Topographies of Sentiment: Mongolian Kazakh Senses of Place, Home and Belonging

In this project, I explore the feelings place inspires for Mongolian Kazakhs, which homeland-making choices it informs and how these are all expressed through song, asking, 'How does the Mongolian Kazakh sense of place inform their sense of home and belonging in Mongolia?' and, 'Can paying close attention to senses of place, home and belonging help us look at the concepts of emotion and affect in a new way?'
In the mid-1990s, the anthropology of place experienced a brief surge. However, as the turn of the 21st century hatched an interest in the mutability of things once deemed constant, the focus shifted to the permeability of borders, the mobility of people, the fragility of states and the multivalent Frictions produced by Global Connection (Tsing 2005). The salience of place blended into the background of a world that was experienced as decreasingly localised and increasingly globalised.
However, as Doreen Massey wrote more recently, 'the globalised world is not placeless' and a closer look at trends in contemporary anthropology reveals that place is still there in the confluent conversations about the Anthropocene, environmental change and relations between humans and those beyond the human. It is there beyond academia too, in the voting hands of Brexiteers wishing to protect England's 'green and pleasant land' and the efforts of refugees to 'integrate' in environments vastly different to their former homes. When I attended Berlin's 2017 Human Rights Film Festival, I heard diverse voices on screen speaking about 'home', 'place' and 'belonging' but see these senses addressed much less explicitly in the pages of journals and newspapers.
I want to explore the emotional resonances of place in Bayan-Ölgii, Mongolia's westernmost province. Mongolia's Kazakh minority (approx. 4%), which makes up the vast majority of Bayan-Ölgii's population (approx. 93%), is currently facing pressure from Kazakhstan's government to 'return' to a country that did not exist when it left a century ago and is being offered financial and material incentives to do so. Meanwhile, Mongolia itself seems indifferent. Nevertheless, most Mongolian Kazakhs are staying in their birthplace and many who 'returned' to Kazakhstan in the 1990s now live again in Bayan-Ölgii. Throughout, those who stay sing about the places they cannot bear to leave and those who leave sing about the places they cannot bear to miss. I am interested in what makes place so powerful in this context, and believe that song is a useful lens through which to observe the sentiments at play.
In carrying out this research, I will join a small group of social scientists interested in Mongolian Kazakhs: geographers Alexander C Diener and Holly Barcus, anthropologists Eva-Marie Dubuisson, Peter Finke, Cynthia Werner and Anna Portisch and ethnomusicologist Jennifer C Post. However, despite repeated questions about where Kazakhs choose to make a home and why, there is still a lack of interest in the connection between place and belonging. My project will augment the ethnographic literature and provide a theoretical framework which can elucidate our understanding of what it means to feel at home.
I envisage a village ethnography in western Bayan-Ölgii, based with a Kazakh family in an auyl (nomadic village) I visited briefly in 2014. Through participant observation of life and song in this auyl and meeting other musicians in the family's network, I will pay attention to how home and place are made sense of in the everyday. I will also attend an intensive language course in Kazakhstan prior to fieldwork. Following initial fieldwork, I will begin to problematise the nominal dualism of emotion and affect and seek to elaborate the still nascent body of thought about how anthropologists can productively employ these concepts. I see a strong potential for establishing a different kind of ethnography that frames affect not as a product of physiological senses but as a corporeal partner to emotion.