Excavating One Anthropologist's Investigation into Conservation‐Based Conflicts in Northern‐Most Mongolia—A Brief Exposition

This photo essay addresses conservation‐based conflicts that stem from the Tengis–Shishged National Park and are imbricated in broader institutional processes, drawing on seven months of eth(n)ography conducted in 2014–2018 among Dukha hunter‐gatherer reindeer pastoralists in northernmost Mongolia. I elaborate some of the institutional, social, and economic dimensions of these conflicts and expose a history of my own multifaceted learning process in and beyond the field. Excavating this history serves as a means to convey topical knowledge and affords a deeper appreciation of how learning takes place. Dispositions emerge in mutually generative counterpoint with experience(s), skills, and inclinations through various stages of anthropological practice, namely (though not exclusively) fieldwork. I do this hoping to bring attention not only to the existence of conflicts over the national park and their effects on Dukha people, but also to some of the subtleties that make these conflicts and effects so contentious. In doing so, I highlight the salience of anthropological practice and dispositions and the time and phasal oscillations that go into them for understanding and pragmatically engaging with contemporary social issues, whether they be localized, systemic, or some multi‐scalaramalgamof the two. I briefly introduce the term ‘eth(n)ograph/y/ic,’ which develops van Dooren and Rose's (2016).notion of more‐than‐ merely‐human “ethography” by combining ‘ethnos’ and ‘ethos.’ I develop this concept because I wish to emphasize how anthropological attention to ethea often exceeds focus on any one distinct ethnicity and, indeed, species.