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AbstractRecent scholarship in economic anthropology examines how the intersection of multiple forms of temporality shapes the time of debt relations. This article builds on and refines these approaches by analysing debt as a social relation that 'folds' the time of other relations within itself. It does so through deploying the concept of the 'fold' drawn from continental philosophy and anthropological literature on personhood. This approach provides a novel way of illuminating and reflecting upon a temporal tension at the heart of debt relations, in which the timely performance of debtor‐creditor relations is contingent on the harnessing of temporalities formally outside their scope. This argument is made in relation to an ethnographic study of malchny zeel (the 'herder's loan') issued by commercial banks in a pastoral region of Mongolia.

Much recent anthropology reflects on how scales are contested and contingent products of heterogeneous social interactions, not the 'ontological givens' (sensu Carr and Lempert) described in earlier scholarship. This article examines the importance of number in the formation of scales of measurement. It does so regarding a pastoral Mongolian scale of livestock-counting based on the number ten thousand, or tüm[en]: a qualitative-cum-quantitative term suggesting plenty and abundance. Drawing on literature on the anthropology of number, and bringing it into dialogue with studies of scale and ideology, this article argues that number is not just a means for calibrating pre-existing scales. Instead, as something endowed with particular qualities and conceptual stability, number can be mobilized to produce ideologically charged scales of measurement.

This paper explores perceptions of zoos, objects which are generally replicas of Manchu-era coins attached to the surfaces of some shamans' coats in present-day Mongolia. Beginning by noting that the general perception of these objects in shamanic praxis is to protect the shaman who wears them, I explore another way in which they are perceived: as things which connote particular aspects of money used in present-day Mongolia. I take two aspects of Mongolian money—its multiplicity and capacity for transformation—and use these to account for the presence of zoos on shamans' coats. I argue that the multiplicity aspect of money is analogous with the multiplicity of objects attached to a shaman's coat, and that the multiplicity aspect of money connoted by zoos is something into which can be read the operation of this type of garment. I also explore the capacity of Mongolian money to be transformed into other things, and suggest this is analogous to the transformative nature of spirits which possess shamans during seances. In doing so, I propose that zoos are able to elaborate the operation of the garments to which they are attached, in a way that is informative of particular perceptions of money in present-day Mongolia.

Anya Bernstein, The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 296, 2019.Tomas Matza, Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-being in Postsocialist Russia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 305, 2018.

Abstract
Accounts of Mongol mountain sacrifices (ovoo takhilga) variously focus on transactional offerings that elicit benefits from local spirits and on the patron-like position held by spirits towards those who supplicate them. In contrast this article explores how, in such ceremonies, human–spirit relations are shaped through the enactment of emotions: in this context, happiness. Bringing classic literature on sacrifice into dialogue with recent studies of happiness as a social phenomenon, we argue that the generation of happiness (bayarluulakh; bayasgakh) in local spirits is of great importance in mediating the distance between spirits and their human neighbours. This mediation allows for the shaping of optimal post-sacrificial relations between these two categories of being. Our argument is made through an analysis of ethnographic and linguistic data relating to an ovoo takhilga in a Khalkha area of central Mongolia.