Reading the Signs by Lenin's Light: Development, Divination and Metonymic Fields in Mongolia

Abstract

This paper examines two apparently contrasting cases: the imaginative effects generated by Mongolian scapulimancy practices, and the impact that the introduction of electric light had on rural Mongolians. Scapula and other divinatory items are analysed as ‘metonymic fields’ – bounded technical practices from which wider meanings are read. The Soviet-era electrification programme was designed to create the sorts of imaginative perceptions that the modernist state advocated. However, it is argued that Mongolia cannot be described in terms of a successful modernist ‘colonisation’ of the social imaginary, since this metaphor implies a bounded space being filled with particular ideologies. Rather than displace each other, narrative genres and metonymic fields have coexisted and interacted in new ways.