Being skillful. Wisely navigating an intensely heterogeneous cosmos in Mongolia

Abstract

This paper proposes to explore how being “skillful” (mergen) plays out and is relied upon in Mongolia within two different contexts, archery and divination, both linked to “cairns” (ovoo) in more than one way. In these contexts, skillful people are expected to embody a virtue that any Mongolian man or woman is supposed to exhibit daily in a less spectacular and consequential manner. As prominent bearers of skillfulness, archers and diviners are indeed relied upon to respond with accuracy to a complex set of potentially clashing variables, and thus to ensure each in their own way the proper and fortunate positioning of people within an intensely heterogeneous cosmos.

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