ABSTRACT
The introduction of the new property regime had the effect of breaking up the concentrated herd ownership, the large-scale movement systems, and specialist support operations that the collectives had organized. Property can be understood as part of the wider social and material networks that generate its value – in short, it is an element of a sociotechnical system. The postsocialist market-oriented reforms, however, can be seen to have disassembled an integrated pastoral system and created an atomized pastoral sector of subsistence-oriented pastoral producer households. Indigenous Mongolian notions of land “ownership” can be described as custodial, in that agencies had conditional rights to use territory and always within a wider sociopolitical framework. The reform-era controversy over private rights to land reflects both the history of the region and the resilience of indigenous attitudes toward land. Mongolia is in the process of developing a new relationship between public and private rights to land.
