to common pool resource.
Paper long abstract:
This paper intends explore three relations tied to the land. Mainly how mobility and access to common pool resource is affected by; boundaries, changes in the ecology and finally private and public economic relations tied to the land tenure. State as well as development agencies try to draw up specific pasture and administrative boundaries related to seasonal mobility as well as fixed timeframe for local moves. The pan-optic approach to the landscape does not always correspond with local community imagination about space, boundaries and relations to it. As ethnographic field work and theoretical literature demonstrates the land in mobile Mongolian pastoralist society is constituted by fluid social relations and adaptive strategies that remain part of the landscape.