Twenty-first-century Mongolia is a land of conspicuous inequality and striking concentrations of wealth. It’s multiparty parliamentary political system is well entrenched, but democracy has been unable to do much to reduce poverty, which remains widespread, and the prospects of the economy creating large numbers of secure, well-paid jobs still seems remote.

In 1991 President Ochirbat predicted that Mongolia would rapidly develop another Asian Tiger economy (Ochirbat 1996: 235-236), but the reality proved to be very different. In retrospect, the privatization policies of the 1990s created more long-term damage than expected. The MPR had exported a range of products, including textiles, leather garments and other livestock-related products. As Reinert (2004: 158) notes, ‘[d]uring the 50 years preceding the reforms of 1991, Mongolia slowly but successfully built a diversified industrial sector […] [this] was virtually annihilated over a period of only four years, from 1991 to 1995, not to recover again. In a majority of industrial sectors, production is down by more than 90 per cent.’

Nevertheless, Mongolia’s enormous mineral wealth remained largely intact below the ground. A number of mining ventures had been established in the state socialist period, including the major Soviet-Mongolian Erdenet copper and molybdenum mine. Minerals could still be sold as raw materials on the international market, and with few other industries surviving the transition the mining sector came to dominate the economy. The 1990s liberal reform policies also attracted foreign companies to buy up mining licences and invest in copper-, gold- and coal-mining operations, most notably the Oyu Tolgoi copper and gold mine acquired by the multinational Rio Tinto Group. Having become heavily dependent on the export of raw materials, primarily copper, coal and gold, Mongolia has experienced two cycles of boom and bust since 2000, reflecting the rise and fall of global commodity prices.

The economy registered some spells of positive growth in the opening decades of the twenty-first century, stimulated by mining booms. This generated bouts of rapid property development and a soaring real-estate market in Ulaanbaatar, but did little to reduce long-term poverty. About a third of the population were living below the poverty line in the late 1990s (United Nations Systems in Mongolia 1999: 5), and although the rate has fluctuated year on year there has been little sign of significant improvement.

Introduction

Comparison of the la rtse and obo (ovoo, obuγ-a, oboo) rituals reveals very strong similarities. The cairns of stones with their Wind Horse flags themselves look almost identical; both rites are traditionally attended by adult males and are followed by horse races and archery contests. Similar offerings and prayers are employed, and both aims to propitiate spirit masters/owners or deities of a local territory. In the Tibetan case the local entities concerned might be gzhi bdag, yul lha or sa bdag. The equivalent Mongolian local spirits were gajarun ejed [gazryn ezed] (masters of the land), and spirits were classed as sa bdag and the eight classes of lords of land and water by the monastic establishment (Heissig 1980: 103-105). The spirits associated with a given obo [ovoo] and locality have different characters and preferences with respect to offerings. The prayers made at these ceremonies typically call upon the local spirits for protection from illness, plague, drought, storms or other adverse weather, cattle-pest, thieves, wolves and other dangers, and request long life, increased herds and good fortune (Heissig 1980: 105-106, Bawden 1958: 38-39, Tatar 1976: 26-33).

In both cases the practices had and continue to have important political aspects. In the Tibetan case Karmay (1998: 423-450) argues that the concept of gzhi bdag/yul lha local deities reflects the territorial divisions of the polity of the early Tibetan clanic society, and may have originally resembled the muster of warriors by local leaders. In Qing times the Mongolian rites expressed the administrative divisions and subdivisions of the state and reflected the relations of political subjects to district authorities (Sneath 2000: 235-250). Bulag (2002: 37-41) has described the use by the Qing of the ceremonies for the Xining local deity to legitimate and regulate the use of land between Tibetan and Mongolian groups in the Khökhnuur region. In Mongolia the obo ceremony has become expressive of the political order once more, after decades of Soviet-inspired disapproval and marginalization. A ceremony for Otgon Tenger Mountain was carried out in 2003 by President Bagabandi in his home province of Zavkhan, with rites performed by monks brought in from the central monastery of Gandan in Ulaanbaatar.

The Construction of a National People

Official histories of the Soviet period tended to project the contemporary national and ethnic categories onto the past, so as to tell the story of the Mongol or Khalkh ‘peoples’ through time (e.g., Gongor 1978). However, more recent scholarship (e.g., Atwood 1994, Bulag 1998, Kaplonski 1998, Munkh- Erdene 2006, Elverskog 2006) has challenged these historical representations. These approaches suggest that national identity, as it is understood today, is a relatively recent development in Mongolia, although authors differ in their understanding of politically significant identities in the Qing and pre-Qing periods. Kaplonski argues that ‘[a]lthough its origins can be traced to the end of the nineteenth century, national identity on a broader scale became important only with the establishment of the socialist regime in the 1920s. […] It was, therefore […] largely the socialist government itself that was responsible for creating and propagating an identity based on the concept of ‘nation’ in Mongolia’ (1998: 35).

In the Qing period (1691-1911), Mongolia was ruled by an aristocracy – the descendants of Chinggis Khan's lineage who held the title taiji. Mongolia was divided into about a hundred petty principalities termed khoshuu, conventionally translated as ‘banner’ in English, each governed by a taiji who held the title of zasag (ruler). In this era it is difficult to identify a clear sense of Mongol ethnic identity that is distinct from the tracing of noble or elite ancestry (Munkh-Erdene 2006, Atwood 1994, Elverskog 2006).

Mongol commoners did not share common descent with the nobility, nor could they do so even in theory since descent from royal ancestors was the basis of aristocratic status. When, in a later era, Mongolian nationalists cast back through historical records for records of a common ethnic origin for all Mongols, they found accounts of ruling lineages. Historically, the ‘lineage of the Mongols,’ then, was primarily a reference to the aristocracy. As Atwood (2004: 507) puts it ‘[Chinggis Khan’s] descendants, the Taiji class, were the only full members of the Mongolian community.’

But in the twentieth century this aristocratic political discourse was transformed by new ideologies. Mongolian independence movements began to construct a new discourse of popular nationalism in which the shared descent of the Chinggisid lineage was used as the template for the concept of the Mongolian nationality.

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.

Introduction

Since the 1990s Mongolians have seen the transactional, quantifying logic of the market expand to entangle an ever-greater set of social relations. In the new neoliberal political economy, timely money became a scarce resource and essential requirement, one that could be made to command a premium price through high interest rates. Most households became subject to a regime of debt that linked their fortunes to the national and international financial markets. It might seem implausible to suggest that debt has only recently appeared in Mongolia. Surely people have always been enmeshed in the obligations created by systems of exchange? But this thinking reflects Graeber's point that ‘our common-sense assumptions […] tend to reduce all human relations to exchange, as if our ties to society, even to the cosmos itself, can be imagined in the same terms as a business deal’ (2011: 18). In this view some form of debt might appear to be a social inevitability, an enduring aspect of the human condition, for example, saw social relations themselves as forms of debt: ‘persisting relationships only exist as feelings of indebtedness’ (Leach 1982: 154). But more recent anthropology has challenged the classical application of the notion of exchange which has, as Hunt (2002: 115) points out, tended to obscure alternative modes of allocation that he describes as ‘transfers.’

On reflection then, debt is clearly produced by a particular set of institutional formations within a given political economy; it cannot be taken for the substance of human relations, not even those that produce transfers of material goods. This is because debt is made to appear by the transactional logic of the exchange idiom, which is only one of the possible schemas used for the distribution of what economists would term goods and services. In Mongolia objects and help may be subject to transactional logics, and these may be commercialized and commoditized and subject to the logics of monetary economy. But many things are provided for others using non-transactional logics; ones that do not produce ‘debt’ as such at all.

Very substantial material flows are generated by obligations owed to relatives, for example, such as providing idesh – food supplies.

Introduction

The urban has come to occupy a particular position in Mongolian culture, which continues to be represented as rooted in traditions of nomadic pastoralism. Although pastoralists and their ruling elites frequently had antagonistic relations with the great urban cultures of China, and conceived of their own lifestyles in contrast to Chinese urban and agricultural life, there was a long history of indigenous centres of power within pastoral Mongolian society itself. As Mongolian elite culture adopted Buddhism and became incorporated into the Manchu (Qing) state, however, these centres of power became increasingly identified with fixed structures – monastic and urban centres. Mongolian notions of the rural and the urban can be seen to be rooted in these histories and reflect the unique nature of relations between pastoral and urban lifestyles.

Mongolian culture has inherited distinctive sets of notions, dispositions and institutions oriented towards the rural, local and domestic on the one hand, and towards centres, elites and political structures on the other. State socialism invested massively in urban and industrial centres and the ways of life associated with them; making the identification between political centres, elites, and the city even stronger.

As a heuristic device, this chapter identifies two integrated complexes of norms, values and skills. One of these reflects the interests of the political elite, and is oriented towards urban and political centres, and the other which is based upon the day-to-day concerns of common pastoralists, and is oriented towards the domestic unit, subsistence tasks and local relations. The first is termed ‘elite-centralist,’ and the second ‘rural-localist.’ These complexes resemble Bourdieu's notion of habitus in some ways. Bourdieu (1977) notes that the cognitive structures of the habitus are shaped by the relations of domination, and in turn they reproduce them, and this is also a central feature of the process that I wish to describe. However, elitecentralist and rural-localist complexes are not mutually exclusive. Most Mongolians are acquainted with both to some extent, although lifestyle, occupation and personal inclination tend to privilege one over the other in terms of the personal orientation of individuals. The relationship between these two conjectural poles of the cultural spectrum can be thought of as ‘symbiotic’ because in many ways they are complementary, reflecting and reinforcing each other.

The Colonization of the Imagination

We commonly encounter phrases such as the ‘colonization of the imagination’ that seem to describe the ways by which discursive formations such as modernity, education, or development have come to be dominant interpretive grids in public consciousness. In their edited work Decolonization of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power, for example, Pieterse and Parekh (1995) set out to explore the relationship between power and culture, domination and the imaginary, in the context of colonialism and its legacy. Work of this sort reflects notions of the social imaginary in the tradition of Castoriadis and Taylor, as discussed in the introduction of this collection. Here ‘shared mental life’ (Strauss 2006: 332) has come to be dominated by colonial imagery so that it requires purposeful intellectual activity to escape from these ways of imagining the world.

This idiom raises a number of questions, in particular, what were the means, methods and techniques by which imagination was ‘colonized.’ In the case of the multifold and ramifying notion of modernity, renderings of which have so powerfully influenced imagination throughout the globe, it is clear that it has not been through text and speech alone that this colonization has taken place. The transformation was also the result of the imaginative effects and possibilities generated by myriad objects, procedures and technologies. The wide range of instruments by which the notion of modernity came to dominate our representations of the world included the new experiences made possible by the industrial and scientific revolutions. In his Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (1999), for example, James Ferguson examines Zambian experiences of disillusionment as the promise of industrial development evaporated; in doing so he reveals the importance of the urban lifestyles and environments generated by mid-twentieth-century industrialization for cosmological formation and transformation.

Mongolia also experienced the rapid growth of industrial and urban lifestyles in the second half of the twentieth century. After the Soviet-backed Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (MPRP) took control of Outer Mongolia in the 1920s, the newly independent nation received the Leninist variant of modernism and set about installing all the trappings of the Soviet vision of the nation-state. Urbanization was rapid.

In Mongolia the debate over the ownership of land has become one of the most controversial political issues in the recent history of this post-socialist state. The introduction of laws that would allow, for the first time, the private ownership of land has provoked heated discussion in a nation that continues to construct its identity with reference to ancient traditions of mobile pastoralism.

In the early 1990s, in the wake of the collapse of Soviet-backed state socialism, the Mongolian state undertook wholesale political and economic reform. A multiparty electoral system was introduced, and although the old ‘communist’ ruling party (the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party, MPRP) was confirmed in office, the state nevertheless embraced a broadly liberal agenda. The government embarked on a series of radical reforms designed to create a market economy. In common with other Soviet-block countries, the Western economic advice given to Mongolia resembled the stabilization and structural reform packages that the IMF and the World Bank recommended for poor countries in the 1970s and 1980s (Nolan 1995: 75). It included the privatization of public assets, price liberalization, cutting state subsidies and expenditure, currency convertibility, and the rapid introduction of markets. The recommendations reflected a neoliberal discourse in which the economy should be emancipated from the political structure, permitted to assume its latent ‘natural’ form, composed of private property and the market.

In 1991 Mongolia began a huge programme to privatize collective and state enterprises (Asian Development Bank 1992: 86-88, World Bank 1994: 9). In rural districts the reforms included the dissolution of the pastoral collectives (negdel) and most of the state farms (sangiin aj akhui). The collective herds of sheep, goats, cattle, horses and in some regions camels, were divided between the former members, as were the other collective assets such as motor vehicles, machinery and equipment.

The introduction of the new proprietary regime had the effect of breaking up the concentrated herd ownership, the large-scale movement systems and specialist support operations the collectives had organized. Many of the workers in the rural settlements lost their jobs but gained some livestock instead. This trebled the number of workers directly reliant on pastoralism for their livelihood from less that 18% of the national workforce in 1989 to 50% of the working population in 1998 (National Statistical Office of Mongolia 1999: 95 and 45, Statistical Office of Mongolia 1993: 6).

Introduction

Before the communist revolutionary transformation of Inner Asia, the cultural context for public ritual was what Atwood terms the Buddhist ecumene (oikumene) and the Qing empire (Atwood 2011: 67). This zone extended across much of ‘High Asia’ (Haute-Asie) from the Himalayas to the shores of Lake Baikal, including areas of Tibet, Amdo, Qinghai, Gansu, Inner and Outer Mongolia, and Buryatia in the first instance, but its influence also extended throughout the Qing empire to some degree. This, I argue, can be seen in civilizational terms, as a repertory of material and immaterial culture, not itself systematically integrated, but potentially subject to historical projects of systemization.

I certainly do not use the term civilization in the way that Huntington does in his treatise on the ‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington 1996). There is no reason to reify the category or project upon it the sorts of strategic logics assumed for nation-state or imperial polities. Indeed, as Matlock puts it: ‘It is a mistake […] to treat a hypothetical “civilization” as anything other than a convenient intellectual construct used to establish the boundaries of a field or topic of study’ (1999: 439). As he remarks, however, ‘if we define a “civilization” as simply the subject of an intellectual inquiry, it can be a useful term’ (Matlock 1999: 438). Neither do I employ it ethnographically to refer to a particular normative concept such as a civilizing mission or the notion of wenming as discussed by Harrel (1995) and Feuchtwang (2012). I am not concerned here, then, with what Duara calls the ‘new civilization discourse’ linked to Pan-Asianism of the early twentieth century (Duara 2001). Here I simply use the term as a heuristic category, as noted above, for a cultural repertoire specified by the subject of inquiry – in this case that of the Inner Asian Buddhist ecumene of the nineteenth century and its legacy in the twenty-first.

The President Comes to the Mountain

Just after dawn on 6 July 2009 about 60 male dignitaries, policemen, lamas, musicians, ceremonial guardsmen, military officers and about the same number of male spectators waited near the summit of Mount Altan Khökhii, one of the five sacred mountains of Mongolia at which state ceremonial is conducted by the Head of State.

Part I The Making and Remaking of Mongolia

In the course of the twentieth century Mongolia underwent two episodes of revolutionary change that marked the transition between three radically different social orders. The 1920s and 1930s saw the overthrow of a Buddhist aristocracy and the construction of a Soviet-style modernist nation-state, and the 1990s witnessed the collapse of state socialism and the introduction of a ‘neoliberal’ market economy and parliamentary system. These transformations have made and remade Mongolia as we know it today. The articles collected in this volume1 are diverse, but all of them are concerned with the historical processes that have produced contemporary Mongolia. Three of these transformations are particularly striking: (a) the construction of national culture, (b) the transformation of political economy, and (c) the re-introduction of cosmological politics.

Tracing the first of these strands entails an examination of the historical processes by which the Mongolian nation-state was constructed, and distinctive national and ethnic identities produced from the aristocratic and imperial orders of the past. This theme is touched on in this introduction and explored in Chapter 2, which charts the history of the term Mongol, and the ways in which it was applied to persons and territories before it became the ethnonational category that it is today. Dominant conceptions of Mongolian identity reflect the influence of national populist thought, in which tribes and peoples were proto-national units, defined by common culture. This is, however, a poor guide to understanding pre-revolutionary Mongolia, which is better thought of in terms of what Anderson ([1983] 1991) terms the ‘dynastic realm’ – in which political society is a product of rulership. Since the earliest historical times, Mongolia has been subject to aristocratic and imperial projects of governance. The aristocratic orders of the past were often decentralized, but nevertheless operated in ways that resembled the state more than they did evolutionist models of kin-organized ‘tribal society.’ This leads on to an examination of the processes by which Mongolian ethnicity and national culture were constructed in the twentieth century.

This theme also stands as a backdrop for Chapter 3, which describes a central feature of Mongolian national culture – the distinction between the urban (khotyn) with its associations of modernity and the rural (khodoonii), seen as a touchstone of tradition.