A Thousand Steps to Parliament: Constructing Electable Women in Mongolia (University of Chicago Press, 2022)
By Manduhai Buyandelger
Reviewed by Hedwig A. Waters
Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague
It is remarkable that there has not yet been a single English-language ethnography detailing the lived experiences of Mongolian women in the post-socialist, market-democratic era. This glaring lacuna has now importantly been addressed with the second book by Manduhai Buyandelger, a US-trained anthropologist originally from Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s capital city. A Thousand Steps to Parliament: Constructing Electable Women in Mongolia is an engaging and pathbreaking study of female parliamentary candidates, ethnographically based on participant observation with candidates and voter interviews on the campaign trails of the 2008, 2012 and 2016 elections. The book addresses the question whether the world has reached a glass ceiling in female political representation by depicting the structural and discursive challenges, experiences and practices lived by women within monetarily high stakes politics. Written in an easy-to-read manner, it makes a significant contribution to both the visibility of contemporary Mongolian women’s experiences and the advancement of gender anthropology on and in Mongolia. For scholars of political and legal anthropology, the book presents a valuable case study of the female candidate quota in parliament and its impact.
The book’s thesis is comprised of two overarching arguments. First, since Mongolia’s shift from a socialist to a market-democratic system, its state and elections have undergone neoliberal transformations, which disadvantage women candidates. Since the early 90s, Mongolia has had (at least) 24 elections, which all require extensive pre-campaigning periods, while state funding is slashed for both the electorate and its candidates. This has elevated the importance of money for election outcomes: candidates must rely on personal fortunes to assemble huge media and advocacy teams, while electoral requests for assistance as gifts, infrastructure projects, and natural disaster relief increases. Buyandelger coins the term “electionization” to describe how elections have been transformed through neoliberal policies from limited, time-bound political competitions to a near-constant societal structuring phenomenon, a new form of governing through elections. Drawing on political anthropology, she describes elections as an example of a non-emic notion that has taken on new dimensions in this non-Western context. This new modus operandi disadvantages women candidates, who not only tend to have less financial capital but struggle against the electorate’s association of political power with masculinity. The book’s second argument maintains that, given their disadvantage, women candidates selectively appropriate various political and gendered histories and registers to strengthen their social, political, and symbolic capital. First, women’s contemporary activism relies on deep histories of advocacy from the socialist era. At the same time, women candidates have become neoliberal subjects that engage in various techniques of “self-polishing”—the consumptive cultivation of both the body and mind. This line of argumentation is reminiscent of debates within practice theory and representation—the consideration of a subject’s agency within structures and registers of power—citing notable postmodernist scholars within the social
sciences (Bourdieu 1977, 1991; de Certeau 1984), feminist theory (Scott 2019) and gender anthropology (Ortner 2006; Mahmood 2005; Ghodsee 2019). The author approaches her subjects as self-aware agentic selves who knowingly appropriate different registers and, through their inventive tactics, create new post-socialist political subjectivities for women in Mongolia.
The six chapters slowly build the combined argument. The Preface and Introduction describe the establishment of the contemporary gender representation quota in Mongolia and how the presence of this structural policy impacts women’s other political strategies. Chapter One details the emergence and activities of the socialist Mongolian Women’s Committee (1924-90) and how its advocacy carried into the post-socialist era. Chapter Two unpacks electionization by describing how elections entail a phenomenal mobilization of activity, money, and media to become a collective effort that draws in all of society. Chapter Three ethnographically focuses on campaign media and posters, analyzing how they reflect and stabilize societal anxieties around gender in democratic politics. Chapter Four follows the compelling case study of Serjee throughout her precampaigning efforts, depicting the intricacies of electionization, how women are disadvantaged by and invent creative strategies to navigate it. Chapter Five follows four women candidates to describe how they cultivate the gendered political subjectivity of being oyunlag (“intellectful”)—an affect of studied, silken intelligence—to increase their symbolic capital amongst the electorate. Chapter Six describes how appearance cultivation is important for female candidates, who combine consumption-based symbols from home and abroad to convey individualized political messages.
This book is a treat for anyone who is interested in the nexus of gender and politics. It is accessibly written and draws the reader in through the author’s utilization of anecdotes from her life as well as memorable ethnographic imagery. It involves interviews with some of the most extraordinary women in contemporary Mongolia, providing a fascinating glimpse into the inner workings of the decision-making of women candidates with potentially wide-reaching impact. In doing so, it effectively depicts how women candidates face variegated structural struggles and tailored discursive judgements, making a convincing case for the value of a gender quota in democratic politics.
Although the author makes clear that they are aware of the classed positionality and exceptional nature of these women’s stories, they also emphasize that they are representative of larger dynamics of new gendered subjectivities in Mongolia (196). To ethnographically reinforce this angle, I would have enjoyed more ethnographic voices from women within or affected by
campaigns, either female voters from different demographics or staffers like the women mobilized by Serjee. Much of the ethnography draws on the candidates’ own accounts and worldviews, which are presented with rich detail, though at times without the supplementary perspectives or media sources that might further situate or contextualize them.
In sum, A Thousand Steps to Parliament is a significant and timely contribution to the anthropology of gender, politics, and post-socialist transitions. It is poised to become a touchstone for future research on gender anthropology in Mongolia, as well as political anthropology on elections and female quotas.
References
Bourdieu, Pierre
1997. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
De Certeau, Michel
1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ghodsee, Kristen
2019. Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women’s Activism and Global Solidarity During
the Cold War. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Mahmood, Saba
2005. The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Ortner, Sherry B.
2006. “Power and Projects: Reflections on Agency.” In Anthropology and Social Theory:
Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject. Sherry Ortner, ed. Pp. 129-53. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Scott, Joan W.
2019. Sex and Secularism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.