The Generative Potential of Movement

This chapter reflects on the distinction between naturalist ontologies of growth and those found in the Mongolian concept of fortune. A review of these ideas in relation to the ethnography suggests that previous distinctions, which have usually been considered as distinct modes or ways of being — such as ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’, or ‘agnatic’ and ‘consanguineal’ — should instead be viewed as instantiations of a wider archetype for perspectival traffic. By focusing on the transformations afforded when parts are extracted from people, animals, and things and then contained, or housed, to allow for growth and generation, we see that these distinctions are always internal. In shifting between them, fortune is harnessed and growth is made visible.

Housing Others in Rebirths

This chapter explores the relationship between memory and kinship, showing how people's bodies can also be viewed as the containers that ‘house’ deceased kin. This is necessary because a sense of being separated from one's relatives embraces many levels of life for pastoral herders in Ashinga. Primarily, there is a sense of absence from place as the Buriads escaped war and disruption in Russian Buryatia and migrated to Mongolia in the early 1900s. In Mongolia, the Buriad were heavily persecuted during the socialist period and people were prohibited from communicating with their ancestors through shamanic performance. Intra-kin rebirths, common to most families in this area, provide a way in which to negotiate the politics of memory and wider feelings of loss. Nevertheless, when people are born into a world where they are both the rebirth of their grandfather and the daughter of someone in the present, life becomes a process of learning how to separate out this multiplicity in order that one may become the son or daughter of a person in the present.

Assemblage at the Household Chest

Focusing on objects inside the household, this chapter explores how photographic montages and embroideries project different aspects of the person on to visitors to the house. These objects outwardly display the relations of obligation available to people within the household, while provoking individual memories of absent people and places for those who live in their vicinity.

The Mirror’s Reflections and Refractions

This chapter examines the role of the mirror, which is placed at the centre of the display, to reveal an exemplary kind of person made from each of the parts that constitute the household chest. Drawing on recent work in artefact-oriented research, these visible and hidden components of the household chest appear as inter-dependent perspectives that index different concepts of the person. They reveal that relations based on affinity, separation, rupture, and difference are the necessary, yet invisible, background that supports the visibly foregrounded relations based on shared bone, containment, and sameness. When viewed together, through the mirror that stands at the centre of the display, we see that a person is made from each of them. Far from being a mere psychological reaction to external stimuli, here vision of oneself through the mirror becomes the ‘tool’ through which an exemplary kind of personhood is revealed.

Boundaries and their Transgression

This chapter shows how the creation of hidden pieces, such as umbilical cords and pieces of tail hair from herd animals, contained within the household chest, point to modalities of personhood, quite different to those objectified on the outer surface of the chest. Here, people are brought into being, not though repetition and stasis, but through their separation and movement across time and space.

The Mountain and the Runaway Daughter

This chapter presents narratives concerned with people's past experiences of loss and migration. This is explored through the prism of their current interstitial position as an ethnic minority living in Mongolia's far countryside. Narratives about the Buriad's sustained persecution by the Mongolian state are often evoked as a means by which to objectify themselves as different from other Mongolians. In contrast, narratives of continuity revolving around the tracing of clans and genealogies are used to highlight connections to a wider Buriad diaspora. Focusing on the way in which people define themselves against or alongside others, the chapter reveals some of the idioms by which people evoke different kinds of personhood. These narratives provide a background against which ideas of separation and containment can be used to think through other aspects of Buriad social life.

Vessels of Harnessed Fortune

This chapter examines practices by which a household manages its fortune through attention to its herds and in mountain ceremonies. These practices point to domestic ways of forging a sense of personhood in the present, whereby people are viewed as the custodians of the land in which they currently live. They also involve attention to particular objects and so they highlight the moral means by which fortune is harnessed and contained.

The Ambiguous Power of Fire and Sites of Accumulation

In Ashinga's district centre, wealth is increasingly visible in the form of people's elaborately constructed wooden houses. This chapter shows that these static displays have, over the past decade, become the target of serious arson attacks. Such attacks bring to the fore memories of past terrors where people's property was confiscated in the dead of night. But the threat of arson should not be viewed simply as an extension of a previous terror. Instead, through a focus on Mongolian ideas about fire, arson appears as a form of purification, as people question the morality of their new means of accumulating wealth and power.

Managing the Landscape’s Resources

This chapter focuses on the accumulation of wealth through herding. For pastoral herders, movement across the landscape is the dominant means by which fortune is harnessed and growth in animals achieved. Here, fecundity and wealth are visible in mobile and transitory forms. At the most basic level, it is the herds that form the landscape as it is they who traverse the land and contain the fortune that engenders the fertility and vital energy that makes ‘places’. In the face of competing claims on the landscape, local shamans are motivated to establish relations with previous inhabitants who are held to reside in particular places. In so doing, they gain endorsement from past historical figures who claim that they are good people who should remain there. In securing this endorsement, the Buriad go some way in gaining authority over the place in which they currently live.

Introduction

This introductory chapter begins with a description of a small district called Ashinga, in Hentii Province along the Mongolian-Russian border, where the author conducted her PhD fieldwork between 1999 and 2000. It describes the area, its people, and how they go about their daily lives. The chapter then sets out the book's purpose, which is to address a set of seemingly paradoxical questions that emerged out of the author's placement in a family and extends to wider spheres of social life for the Buriad: How do people who traverse the border zone between two countries and have no private land or state of their own accumulate possessions and grow things? How can people who have lived under intense persecution during the socialist period, when most of their male relatives were either killed or taken away, harness such loss and absence to generate a proliferation of relations? Why is it that when these people display wealth in a stationary form, they destroy these exhibits through acts of arson that separate them from such accumulation? An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.