Locality God vs. Locals: Ritual Worship as Risk Management in a Sino-Mongolian Mining Encounter

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Abstract

This paper is concerned with the significance of rituals in transnational extractive operations, drawing on an ethnographic account of a privately-owned Chinese mining company in post-socialist Mongolia. I argue that Chinese miners adopt ritual worship of Tudi Ye (Locality God) as a strategy for managing the risks associated with extractive labor in a foreign territory. The paper further explores the contrasting perceptions of risk between the Chinese miners and the Mongolian residents and administrators, who view the mining industry as a source of danger and seek appeasement through propitiating the local land master. The parallel rituals performed by both groups shed light on the underlying political contention inherent in the mining industry. By interweaving ethnographic theories of risk with analyses of ritual politics in Chinese and Mongolian Studies, this paper provides a nuanced contextualization of transnational extractive labor and offers insight into the mobility of territorial spirits.

Speaker's Bio

Ruiyi Zhu is a social anthropologist with a keen interest in the Sino-Mongolian interface. Her doctoral research focuses on Chinese capital and labor in Mongolia’s post-socialist extractive economy — a microcosm of China’s recent global influence caught in complex and often fraught historical entanglements. Her recent writings on the everyday politics of translation and China’s labor diplomacy in socialist Mongolia are published in Made in China and Proletarian China. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge and is currently a Global Perspectives on Society postdoctoral fellow at NYU Shanghai.

Organizer

Global China Local Cultures (GCLC), ASIAR Research Cluster, HKIHSS, HKU