On ‘Wise Cunning’ and ‘Clever Methods’: Framings of Environmental Protection in Rural Mongolia

Abstract

A significant number of works in environmental anthropology explore how environmentally protective practices are based on representationally truthful claims about the world. This article, in contrast, makes the case for an analytically more expansive approach for studying such activities, and does so by arguing for anthropological attention to practices whose conceptual persuasiveness and affective force derive from their ‘cunning’ construction. It does so by drawing on ethnography from central Mongolia where haunting narratives, whose origins are credited to ‘wise people’ who lived long ago, cunningly instrumentalise stories of vengeful and powerful spirits to deter people from harming environmentally vulnerable areas (here, wooded ones).