Troubled Perspectives in the New Mongolian Economy

In the last fifteen years, Mongolians have experienced rapid socio-economic change, and most people have faced a universe of unsettled socio-economic relations. In this article, the cases of two women, who are exploring the new fields of socio-economic relations, are investigated. The cases are discussed with reference to Viveiros de Castro's ideas on perspectivism, but rather than comparing a Mongolian cosmology with an Amerindian one, perspectivism is critically engaged with as an ontology of social life in the Maussian tradition against which the ethnographic cases are discussed. It is concluded that whereas perspectivism points to a primordial identification with ‘the other', the present Mongolian context points to the danger of such coming into being through others as well as to precautions taken to avoid it.