Harnessing Fortune

This is the first detailed ethnography of rural Mongolian life since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Based on fieldwork with migrant herding families who traverse the Northern Mongolian-Russian border, the volume explores how intimate social relationships and identities are drawn upon to engage with new political and economic uncertainties. Based on long-term fieldwork with herding families along the Mongolian-Russian border, this book examines how people tend to past memories in their homes while navigating new ways of accumulating wealth and fortune in the face of political and economic uncertainties. It is at this intersection, where the politics of tending to the past and the morality of new means of accumulating wealth come together to shape intimate social relations that the book reveals an innovative area for the study of kinship in anthropology. Combining personal experience with ethnographic insight, the volume will be essential reading for social anthropologists and those with a general interest in East Asia and post-socialist countries.