Absent powers: Magic and loss in post-socialist Mongolia

Abstract

When Mongolian villagers and nomadic pastoralists left socialism behind in the early 1990s, they were filled with the certainty that something had now changed - post-socialism had become an ethnographic reality rather than merely an academic invention. Socialism had profoundly altered the cultural and religious conditions prevailing in pre-revolutionary Mongolia, and with the passing of socialism Mongolians confronted the fact that something had been lost and an unbridgeable gap between pre-socialist and post-socialist times had emerged (cf. Humphrey 1992). It is this perception of gap and loss that is the focus of this article. However, rather than seeing it as lamentable loss, I will be concerned with the creative aspects of absent knowledge. © 2010 Springer-Verlag New York.