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Hedwig Waters
Leiden University
A proportional share: the political aesthetics of resource wealth amongst the wildlife procurers of remote post-socialist Mongolia
In Ferguson’s latest work, he surmises that the recent global increase in ‘rightful share’ politics – in other words, political demands for economic redistribution based on citizenship belonging – is linked to the failure of neoliberalism to improve the wellbeing of all (2015). This paper focuses specifically on the question concerning why and how the ‘rightful share’ repeatedly emerges within resource-based politics by analysing the aesthetics of the ‘proportional share’ amongst the wildlife procurers of Magtaal, a remote region in eastern Mongolia. Over the last fifteen years, in particular after Mongolia gradually underwent a mining-speculative economic boom in the late 2000s/early 2010s, both various Mongolian governments and the everyday citizens of Magtaal have relied on taking minerals and wildlife, respectively, from the land to make economic proceeds, both variously using a language of giving or receiving ‘shares’ to justify these actions. This paper argues that, although parts-to-whole share politics do emerge in contexts where there is a failure of redistribution, the ‘proportional share’ as used by the wildlife procurers of Magtaal is also rooted in historical understandings of the land and resource commons as pastoral ‘inalienable wealth’, which has been both democratised and mediated through money in post-socialist market Mongolia. Here, the ‘proportional share’ is a portion of economic proceeds that is pre-‘encompassed’ (Holbraad 2005) or spiritually-marked due to its perceived origin in the land and thus must be rightfully returned, in altered form to continue the cycle, to the political body from whence it came.
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