Journal article
Effective Cynicism: Waste, Power, and the Negotiation of Urban Decay and Renewal in Ulaanbaatar
Rebekah Plueckhahn
Cultural anthropology | American Anthropological Association | Published : 2024
DOI: 10.14506/ca39.3.05
Abstract
In this article, I show how “effective cynicism” allows residents to decipher unequal power relations in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Ethnographic analysis of the myriad ways residents hold onto dilapidated housing in a failed redevelopment scheme reveals how residents’ cynical reflections assist in their efforts to decipher and mobilize state authority. Residents undertake this while simultaneously negotiating the insidious decay of waste accumulated as a by-product of failed redevelopment processes. Throughout, I focus on the presence of waste and cynicism as phenomena that both foreclose and open possibilities. I argue that residents’ repurposing of cynicism as a diagnostic tool, rather than pr..
View full abstractGrants
Awarded by European Research Council
Awarded by European Research Council (ERC)
Funding Acknowledgements
I sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers who provided invaluable suggestions, as well as colleagues in the Anthropology and Development Studies Program at the University of Melbourne who provided feedback on an earlier draft. Most importantly, I sincerely thank the residents of Ulaanbaatar who generously shared their experiences. Any errors are my own. I sincerely thank B. Doljinsueren and B. Erdenezayaa for their research assistance at different stages of this research, and I thank Byambabaatar Ichinkhorloo for his translation of the article abstract into Mongolian. Research for this article was funded by the European Research Council, ERC-2013-CoG, 615785, Emerging Subjects, at University College London-Anthropology. I am also grateful for the research and writing funding received through the Thomas and Margaret Ruth McArthur Fellowship in Anthropology at the University of Melbourne.