Subjective Lives and Economic Transformations in Mongolia: Life in the Gap

It is the cover image that first brings the reader into the fold of “the gap” that is the conceptual anchor of Rebecca Empson's Subjective Lives and Economic Transformations in Mongolia: Life in the Gap. A goddess figure looms large, peering above the title with her focused gaze, rising amid a tangle of strings from which hang marionettes of human figures, balloons, lungs, wind chimes, and other thematically related objects depicted against a moving sky of scattered clouds, a swirl of dandelion seeds, a coming tornado. This is Air (Agaar), one of five paintings by the artist Nomin Bold, which the author has beautifully reproduced in color. The series depicts five Mongolian women as “guardians of the five elements” (vi), of earth, air, fire, water, and wood, which compose the world. These images punctuate and give rhythm to the book, suspended between the portraits of five female figures and interludes that cut through the text, as if to suspend time, as if to evoke imagistically the experience of “life in the gap.”This project of illuminating this world of rapid economic transformation in Mongolia (2014–19) is a political one for Empson.1 It is political, because how does one write about a world in flux where things “appeared to change so quickly that it was difficult to know what, if anything, remained the same” (2)? What forms can an ethnography take in such a context of “rapid growth and sudden decline” (92), of “speculation and critique” (140), in a time of “contradictions, indeterminacy, and precarity” (8)? What one chooses to attend to in the midst of shifting ground has long been a central concern of anthropology.2 The how of the writing, alongside multimodal engagements that seek to evoke the politics of place beyond the shorthand of “capitalism” and “the economy”—that is at stake here too.3 In this sense, Empson's book takes up ethnography as a criticopoetic intervention into the experience of living in capitalist ruin and imagining life beyond it.Through the stories of five Mongolian women—Oyunaa, Sara, Tuyaa, Zedlen, Delgermaa—each from different socioeconomic backgrounds, each affected differently by the shifting economic and political environment, Empson articulates the emerging realities of this world moving too quickly. These are the subjects of a new Mongolia, where “crisis becomes the regular and ordinary” (17).4 But her focus on these women, their lives as “a herder, an environmental activist, a mineworker, a kindergarten teacher and a real estate agent” among a multiplicity of other roles and relations they are bound up with, does more than just bring about a set of portraits.The way the individual stories are brought into “juxtaposition” with one another, with the interludes, the images, as well as Empson's own participation as a figure in the stories, sustains a generative tension. Indeed, bringing the stories together in this way “facilitates insight across scales, economic, social, and political” (27). Certainly, it pushes against the idea of a “‘single’ fieldsite” (27). But the stories are also much more expansive than the individual figures that feature across the five chapters. They are at once fashioned as portraits and yet also composed to be dissolved as such. Put in different terms, even as the author's descriptions remain legible to the women whose stories are told here, and even as they “recognize each other's descriptions of what's going on in Mongolia today,” they are expansive and open enough that the women “may not recognize themselves in the chapters about them” (26–27). Here is life in the gap. This is the artful innovation of Empson's book.“Sharing stories about our lives takes us both into and out of ourselves,” Empson writes in reference to the notion of “inter-subjectivity,” after Michael Jackson (27). The movement into and out of seemingly implicates us all.There is Oyunaa the event-planner entrepreneur, always working on multiple projects, “not so much as a result of uncertainty and marginalization, but in order to keep several futures open as possibilities” (36). There is Sara, the real estate agent that looks to thirteenth-century exemplars for political insight that might offer new ways to imagine the future of Mongolia. There is Tuyaa, “caught indefinitely in a structural bind created by short term loans” (89) yet endlessly called upon to be the primary caregiver to her blind mother and young son, “to be resilient, enduring conditions of volatility and flux” (92). There is Zedlen, working at the Ministry of Nature and Environment and Tourism, who describes herself as “a singularity, a hangover from a previous generation, amid a society that has radically changed its values and priorities” (21). And there is Delgermaa, the herder involved in an array of seasonally dependent business ventures such as antler collecting, a kind of “salvage accumulation,” after Anna Tsing (137).But as several of Empson's interlocutors expressed: “In this world, no one is simply a herder, a businessman, or a trader. . . . Everyone is at least two or more things” (9); “everyone juggles multiple ways of getting by” (136). It is not a singular subject but an emerging one, and it is not the same gap and yet is a gap that becomes visible across expanses and interludes. What stands in common, reflected as in “a mirror” in and out of Mongolia, is that we are all caught up in a gap, “in a chain of relations” (150). As in the images dreamed by Nomin Bold, a jack-o’-lantern and a red barn here strung to an elephant and a construction-site crane there, no way to locate a beginning or an end.The conceptual approach of this book would be of interest for readers grappling with writing economic volatility and precarity. And, of course, it is still “very much a book about Mongolian women” (27). But really, it is a book about politics.If the gap can be a space of “nuanced critique” (58) and “prefigurative politics” (49), as Empson suggests following David Graeber, what then to do with the comment made by Delgermaa's husband, that “it was actually better under socialism when we all had jobs” (139)? How to make sense of Zedlen's “red hangover” and the “communist afterlives” that continue to reflect back certain ethical commitments and forms of life?5 It seems the “post” in postsocialist is also a gap, a space of potentialities that remains unfurling.