Managing Uncertainty, Beckoning Security: Ritual Offerings to a Local Ovoo in Mongolia

Abstract

ABSTRACT With the demise of the socialist state in 1990, Mongolia was plunged into a process of neoliberal economic reform. The social and economic uncertainty that followed in its wake, combined with recurrent winter calamities, created an escalating vulnerability among the mobile herders. This article brings into focus the revived local offerings to the spirits of the land at ovoos as significant nexuses for managing unpredictable weather phenomena and the contingency of economic hardship, thus providing an exploration of ritual practice as embedded in multifaceted entanglements of lived lives and societal changes. It is argued that an ovoo provide a moment for Mongolian herders to act upon their ability and agency to influence future results. While the ovoo ritual is not in itself characterised by intrinsic ambiguity as a means to, or de facto, produce efficacious outcomes, its ambiguity resides in the explanatory modes that encompass the ritual.