Unbridled Ethics: Cultivating Humans and History through Non-formal and Lifelong Education in Ulaanbaatar

This thesis explores how local practices of history-making in Mongolia cultivate an ethical relationship to time. I examine how people combine multiple temporal practices to guide them towards enacting better social relationships. The focus is on a locally salient form of ethical cultivation currently being taught to adult learners in Non-formal and Lifelong Education (NFLE) centres across Mongolia. While this form of cultivation has long existed in the country, only recently has it been introduced into the national education system as a response to widespread concerns across the population that ethical life has become increasingly 'unbridled' (hazaargüi), resulting in a temporality in which people feel 'stuck' (gatssan). Ethnographic data was collected over 18 months of fieldwork in Ulaanbaatar. This focused on the practice of hümüüjil, the cultivation of human beings, at the heart of NFLE's attempts to produce ethical persons. I examine the explicit teaching of history (tüüh) as a means to animate a certain kind of person capable of creating affective tensions and identifications with the past in ways that are orientated towards ethical courses of action in the future.

Current debates on ethics in anthropology have often treated history ambivalently (e.g. Laidlaw 2014, Mattingly 2014). In these debates, history remains at the side-lines of analyses, generally equated to a set of moral ideals against which people determine ethical courses of action. This theoretical orientation tends to assume that history is chronological and, by extension, that causality is solely determined from the past. The practice of hümüüjil offers a field in which to explore a different theoretical approach. Focusing on a set of ontological entanglements that encompass local notions of history and ethics, my research examines how multiple temporalities and causal factors bring history to bear on people's capacity for ethical cultivation in complex ways. I demonstrate the ways in which ethical cultivation in this context draws together a pedagogical mode of historical consciousness in which time and value are reconstituted through relationships as a way of feeling, communicating and, ultimately, being human. By interrogating how conceptualisations of temporality come to shape understandings of the ethical, this research engages with key debates in anthropology about what it means to live historically, and the ways in which this intertwines with our sense of limits and possibilities, identities and evaluations.