Moralities of the Mongolian ‘Market’: A Genealogy of Trade Relations and the Zah Zee

The Mongolian notion of a market economy as expressed in the compound term zah zeel – the present-day Mongolian equivalent for ‘the market’ – challenges the neo–liberal model of ‘the market’ metaphor, which is a construction based on Euro–American moral valuations of trade relations and commercial exchange. The Mongolian model provides an example of how the oscillations between collective control (as expressed in the zah) and individual innovation (as expressed in the zeel) can exist in one market model – the zah zeel.