Jenny Tang, Sigrid Rausing MIASU Doctoral Student in the Social Anthropology of Inner Asia, University of Cambridge
‘Mongolian time or German time?’: Rethinking the ‘nomadic’ through an art residency
This Lunchtime Seminar explores the ideas of time and nomadism ethnographically through my doctoral fieldwork conducted with contemporary artists in Mongolia in 2022-23. Focusing on the case of an art residency involving international participants and a shared excursion (aylal) from the city to the countryside, the presentation builds the case of the ‘art residency’ as an intensified site of sociocultural interaction that demands participants’ conscious reflection on values, habits, and discourses that are normalised in their ordinary sociocultural lives and artistic practices. In particular, I attempt to theorise how specifically temporal conflicts revealed uneasy ideological tensions between the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’ and, thereby, a key dimension of Mongolia’s ‘contemporary’ intellectual problem. Through participants’ highly emotive responses to the proposed or actual temporal organisation of the residency, it became apparent that not only was time a ‘pervasive’ and ‘inescapable dimension of all aspects of social experience and practice’ (Munn 1992) during the residency but that the sharing and negotiation of temporality offered a key avenue for cultural and artistic exchange, the intended aim of the residency project. Social conflicts induced by cultural-temporal differences and subsequent processes of deliberation revealed that the concept of the ‘nomadic’, however abstract, was central to Mongols’ defence of modes of temporal organisation that would otherwise be considered unreasonable and inefficient in a modernist sense. While Mongolian artists at the residency were evidently proud of their ‘nomadic’ spirit, mentality, or culture, they were equally critical of the inefficiencies and disorganisation that resulted from the ‘nomadic’ way of doing things. In fact, such ambivalent reflections were mobilised as conceptual resources for artistic production both during and after the residency. Therefore, by unpacking the temporal conflicts that occurred at the residency and the artists’ subsequent reflections upon them, I explore how temporal distinctions constitute a key aspect of these artists’ engagement with the ‘nomadic’ and, thereby, the making of contemporary Mongolian subjectivities more generally.