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Anticipating Relations
Beyond Reciprocity and Obligation in the Ger Districts of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
in The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
Abstract
In the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar, known as ger districts, a growing number of rural-to-urban migrants live without access to formal urban infrastructure or regular incomes. Under these challenging material conditions, personal networks take precedence, providing and regulating access to employment and meat provisioning. Looking beyond discussions of anticipation among migrants focusing on the goals of migration, I interrogate the role of anticipation in the making and maintaining of relational networks. Existing analyses of such networks in Mongolia have generally relied on idioms of reciprocity or obligation. Focusing instead on material transfers and transactions among ger district residents reveals such networks to be more ambiguous and prone to failure than notions of reciprocity or obligation can easily accommodate. This article argues that the productive contradiction within the concept of anticipation – encompassing both expectative waiting and pre-emptive action – can illuminate new aspects of these relations and networks in action.
Contributor Notes
Elizabeth Fox is an ESRC-funded PhD candidate at the Department of Anthropology, University College London. Her work, ‘Making Cashmere, Making Futures: The Work of Hope and the Materialisation of Dreams in a Mongolian Cashmere Factory’, has been published in the journal Inner Asia (17:1, 2015) and she has contributed to The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality (Ledeneva et al. [eds], 2017), providing an entry on ‘Tsartsaani Nüüdel’ (Mongolia). She is a guest contributor to the blog of the ERC-funded project ‘Emerging Subjects of the New Economy’ and her PhD research focused on domestic life and the welfare state in Ulaanbaatar.
