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東文研セミナー「State Nomadism: Droving Corridors and Mobile Fattening in Socialist Mongolia, 1950s–1980s」のお知らせ
日時：2026年4月7日（火）16:00–18:00
会場：東京大学東洋文化研究所大会議室（3階）
題目：State Nomadism: Droving Corridors and Mobile Fattening in Socialist Mongolia, 1950s–1980s
発表者：Uradyn E. Bulag (ケンブリッジ大学・教授)
言語：英語
司会：額定其労（東京大学東洋文化研究所・准教授）
登録（対面）：https://forms.gle/y9Bm1uGNvF8tHYh59
要旨
During the era of high socialism, the Mongolian People’s Republic integrated its pastoral economy into a planned meat procurement system supplying domestic cities and Soviet/COMECON exports. I examine an underexplored element of that system: state-organised mobility. Between the 1950s and the late 1980s, Mongolia dispatched thousands of droving expeditions (ekspeditsi), moving herds from distant districts to slaughter hubs, railheads, and border crossings. I conceptualise these convoys as “state nomadism,” a socialist pastoral infrastructure in which movement itself became a production technology and an administrative object. At the system’s core lay mobile fattening (targa khüch avakh): animals collected in late spring moved through pasture corridors for months, arriving heavier, with gains verified through serial weighings and rewarded through bonuses and socialist competition.
Drawing on socialist-era technical manuals, expedition narratives, oral histories with former drovers, and site visits to abandoned bases, I show how state nomadism functioned simultaneously as (1) an ecological production technology – distributed grazing across successive vegetation zones that turned the landscape into a finishing system – and (2) a political technology of legibility and discipline that rendered mobile animals calculable to planners. I also examine the Soviet export interface – the inspection regime remembered as malindakh and the category of rejected livestock (zaazny mal) – to argue that state nomadism generated logistical capacity while intensifying extractive pressure and moral ambivalence. After 1990, privatisation dismantled the institutions that made corridor commons possible. Abandoned bases and loading stations now constitute “negative heritage”: ruins that index lost infrastructural capacity and the post-socialist state’s difficulty in valuing its socialist pastoral past.
連絡先：Khohchahar E. Chuluu（echuluu[a]ioc.u-tokyo.ac.jp）
登録種別：研究会関連
登録日時：TueMar1016:49:182026
登録者 ：額定其労・多田
掲載期間：20260311 - 20260407
当日期間：20260407 - 20260407
