| dc.description.abstract | It had been three years since I was last in Mongolia, and things felt unfamiliar. The skyline was crowded by new buildings. Fashion styles had
diversified. Shops and restaurants proliferated. There was also a new
kind of dirty, rugged and raw side to the gloss and glamour that Mongolians are so good at upholding. As on previous visits, but perhaps more
intensely simply because of the great contrasts, in 2015 I felt that I was
being confronted in a somewhat dystopian way with what a capitalism of
the future might look like.
Brushing up against this underside – the ruthless contrast between
rich and poor, the seeming absence of the state, the horrendous air pollution in the city and the ravaging of natural resources, the unequal access
to medical care and the way in which people were trying to make a living
on the edges of things – provided a glimpse of the reverberating effects of
late capitalism being felt in numerous places. Deeply destructive, uneven
and desperate, it also appeared thrilling and full of potential. Cutting
across this landscape of raw inequalities were individual people forging
their own ethical projects that sometimes, somewhat surprisingly, seemed
to flourish and grow in the cracks. Rather than a simple before and after
(boom and bust, utopian and dystopian) narrative, I hope that through
our attention to the lives of individuals will bring out a more complex and
nuanced understanding of this time will emerge. | |
