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The Vanishing Power Plant
Infrastructure and Ignorance in Peri-urban Ulaanbaatar
in The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
Author:
Morten Axel Pedersen
Morten Axel Pedersen
University of Copenhagen morten.pedersen@anthro.ku.dk
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Abstract
In a neglected corner of peri-urban Ulaanbaatar’s sprawling post-socialist slums, the livelihood of dozens of households has over recent years been affected by a large infrastructure project that will never be built. ‘Power Plant #5’ was originally tendered to a Chinese construction firm in 2008 as part of a national strategy to develop Mongolia’s energy production to meet new needs. Taking its departure in the story of a poverty-stricken woman long employed as a caretaker by a mysterious organization allegedly in charge of Power Plant #5, this article explores the peculiar dynamics by which lacking knowledge about this and other infrastructural projects in contemporary Mongolia feeds into dispossessed people’s dreams about and plans for the future. Indeed, it suggests that ignorance itself may be conceived of as an infrastructure in its own right, insofar as it constitutes a ground from which certainty as well as uncertainty emerge.
Contributor Notes
Morten Axel Pedersen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. He is author of Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia (Cornell University Press, 2011) and The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition (with M. Holbraad, Cambridge University Press, 2017), and co-editor of the special journal issues Inner Asian Perspectivism (Inner Asia, 2007), Technologies of the Imagination (Ethnos, 2009), Comparative Relativism (Common Knowledge, 2011) and Times of Security: Ethnographies of Fear, Protest, and the Future (Routledge, 2013). He is also co-editor of the book series Ethnography, Theory, Experiment, published by Berghahn Books.