Urban Hunters: Dealing and Dreaming in Times of Transition

An ethnography of the Mongolian capital city of Ulaanbaatar during the nation’s transition from socialism to a market-based economic system

Urban Hunters is an ethnography of the Mongolian capital city, Ulaanbaatar, during the nation’s transition from socialism to a market-based economic system. Following the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, Mongolia entered a period of economic chaos characterized by wild inflation, disappearing banks, and closing farms, factories, and schools. During this time of widespread poverty, a generation of young adults came of age. In exploring the social, cultural, and existential ramifications of a transition that has become permanent and acquired a logic of its own, Lars Højer and Morten Axel Pedersen present a new theorization of social agency in postsocialist as well as postcolonial contexts.

Lars Højer is associate professor and deputy head at the Department for Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, and the director of the Centre for Comparative Culture Studies. Morten Axel Pedersen is professor of social anthropology at the University of Copenhagen and a vice-director of the Copenhagen Centre for Social Data Science.