Introduction

How should we go about mapping Mongolia and establishing its contemporary and historical boundaries? And if we were to envisage Eurasia in terms of an ‘ethnoscape,’ how would we identify the ‘Mongol’ parts of this distribution, and to what extent would these correspond to the nation-states that we are familiar with? Any discussion as to the geographical extent of a national or potentially national entity will reflect our concepts of a ‘people’ and their relationship to territory. In approaching these questions then, we are bound to reflect upon the history of these concepts, and the political orders that identified persons and places as Mongol. This chapter argues that Benedict Anderson's ([1983] 1991) concept of the dynastic realm, which treats political society as a product of rulership, fits historical Mongolia better than the currently dominant notion of national populist thought, which conceives of Volk (people) – culture and society – as autochthonous, grassroots entities to be thought of in terms of commonality and solidarity. For much of its history, the peoples and territories that might be described as Mongolian have not been subject to a single sovereign power or centralized state as it is commonly understood. Instead they were linked by a common aristocratic order – a ‘headless state’ (Sneath 2007). Historically, the term Monggol only fully applied to members of the Borjigin aristocracy and extended to their subjects as part of the project of rulership (see Atwood 2004: 507). The commonalities assumed of people sharing the same political identity (such as Monggol or Oirad) were very different from those of the era of national populism, in which they might be expected to share distinctive languages and phenomena described as culture and society. Mongolian territories, therefore, designated those ruled by Chinggisid Borjigin nobles, and groups of people and their lands might stop being Mongol if they renounced Chinggisid rule – as in the case of the Oirads. This reveals the political basis of the designation, a distributed aristocratic order that was state-like in many ways, but might or might not be unified under a single overlord.

Mapping this headless state in different historical eras would be a challenging cartographical task, since its territories were often neither contiguous nor always unambiguous in their political affiliation.