Economic Anthropology 2014; 1: 104–123 DOI:10.1111/sea2.12007 Booms and Busts: Asset Dynamics, Disaster, and the Politics of Wealth in Rural Mongolia Daniel J. Murphy Department of Anthropology, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0380, USA Corresponding author: Daniel J. Murphy; e-mail: daniel.murphy2@uc.edu Asset-based approaches in poverty research argue that trajectories of asset accumulation and decumulation in rural, agricultural livelihoods can be located in the connections between household asset endowments and exposure to shocks. Though these frameworks show that wealth and its “other,” poverty, can be persistent over time, there is a critical lack in understanding the political and historical mechanisms of that persistence including the dynamic interaction between resource access, socioeconomic inequality, and risk management. In this article, I use contemporary and historical livestock data collected from rural pastoralists in Mongolia to demonstrate that asset dynamics are largely an effect of historical processes of dispossession and impoverishment, and the resulting unequal distribution of risks and resources, rather than a cause. As such, I argue that booms and busts in household herds must be seen through a kaleidoscope of emerging and shifting institutions where differences in endowments, entitlements, and risk exposure are filtered through local cultural politics. In conclusion, I argue that by contextualizing rather than eschewing asset-based approaches, researchers can uncover the politics of excess as a politics of access and shed light on the cultural and institutional foundations of wealth, surplus, and their “others.” Keywords Assets; Inequality; Poverty; Disaster; Mongolia How do we explain extreme wealth in the context of extreme poverty, surplus in the context of deicit and lack, and excess in the context of destitution? Inluential work in microeconomics argues that trajectories of asset accumulation and decumulation (i.e., asset diferentiation) within rural, agricultural livelihoods can be located in the connections between household asset endowments and exposure to shocks (Carter, 2007; Carter & Barrett, 2006; Carter & Ikegami, 2008; Dani & Moser, 2008; Lybbert & Barrett, 2004, 2007; Moser, 2009, 2004, 1998; Siegel, 2005, Zimmerman & Carter, 2003). his work has been highly inluential in rural development policy that attempts to alleviate poverty by increasing household productive assets. Despite the inluence of such research in the World Bank, Brookings Institute, and other prominent think tanks and development institutions, these depoliticized, ahistorical framings of poverty and wealth fundamentally miss the dynamic interaction between access to resources, socioeconomic inequality, and risk management that more directly determine who wins and who fails within rural, agricultural economies. 1 In this article, I use contemporary and historical livestock asset data collected from rural pastoralists in Mongolia to demonstrate that asset dynamics are largely an efect of the unequal distribution of risks and resources and historical processes of dispossession and impoverishment rather than a cause. In particular, I do this by tracing the impact of transformations in resource management 104 © 2014 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved