These are some of the topics I'm hoping to explore in the not-too-distant future. For the time being, I've just included some of my more 'anthropological' concerns. I'll eventually update with the some of the other more Mongolia-oriented projects (not that the two are mutually exclusive) I hope to undertake.

Intentionality

One of the other questions that interests me, although I have not yet had the opportunity to explore it as much as I would like, is that of intentionality. What role does it play in our efforts to understand people's actions and the meanings they give to events, actions and beliefs? What should should it play? In the end, how important is the intentionality of the actor?

This interest developed from the intersection of my reading James Scott's work on peasant resistance and my work in the archives in Mongolia. I read about a number of different events that looked a lot like 'everyday forms of resistance,' in Scott's terminology. And is seems that the security apparatus and other observers thought so too. But were they intended as such? And does it matter? The issue of intentionality didn't seem to matter to the observers reporting the events, but should it matter to us as academics? And how do we come to terms with it, especially in historical cases?

This is something I hope to explore at some point in the not too distant future, when other projects leave me time to think about it, and do the required background reading.

Narrative

Another area that I've been intrigued with has been that of narrative. The astute reader of my work (if there are any! - readers, that is) will have noticed the influence the issue - as well as some aspects of literary theory - has had on my work so far. But I also hope to find time to look more explicitly at issues of narrative, in particular in relation to the accounts of the repressions of the 1930s in Mongolia I have collected. When listening to people tell me about the experiences of themselves or their relatives during the repressions, I was struck by the similarity in how people told their stories. Part of this was due, no doubt, to the fact that the Ministry of Internal Affairs (the security apparatus) had a set way of operating. But I also believe there must be more to it than that, that there was something more going on when people were telling their stories. This has led me to want to look more closely at the role of narrative in identity construction, and the interaction of the two.

Contingency and fate

This is a project I keep coming back to. I may take some time off from other, in theory more pressing work, to finally work it up soon. I think that we - as anthropologists and area specialists - tend to over-theorize and over-rationalize many events. Maybe it's just to give us something to do. But it often seems to me that just about everything is represented as happening for a reason, or having some deeper significance. Based on readings and interviews I've done about the socialist-era banning of Tsagaan Sar, the traditional lunar new year in Mongolia, I've become convinced that we downplay the role of chance, contingency and randomness in our work. Its not uncommon for postmodernists and others to argue for a recognition of contingency, but I can't really think of anyone who has engaged with the concept of chance, or whatever, and the role it actually plays in "real life" on a more theoretical, formal level. Maybe it's that chance isn't very theoretically challenging, or counterfactuals are interesting but not really that productive in the end. I still need to do more literature searches, but the ones I've turned up so far haven't really turned up anything. (In fact, if you run "anthropology contingency" through Google, this page is about fifth on the list....)

I have a small project planned to at least raise this issue, looking through the lens of the events leading the banning of Tsagaan Sar in the 1950s, when the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party took advantage of the coincidence(?) that Choibalsan, the leader of the country, died on the lunar New Year to ban its celebration, since it wouldn't be appropriate - it was said - to celebrate when they should be mourning. I want to expand upon this to argue, in effect, that we have a tendency to overtheorize and as a result, downplay contigency, chance, fate - call it what you will. We'll see if this line of thought turns up anything interesting or not. As you can tell from these rather jumbled two paragraphs, it is still very much an idea I'm just playing around with.