Papers by Marissa J. Smith
Mongolia Focus, 2024
https://blogs.ubc.ca/mongolia/2024/yet-another-new-election-system/
Nikkei Asia, 2023
https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Mongolia-needs-to-be-reconnected-to-the-outside-world
https://doi.org/10.52698/GVHN2150
This dissertation concerns relations of international friendship in Erdenet, Mongolia. Erdenet wa... more This dissertation concerns relations of international friendship in Erdenet, Mongolia. Erdenet was established in the mid-1970s by the Mongolian People’s Republic and the Soviet Union, planned and built with one of the world’s largest copper mines. The Erdenet enterprise was never fully privatized and Mongolian-Russian relations are strong in Erdenet, while the enterprise also involves many relationships reaching beyond the Eastern Bloc. The description and analysis are based on participant observation conducted from 2010 to 2012, primarily with engineers involved in training programs and research projects with partners from outside Mongolia. As Erdenet was settled by people from across Mongolia as well as the Soviet Union, residents hail from multiple nationalities and often also reckon relationships among themselves in terms of nationality. Using the concepts of accretion and erosion, the analysis draws together various practices of developing relations across and of difference, w...
Journal of Eurasian Studies, 2020
In 1994, the new Orkhon Province was created, transforming the status of the Soviet-established f... more In 1994, the new Orkhon Province was created, transforming the status of the Soviet-established federal municipality Erdenet, a major copper-mining center responsible for much of the country’s export revenues and central to ongoing Mongolian–Russian relations. Rather than representing increased participation in national government for Erdenet residents, many of whom are members of transborder minority ethnicities with ties to remote parts of the country, the formation of the province has been controversial locally, as it has meant the introduction of provincial governors, de facto appointed by the Prime Minister. At the same time, the People’s Parties descending from the single state party of the socialist era have in fact been successful at maintaining their networks across the country, and often fielded successful candidates for seats representing Orkhon. Representatives have included the director of a large local construction firm who also held the post of director of foreign tra...
International Policy Journal, 2022
Études mongoles et sibériennes, centrasiatiques et tibétaines, 2021
Critical Asian Studies, 2021
https://doi.org/10.52698/GVHN2150
Mongolia Focus, 2021
http://blogs.ubc.ca/mongolia/2021/constitutional-court-gridlock/
Mongolia Focus, 2020
http://blogs.ubc.ca/mongolia/2020/mongolian-presidents-mongolian-language-education/
Mongolia Focus, 2020
http://blogs.ubc.ca/mongolia/2020/the-demos-party-third-party-rural-strategy/
Journal of Eurasian Studies, 2020
https://doi.org/10.1177/1879366520916743
Global Informality Project, 2018
http://in-formality.com/wiki/index.php?title=Mungu_idekh_(Mongolia)
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Papers by Marissa J. Smith
This dissertation concerns relations of international friendship in Erdenet, Mongolia. Erdenet was established in the mid-1970s by the Mongolian People's Republic and the Soviet Union, planned and built with one of the world's largest copper mines. The Erdenet enterprise was never fully privatized and Mongolian-Russian relations are strong in Erdenet, while the enterprise also involves many relationships reaching beyond the Eastern Bloc.
The description and analysis are based on participant observation conducted from 2010 to 2012, primarily with engineers involved in training programs and research projects with partners from outside Mongolia. As Erdenet was settled by people from across Mongolia as well as the Soviet Union, residents hail from multiple nationalities and often also reckon relationships among themselves in terms of nationality. Using the concepts of accretion and erosion, the analysis draws together various practices of developing relations across and of difference, which are coded as national but also in terms of profession and age. Associated with the continuity of the mining enterprise, these systems of relation are available to people in Erdenet in ways they are not elsewhere in Eurasia.
Proper relations with foreigners as well as nonhumans including the Buddha are also critical to access and control of eternally reproducible erdene valuables, which include future generations as well as ores. Mongolia has long been involved in international socialism and its common projects of nationalism and internationalism, science and technology, education and professionalism. Mongolian concepts and practices are however foregrounded here, practices such as the construction of ovoo, physical structures where earthly, animal, and human substances are regularly placed and accrete as ever-growing friendly communities of humans and nonhumans called nutag. The social consumption of alcohol is another modality of accretion, as is speaking another's national language. Ovoo practices (including mining), drinking and feasting, and language-switching are creative and dangerous in ways that only shamans master, but directors also engage widely in the multiple kinds of relation associated with different nationalities, professions, and ages.
This ethnography also comprises a first-person account in which the anthropologist accounts her own accretion in Mongolia, risking erosion while trusting in friendship.
This talk describes the years-long process of planning, construction, remodeling, awakening, and reawakening of a monumental Buddha (Burkhan Bagsh) in Erdenet, Mongolia. Other monumental statuary projects of the postsocialist period, including Kh. Battulga’s Chinggis Khaan complex and Guru Deva Rinpoche’s Burkhan Bagsh in Ulaanbaatar, have been associated with a single human person’s claims to exemplarship and assertion of the singular importance of an institution these individual masters are reforming. The construction of the Erdenet Burkhan Bagsh, however, has involved local and national-level Buddhist institutions, the city’s coeval mining corporation, and the office of the provincial governor appointed by the national government. These institutions have often been in open conflict with one another and variously patronized by different demographics resident in Erdenet. However, during the process of building the Burkhan Bagsh divisions along lines of territorialized ethnic (undesten) identity, religious practice, political party affiliation, and natural resource management have been maintained, various masters of the land and ties to other pastures undisturbed, and local coherence in terms of national heritage, environmental responsibility, and international belonging articulated.
Though the hegemonizing tendencies of great powers has often been the focus of research on the region, the definition of nationality in the context of the Eastern Bloc (including its Asian member nations) also created space for the recognition of distinctive practices, knowledge, and values while expecting engagement with those of other nationalities’. Based largely on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Mongolia since 2006, mostly in the Mongolian-Russian mining city of Erdenet, this talk examines how “brotherhood” is a highly valued and highly contested relation through which negotiations of ownership, inheritance, and moral obligation in ongoing Mongolian-Russian relations, both at the scales of international relations and interpersonal intimacies, are conducted on very Mongolian terms while always emphasizing distinctions between nationalities.
To more deeply explore the concerns of these stakeholders that also impede the development of transport infrastructure that would be used not only by the mining industry, this paper considers the series of agreements around the proposed Ovoot coal mine in southern Khuvsgul aimag. In raising capital for the mining project since 2013, Aspire Mining of Australia has presented not only the quality of the deposit’s coking coal, but also plans to link the mine by rail with the existing railhead at Erdenet. In 2015, announcements were made that the Mongolian parliament had ruled that Northern Railways, a subsidiary of China Railway Construction Corporation, could begin construction of the rail link after a series of feasibility studies were presented. This paper takes a closer look at the series of agreements, asking what further agreements with what parties -- for instance, the Russian-Mongolian joint railway corporation currently owning and operating the railways of Mongolia that the Ovoot-Erdenet line would link with -- might also be necessary to bring the rail line into existence, and in what forms. Why do the most recent maps presented by Aspire show the railway eventually extending eastward, to link up with a future spur of the Trans-Siberian that would pass south through Tuva? To what extent to these represent hype directed at a small pool of potential investors versus the genuine aspirations of Australian, Mongolian, Chinese, and Russian stakeholders within and beyond the mining industry, which would be required for the railroad to be built?