Association for Political and Legal Anthropology

Oral Presentation Session

‘Alive as you and me’?: Assessing Real Socialism's Vestigiality for Los Angeles’ Mongolians

Presenter(s)

• CA

  Chima Michael Anyadike-Danes

  The University of Sheffield

In March of 1990 after a couple of months of peaceful protests by demonstrators in Ulaanbaatar’s Sukhbaatar Square, Mongolia’s Politburo resigned and several months later multiparty elections were held for the first time in the nation’s history (Rossabi 2005). Bolstered by the support of transitologists, who advocated a swift transition to capitalism, the nation’s free-market capitalists set about orchestrating the liberalisation of Mongolia’s economy (Munkherdene 2018). The shock of these developments along with the concurrent collapse of Mongolia’s former trading partners plunged the nation into years of economic turmoil (Munkh-Erdene 2012). This uncertainty led to economic migration and in the late 1990s, the first Mongolians began to arrive in Los Angeles. As the economy improved in the early 2000s they were joined by many more fellow nationals who sought to take advantage of the city’s higher educational institutions.

Transitologists assumed that market liberalisation represented the ideal form of societal evolution. Developed socialism was marked as a deviation from the purported natural order of things. However, actually-existing socialism was considerably more than a set of economic practices, but a total social fact. Anthropological accounts of attitudes to consumption, the obduracy of socialist ethics within commonplace infrastructures, and the perpetuation of socialist attitudes to exchange are evidence of this (Collier and Kemoklidze 2014; Morris 2016; Rogers 2014). Inspired by such accounts in this presentation I discuss the Mongolian population of Los Angeles for whom, I argue, real socialism remains far from vestigial.