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Ancestral Spirits Love Mining Sites: Shamanic Activities Around a Copper-gold Mining Site in Mongolia
Abstract
In recent years, Mongolia has been enjoying rapid economic growth thanks to the development of its enormous natural resource deposits of copper, coal, gold, petroleum, and so on. However, due to the consequent social instability, the number of shamans has increased dramatically over the last 10 years, especially in the capital city Ulaanbaatar and mining towns. In this paper, I will explore shamanic activities around the Oyu Tolgoi mining site in South Gobi, examining what kinds of people are actually becoming shamans and how they become shamans, as well as what activities they are involved in with relevance to the dramatic socio-economic and environmental changes.
... The Oyu Tolgoi (hereafter, OT) copper and gold mine epitomises the significance of foreign investment in mining in Mongolia (Chuluun and Byambaragchaa, 2014;Hatcher, 2020;Jackson, 2015;Shimamura, 2014). The Government of Mongolia holds 34% of stocks in OT, while the remaining 66% is held by Canadian Turquoise Hill Resources, whose major stakeholder is the Anglo-Australian multinational Rio Tinto Group, the second largest metals and mining corporation in the world. ...
This paper outlines the debates surrounding the conflicts between large- and small-scale mining in Mongolia. It provides a historical overview of these conflicts, discusses the critical role of mining in Mongolia's international relations and foreign investment, and the chain of economic, social and environmental causes and effects at work in the trend of herders diversifying into (largely informal) mining activities. As we show, despite the rapid changes in relation to land, culture, community currently taking place in Mongolia stemming from neoliberal policies, privatization and deepening disparities in wealth, notions of social justice remain firmly rooted in socialist ethics.
... One of the first destructive incidents, mentioned earlier, was the case of Ulaan Lake (Ulaan Nuur) and Ongi River (Ongi Gol) in the South of Mongolia. Ulaan Lake had started shrinking in the late 1990s and by 2000 its main source of water, the Ongi River, disappeared (for similar stories, see also Shimamura 2014). This left about 60,000 people, most of whom were herders, and a million head of livestock in eight sums of three different aimags (Omnogovi, Dundgovi and Övörkhangai) along the river with no sufficient source of water (Byambajav 2015: 93;Snow 2010;Upton 2012: 240). ...
This paper aims to unveil sources of nationalist sentiments that are often disregarded, in part because they are often given ‘pejorative labels’ such as ‘populist’ and ‘resource nationalist’ by those who promote the market economy and mining industry. Anthropologists can extend their research beyond such labelling and find out what is at the origin of such popular mobilisations and consequent political decisions against mining. I find that the culturally accepted term nutag , which means birthplace, homeland and country of origin, is the basic source of nationalist sentiments that resist mining. The term nutag has evolved from meaning one’s naturally related birthplace to referring also to the politically independent country of Mongolia. The ideas associated with the original meaning make such nationalist sentiments different from, and much broader than, the idea of controlling natural resources indicated by the term ‘resource nationalism’.
Environmental conflict between indigenous peoples and state agencies developing natural resources has become a global phenomenon. This article presents a compelling but underreported incident of environmental conflict in China. The Tongpo case describes a struggle between a Mongol pastoral people who worship and protect their sacred mountain and a Han Chinese natural resource development company that began constructing a coking mill at the foot of this mountain in late 2005. This paper gives a detailed account of the origins, development, and impact of the Tongpo case from the perspective of indigenous environmental justice. It focuses on two related subjects: how Mongol indigenous institutions in China have protected the environment, and how environmental injustice has occurred at the local level in China. By applying an indigenous environmental justice lens to this case study, this paper exposes how environmental injustice is manifested through internal colonialism, nationalism, and racism and illuminates the ways in which indigenous groups protect their sacred lands.
Archaeological sites are usually discussed as places of academic research, however, there is an ever growing demand for museums and archaeological parks that present reconstructed buildings and archaeological features in a form that makes them accessible for the wider public. Sometimes these monuments have strong connections to cultural tourism and education, and have the potential to be turned into an experience-based exhibition; in other cases they are strongly embedded in local religious phenomena, popular beliefs, or even have ties to one or the other of the major religious groups, making them sacred places. In this paper we discuss the sacralization process of archaeological sites in Mongolia. The examples examined below are partly connected to the Khi-Land project, a Hungarian-Mongolian landscape archaeological endeavour, and partly to the excavations in one of the largest Xiongnu sites, Noyon Uul (Noin-Ula).
A régészeti lelőhelyek általában a tudományos kutatások helyszíneként jelennek meg, de egyre nagyobb igény van arra, hogy az álló emlékeknél, a helyreállított épületekben vagy a rekonstruált régészeti jelenségekhez kapcsolódóan bemutatóhelyek, a nagyközönség által látogatható múzeumok és régészeti parkok jöjjenek létre. Ezek ma gyakran olyan emlékhelyek is, ahol a kulturális turizmus, az oktatás, az élmény alapú megismerés helyszíneiről beszélhetünk, de sok esetben helyi vallási jelenségekhez, a népi vallásossághoz, vagy valamilyen nagy világvalláshoz kapcsolódó, vagyis szakrális helyszínek is lehetnek. Jelen tanulmányunkban e jelenség egyik érdekes megjelenési formáját, a mongóliai régészeti lelőhelyek szakralizációját szeretnénk bemutatni. Az itt közreadott példák részben a magyar-mongol tájrégészeti kutatás, a Khi-Land projekt terepmunkái során szerzett tapasztalatok, részben pedig a mai Mongólia területén található egyik legnagyobb xiongnu lelőhely, Noyon Uul (Noin-Ula) ásatásaihoz köthetők.
Mongolia’s mining sector, along with its environmental and social costs, have been the subject of prolonged and heated debate. This debate has often cast the country as either a victim of the ‘resource curse’ or guilty of ‘resource nationalism’. In The State, Popular Mobilisation and Gold Mining in Mongolia, Dulam Bumochir aims to avoid the pitfalls of this debate by adopting an alternative theoretical approach. He focuses on the indigenous representations of nature, environment, economy, state and sovereignty that have triggered nationalist and statist responses to the mining boom. In doing so, he explores the ways in which these responses have shaped the apparently ‘neo-liberal’ policies of twenty-first century Mongolia, and the economy that has emerged from them, in the face of competing mining companies, protest movements, international donor organizations, economic downturn, and local and central government policies. Applying rich ethnography to a nuanced and complex picture, Bumochir’s analysis is essential reading for students and researchers studying the environment and mining, especially in Central and North East Asia and post-Soviet regions, and also for readers interested in the relationship between neoliberalism, nationalism, environmentalism and state.
Since its emergence in the mid-1990s, unauthorized small-scale gold mining—widely known as “ninja mining”—has grown to become a central element of Mongolia’s informal economy, engaging tens of thousands of people in seasonal, unregulated, and occasionally dangerous labor. In this paper we set out to show that the story of ninja mining is illustrative of the wider transformation of political economy that Mongolia has experienced, in which a de facto public resource was created in the wake of the collapsed state socialist economy, only to be progressively privatized and enclosed by increasingly powerful mining company interests. We examine the implementation of a development project aimed at providing sustainable livelihoods for those engaged in unauthorized mining. Drawing upon anthropological critiques of development, we explore the ways in which the project, while arguably succeeding in its own terms, failed to meet the expectations of the miners involved. Committed as it was to working within the new private property regime for land introduced by “neoliberal” reforms, the project constructed the ninja “problem” in terms of a lack of formalization and training. It was ultimately unable to address the fundamental issues of property relations and access to resources that lie at the heart of the ninja phenomenon. © 2018 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.
This article explores aspects of religious innovation that have developed since the early 1990s in the process of the reconstitution of ethnic and religious identity in Kalmykia, a republic in the southwest of Russia. After a brief overview of Kalmyk history and the contemporary Kalmyk Buddhist landscape, the author focuses on new religious groups. Participants call themselves adherents of a “cosmic religion,” involving the worship of the deity the White Old Man. Their beliefs and ritual activities are based on texts allegedly dispatched from the cosmos in an unknown language. The article draws on anthropological fieldwork conducted in 2011 and 2012.
Since the early 1990s, Kalmykia, in common with the other republics and ethnic groups of the former Soviet Union, has been going through a period of religious and cultural reconstruction after decades of the atheistic policy during the communist era. This article focuses on a modern Kalmyk category of religious specialists claiming to have received the patronage of 'guardian deities', mostly from the Buddhist pantheon, with the deity the White Old Man being of particular importance. Based on interviews conducted in Kalmykia during 2011 and 2012, this study introduces some of the beliefs and ritual activities of these practitioners, discusses functions they perform in society and offers a description of their initiation ceremonies, with the primary aim of exploring what 'accepting divine patronage' implies in the present-day Kalmyk context. The author argues that receiving the tutelage of deities, and hence claiming special healing and visionary abilities, is a proliferating phenomenon in Kalmykia and can be regarded as a distinctive particularity of its contemporary religious scene.
This article examines how Mongolian Buddhist monks view the freedom they have experienced since the fall of Soviet socialism in 1990. Whereas the anthropological literature on postsocialism tends to focus on political and economic transformations, I argue that contemporary Mongolian politics points to the coexistence and interdependence of human and nonhuman agents. The article highlights how, in the context of the country's current mining boom, postsocialist politics requires attention to contemporary religious practices and spiritual beings beyond the ‘secular’. Considering emerging forms of Buddhist environmentalism, I describe how the freedom projects of Mongolian monks crystallize the intersection of Soviet socialist materialism, neoliberal individualism, and a Buddhist ethics of self-transformation.
Two antagonistic forces confronted each other on the territory of the Republic of Buryatia in 2002. One of them was YUKOS, an international petroleum company, the other the Tunka National Park, a legally protected nature reserve of national importance. The essence of the conflict was the intention of YUKOS to build a pipeline from Angarsk (a town in the Irkutsk province of Russia) to Daqing (a city in the Heilongjian province in China) directly through the territory of the national park, though the law forbade it. The mighty YUKOS, supported by the Government and President of Buryatia, faced resistance from Buryat ecol-ogists, the administration and personnel of the national park, and the rank-and-file of Tunka district - cattle-breeders, farmers, teachers, doctors, pensioners - all of whom understood that the ecology of the park would suffer irretrievably, compromising both its natural riches and beauty, and many cultural and historical objects: archaeological sites, sacred groves, clan cemeteries, places of shamanist and Buddhist worship, etc. The practitioners of the local religions, such as shamans, Buddhist lamas and divinators of mountain spirits, united to organise special rituals and prayers around the places of worship and sacred objects, asking the local deities and spirits to defend their worshippers, their land, and their sanctuaries. Although the final collapse of YUKOS was determined politically, the experience of Tunka has demonstrated that oil magnates should not arrogantly disregard the populations and cultures of the territories they intend to utilise for their business activities.
The Unmakinyl oJ'soviet LiJb: Eaeryday economies after socialisru
- C Htrmphrey
- Zooz
Htrmphrey, C. zooz. The Unmakinyl oJ'soviet LiJb: Eaeryday economies after socialisru.
Ithaca (Nv) & Cambridge (rvre): Cornell University Press.
The ltoots Seekers: Shamanism and Etlmicity among the Mongol Buryats
- Shimamura
Shimamura,l. zor4. The ltoots Seekers: Shamanism and Etlmicity among the Mongol
Buryats. Yokohama: Shr-rmpusha Publishing.
Kokka naku shite minzoku ha ikinokoreru ka: Buriyaato Mongoru no chishikilintachi' ICan a Nation Suruive without a State? Intellectuals of Buryat Mcrngols
- K Tanaka
- Zooz
Tanaka, K. zooz. 'Kokka naku shite minzoku ha ikinokoreru ka: Buriyaato Mongoru no
chishikilintachi' ICan a Nation Suruive without a State? Intellectuals of Buryat
Mcrngols], in E. Kurocla (ecl.), Minzoku no unclou to shidoushct tachi [National Movements and Their Leadersl: 74-gS. Tokyo:Yamakawa Shuppan.
‘Kokka naku shite minzoku ha ikinokoreru ka: Buriyaato Mongoru no chishikijintachi’
- Tanaka