Introduction

Since the 1990s Mongolians have seen the transactional, quantifying logic of the market expand to entangle an ever-greater set of social relations. In the new neoliberal political economy, timely money became a scarce resource and essential requirement, one that could be made to command a premium price through high interest rates. Most households became subject to a regime of debt that linked their fortunes to the national and international financial markets. It might seem implausible to suggest that debt has only recently appeared in Mongolia. Surely people have always been enmeshed in the obligations created by systems of exchange? But this thinking reflects Graeber's point that ‘our common-sense assumptions […] tend to reduce all human relations to exchange, as if our ties to society, even to the cosmos itself, can be imagined in the same terms as a business deal’ (2011: 18). In this view some form of debt might appear to be a social inevitability, an enduring aspect of the human condition, for example, saw social relations themselves as forms of debt: ‘persisting relationships only exist as feelings of indebtedness’ (Leach 1982: 154). But more recent anthropology has challenged the classical application of the notion of exchange which has, as Hunt (2002: 115) points out, tended to obscure alternative modes of allocation that he describes as ‘transfers.’

On reflection then, debt is clearly produced by a particular set of institutional formations within a given political economy; it cannot be taken for the substance of human relations, not even those that produce transfers of material goods. This is because debt is made to appear by the transactional logic of the exchange idiom, which is only one of the possible schemas used for the distribution of what economists would term goods and services. In Mongolia objects and help may be subject to transactional logics, and these may be commercialized and commoditized and subject to the logics of monetary economy. But many things are provided for others using non-transactional logics; ones that do not produce ‘debt’ as such at all.

Very substantial material flows are generated by obligations owed to relatives, for example, such as providing idesh – food supplies.