David Sneath
Biographic Data
| ID | 432956 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Sneath |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Sneath |
| SIGNATURE | SNEATH D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 369 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Steppe Transitions
Mongolia’s diverse ecology was the site of revolutionary transformations in the twentieth century, when the principal source of wealth—the livestock herd—was sequentially the basis of feudal class, collective resource and a privatized asset. The socialist making of a nation-state and its capitalist unmaking—a materialist account
Nationalist imaginaries and the Covid pandemic in inner Asia: Notes towards an analytic methodology
The Mongolian state and the coronavirus pandemic: Policy, messaging and the nationalist imaginary
The COVID-19 pandemic introduced inevitable changes in the society and internal politics of Mongolia. While analysing the chronology of the state response to the pandemic with the help of discourse analysis, the authors pose the following question: ‘What sort of laments or demands are organising tropes in contemporary Mongolian nationalism?’ The authors identify demands or laments as organising tropes for the forms of narrative that are made poss…
Chapter 2. The Savage Noble: Alterity and Aristocracy in Anthropology
Cosmopolitical Ecologies Across Asia: Places and Practices of Power in Changing Environments
Cosmopolitical Ecologies Across Asia: Places of Power in Changing Environments
Everyday Hospitality in Mongolia: Obligation, Enaction and Projects of Governance
Hospitality is an everyday part of life on the Mongolian steppe. Visitors to any rural ail (« encampment ») expect to be offered food, drink and, if need be, a place for the night. Rather than a form of reciprocity, Mongolian everyday hospitality can be seen to be enactional, not transactional ; its practices are materialisations of the roles of host and guest and do not imply some sort of return. As Annette Weiner noted, the notion of reciprocit…
Mongolia Remade: Post-socialist National Culture, Political Economy, and Cosmopolitics
Afterword: Mongolian-made capitalism
Oligarchy (oligarhi) has become a well-worn Mongolian term for describing the social order. Real power and wealth is now said to be monopolized by a small number of super-elite families. The roots of this oligarchic capitalism lie in the process by which ownership was acquired and concentrated so as to take control of companies, rather than simply making profitable investments. The emergent form resembles Thomas Piketty's notion of ‘patrimonial c…
Enclosing the Gold-Mining Commons of Mongolia: The Vanishing Ninja and the Development Project as Resource
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 fac…
Commonwealth, inalienable possessions, and theres publica: The anthropology of aristocratic order and the landed estate
Annette Weiner used the term 'inalienable possessions' to describe a category of property of fundamental importance in Oceania, and in Europe, from Roman times until the eighteenth century. The archetypal form of this inalienable wealth is the landed estate - the 'immovable property' of Romano-Germanic law. This type of wealth, inherently political and carrying functions we associate with the state, has been historically produced by aristocratic …
Tribe
The concept of ‘tribal society’ is one of the most prominent and popular ‘anthropological’ notions of our time, yet within western social and cultural anthropology it has been largely abandoned as a sociological category. Although the origin of the word was rooted in the ancient Roman tribus, the modern concept of tribe emerged in the era of Euroamerican colonial expansion. It became the standard term for the social units of peoples considered pr…
Nationalising civilisational resources: Sacred mountains and cosmopolitical ritual in Mongolia
This paper is concerned with the historical process by which elements drawn from a religious ‘civilisation’ have been reinvented as specifically national phenomena. It examines the Mongolian state ceremonies for sacred mountains conducted by the President as an example of the reinvention of an institution originally produced by the wider culture or civilisation of the Buddhist ecumene encompassing both Mongolia and Tibet. Such ritual, I argue, ca…
Seeing' Environmental Process in Time: Questions of Evidence and Agency
This introduction reviews the articles collected in this special section, articles that explore different visions of the environment and how they engender particular ways of seeing evidence of climatic and environmental change. A key aspect of such distinctive understandings seems to be the attribution of agency within conceptions of the environment that in each case are entangled with humans. Notions of anthropogenic and non-equilibrial environm…
The ‘age of the market’ and the regime of debt: The role of credit in the transformation of pastoral Mongolia 1
Since the decollectivisation of the rural economy in the 1990s, Mongolian pastoralists have become subject to the new property regime of the ‘age of the market’ (). Formerly collective assets, such as livestock, machinery and buildings, have become private property and land is increasingly becoming a resource available for private ownership. International finance and development agencies have advocated credit schemes for pastoralists faced with u…
Communicating Climate Knowledge: Proxies, Processes, Politics
This forum article is the product of interdisciplinary discussion at a conference on climate histories held in Cambridge, United Kingdom, in early 2011, with the specific aim of building a network around the issue of communicating cultural knowledge of environmental change. The lead articles, by Kirsten Hastrup as an anthropologist and Simon Schaffer as a historian of science, highlight the role of agents and proxies. These are followed by five i…
Rejoinders - A Response by David Sneath to Peter Golden's Review of the Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, and Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia (JAS 68:1)
Political mobilization and the construction of collective identity in Mongolia
In the twentieth century, Mongolia became subject to the Soviet version of nationalist thought. As the state constructed a single national ‘people’ (ündesten, ard tümen) it also, following the Soviet model, constructed the past in terms of tradition (ulamjlal), and launched the ethnographic project of identifying and describing sub-national ‘ethnic’ groups or tribes (aimag, yastan). Since the collapse of Soviet-style state socialism and the intro…
A Response to Critics
В “Ответе критикам” Дэвид Снит выражает признательность всем, кто принял участие в обсуждении его статьи (и книги), поскольку книга задумывалась именно для того, чтобы инициировать полномасштабную дискуссию в антропологии о новом аналитическом языке описания кочевых сообществ. Снит подчеркивает, что он не отрицает важности родства в устройстве неевропейских кочевых сообществ, однако не согласен, что это может быть конституирующим признаком их отл…
Reading the Signs by Lenin's Light: Development, Divination and Metonymic Fields in Mongolia
This paper examines two apparently contrasting cases: the imaginative effects generated by Mongolian scapulimancy practices, and the impact that the introduction of electric light had on rural Mongolians. Scapula and other divinatory items are analysed as 'metonymic fields' - bounded technical practices from which wider meanings are read. The Soviet-era electrification programme was designed to create the sorts of imaginative perceptions that the…
Technologies of the Imagination: An Introduction
The End of post-socialism? An Account of the 1st of July Riots in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, and Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia
In this groundbreaking work, social anthropologist David Sneath aggressively dispels the myths surrounding the history of steppe societies and proposes a new understanding of the nature and formation of the state. Since the colonial era, representations of Inner Asia have been dominated by images of fierce nomads organized into clans and tribes—but as Sneath reveals, these representations have no sound basis in historical fact. Rather, they are t…
Transacting and enacting: Corruption, obligation and the use of monies in Mongolia
This paper has two aims: firstly it sets out to describe public perceptions and discourses of corruption in Mongolia and show how these relate to wider notions of legitimate and illegitimate gifting and other material transmissions. Secondly, it offers an analysis of the idioms used by anthropologists and others to describe and explain material transfers. I adopt a critical and selective approach to the use of the idiom of exchange which, I argue…
International Symposium on Inner Asian Statecraft and Technologies of Governance
The symposium was organised by the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit, University of Cambridge, with the support of the British Academy, the Sigrid Rausing Inner Asian Scholarly Exchange Programme, and the French Cultural Delegation in Cambridge. It was held on 18 and 19 March 2004 at Corpus Christi College, and was attended by many of the leading scholars of the history and culture of Inner Asia, including three Mongolian academicians
Technologies of the Imagination: An Introduction
Transacting and enacting: Corruption, obligation and the use of monies in Mongolia
This paper has two aims: firstly it sets out to describe public perceptions and discourses of corruption in Mongolia and show how these relate to wider notions of legitimate and illegitimate gifting and other material transmissions. Secondly, it offers an analysis of the idioms used by anthropologists and others to describe and explain material transfers. I adopt a critical and selective approach to the use of the idiom of exchange which, I argue…
Notions of Rights over Land and the History of Mongolian Pastoralism
In the 1990s the Mongolian state implemented a series of reforms designed to create a competitive market economy based on private property. These included the wholesale privatisation of the pastoral economy and the dissolution of the collective and state farms. The Asian Development Bank and other international development agencies advocated new legislation to allow the private ownership of land. This remains a highly controversial issue in Mongo…
Reading the Signs by Lenin's Light: Development, Divination and Metonymic Fields in Mongolia
This paper examines two apparently contrasting cases: the imaginative effects generated by Mongolian scapulimancy practices, and the impact that the introduction of electric light had on rural Mongolians. Scapula and other divinatory items are analysed as 'metonymic fields' - bounded technical practices from which wider meanings are read. The Soviet-era electrification programme was designed to create the sorts of imaginative perceptions that the…
Political mobilization and the construction of collective identity in Mongolia
In the twentieth century, Mongolia became subject to the Soviet version of nationalist thought. As the state constructed a single national ‘people’ (ündesten, ard tümen) it also, following the Soviet model, constructed the past in terms of tradition (ulamjlal), and launched the ethnographic project of identifying and describing sub-national ‘ethnic’ groups or tribes (aimag, yastan). Since the collapse of Soviet-style state socialism and the intro…
Communicating Climate Knowledge: Proxies, Processes, Politics
This forum article is the product of interdisciplinary discussion at a conference on climate histories held in Cambridge, United Kingdom, in early 2011, with the specific aim of building a network around the issue of communicating cultural knowledge of environmental change. The lead articles, by Kirsten Hastrup as an anthropologist and Simon Schaffer as a historian of science, highlight the role of agents and proxies. These are followed by five i…
Lost in the Post: Technologies of Imagination, and the Soviet Legacy in Post-Socialist Mongolia
Verdery has suggested exploring the parallels between post-socialist and postcolonial studies. Mongolia has, like many post-colonial states, experienced a series of almost simultaneous transformations in the twentieth century. After the advent of Soviet control in the 1920s Mongolia began to receive Leninist Modernisation and all the trappings of the Soviet version of the European nationstate. The imaginative project of Soviet order shaped the no…
Enclosing the Gold-Mining Commons of Mongolia: The Vanishing Ninja and the Development Project as Resource
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 fac…
Culture and Environment in Inner Asia
BRILL Phone (NL) +31 (0)71-53 53 500 Phone (US) +1-617-263-2323 Email: [email protected] Complementing The Pastoral Economy and the Environment, this volume examines the great social change experienced throughout the region following the demise of the Soviet Union, the advent of democracy in Russia and the economic reforms in China. Its contents include an examination of social attitudes regarding the environment, education, employment and unem…
Everyday Hospitality in Mongolia: Obligation, Enaction and Projects of Governance
Hospitality is an everyday part of life on the Mongolian steppe. Visitors to any rural ail (« encampment ») expect to be offered food, drink and, if need be, a place for the night. Rather than a form of reciprocity, Mongolian everyday hospitality can be seen to be enactional, not transactional ; its practices are materialisations of the roles of host and guest and do not imply some sort of return. As Annette Weiner noted, the notion of reciprocit…
Nationalising civilisational resources: Sacred mountains and cosmopolitical ritual in Mongolia
This paper is concerned with the historical process by which elements drawn from a religious ‘civilisation’ have been reinvented as specifically national phenomena. It examines the Mongolian state ceremonies for sacred mountains conducted by the President as an example of the reinvention of an institution originally produced by the wider culture or civilisation of the Buddhist ecumene encompassing both Mongolia and Tibet. Such ritual, I argue, ca…
Commonwealth, inalienable possessions, and theres publica: The anthropology of aristocratic order and the landed estate
Annette Weiner used the term 'inalienable possessions' to describe a category of property of fundamental importance in Oceania, and in Europe, from Roman times until the eighteenth century. The archetypal form of this inalienable wealth is the landed estate - the 'immovable property' of Romano-Germanic law. This type of wealth, inherently political and carrying functions we associate with the state, has been historically produced by aristocratic …
Beyond the Willow Palisade: Manchuria and the History of China's Inner Asian Frontier
Dr David Sneath is the Director of the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit at Cambridge University and a lecturer in Social Anthropology. He is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College where he is Deputy Tutor for Advanced Students and Director of Studies in Archaeology and Anthropology. He is the Co-editor of the journal Inner Asia and his most recent book Changing Inner Mongolia: Pastoral Mongolian Society and the Chinese State was published in 2000…
The Impact of the Cultural Revolution in China on the Mongolians of Inner Mongolia
A number of papers have been written in the west on the subject of the Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia. Hyer and Heaton's (1968) account of the period in the China Quarterly deals with events up until 1968, and relies heavily upon an analysis of the news reports broadcast by Radio Inner Mongolia at that time. The paper focuses upon the fate of Ulanhu, the Chairman of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region who fell from power during the Cultu…
The End of post-socialism? An Account of the 1st of July Riots in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
The Mongolian state and the coronavirus pandemic: Policy, messaging and the nationalist imaginary
The COVID-19 pandemic introduced inevitable changes in the society and internal politics of Mongolia. While analysing the chronology of the state response to the pandemic with the help of discourse analysis, the authors pose the following question: ‘What sort of laments or demands are organising tropes in contemporary Mongolian nationalism?’ The authors identify demands or laments as organising tropes for the forms of narrative that are made poss…
Mongolia Remade: Post-socialist National Culture, Political Economy, and Cosmopolitics
Afterword: Mongolian-made capitalism
Oligarchy (oligarhi) has become a well-worn Mongolian term for describing the social order. Real power and wealth is now said to be monopolized by a small number of super-elite families. The roots of this oligarchic capitalism lie in the process by which ownership was acquired and concentrated so as to take control of companies, rather than simply making profitable investments. The emergent form resembles Thomas Piketty's notion of ‘patrimonial c…
The Impact of the Cultural Revolution in China on the Mongolians of Inner Mongolia
A number of papers have been written in the west on the subject of the Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia. Hyer and Heaton's (1968) account of the period in the China Quarterly deals with events up until 1968, and relies heavily upon an analysis of the news reports broadcast by Radio Inner Mongolia at that time. The paper focuses upon the fate of Ulanhu, the Chairman of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region who fell from power during the Cultu…
Culture and Environment in Inner Asia
BRILL Phone (NL) +31 (0)71-53 53 500 Phone (US) +1-617-263-2323 Email: [email protected] Complementing The Pastoral Economy and the Environment, this volume examines the great social change experienced throughout the region following the demise of the Soviet Union, the advent of democracy in Russia and the economic reforms in China. Its contents include an examination of social attitudes regarding the environment, education, employment and unem…
The End of Nomadism?: Society, State and the Environment in Inner Asia
The vast steppe region of Inner Asia is historically dominated by Mongol culture, Buddhist-shamanist religion and an economy based on mobile pastoralism. Now, as its constituent states – China, Russia and Mongolia – adapt to market conditions, this long-standing cultural economic zone is seen to be facing more radical change than at any previous time in its past.
Some Notes on a Visit to a ‘Mongolian’ Village in Yunnan, China
Notions of Rights over Land and the History of Mongolian Pastoralism
In the 1990s the Mongolian state implemented a series of reforms designed to create a competitive market economy based on private property. These included the wholesale privatisation of the pastoral economy and the dissolution of the collective and state farms. The Asian Development Bank and other international development agencies advocated new legislation to allow the private ownership of land. This remains a highly controversial issue in Mongo…
Mongolia
Lost in the Post: Technologies of Imagination, and the Soviet Legacy in Post-Socialist Mongolia
Verdery has suggested exploring the parallels between post-socialist and postcolonial studies. Mongolia has, like many post-colonial states, experienced a series of almost simultaneous transformations in the twentieth century. After the advent of Soviet control in the 1920s Mongolia began to receive Leninist Modernisation and all the trappings of the Soviet version of the European nationstate. The imaginative project of Soviet order shaped the no…
Beyond the Willow Palisade: Manchuria and the History of China's Inner Asian Frontier
Dr David Sneath is the Director of the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit at Cambridge University and a lecturer in Social Anthropology. He is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College where he is Deputy Tutor for Advanced Students and Director of Studies in Archaeology and Anthropology. He is the Co-editor of the journal Inner Asia and his most recent book Changing Inner Mongolia: Pastoral Mongolian Society and the Chinese State was published in 2000…
International Symposium on Inner Asian Statecraft and Technologies of Governance
The symposium was organised by the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit, University of Cambridge, with the support of the British Academy, the Sigrid Rausing Inner Asian Scholarly Exchange Programme, and the French Cultural Delegation in Cambridge. It was held on 18 and 19 March 2004 at Corpus Christi College, and was attended by many of the leading scholars of the history and culture of Inner Asia, including three Mongolian academicians
Transacting and enacting: Corruption, obligation and the use of monies in Mongolia
This paper has two aims: firstly it sets out to describe public perceptions and discourses of corruption in Mongolia and show how these relate to wider notions of legitimate and illegitimate gifting and other material transmissions. Secondly, it offers an analysis of the idioms used by anthropologists and others to describe and explain material transfers. I adopt a critical and selective approach to the use of the idiom of exchange which, I argue…
The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, and Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia
In this groundbreaking work, social anthropologist David Sneath aggressively dispels the myths surrounding the history of steppe societies and proposes a new understanding of the nature and formation of the state. Since the colonial era, representations of Inner Asia have been dominated by images of fierce nomads organized into clans and tribes—but as Sneath reveals, these representations have no sound basis in historical fact. Rather, they are t…
The End of post-socialism? An Account of the 1st of July Riots in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
A Response to Critics
В “Ответе критикам” Дэвид Снит выражает признательность всем, кто принял участие в обсуждении его статьи (и книги), поскольку книга задумывалась именно для того, чтобы инициировать полномасштабную дискуссию в антропологии о новом аналитическом языке описания кочевых сообществ. Снит подчеркивает, что он не отрицает важности родства в устройстве неевропейских кочевых сообществ, однако не согласен, что это может быть конституирующим признаком их отл…
Reading the Signs by Lenin's Light: Development, Divination and Metonymic Fields in Mongolia
This paper examines two apparently contrasting cases: the imaginative effects generated by Mongolian scapulimancy practices, and the impact that the introduction of electric light had on rural Mongolians. Scapula and other divinatory items are analysed as 'metonymic fields' - bounded technical practices from which wider meanings are read. The Soviet-era electrification programme was designed to create the sorts of imaginative perceptions that the…
Technologies of the Imagination: An Introduction
Rejoinders - A Response by David Sneath to Peter Golden's Review of the Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, and Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia (JAS 68:1)
Political mobilization and the construction of collective identity in Mongolia
In the twentieth century, Mongolia became subject to the Soviet version of nationalist thought. As the state constructed a single national ‘people’ (ündesten, ard tümen) it also, following the Soviet model, constructed the past in terms of tradition (ulamjlal), and launched the ethnographic project of identifying and describing sub-national ‘ethnic’ groups or tribes (aimag, yastan). Since the collapse of Soviet-style state socialism and the intro…
The ‘age of the market’ and the regime of debt: The role of credit in the transformation of pastoral Mongolia 1
Since the decollectivisation of the rural economy in the 1990s, Mongolian pastoralists have become subject to the new property regime of the ‘age of the market’ (). Formerly collective assets, such as livestock, machinery and buildings, have become private property and land is increasingly becoming a resource available for private ownership. International finance and development agencies have advocated credit schemes for pastoralists faced with u…
Communicating Climate Knowledge: Proxies, Processes, Politics
This forum article is the product of interdisciplinary discussion at a conference on climate histories held in Cambridge, United Kingdom, in early 2011, with the specific aim of building a network around the issue of communicating cultural knowledge of environmental change. The lead articles, by Kirsten Hastrup as an anthropologist and Simon Schaffer as a historian of science, highlight the role of agents and proxies. These are followed by five i…
Seeing' Environmental Process in Time: Questions of Evidence and Agency
This introduction reviews the articles collected in this special section, articles that explore different visions of the environment and how they engender particular ways of seeing evidence of climatic and environmental change. A key aspect of such distinctive understandings seems to be the attribution of agency within conceptions of the environment that in each case are entangled with humans. Notions of anthropogenic and non-equilibrial environm…
Nationalising civilisational resources: Sacred mountains and cosmopolitical ritual in Mongolia
This paper is concerned with the historical process by which elements drawn from a religious ‘civilisation’ have been reinvented as specifically national phenomena. It examines the Mongolian state ceremonies for sacred mountains conducted by the President as an example of the reinvention of an institution originally produced by the wider culture or civilisation of the Buddhist ecumene encompassing both Mongolia and Tibet. Such ritual, I argue, ca…
Tribe
The concept of ‘tribal society’ is one of the most prominent and popular ‘anthropological’ notions of our time, yet within western social and cultural anthropology it has been largely abandoned as a sociological category. Although the origin of the word was rooted in the ancient Roman tribus, the modern concept of tribe emerged in the era of Euroamerican colonial expansion. It became the standard term for the social units of peoples considered pr…
Mongolia Remade: Post-socialist National Culture, Political Economy, and Cosmopolitics
Afterword: Mongolian-made capitalism
Oligarchy (oligarhi) has become a well-worn Mongolian term for describing the social order. Real power and wealth is now said to be monopolized by a small number of super-elite families. The roots of this oligarchic capitalism lie in the process by which ownership was acquired and concentrated so as to take control of companies, rather than simply making profitable investments. The emergent form resembles Thomas Piketty's notion of ‘patrimonial c…
Enclosing the Gold-Mining Commons of Mongolia: The Vanishing Ninja and the Development Project as Resource
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 fac…
Sociology (18 works) · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology (17 works) · Political science (15 works) · History (14 works) · Law (14 works) · Geography (13 works) · Politics (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Anthropology (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works)