Mining, Foreignness, and Friendship in Contemporary Mongolia

Treasure Underfoot and Far Away: Mining, Foreignness, and Friendship in Contemporary Mongolia Marissa Jo Smith A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of Princeton University in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Recommended for Acceptance by the Department of Anthropology Advisers: Rena S. Lederman and John W. Borneman June 2015 c Copyright by Marissa Jo Smith, 2015. All rights reserved. Abstract This dissertation concerns relations of international friendship in Erdenet, Mongolia. Erdenet was established in the mid-1970s by the Mongolian People’s Republic and the Soviet Union, planned and built with one of the world’s largest copper mines. The Erdenet enterprise was never fully privatized and Mongolian-Russian relations are strong in Erdenet, while the enterprise also involves many relationships reaching beyond the Eastern Bloc. The description and analysis are based on participant observation conducted from 2010 to 2012, primarily with engineers involved in training programs and research projects with partners from outside Mongolia. As Erdenet was settled by people from across Mongolia as well as the Soviet Union, residents hail from multiple nationalities and often also reckon relationships among themselves in terms of nationality. Using the concepts of accretion and erosion, the analysis draws together various practices of developing relations across and of difference, which are coded as national but also in terms of profession and age. Associated with the continuity of the mining enterprise, these systems of relation are available to people in Erdenet in ways they are not elsewhere in Eurasia. Proper relations with foreigners as well as nonhumans including the Buddha are also critical to access and control of eternally reproducible erdene valuables, which include future generations as well as ores. Mongolia has long been involved in international socialism and its common projects of nationalism and internationalism, science and technology, education and professionalism. Mongolian concepts and practices are however foregrounded here, practices such as the construction of ovoo, physical structures where earthly, animal, and human substances are regularly placed and accrete as ever-growing friendly communities of humans and nonhumans called nutag. The social consumption of alcohol is another modality of accretion, as is speaking another’s national language. Ovoo practices (including mining), drinking iii and feasting, and language-switching are creative and dangerous in ways that only shamans master, but directors also engage widely in the multiple kinds of relation associated with different nationalities, professions, and ages. This ethnography also comprises a first-person account in which the anthropologist accounts her own accretion in Mongolia, risking erosion while trusting in friendship. iv Acknowledgements My first thanks go to everyone in Erdenet and elsewhere in Mongolia who are a part of this project. In particular I thank members of the workplaces that I became a part of: the Erdenet Mining Corporation, the Sh. Otgonbileg Institute of Technology, and the Hydrometallurgical Research Laboratory. I also thank the University of Science and Technology in Ulaanbaatar and the International Association for the Exchange of Students for Technical Experience, the international students who worked in Erdenet through the ShUTIS and IAESTE, and other visitors from afar who came to Erdenet to engage in the work of international friendship and collaboration, with or without becoming members of the workplaces of Erdenet. I will always treasure and work to bring further value from our relations as elders and youths, teachers and students, coworkers, and friends. This project is also the result of relations between elders and youth, teacher and student, at Princeton. Rena Lederman and John Borneman have been with me at Princeton since the beginning, always taking seriously my commitments to Erdenet and Mongolia as well as my continued involvement in my communities of origin based in the American West, while also continually encouraging me to further explore and situate these relationships in the production of anthropological and ethnographic knowledge. Rena and John have always not only taught but enacted anthropology as a collaborative practice that takes others and their concerns, as well as one’s own concerns, seriously, never shrinking from the difficulties of difference and continuously demonstrating the great potential of anthropology. While John brought perspective on issues of socialism and postsocialism from the other side of the Eastern Bloc, Rena has always supported my interest in and engagement with Melanesianist literature and Melanesianists. Carol Greenhouse has taught and demonstrated much about how to communicate concisely and effectively, warmly and generously. I also thank Carol for helping me to begin and continue work on the forth chapter of this dissertation, v in which I attempt to engage not only the extensive work of Mongolists on political morality and law, but also that of Weber and Durkheim. Serguei Oushakine has not only always encouraged and engaged my work but also encouraged and helped me to engage formally and informally with members of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Kruzhok of Eurasianists scattered throughout Princeton. Jim Boon has always provided instruction and inspiration in contrarianism and creative association. Larry Rosen contributed to this project throughout my time at Princeton, and I also thank him for giving me the opportunity to hone my skills as a teacher under his mentorship. I also thank Isabelle Clark-Deces and Abdellah Hammoudi for their part in my apprenticeship as a Princeton anthropologist, committed to the practice of ethnography as skillful reading, writing, and the work of encounter and relation of and between difference. Carol Zanca has always been there to make everything, inside and outside of Princeton, cohere. I also thank Mo Lin Yee and Gabriela Drinovan. I have been fortunate to also acquire many friends among my agemates, older and younger, at Princeton. Eva Harman, Erin Raffety, and Pablo Landa formed a writing group with me that was instrumental in getting my dissertation underway and creating a new kind of belonging at Princeton and as an anthropologist after a lengthy period away in Mongolia among engineers. Saul Schwartz has been a friend and intellectual companion for over a decade now – at Beloit as well as Princeton. Daniel Polk has always been a calming and encouraging, while consistently intellectually challenging and stimulating, presence. Megan Steffen visited me in Erdenet and I benefit greatly from conversations with her to work out our very different perspectives and experiences had together in Erdenet and Mongolia. I am grateful that Celeste Alexander, Joel Rozen, and Sebastian Ramirez returned from fieldwork in time for us to continue our friendships and conversations as dissertation writers. I also thank friends I met through living at the Graduate College, particularly anthropologist Gregory Finkelstein of the Department of Geosciences as well as many friends in the vi Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Department of Electrical Engineering. Extra thanks go to Jeff Dwoskin for his LaTex template for Princeton PhD dissertations. Returning to Mongolia, I thank friends, mentors, and colleagues I met while working and living there. Rebecca Watters has become the most dotno of naiz and taught me much about travelling in the Mongolian khodoo and the power of otherness, particularly that of wild animals and mountains. I owe much of my thinking about ovoo to experiences and conversations shared with her. While I travelled to the central and western mountains with Rebecca, I went to the Gobi with Sara Jackson, who has helped keep me in touch with mining there spearheaded by Western miners. Conversations with Sara Jackson and Lauren Bonilla also helped me to further understand the particular forms of Erdenet and post-Soviet enterprise by contrasting these with Gobi mining operations. Devon Dear shared her warm, centrally-located apartment with me during winter trips to take care of immigration business in Ulaanbaatar, while also sharing the insights of an incisive social analyst and historian accessing and sharing the treasures of the archive. Devon also taught me much about the fields of East and Inner Asian history as practiced in the United States and Russia. I also thank Kip Grosvenor Hutchinson for many discussions about how relationships are created and sustained through music. Morten Pedersen and Mette High have been important mentors not only in terms of the anthropology of Mongolia, but also the professional practices of academia more generally. Conversations with both of them, as well as their published work, has enriched this project in ways that continue to generate value. More recently Manduhai Buyandelger has also taken me under her wing. I also thank Frank Bille, Gregory Delaplace, Brian Baumann, and Christopher Kaplonski. Chima Anyadike- Danes has quickly become a good friend and crucial collaborator, often through late vii night Facebook chats. I also thank Tal Liron for his collaboration, largely conducted through late night internet meetups. In the final stages of my dissertation writing I was invited to the Mongolian and Inner Asian Studies Unit at the University of Cambridge, where I also benefited from conversations with Uradyn Bulag as well as the direct and very rich questions and

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