TY - JOUR
TI - Asset or Burden: The Ethical Calculus of Care in Ulaanbaatar’s Urban Margins
AU - Empson, Rebecca
AU - Fox, Elizabeth
TI - Asset or Burden: The Ethical Calculus of Care in Ulaanbaatar’s Urban Margins
AB - 
	How do family relations change in the move from rural to urban living? What are the impacts of ur­banisation on the domestic? Drawing on the ethnography of two families on the outskirts of Mongo­lia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar, this chapter tackles the intersections of urbanisation and intergenerational care, charting the effects of rural-urban migration on family lives. Although their family structures differ, Tuya and Duya each find themselves shouldering the burden of being urban female breadwin­ners. To navigate conditions of profound economic precarity, they approach their families through a lens of economic-cum-moral strategizing, which we term a form of ‘ethical calculus’. In the city, money becomes synonymous with care and family members are categorised according to a scale of asset-to-burden based on their capacity to support or increase the breadwinner’s load. A focus on the work involved in such forms of care reveals a qualitatively different approach to family ties in ur­ban Mongolia that pulls people in two directions. The first is the reconfiguration of marginal popu­lations’ relationship with the state to one that equates care with money. The second is the atomising pressure that life on Ulaanbaatar’s margins puts on the hopes and capacities of household members.
VL - 2021
IS - Tom 49 Numer 1-2
PY - 2021
SN - 0083-4327
C1 - 2299-9558
SP - 85
EP - 101
DO - 10.4467/22999558.PE.21.006.14128
UR - https://ejournals.eu/czasopismo/prace-etnograficzne/artykul/asset-or-burden-the-ethical-calculus-of-care-in-ulaanbaatars-urban-margins
KW - care
KW - ethics
KW - female breadwinners
KW - interiority and exteriority
KW - urban living
KW - rural-urban migration
KW - state
KW - economy
KW - home
KW - pensions