MMRN Research Seminar, Kiril Sharapov

Dead animals, frozen grass and people on the move: neoliberal encompassment and abandonment in Mongolia

This talk draws upon the concepts of neoliberal abandonment and agnotology to interrogate how continuums of slow decay of nomadic herders, their animals, grasslands and entire ecosystems pass between and through each other within the context of neoliberal state/capital entanglements. By drawing upon a series of interviews with internally displaced residents of semi-legal ‘ger’ settlements on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar conducted in June 2016, it explores the processes of, on the one hand, neoliberal encompassment of the savaged body of Nature and of expendable human bodies as resources to be consumed and exploited; and, on the other hand, of neoliberal abandonment of the viciously neglected human and non-human others, whose life is earmarked as lying outside market value.