Meat Security and Sovereignty in Urban Mongolia
Dr Elizabeth Fox’s focus will be the intersection of meat and social transformation. In particular, Fox will carry out ethnographic research among the growing numbers of rural-urban migrants living in Ulaanbaatar’s ‘ger district’ outskirts, investigating the impacts of the planned intensification of the meat industry on informal and already precarious domestic supply chains, and the nexus of urbanisation, economic precarity, and ethno-nationalism that meat brings to the fore. Engaging with the concept of ‘food sovereignty’ - the right of people to not only healthy but ‘culturally appropriate’ food and to define their own food and agriculture systems - Fox’s research will address the growing discontent with socio- economic inequality among those on Ulaanbaatar’s periphery and the way that anxieties regarding access to meat intersect with nationalist anxieties. Fox will further investigate the informal slaughterhouses that operate in Ulaanbaatar’s periphery and provide occasional employment for rural-urban migrants with otherwise limited employment opportunities.
Dr Elizabeth Fox is an anthropologist and researcher of Mongolia. Focussed mainly on Ulaanbaatar, her research has covered circus contortionists, cashmere factory workers, street-level bureaucrats, and ger district residents. Her doctoral thesis 'Between Iron and Coal: Enacting Kinship, Bureaucracy and Infrastructure in the Ger Districts of Ulaanbaatar' (UCL, 2019) was based on long term fieldwork in the outskirts of Mongolia's capital and constitutes one of the first book-length anthropological studies of life in these areas. Her postdoctoral research builds on the questions raised in her thesis about the role of meat in contemporary Mongolia, interrogating its potential as a material index of social, political and economic change.