Risk and its others: Toward an anthropology of “protection” in rural Mongolia

Abstract

Anthropological studies of risk have long focused on how people respond to and aim to manage potential harm. But despite its long and important genealogy, this article suggests that risk can pose an analytic blind spot that potentially occludes other ways of understanding how people aim to live well in potentially harmful situations. In doing so, it argues for anthropological attention to a Mongolian “protection” concept: an optimistic idea that imaginatively tethers defense against harm with prospects of living well in the conditions that follow. This approach aims to recast and deepen anthropological understanding of how people conceptualize, deal with, and move beyond harms encountered in everyday life.