[Expletive] the Permit', the Reindeer Herder Answered

Constitution and Contestation of State Territorialising Power in Northernmost Mongolia

Bibliographic Data

ID4889945
AuthorsNicolas Rasiulis (PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, McGill University Montreal, Quebec Canada, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume26
Issue1
Pages3-28
Publication date2024-05-17
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueInner Asia (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1464-8172 • E-ISSN: 2210-5018
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1163/22105018-02601002
OpenAlexW4411454596
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited12

Territorial mastery in northernmost Mongolia's taiga is contested. The main contestants are: 1) taiga-dwelling Duhas (nomadic reindeer-enabled hunter-gatherers and multispecies pastoralists), their livestock, and other, non-human local masters of Duha homeland (emplaced in the Darhad Depression's mountainous rim); 2) the Mongolian state (centralised far away in the capital, and reaching outward along operational extensions centralised in concentric outposts), and the state's embedded agents (mostly emplaced in the Darhad Depression's steppe). For Duhas (who maintain ground superiority in the taiga), competitive performance consists largely of maintaining or resuming traditional territorial engagement, and representing and/or strengthening their situation vis-à-vis the state in their dialogue and/or cohabitation with useful outsiders (e.g. tourists and anthropologists). For the state (and its nature reserve rangers and border guards), performance consists largely of geosocial demarcations, proscriptions and prescriptions, and enforcement thereof. Here Ulaan Taiga Specially Protected Areas Administration (UTSPAA), and the largest of its three nature reserves Tengis-Shishged National Park (TSNP) in particular, are indispensable to Mongolia's territorialization. In the de jure sprawl and de facto murkiness of UTSPAA zoning throughout the three reserves and their interstices, state potency looms spectrally omnipresent at the remotest reaches of Mongolia's centralised territorialising power. Occulted at the margin, Duhas and their homeland loom 'spiritually sovereign' beyond the steppe. A Duha territorial group's repeated mass circumvention of a state permission-restricted mobility system reveals the in situ supremacy of Duhas' taiga-sourced sovereignty, and how Mongolia arbitrages incompatibility (of its territorial order with reality) in line with its interests

Geography · Homeland · Livestock · Pastoralism · Political science · Sovereignty · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Law · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology · Forestry

Tools

Open DOI