Jessica Madison-Pískatá

"On the Mongolian grasslands, poetry is not only a way of describing landscapes but also a means of producing them through appeals to the world of spirits, gods, and ghosts. Exploring this magical ecology, Jessica Madison’s article analyzes how word-making and world-making are entangled for the people in Dariganga. In a landscape broken by decades of socialist ruination as well as by the numerous mining operations that have bloomed after the Mongolian mining boom in 2010, Madison argues that poetry, ovoo stone heaps, and musical performances are marshalled to hold the landscape together, to sing the landscape
into flatness in an increasingly vertical world. And yet this is not your classical instance of traditional resistance to modernity, Madison insists. For modernity in Mongolia is associated with the socialist past. In a very real sense, modernity has already come and gone. The current mining boom is also ambiguous. It benefits many Mongolians even as it destroys their world: mining is both life- and deathgiving.
Under these circumstances where neither past, present, nor future can be
taken for granted, poetry and the ritual ovoo stone heaps that seek to bring the world together are highly ambivalent practices. Madison calls them “strategic equivocations”: experimental spiritual designs to materialize a more-than-material landscape in a changing, uncertain world."
-Nils Bubant, Introduction to "Non-Secular Anthropocene"

My research explores Mongolia’s mineral extraction boom through an examination of local concepts of landscape. In order to engage seriously with local place-making practices, this project considers the steppe and its ruptures via engagement with poetic genre and performance. In Mongolia, poetry is a primary means of mediating human interaction with space, and poetic literacy is necessary for understanding knowledge that turns space into landscape. My research asks: how does an otherwise closed and harmonious sacred landscape accommodate a zinc mine? Bringing together literature from the anthropology of religion, the environmental humanities, and the anthropology of poetry, my research considers the category of ovoo: a landscape node that is both “energy center” and “sacrifice zone,” holy mountain and toxic mine.

This paper focuses on a central puzzle: how does what otherwise appears to be a harmonious “magical ecology” accommodate a zinc mine? How can a tradition that sacralizes the unbroken earth also name mines after mountains? Considering both mountain and mine as different kinds of ovoo, nodes that function as both “energy centers” and “sacrifice zones” within the landscape, the paper interfaces with local theories that illuminate poetry to be a creator of worlds, and highlights the ambivalence, ambiguity, and poetic irony of mineral extraction in Mongolia. This paper explores Mongolia’s mineral extraction boom through an examination of local concepts of landscape. In order to engage seriously with local place-making practices, it analyzes the steppe topologically, looking at attributes of landscape that transcend material upheaval. In eastern Mongolia, poetry is a primary means of mediating human interaction with space, and thus poetic literacy is necessary for producing and understanding knowledge that turns space into landscape.