Transacting and enacting: Corruption, obligation and the use of monies in Mongolia

Abstract

Abstract This paper has two aims: firstly it sets out to describe public perceptions and discourses of corruption in Mongolia and show how these relate to wider notions of legitimate and illegitimate gifting and other material transmissions. Secondly, it offers an analysis of the idioms used by anthropologists and others to describe and explain material transfers. I adopt a critical and selective approach to the use of the idiom of exchange which, I argue, can only be properly applied to practices that actors consider transactional. Other material flows are better understood as ‘enactions’ – the materialisation of aspects of relations and persons that are more aptly described in terms of obligation and expectation. Even transfers of money need not imply relations of exchange, as the use of monies in Mongolia demonstrates.