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С 509 © Марисса Смит
ПАСТЫРИ СОЦИАЛИСТИЧЕСКОЙ ИНЖЕНЕРИИ: МОНГОЛЬСКИЕ РАБОЧИЕ В МИРОВОЙ ДОБЫВАЮЩЕЙ ИНДУСТРИИ
Данная статья посвящена проблеме изучения восприятия монголами добывающей индустрии в контексте традиций шаманизма и советского опыта. Автор этой работы ставит вопрос о том, что такое «шаманское место»? Что такое власть в современных условиях? Каким образом представления о власти вписываются в контекст современного этнонационального дискурса в Монголии? В основу статьи легла методология этнографического анализа. Ключевые слова: Эдэнэт, Монголия, добывающая промышленность, шаманы, Россия.
Marissa Smith
SOCIALIST SHEPHERD ENGINEERS: MONGOLIAN WORKERS AND THE GLOBAL MINING INDUSTRY
This article is devoted to the study of the perception of the Mongols of the mining industry in the context of the traditions of shamanism and the Soviet experience. The author of this work asks what a «shamanic place»? What is power today? How notions of power fitted into the context of contemporary ethno-national discourse of Mongolia? This article is based on methodology of the ethnographic analysis.
Keywords: Erdenet, Mongolia, mining industry, shamans, Russia.
I
Mongolia's Erdenet Mining Corporation, as it is now known, produced its first copper concentrate in 1977 and continues to be a Russian-Mongolian joint corporation. Despite having just celebrated its 35th anniversary, for most foreigners as well as many Mongolians Erdenet is something of an enigma. Like Russia itself, Erdenet is as often seen as irrelevant as it is experienced as crucially important.
In this paper I draw on Erdenet to emphasize present continuities of Mongolia's socialist period and so-called "Russian" qualities, while also pointing to the pastoral and shamanic aspects of the same. In line with a now long tradition of describing the "shamanic," I am referring here mostly to Mongolian personhood and politics. In addition, I describe how these qualities align with Western or capitalist as well as Soviet socialist forms of modernity, opening considerations of how they shape Mongolians' encounters with the likes of Rio Tinto and Goldman Sachs.
While considered by many Mongolians to be a new, more modern Erdenet, to many foreigners global mining giant Rio Tinto's projected Oyu Tolgoi constitutes something wholly new to Mongolia. Mongolia is often conceptualized as an undeveloped country, stuck on the evolutionary ladder at pastoralism and socialism, nonproductive and morally corrupt. In addition,
while most social scientists and humanists have abandoned evolutionary models of society, many working on Mongolia have continued to frame pastoralism as separate from industry and finance, severing "urban" sites like Ulaanbaatar and Erdenet from the "countryside" and emphasizing historical continuities with the end of the 19th Century rather than the 1970s and 1980s. Thus we find ourselves, like many of those circulating the public discourses we aim to complicate, trapped using categories such as socialism, capitalism, democracy, and shamanism in temporal ways and side-stepping consideration of their complex moralities. In contrast, I hope to use such categories as immanent, always possible but conflicting and troubled categorizations for working out almost any given encounter in contemporary Mongolia.
In choosing an example of how the social in Mongolia is at once pastoral and industrial, Soviet and Western liberal-democratic, Russian and Mongolian,
I might have decided on some of the events that have no doubt been at the center of many conversations and concentration among Mongolists in early 2012: the arrest of Enkhbayar, the revocation of South Gobi Sands' mining licenses, the media blitz of Mongolia's very short campaign season. I have however decided to first discuss job applications and university degrees. Besides the fact that I take it as the ethnographer's task to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar, I find that these social phenomena demonstrate how Mongolians enact their personhood and power at the intersection of Soviet and Western modernities as well as enduring Mongolian structures. The practices surrounding application documents reveal the place of the "shamanic" in Mongolian power in what are also "bureaucratic" institutions of the type described by the likes of Durkheim, Weber and Foucault. As a second example at a different scale, I also briefly discuss railroad development projects.
II
I will begin by further describing what it is that I mean by the "shamanic" in Mongolian political structures. I largely follow Morten Pedersen's concept as laid out in his recent book Not Quite Shamans (2011). Along with Pedersen, a number of scholars have described power in the Mongolian context in terms of a single important opposition. Caroline Humphrey (1995) termed this distinction as that between "shamans and elders" or "shamans and chiefs." Shamans are on the one hand exceptionally gifted and potentially out of control individuals who, as Morten elaborates, are all different from each other. Elders or chiefs are on the other hand powerful and respected because they are part of a class of persons who are all similar to one another. In the first group, Pedersen places singular individuals such as blacksmiths who are diviners and hunters who make abominable jokes, while respectable old men and traders inhabit the second class. This opposition also helps us to understand Mongolia's unique incarnation of democracy that balances statism and individualism. In addition to many Mongolians, Pedersen, Sabloff (2002, 2010), Kaplonski (2004) and a number of other scholars have linked this aspect especially with Chinggis Khaan's statesmanship and military prowess, while
High (2008), Sneath (2006), and others have described the tensions between individualism and powerful individual rule in everyday pastoral life.
In other words, the state and other groups are headed by exceptional individuals, who if they are truly exceptional are beyond reproach, but if not are properly subject to others' criticism and revolt. To conceptualize how individual exceptionalism provides the key to understanding the apparent contradiction of democracy and autocracy, consider Chinggis Khaan himself. He was a distinguished warrior among warriors, but also clearly exceptional in his relation to Eternal Heaven. As a result of his great power beyond reproach he successfully defeated both his warrior blood brother Jamuka and his shaman consultant Teb Tengri.
Building on this work dealing with the particularly Mongolian, I want to describe how these structures correspond to ones found not only in contemporary Erdenet but across the Soviet world, before and after the so-called "collapse."1 A key feature of social scientific literature on this region is the description of the widespread nature of social networks that not only helped consumers acquire scarce commodities and fueled extortion rackets in the 80s and 90s but constituted the "socialist mode of production" itself, as Verdery (2000) termed it. As Verdery describes, the planned economy of Romania and other Eastern Bloc countries was based around hoarding and trading, at once creating and addressing conditions of shortage. The rise of oligarchs from such so-called black market trading has been extensively addressed by Ledeneva (2006), Volkov (2002), and many others.
Notably, these works tend to highlight the dark side of these structures and frame them as economic necessities that are viewed not only by Westerners but their Soviet practitioners as for the most part immoral, while (as Pedersen (2011) points out and counters) "native" practices like shamanism tend to be positively evaluated as structuring order amidst the political-criminal chaos of black market and planned economies. I argue however that both of these kinds of practices are related and elementary aspects of political power and everyday life from Romania to Mongolia and thus morally complicated. Besides politics at the level of states, Mongolians as well as Russians and Romanians experience and reflect on their own social networking and its individual-state forms of power, secular and shamanic, as potentially good or evil. Consider the positive attitudes many have towards not only Chinggis Khaan, but in Russia towards Stalin and in Romania towards Ceaucescu.
As Pedersen (2011) elaborates for shamanic power, a dominant Soviet attitude towards difference underlies the concept of exceptional persons and the correct use of power. Besides being expected to ensure general prosperity in the forms of modern infrastructure and services and the provision of international aid and investment, leaders are held to standards in elevating others, for example through school admissions and work assignments. Corruption discourse, I contend, is about who deserves what - as Sneath (2006)
1 Interestingly, in Russian the term is raspad, which might be translated as "separation." I do not know Mongolians to utilize a similar concept, concentrating rather on revolution.
has described, proper gifts are enactions of, rather than generative of, proper relations. Immorally, an oligarch or boss (darga) might use his position to place individuals who are incapable into positions of personal benefit and power. In Mongolia, aiding close family members is often highly suspect-for example I consider it highly symbolic that the specific legal accusations brought against Enkhbayar involve the privatization of a hotel in his son's favor. In Erdenet the supposed practice of paying bribes to enter the company is unambiguously criticized. On the other hand, a person's capability cannot be assessed by the fact that they hold a degree or by reviewing a job application, though their abilities stem from institutions as well as innate abilities, as is the case with shamans and lamas.
Thus, all encounters, in that they are power relations, require working with social networks in a way that is morally dangerous. These observations are important for understanding the present condition and future of multinational companies from Anglo countries in Mongolia, as this is a site of great tension in interpersonal relations and the working of institutions that are structured quite differently. In the Soviet world, that individuals and groups are different from one another as well as internally differentiated, capable of good and evil, is accepted in ways that it is not in the United States and other Anglo contexts, where persons are held to be assessable through the abstracting and essentializing tools of standardized tests, academic transcripts, and resumes as well as deriving more of their abilities through institutions than innate talent. In Mongolia, while perhaps anyone can be a herder but not everyone an engineer or businessman, in the United States the schoolroom refrain is that anyone can be anything.
III
This attitude towards difference in the Soviet context might be described through considerations of nationality policy or the worker/intelligentsia distinction. These have played out in ways very different from Western modernity, and have huge implications for interaction between the different persons and institutions structured along them. I hope to explore these aspects in my dissertation and other future work. For now though I continue describing documents.
Today, the Erdenet Mining Company continues to be characterized by a vertical structure, linked through the movement of documents up and down levels of nachalniks and zakhirlals (directors), with each exchange finalized by the issuance of at least one and at times seven or more stamped and signed prikazi or "orders" from above. (Though I don't want to sloppily translate this term - the Russian stem kaz- can be glossed as "to show" or "to appear." Its "magical" qualities can be attested by how in Erdenet we never translate it from Russian into English, Mongolian or Kazak.) However, these decisions take into account all manner of interactions and conditions that are not documented, or attempted to be documented.
In tension with a classical form of bureaucracy, the structure of units within the company mirrors those found in the apartment, hashaa and pastoral ail. In
the first place elders, especially male elders, are almost automatically figures of respect, even transcending the worker/intellectual divide. During Tsaagan Sar younger persons ceremonially greet (zovlokh) their elders and consume airag and dairy foods at the school as well as at visits to their apartments and hashaas. Among elders are also those taken to be exceptionally educated and cultured. Younger persons work under their direction while relying on them for aid, for example in the case of job and school applications, for personal recommendations reflecting their own exceptional qualities.
In my experience of the American system of applications, the written recommendation is of utmost importance, and demonstrates how Americans appreciate "informal" relations yet still attempt to document and "formalize" them. Even face-to-face "networking" is often highly formalized. As I have experienced in helping people with applications in Erdenet the concept of a written recommendation is an unfamiliar one. They tend to be brief and official, in the manner of prikaz, without the use of specific anecdotes, for example, found in good American recommendations that aim to demonstrate how a student or worker's abilities play out in "real life."
My agemates in Erdenet are highly uncomfortable with taking the TOEFL test, filing an application posted publicly online and researching let alone contacting potential graduate school advisors on their own. I give one of many possible examples. For one acquaintance especially determined to gain a Master's degree in the United States, I went beyond explaining the importance of and process of finding an advisor and thus a source of funding and much higher chances of admission by offering to talk to my father, a petroleum engineer, about any faculty he might know at the prestigious Colorado School of Mines. When I discussed applying again with this acquaintance a few months later she had not done any of the research or emailing of potential advisors that I had suggested but did not fail to ask what networking with my father had turned up.
Clearly, the Erdenet Mining Corporation is based around a kind of flexibility that is highly at odds with the neoliberal kind that Rio Tinto bases itself on. While in Erdenet we rely on extensive networks to aid us in bringing to account one another as infinitely variable individuals, some of whom are intrinsically gifted, Rio Tinto seeks to fill pre-determined positions through the use of abstracting documents. As its logic of managing a portfolio of mining operations around the world that can be quickly opened and closed with changes in commodity prices and local conditions abstracts the infinitely variable qualities of each operation through the medium of money, Rio Tinto attempts to abstract potential employees through the use of documents. Rio Tinto meets difficulty in both attempts that we should take into account as much as we situate the company as an immensely powerful global actor.
As jobs are often procured in Erdenet through the personal recommendations of teachers, relatives, and acquaintances (tanil), we might consider how Rio Tinto and its Mongolian employees are dealing with and will deal with Mongolian expectations that Rio Tinto engage in personal rather than abstracted interactions. These include requests from employees that Rio Tinto employ their family and friends, as well as expectations that Oyu Tolgoi will become the site of a new
Erdenet, a fully realized city with kindergartens, parks, and roads without traffic jams. In my experience of helping a few individuals make applications to work or obtain scholarships from Rio Tinto, I have tried with difficulty to explain how describing current difficult circumstances, for example the death of a parent, would not aid a work application. Currently, Oyu Tolgoi like Erdenet is conceived of as an exceptional leader whose legitimacy rests on the creation of benefit for the non-exceptional. As an Anglo corporation, Rio Tinto however conceptualizes itself as an individual among equals, all serving themselves, and expects applications describing how the potential worker would benefit the company.
IV
Hopefully I have used an account of the mundane and everyday to establish the way that social processes work in Erdenet offices and homes so that I may now jump scales and describe phenomena at the national and global level that are probably of more enduring concern to more readers and the likes of Rio Tinto. Commentators in the public media as well as some academic fields are constantly concerned with how Mongolian politicians, while supposedly constituting an exemplary democratic and market-oriented state, engage in the politics of so-called resource nationalism. Many write this off as epiphenomenal, for example stating that politicians must engage in such to secure re-election, causing the parliament to fragment when it comes to matters such as the Oyu Tolgoi investment agreement. I contend rather that phenomena packaged together as "resource nationalism" are core elements of Mongolian political structure, including those that I have been describing.
I give the planning and development of new railroad infrastructure as an example. On the one hand, foreign corporations and elements of the Mongolian state continually face off on who should pay for and construct railroads, power plants and other major infrastructure necessary for mining operations as well as Mongolian expectations for proper everyday life. On the Mongolian side, with Soviet enterprises like Erdenet as the model, the distinction between state and corporation often breaks down and Mongolians view some foreign corporations as exceptional national institutions whose constant enactment of superior ability includes aiding so-called undeveloped countries such as Mongolia. However, even when Rio Tinto and others have been willing to construct rail, they generally plan to build only directly to China. Investors I have talked to and read are unable to accept why Mongolians would object to this, as they base their evaluations on simplified and abstracted cost and profit models that generally do not differentiate corporations between corporations and nations between nations, if even they differentiate buyers from buyers and sellers from sellers. Mongolians on the other hand, viewing nations and corporations as actors like the individuals I have described earlier, appreciate these entities as different among and inside themselves in ways that can only be known through interactions and who are held to enact their superior abilities by providing for the public (in this case Mongolia's) good. Thus, Russia as a proven partner may be preferred to China and the likes of the United States and Germany become especially welcome, though also capable of moral failure.
V
Many investors and businessmen convince themselves that Mongolia is essentially democratic rather than socialist or otherwise "backwards." However, the likes of "resource nationalism" and so-called "corruption" are not wrinkles to be ironed out-they are manifestations of core elements of Mongolian political structure, which are very much lived in the everyday as well as played out in election campaigns and legislation. In this context, power should only be held by the capable, and they are always subject to evaluation by those they must benefit and expect to follow them. These processes are always morally ambiguous. This formulation is deeply at odds with the notion that the state should exist only to allow individuals to interact as equals, protecting the good and weak from the predations of the evil and strong first by cultivating them all through public institutions to have a standardized repertoire of abilities, and second by rendering everything transferrable between equals through the abstraction of value through money. Like other members of the still extant Soviet empire and many generations before, Mongolians appreciate that things are different among themselves but within themselves as well, each individual having unique capabilities that might do good as well as evil that always have consequences beyond the individual self, nation, and empire.
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Смит Марисса - Департамент Антропологии, Принстон.
Smith Marissa - Department of Anthropology, Princeton University.
