EMERGING SUBJECTS · Emerging Subjects of the New Economy: Tracing Economic Growth in Mongolia

This project examines how predicted economic growth is experienced by people in Mongolia with the advent of large-scale mining operations. Our project will generate new insight into two areas of concern for economic anthropology and beyond. First we will examine the way that the economy is unfolding in a distinct way in East Asia through different kinds of predictive narratives that come to have an effect on the way people act. Second we will explore how individual subjects also shape the economy in their everyday relations through various forms of exchange and the accumulation of wealth.This dual focus provides the basis for a nuanced and powerful critique of our understanding of the way in which economic realities are shaped through predictive narratives as well as formed, from the ground-up, by local actors who carve out new forms of subjectivity through such actions. Indeed it is our suggestion that these new subjects of the growing economy are distinctly different from the post-socialist selves described in previous literature on the region. Instead they are powerful and hopeful subjects who demand a different kind of engagement and entitlement. The form such engagement takes and the kind of economic realities produced out of such forms is the focus of our study.