North-East Asian Studies. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. 226 pp. (B&W photos, illustrations.) US$105.00, cloth. ISBN 978-94-6298-956-6.
The collapse of the one-party political system in Mongolia in 1990 offered opportunities for scholars to study the country, its people, and its institutions without ideological blinkers. Anthropologists, in particular, flocked to Mongolia because fieldwork was now permitted. Research on shamanism, pastoralism mining, Buddhism, application of neo-liberal economics, and Mongolian attitudes toward China have been published and have frequently added to knowledge about this ill-studied and formerly isolated country. However, many of the authors believed that they needed to engage with anthropological theory and laced their prose with a highly technical vocabulary, which was often unreadable and came perilously close to jargon.
In his introduction to a collection of his previously published essays, Dr. David Sneath veers from this pattern and instead offers a straightforward survey of Mongol history and ethnicity. The last ten pages of the introduction provide a useful survey of the country’s socialist and post-socialist experience, focusing on the neo-liberal agenda or so-called Washington Consensus. There have been earlier accounts of the neo-liberal agenda or shock therapy, which was promoted by the International Monetary Fund, the Asian Development Bank, the United States Agency for International Development, and the World Bank for Mongolia from 1990 on, but Sneath provides an informed summary. These policies emphasized privatization of state enterprises (including the herds which had been owned by collectives in the socialist period), price liberalization, elimination of state subsidies, government austerity, reductions in expenditures for social welfare, pensions, education, and medical care, and a rapid transition to a capitalist economy. The result was inflation, unemployment, an extraordinary increase in the rate of poverty, and a dramatic rise in income inequality. Privatization proceeded rapidly and was a dismal failure, as a few oligarchs helped themselves to state assets. As Sneath writes, “One of the most widely felt public grievances is that the privatization of property was unfair, dishonest, or unjust. It is now hard to believe that privatization was ever intended to benefit the Mongolian public as a whole” (199).
Privatization has also remade the countryside, leading to increasing instability. The rapid elimination of the negdels, or collectives, the basis of the socialist economy, in the early 1990s and the drive toward privatization of the herds caused considerable disruptions and allowed a few Mongolians to appropriate the collectives’ trucks and other assets and to acquire more of the animals. Ordinary herders owned fewer animals and did not receive vital government support. The state scarcely assisted in transport of animals to market, limited loans to herders with few animals, did not provide veterinary services, did not maintain wells, and did not supply hay during snowy or icy winters when the animals could not reach the life-preserving grass. Without state support, ordinary herders were vulnerable. Seeking to escape the ensuing hardships and poverty, many herders, who heard rumors about money-making opportunities in the urban areas, migrated to the cities. Almost half the country’s population now lives in the capital Ulaan Baatar, placing an enormous strain on the city’s infrastructure. Most of these migrants live in the so-called ger (or tent) districts surrounding Ulaan Baatar and have limited, if any, access to running water, electricity, and proper garbage collection.
Having provided this summary of post-socialist Mongolia, Sneath wonders whether Mongolian capitalism “will be able to deliver solutions for Mongolia’s problems of poverty, debt, inequality, and environmental loss” (206), and appears to have doubts about capitalism’s success in resolving these problems. He notes that loans from the international financial agencies have been predicated on adherence to a neo-liberal agenda, which has undercut economic progress and an equitable distribution of income. In other essays in the volume, he writes about land ownership, credit, and economic development, and his language is often blessedly free of jargon or popular words in scholarship, though on occasion, he slips and writes about “the discourse of corruption” or “metonymic fields.”
There are two minor deficiencies. One is the lack of an index, which makes it difficult for the reader to follow up on specific themes or people in the book. Another is errors in the bibliography. For example, I am grateful that Sneath cites me approvingly on several occasions, but his bibliography mentions the wrong book. The quotes and references were not from China and Inner Asia, which was published 15 years before the post-socialist era, but from Modern Mongolia, which dealt primarily with the post-socialist era.
Nonetheless, Sneath’s book can be recommended as a fine analysis of the dilemmas Mongolia has confronted since the collapse of socialism in 1990.
Morris Rossabi
City University of New York, New York