Mongolia Remade: Post-socialist National Culture, Political Economy, and Cosmopolitics 9789048542130

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Mongolia Remade

North-East Asian Studies This series presents ground-breaking research on North-East Asia, a vast region encompassing the Russian Far East, Siberia, northern China, Mongolia, Japan, and Korea. Despite its strategic significance, studies of North East Asia remain fragmented and pigeonholed within the academic traditions of Eastern European, postsocialist and Asian studies. The series will seek to address this gap by publishing innovative monographs and edited volumes spanning the region beyond national boundaries. Ranging from migration and cross-border trade to urban development and climate change, the series will foreground contemporary and emerging issues, and make critical interventions in both regional studies and in the field of social sciences. North-East Asian Studies is published in collaboration with the Mongolia and Inner Asia Research Unit at the University of Cambridge. Series Editors Caroline Humphrey, University of Cambridge Franck Billé, University of California, Berkeley Editorial Board Members Manduhai Buyandelger, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Bruce Grant, New York University Liu Xin, University of California, Berkeley Madeleine Reeves, University of Manchester Sonia Ryang, Rice University

Mongolia Remade Post-socialist National Culture, Political Economy, and Cosmopolitics

David Sneath

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Ceremonial guard with flags and the sacred black standard of Chinggis Khan Photo: David Sneath Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6298 956 6 e-isbn 978 90 4854 213 0 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789462989566 nur 740 © David Sneath / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2018 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

7

1 Introduction

9

2 Mapping and the Headless State

35

3 The Rural and the Urban in Pastoral Mongolia

57

4 Proprietary Regimes and Sociotechnical Systems

79

Rethinking National Populist Concepts of Mongolia

Rights over Land in Mongolia’s ‘Age of the Market’

5 Political Mobilization and the Construction of Collective Identity in Mongolia

103

6 The Age of the Market and the Regime of Debt

125

7 Reading the Signs by Lenin’s Light

145

8 Ritual Idioms and Spatial Orders

163

9 Nationalizing Civilizational Resources

175

10 Mongolian Capitalism

193

Addendum

211

References

215

The Role of Credit in the Transformation of Pastoral Mongolia

Development, Divination and Metonymic Fields in Mongolia

Comparing the Rites for Mongolian and Tibetan ‘Local Deities’

Sacred Mountains and Cosmopolitical Ritual in Mongolia

Obugan-u egüdku jang üile selte orusiba (Rites and so on for the establishment of a new obo)

List of Figures Figure 3.1 Mongolian Urban and Rural Population, 1990-2002 59 Figure 7.1 Light bulb made to commemorate Lenin’s ­electrification programme 148 Figure 7.2 Altankhüü reading a dal, Khövsgöl aimag, 2008 153 Figure 7.3 Interpretive plan for dal collected in Inner Mongolia, 1938 155 Figure 7.4 A contemporary plan for dal in a pamphlet, ­Ulaanbaatar, 2004 156 Figure 8.1 Plan for the obo from Mergen Diyanchi Lama’s text 167 Figure 8.2 Plan for the obo from the 1649-1691 text 167 Figure 8.3 Notional location of different classes of obos based on the 1649-1691 text 169 Figure 9.1 The seven burkhan images are taken to the ovoo and the khar süld 177 Figure 9.2 The President places a khadag on the ovoo 178

Acknowledgements The author would like to thank the following: The Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center for permission to republish ‘Masters of the Steppe: Peoples of Mongolia’ as Part II of the introduction; the University of Pennsylvania Press for permission to republish ‘Mapping and the Headless State: Rethinking National Populist Concepts of Mongolia’ as Chapter 2; NIAS Press for permission to republish ‘The Rural and the Urban in Pastoral Mongolia’ as Chapter 3; Bloomsbury Publishing Plc for permission to republish ‘Proprietary Regimes and Sociotechnical Systems: Rights over Land in Mongolia’s “Age of the Market”’ as Chapter 4; the Taylor & Francis Group for permission to republish ‘Political Mobilization and the Construction of Collective Identity in Mongolia’ as Chapter 5, ‘Reading the Signs by Lenin’s Light: Development, Divination and Metonymic Fields in Mongolia’ as Chapter 7, and ‘Nationalising Civilizational Resources: Sacred Mountains and Cosmopolitical Ritual in Mongolia’ as Chapter 9; Wiley-Blackwell for permission to republish ‘The Age of the Market and the Regime of Debt: The Role of Credit in the Transformation of Pastoral Mongolia’ as Chapter 6; Koninklijke Brill NV for permission to republish ‘Ritual Idioms and Spatial Orders: Comparing the Rites for Mongolian and Tibetan “Local Deities”’ as Chapter 8.

1 Introduction 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 1 All the chapters of this work, except for the introduction and conclusion, have been previously published in journals or edited volumes.

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urban (khotyn) with its associations of modernity and the rural (khödöönii), seen as a touchstone of tradition. It begins by tracing the history of relations between elements of Mongolian culture that have been oriented towards political and ritual centres on the one hand, and those oriented towards rural pastoralism on the other. Although these interlinked constellations have undergone a series of transformations, they remained central themes in both rural and urban society and continue to frame relations between the two. The chapter describes the historical growth of urban lifestyles from pre-revolutionary times to the state socialist and post-socialist eras, exploring the social effects of recent processes of de-urbanization and reurbanization in Mongolia’s ‘age of the market.’ This treatment also introduces the second overarching theme, the transformations of Mongolia’s political economy, which created processes of urbanization in the state socialist era and flows of people out of, and into, urban centres and the peri-urban periphery since the collapse of the centrally planned economy. This theme is developed further in Chapter 4, which deals with the effects of these transformations on ‘nomadic’ or mobile pastoralism and the changing regimes for the ownership of land, in particular, the controversy surrounding proposals to introduce the private ownership of land in the ‘age of the market’ (zakh zeeliin üye) as Mongolians call the post-socialist era. It begins by describing historical forms of mobile pastoralism and the system of rights to land that made them possible, both in the pre-revolutionary and the state socialist collective eras. These systems organized both labour and access to land in such a way as to support large-scale pastoral operations that included long-distance movement and specialist herding. Post-socialist privatization of livestock and other assets transformed Mongolian pastoralism, dissolving the support systems for complex large-scale operations and creating an atomized livestock-rearing sector in which rich and poor rapidly emerged, and herding households became vulnerable to extreme weather such as winter disaster (zud) that have robbed tens of thousands of pastoralists of their livelihoods. The third overarching theme emerges in Chapter 5, which describes the way in which notions of nation and tradition are engaged in projects of popular mobilization and invoked in public ritual. It explores the ways in which Mongolians reconstruct tradition, assert collective identity and deploy concepts of belonging. In the twentieth century the socialist state constructed a single national ‘people’ (ündesten, ard tümen) and, following the Soviet model, represented the past in terms of tradition (ulamjlal). Since the collapse of state socialism and the introduction of multiparty parliamentary politics, notions of both tradition and collective identity have

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become potential resources, particularly for politicians, to mobilize public support. This can be seen in the ‘traditional’ rites held at sacred mountains by Mongolia’s President, as Head of State, and the ceremonies conducted at other ritual cairns (ovoo) by ordinary citizens that dramatize the links between persons and the landscape. This chapter also introduces the importance of notions of ‘homeland’ (nutag) in contemporary Mongolian culture, reflecting both the ideological logic of nationalism and the importance of local social networks. Political economy and its transformation are returned to in Chapter 6, which deals with the impact on pastoralists of the expansion of banking credit and widespread indebtedness. In Mongolia’s age of the market, international finance and development agencies have advocated credit schemes for pastoralists faced with uneven annual income. However, rather than boosting incomes the servicing of debt has become a central burden for an increasing number of Mongolian households. The banks demand for collateral has meant that access to grazing land has come to be mortgaged against loans in ways that are entirely new to Mongolia. Such processes of collateralization has expanded the sphere of monetized relations and made pastoralists dependent not only on climatic variation but also upon increasingly global markets for credit and the prices of the commodities they produce and consume. This new regime of debt has interesting historical parallels with the Qing-era barter trade that impoverished pre-revolutionary Mongolia. The cosmological aspects of contemporary public culture are explored in more depth in the following chapter by examining two apparently contrasting cases: the ancient practice of scapulimancy (divining by means of animal shoulder blades), and the modernist commitment to progress exemplified by the introduction of electric light in rural Mongolia. Scapula and other divinatory items can be approached as ‘metonymic fields’ – bounded technical practices from which wider meanings are read. The Soviet-era electrification programme was designed to create the sorts of imaginative perceptions that the modernist state advocated. However, I argue that Mongolia cannot be described in terms of a successful modernist ‘colonization’ of the social imaginary, since this metaphor implies a bounded space being filled with particular ideologies. Rather than displace each other, narrative genres such as modernism and the metonymic fields used in divination have coexisted and interacted in new ways. The historical roots of public ritual, and the cosmology it reflects, are examined in Chapter 8, which deals with the ceremonial sites used for the worship of the spirits of sacred mountains and other local deities. Both

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the ritual cairns (ovoo) and the spiritual masters of the land that they are dedicated to bear interesting comparison with the knowledge and practices surrounding mountain deities in Tibet. Based on an original translation of the earliest known seventeenth-century Mongolian text that describes these ritual sites, this chapter explores the ways in which these early rites reflected the ordering of space in Mongolia and Tibet, and the historical processes by which these rituals were popularized. Contemporary versions of ovoo ritual are explored in Chapter 9, which presents the notion of ‘cosmopolitics’ – a term that, following De La Cadena (2010), I use to indicate the engagement of spiritual entities in the political arena. This chapter returns us to the first theme, the construction of the Mongolian nation, revealing the ways in which the heritage of Buddhist cosmology has been used as a resource for the on-going construction of national culture, enshrined in state rituals and redesigned to match the needs of a new political culture. It looks again, in greater depth, at the Mongolian state ceremonies for sacred mountains conducted by the President as an example of the reinvention of an institution originally produced by the wider civilization of the Buddhist ecumene that encompassed both Mongolia and Tibet. Here we see elements drawn from that civilization reinvented as specifically national phenomena. Such rituals, I argue, can be seen as cosmopolitical since they engage with nonhumans as actors within a public politics of representation. Furthermore, the contemporary reinvention of these practices has generated a space for a very different, but also cosmopolitical, register for conceiving of relations between human persons and the landscape, used by shamans and others who ritually engage with the spirits of the landscape. The final chapter reflects upon the distinctive political economy that emerged since the collapse of the state socialist system, the emergence of rich and poor, and the rise of a super-rich elite with close ties to the political establishment. This ‘oligarchic capitalism’ has seen wealth sucked up, rather than trickle down, and has begun to resemble what Thomas Piketty terms ‘patrimonial capitalism’ in which inherited wealth dominates the economy. This chapter also picks up the themes explored throughout the volume by showing how the social conditions created by the new constellations of wealth and power provide the context for both contemporary notions of national identity, and the re-appropriation of historical religious and ritual practice that gave rise to new forms of cosmopolitical practice. The remainder of this introduction is divided into three parts, in roughly chronological order. Part II gives a very general introduction to the cultural and historical diversity of the country for those unfamiliar with Mongolia.

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Part III provides the historical backdrop for the first of great transformations Mongolia experienced in the twentieth century, briefly describing the collapse of Qing control and the short-lived autonomous regime of the Bogd Khan or ‘Living Buddha’ (1911-1924). The last part describes the remaking of Outer Mongolia in the Soviet image during the establishment and development of the Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR) (1924-1992).

Part II Masters of the Steppe: Peoples of Mongolia For more than 2,000 years, the Mongolian steppe has been home to an array of peoples and empires. Since the first millennium BCE, if not before, societies with pastoral nomadic lifestyles populated the belt of steppe lands that stretches across Eurasia from the Black Sea to the Manchurian forests (Allard and Erdenebaatar 2005, Levine 1999). These peoples lived in dwellings made of felt and wood that could be moved easily, herded livestock on horseback and travelled from one seasonal pasture to the next. With these strategies, pastoral peoples were able to master the climatic and geographical challenges of the rolling grasslands of Central and Inner Asia. Their mobile lifestyle and equestrian skills also made these mobile pastoralists formidable warriors, well able to exploit military opportunities in neighbouring lands. Chinese sources describe the powerful Xiongnu empire that ruled what is now Mongolia from the third century BCE (see Honeychurch, Fitzhugh and Amartuvshin 2013). To counter the threat of this northern neighbour the Chinese Qin emperor Shi Huang (r. 221-210 BCE) linked smaller existing fortifications into a huge chain of walls that snaked across much of northern China. For centuries, the Great Wall marked the division between the domains of the Chinese emperors and the lords of the steppe (Di Cosmo 2002, Jagchid and Symons 1989). On either side of this charged frontier emerged some of the most expansive empires ever known. Religion and Civil Organization Far from being a timeless land of ancient, unchanged traditions, Mongolia has a tumultuous history of sweeping change. New regimes and religions have transformed political, economic, and ideological life. One of the most important developments was religious conversion. In the thirteenth century Chinggis Khan and his immediate successors sponsored the established polytheistic shamanic religion while tolerating other faiths, but since the

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days of Khublai Khan, Tibetan Buddhism became increasingly important at the courts of Mongol rulers. By the end of the sixteenth century, Buddhism was the dominant religion of the region. Some elements of the pre-Buddhist shamanic religion, including the worship of local deities, may have lived on under Buddhist auspices (see Chapter 8) and some practices appear to have survived periods of active suppression (see Buyandelger 2013). But from the sixteenth century, Buddhist rulers began to effectively suppress the old faith as a public religion, persecuting shamans and burning their ritual objects. Explicitly non-Buddhist shamanic practices were retained in the northern and eastern fringes of the Mongolian world, among groups such as the Buryats and Daur (Humphrey 1996). The Buddhist era introduced monasteries throughout Mongolia. These became prominent ritual, economic, and political centres, and throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they became the hubs of small settlements. Great complexes were built in such places as Urga and Erdenee Zuu – where Ögödei’s imperial capital, Khara Khorum, had once stood. The Buddhist establishment also managed the ritual aspects of relations with the environment. The local spiritual masters of the land (gazryn ezed) were honoured in annual ceremonies held at ritual cairns (ovoo) (see Heissig 1980). The district officials might control access to pasture land, but these rites demonstrated that, in some sense, the true owners of the land were spiritual ones, the local deities attributed with the control of environmental conditions (Erdenetuya 2002). These ceremonies and attendant local games (naadam) have been revived throughout much of the country in recent decades. Mobile pastoralism has long required flexible access to grazing land. District authorities (lordly, monastic, or collective) historically have tended to control large tracts of territory within which pastoral families have been allocated complimentary seasonal pastures. This local control of land has allowed for movement and reallocation of pasture in harsh environmental conditions such as drought and the winter freezes known as zud. Such flexibility is difficult to achieve within systems of ownership based on the rigid and permanent private ownership of land, and until relatively recently, grazing land in Mongolia was not generally owned in this manner. Ceremonial practice, then, can be seen to reflect the notion of spiritual authority over the land, which makes human claims custodial rather than absolute. Some areas in Mongolia are suitable for agriculture, but most of this vast land is best used for grazing livestock. Around a third of Mongolia’s population now relies upon their domestic animals to make a living. Many,

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but not all, of these pastoralists are still mobile, moving to different seasonal pastures as part of an annual cycle. Since long before the time of Chinggis Khan pastoralists have kept what Mongols today describe as the tavan khoshuu mal, the ‘five types of livestock’: horses, cattle, sheep, goats, and, in the drier regions, camels. In the higher northern regions they also keep yaks, sometimes cross-breeding them with Mongol cattle. But above all, Mongolia remains a land of horses. There are about as many horses as people living in Mongolia – some three million. No other animal is more valued, and top racehorses sell for thousands of dollars. Until the development of firearms, horses were a key military resource, providing the deadly mobility for which Mongol armies became famous. Steppe ‘nomadism’ should not be thought of as an aimless, wandering subsistence activity. Mongolian mobile pastoralists know very well which seasonal pastures they will use in winter, spring, summer, and autumn. These generally form an established annual cycle, although pastoralists may adapt their pattern in response to changing economic, social, and environmental circumstances. Pastoralism need not be a small-scale activity, limited to one or two households. Large-scale, coordinated, mobile herding systems can involve hundreds of households, thousands of animals, and have ancient roots. From the seventeenth century until the twentieth, Mongolia was divided into administrative districts called khoshuu (banners) ruled by a hereditary lord or a Buddhist monastery. Mongol commoners were tied to a district and were required to provide taxes and labour to their noble or ecclesiastical masters. Buddhist monasteries, the nobility, and the imperial administration owned large numbers of livestock, which were herded for them by subjects or servants who received a share of the animal produce. Most commoners also owned their own livestock, and some could be rich, but they were still required to render service to local princely or monastic authorities as part of their political units (Natsagdorj 1978, Boldbaatar and Sneath 2006). Pastoral systems could also be highly sophisticated. Specialist herders and their families moved large herds of livestock to selected seasonal pastures in an annual cycle. Banner officials regulated pasture allocation. Some movement systems could entail herd shifts of 150 to 200 km between summer and winter pastures (Simukov 1936, Sneath 1999b). Because different animals have different grazing habits, species were segregated. Sheep crop pasture so close that horses and cattle cannot get at what is left, so efficient use of land required the coordinated movement of livestock. This ‘feudal’ system was largely abolished in the early years of the Soviet-style Mongolian People’s Republic, and, in the 1950s, pastoralists were organized into large

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collective and state farms. Although these collectives represented a radical break from the past, in some respects they resembled the large monastic and noble estates. As had their predecessors, they controlled access to grazing land and required herders to provide quotas of produce as part of a district-wide operation. They also supported seasonal movement and supplied hay using central motor pools. The collectives were disbanded in the early 1990s, using various formulas to divide livestock and other assets among local members. This has allowed some herders to become wealthy, but others now own barely enough animals to make a living, and many pastoral households have struggled to do without collective fodder supplies and motor support in the face of harsh weather conditions (Bruun and Odgaard 1996, Sneath 2002). Mongolian Ethnicity The modern state of Mongolia has a number of officially recognized ethnic groups. More than 80% of Mongolians are registered as Khalkha – a term originally applied to a large administrative unit created by the fifteenthcentury ruler Dayan Khan and subsequently applied to the wide territories ruled by his descendants, in the twentieth century it came to be seen as a national or ethnic category. In the western part of the country there are some 100,000 Kazakhs, whose Turkic Muslim ancestors had moved into the region in the nineteenth century, in part to avoid Tsarist Russian rule. The incorporation of subjects of the former Oirad realms in western Mongolia, after their defeat by the Qing emperor of China in the eighteenth century, left a number of named groups that later became officially registered as ethnic minorities (yastan), mostly in the Mongolian west. Administrative divisions introduced by the Manchu rulers of China and Mongolia created distinctions that served as the raw material for the ethnographic mapping of Mongolia in the Soviet era. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Qing emperor Kangxi (r. 1662-1722) established a unit to raise imperial horse and camel herds in the Dariganga region in what is now western Mongolia. The people of this region were registered as an ethnic group (yastan) in the Mongolian People’s Republic, and in the 2000 census they appear as a minority ethnicity with a population of 32,000. In the north, next to the huge freshwater Lake Khövsgöl, the great monastic estate of the Jebtsundamba Khutagt, the senior reincarnate lama of the Buddhist establishment, gave rise to another census category that came to be registered as an ethnic group. As part of the Jebtsundamba Khutagt’s religious establishment the subjects were exempt from state taxes

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and described as the ‘exempt ones,’ or Darkhad (Atwood 2004: 132). The Soviet-style minority nationalities policies of the MPR led to the Darkhad being registered as another ‘ethnic group’ and by the time of the 2000 census their population was a little under 20,000. Khövsgöl province is also home to some Tuvan-speaking people, such as the Dukha (Tsaatan), famous for herding reindeer. In the early twentieth century, many Buryats crossed the border into Mongolia to escape the turmoil of the Russian revolution. By the early twenty-first century some 40,000 Buryats were registered as citizens of Mongolia, living mostly in the northern provinces of Selenge, Khentii, and Dornod (Dashbadrakh 2006: 135). Today, many aspects of Mongolian culture remain important in Inner Mongolia, now one of the autonomous regions of the People’s Republic of China. Mongolian is an official language, alongside Chinese, and the head of the local government is routinely Mongolian. There are over four million people of Mongolian nationality in the region – many more than in the independent state of Mongolia. However, the region was subject to Chinese settlement throughout the twentieth century, and today around 80% of the population of Inner Mongolia are Han Chinese (Bulag 2002). Farther abroad, people tracing Mongolian descent are also found far to the west. On the Russian shores of the Caspian Sea lies the semi-autonomous Republic of Kalmykia, the successor state of the westernmost outpost of a seventeenth-century expansion by the Oirad Mongols. In exchange for guarding Russia’s frontier, the tsar granted them a small khanate south of the Volga River. The republic has a rich Oirad-Mongol heritage – it is the only Buddhist nation in Europe – although only about half of the republic’s population of 300,000 people are Kalmyk, and many of these no longer speak their historic dialect of Mongolian. Having experienced a turbulent and brutal history within the Soviet Union, diaspora communities of Kalmyks can be found elsewhere in Europe, including Serbia and France, and on the east coast of the United States. The Kalmyk community in New Jersey holds annual festivals to celebrate their Mongolian heritage. Mongolia is also a land of settlements – most of them tiny, widely dispersed villages, isolated in the endless grassy sea of the steppe. There are larger urban centres such as Darkhan and Erdenet, but a single city dominates national consciousness: the capital, Ulaanbaatar. The city started life in the seventeenth century as a great encampment around the Jebtsundamba Khutagt, the head of the Buddhist church. At first it remained mobile, a city of tents that moved every few years. Only around 1778 did it settle in its present location in east-central Mongolia. It was first known as Ikh Khüree (Great Monastery) and later called Urga by Europeans (probably from örgöö,

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the Mongol term for a palace yurt). By the end of the nineteenth century, a hundred monasteries and temples of various sizes were located in the vicinity of Urga, with a total population of around 20,000 monks. In the Soviet era, the capital was renamed Ulaanbaatar (Red Hero). The city took on an unmistakably Soviet look, especially in its architecture, and grew at an amazing speed. In 1935, the population of Urga was 10,400. Fifty years later it was 50 times larger, growing to more than half a million people. Since then, the population has doubled again to over one million (Gilberg and Svantesson 1996, Campi 2006). Mongolia now has a standard language derived from the Khalkha dialects of the past, and a widely shared sense of national culture that recognizes distinct minorities such as the Kazakh, Buryat, and Dukha. Nevertheless, within the Khalkha majority category are remnants of many distinctive local traditions, linguistic dialects, beliefs customs, and techniques of managing livestock. Even greater diversity exists if one includes the peoples of Inner Mongolia, which have been subject to the changing policies of the Chinese state. Yet, throughout ‘greater Mongolia’ one finds common threads that are the legacy of a long history of mobile pastoral steppe life, with roots stretching back for more than two millennia. While keeping step with the increasingly urban, industrialized world, Mongolia’s peoples continue to find countless ways to express their unique history, culture, and way of life.

Part III The Ending of the Old Order From the earliest historical period, the Xiongnu empire of the second century BCE, until the twentieth century, the lands of Mongolia were ruled by aristocrats. The enormous thirteenth-century empire founded by Chinggis Khan not only associated the region with the name Mongol (Monggol) but also installed an aristocracy dominated by the descendants of Chinggis Khan’s royal house, the Borjigin lineage. After the break-up of the empire and the overthrow of the Mongol Yüan dynasty in China in the fourteenth century, Chinggisid aristocrats continued to rule the region of present-day Mongolia. In the fifteenth century, however, Chinggisid control of Mongolia was challenged by the growing power of the Oirad Mongols in the west, whose rulers had held senior office in the Mongol empire but were not themselves recognized descendants of Chinggis Khan. By the seventeenth century Oirad pressure was so great that the remaining Chinggisid rulers swore fealty to the rising power in the east – the Manchu Qing dynasty. The Manchu not only defeated the Ming dynasty to rule China, but went

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on to crush the Oirads. The Mongolian aristocracy became, in effect, junior partners in the imperial project of the Qing; the Mongol and Manchu nobility intermarried and Mongol aristocrats enjoyed high status, particularly in the area of military appointments. The basic sociopolitical unit during the Qing period was the khoshuu (conventionally translated as ‘banners’ to reflect the literal meaning of the equivalent Manchu term), the hereditary domain of the zasag noyon (ruling lord), who managed the territory with the assistance of a series of officials, and held judiciary authority over his subjects. The commoners were tied to their khoshuu districts and required to render corvée service to local authorities. They can be divided into four categories: (a) personal servants of nobles and officials (khamjlaga or khar’yat); (b) the imperial subjects owing legal obligations to their lord (albat, sumyn ard, or just ard); (c) ecclesiastical subjects (shav’nar – described by Bawden (1968: 106) as ‘church serfs’); and (d) slaves (bo’ol). This last category appears to have been numerically quite small, but in theory both nobles and commoners might own slaves.2 In addition there were the independent estates of the various senior reincarnate lamas (khutagts), the most senior being the Jebtsundamba Khutagt. These were separate from, but comparable to, the khoshuu (banners), with their own defined territories and with the advantage of having their subjects exempt from military registration. This system was termed ‘nomadic feudalism’ by the Russian scholar Boris Vladimirtsov (1934). This terminology became unpopular among some later scholars, but the parallels between European feudalism and Qing-era Mongolia were striking, as Owen Lattimore (1976: 3) notes: ‘[T]here are those who hesitate to call the Mongolian social order “feudal”, but I do not see how the term can be avoided: aristocratic rank was hereditary and identified with territorial fiefs, and serfdom was also hereditary and territorially identified.’3 For administrative purposes, the Qing divided Mongolia into two parts: Inner Mongolia was the region close enough to the seat of government to be administered directly by the Qing court in Beijing, whilst the more distant Outer Mongolia was ruled indirectly, via the military governors in the urban centres of Urga, Uliasutai and Khobdo (Khovd). The Manchu and Mongol aristocracy were also enthusiastic sponsors of monastic Buddhism, and the church expanded steadily, building temples and monasteries, and 2 Legal documents from the eighteenth century bare testimony to both the suffering of slaves and a certain, if very limited, concern for them by the Qing authorities (see Bawden 1968: 139-140). 3 For further discussion, see Sneath 2007: 124-131.

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amassing herds, lands and subjects bequeathed by devout nobles. By the late nineteenth century, however, the Qing dynasty was facing a series of challenges that began to overwhelm it. The European colonial powers, and later Japan, defeated and humiliated the empire, imposing unequal treaties that helped provoke popular rebellions and a widening crisis of imperial authority. As the power of the Qing weakened, Outer Mongolia became increasingly restive. By late nineteenth century Chinese economic dominance had generated widespread discontent with Manchu rule. The increasingly impoverished population struggled to pay tax arrears and the interest owed on debts to Chinese merchants. Leading aristocrats, such as the Sain Noyan Khan, who later played a central role in the independence movement, themselves owed large sums to Chinese merchants. Another pressure was the acceleration of Chinese colonization since the mid-nineteenth century. This had largely affected Inner Mongolia, where the loss of Mongolian pastureland precipitated a number of Mongolian uprisings, such as the Töküm insurrection of 1899-1901. Disaffected Inner Mongolian nobles moved into Outer Mongolia and this fuelled anti-Chinese sentiment. One of these, Togtokh Taiji (Prince Togtokh), took to plundering Chinese shops. In the early twentieth century the Qing had begun to prepare for large-scale Chinese colonization in Outer Mongolia, further heightening tension. But the slow disintegration of the Qing loosened what control the Manchu government had upon distant dominions such as Outer Mongolia. In 1900 there was a mutiny of Mongol troops in Uliastai, who plundered the Chinese shops there and returned to their homes. Urga saw a number of riots in which mobs of Mongol lamas and residents looted Chinese shops and offices, and in 1910 the newly arrived Manchu senior official (amban) was apparently pelted with stones. In retrospect the Mongolian ‘independence movement’ that emerged at this time reflected both the political and financial interests of the elite and a popular anti-Chinese sentiment among the commoners. But such popular discontent was nothing new, and the crucial factor was the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, which allowed those nobles advocating independence to gain the support of the revered head of the Buddhist establishment, the Jebtsundamba Khutagt. A provisional government was established in Urga and a small army mobilized, ostensibly in loyal support of the Qing dynasty, but actually to defend the newly independent state. In late 1911 the princes enthroned the Khutagt as the Bogd Khan (Holy Khan) of Mongolia, with the title ‘Exalted by All’ (Olnoo Örgögdsön). The new government included five ministries (increasing later to nine) and a bicameral advisory body – the

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Upper and Lower State Khural (Assembly) (Boldbaatar and Lündeejantsan 1997: 177-179). The Bogd Jebtsundamba announced in a pastoral letter that the time had come for all Mongols to unite and establish themselves as a separate state (ulus). The new government simply declared itself independent, and the internal political turmoil of China precluded any effective opposition from Peking. The Buddhist establishment was by far the most powerful and authoritative institution in Outer Mongolia. It owned around a third of national wealth and included a huge proportion of the male population. Just under 45% of the 237,000 registered household heads were lamas in 1918, while nobles accounted for less than 6%, their khamjilga (personal servants) 17%, albat (commoners) 26%, and 7% were paupers (Namjim 2000b: 27 (Vol.1), Otgonjargal 2003: 15). The Jebtsundamba Khutagt was the only plausible candidate for head of state. Although born to a Tibetan family, he was the recognized reincarnation of the First Bogd Jebtsundamba (the Öndör Gegeen), who was himself a descendant of Chinggis Khan. He was also the richest individual in Outer Mongolia, and had the greatest number of dependants – more than 55,000 rising to nearly 90,000 during his reign – and an annual income of 900,000 taels (about 34,000 kg) of silver (Boldbaatar and Lündeejantsan 1997: 176-177). The Bogd Khan left the basic administrative system unchanged. The 118 khoshuu ‘banner’ administrative-military units and 56 ecclesiastical estates of the Qing period remained much the same. 4 There was little economic change, too, and although Chinese shops had been early targets of the rioting, they continued to operate throughout this period, and Mongols continued to try and service the debt, which in some banners exceeded the total capital value of all the property in the district (Bawden 1968: 203). However, in 1912 the Bogd Jebtsundamba only really controlled the two eastern provinces of Setsen Khan and Tushetu Khan, and Manchu officials still administered the western provinces (aimags) from Khobdo and Uliastai. In Uliastai the Manchu officials were bloodlessly expelled by their Mongol counterparts, but in Khovd they organized a determined defence and called on Chinese reinforcements from Xingjang. The Bogd Khan ordered an attack, and Mongol forces stormed Khovd in 1912. The diverse assortment of nobles and lamas that led this attack reveals something of the multifarious nature of the ‘independence movement’ of the time. They included Magsarjav, military commander of Sain Noyon Khan aimag, Damdinsüren, an Inner 4 There was, however, some renaming and relocation of the provincial (aimag) assemblies (chuulgan), including banners of a given territory. See Shirendev and Natsagdorj 1968: 6-11.

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Mongolian nobleman from Barga who had come to swear fealty to the Bogd Khan, the Jalkhantsa Khutagt, one of the most senior incarnate lamas of western Mongolia, Duke Khaisan from Kharchin in Inner Mongolia, Togtokh Taiji, the Inner Mongolian rebel prince turned freebooter, and the lama Dambijantsan, a charismatic Kalmyk adventurer from the Volga who claimed to be a reincarnation of the famous eighteenth-century anti-Manchu Oirad prince, Amursana. This colourful character is said to have sacrificed the living hearts of Chinese captives to the war banners of the Mongol commanders, and became the de facto ruler of Khovd and much of western Mongolia until arrested by Russian forces in 1914. The young Mongolian state looked to its northern neighbour for support. Even before finally declaring independence in late 1911, the nascent Outer Mongolian government began to appeal to the Russians for military and financial aid and met with a cautious but positive response. Russia recognized the new state in 1912 and provided military instructors, and a 100,000-rouble loan (Boldbaatar and Lündeejantsan 1997: 185). The same year the Russians signed a secret treaty with the Japanese, which divided Mongolia into two spheres of influence; Outer Mongolia was allocated to the Russians, Inner Mongolia to the Japanese (Rossabi 1975: 238). Russian policy became committed to the division of Mongolia. At first, however, the Bogd Khan government hoped to incorporate much of Inner Mongolia into the new state. In 1912 the Barga Mongols of the Khulun Buir region of eastern Inner Mongolia revolted, capturing the city of Khailar and declaring allegiance to Urga. Indeed, 35 of the 49 banners of Inner Mongolia declared for the Bogd Khan. Later that year Yuan Shikai, President of the newly proclaimed Republic of China, attempted to re-impose control of Inner Mongolia by force, and fighting broke out between Chinese troops and soldiers of the Bogd Khan who moved to support the Inner Mongolians. The Russians, however, would not support the bid for unification, and Urga found that alone it was in too weak a position to provide much more than moral support for the Inner Mongolian independence movement. Fighting continued throughout 1913 but Chinese Republican forces retained control of much of Inner Mongolia, although the unrest continued and Khulun Buir remained autonomous until 1920 (Atwood 2002: 34-36). China did not relinquish its claim to Outer Mongolia. A three-power conference between Russia, China and Bogd Khan Mongolia was held in Khiakta in 1914-1915. The resultant Treaty of Khiakta only gave Outer Mongolia the quasi-independent status of ‘autonomy under Chinese suzerainty.’ On the ground, however, the Russians were beginning to establish themselves in Urga, building a military academy, several schools, a small power station and

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opening the first coal mines. When the 1917 Russian Revolution led to the collapse of Tsarist rule, China seemed to have an opportunity to reassert its control in the region. The Mongolian elite, nervous of the Russian Bolsheviks, began to look again towards China for political support. In 1919 General Xu Shuzheng arrived in Urga with a large army and took control. His rule came to be bitterly resented by the Mongolian elite, who were somewhat relieved when in 1920 a coup in Beijing forced Xu to retreat to China, leaving Urga in the hands of the more moderate Chinese commissioner, Chen Yi. Chinese occupation acted as a catalyst for new political activity and in 1918-1919 a number of independence-minded groups formed, such as the Capital group founded by Danzan, a Finance Ministry official, and the Consular Hill group led by the lama Bodoo. Among these activists were Sukhebaatar and Choibalsan, who would later become the much celebrated leaders of the revolutionary movement. Both men had some contact with Russians. Choibalsan had been educated in Irkutsk and Sukhebaatar had spent seven years in the army, which had been trained by Russian instructors. In 1919 Danzan and others, whose politics were more nationalist than revolutionary, approached the White Russians for help against the Chinese, but without apparent success (Futaki 2000: 41). In 1920 I.A. Sorokovikov, an agent of Comintern (the Communist International), was sent to Urga to promote revolution and made contact with Danzan, Bodoo, Choibalsan and the others. The result was that the Capital and Consular groups united to form the tiny Mongolian People’s Party (MPP), apparently committed to some sort of democratic government based on people’s power, and sent delegates to ask the Soviets for help. The response was circumspect and the Mongol delegation was told to obtain a letter from the Bogd Khan requesting Soviet assistance. The Urga government had become desperate enough to consider this, despite the trepidation with which the lay and ecclesiastical nobility initially regarded the Bolsheviks, and a number of leading figures maintained good relations with the pro-Soviet activists. These included General Magsarjav and the Jalkhantsa Khutagt, who had stormed Khovd, and the senior ecclesiastical official, Grand Lama Puntsagdorji. A cautious letter from the Bogd Khan to the Soviets was duly written, asking for discussions on how Outer Mongolian autonomy might be peacefully restored. Sukhebaatar smuggled the letter to Russia and Danzan led a delegation of revolutionary Mongols to Moscow to present their case. Matters came to a head when the Russian civil war spilled over into Outer Mongolia. In late 1920 a White Russian force commanded by Baron Ungern-Sternberg entered Mongolia and approached the capital. The Chinese

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were still unpopular, and the Baron managed to eventually capture the city and expel the Chinese, with some Mongol support, restoring the Bogd Khan to the throne. But the brutally eccentric and anti-Semitic Ungern-Sternberg promptly set about looting Chinese shops and massacring Jews and other foreigners he considered suspect. The prospect of Outer Mongolia becoming a base for their White Russian enemies seems to have finally spurred the Soviets into action. They sponsored a small force of Mongol partisans led by Sukhebaatar and Choibalsan, who in March 1921 managed, with the help of Soviet artillery, to capture the Mongolian border post near Khiatka from the Chinese garrison still occupying it. The revolutionaries invited Soviet troops to support them, and by July a joint Soviet-Mongolian force had ousted the ‘mad baron’ and occupied Urga. A constitutional monarchy was proclaimed, with the Bogd Khan as head of state with very limited powers. High offices were divided between the People’s Party leaders and sympathetic establishment figures. The lama Bodoo, one of the original MPP revolutionaries, was made Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sukhebaatar was appointed Minister of War, and the Bogd Khan’s advisor, Grand Lama Puntsagdorj, became Minister of Internal Affairs. Mongolian historians such as Otgonjargal (2003: 78) have suggested that the primary aim of the 1921 ‘revolution’ was to establish a bourgeois republican or democratic government, and certainly at this stage neither the new Mongol leadership nor its Russian backers were committed to immediate Soviet-style revolution. Shumyatskiy, the senior official in the Soviet Far East, wrote to Lenin that year to say ‘our advice is not to touch the Khutagt […] and not to shape Mongolia according to the Soviet model’ (Morozova 2002: 43). Many figures in government were rather conservative, Minister of Justice Magsar, for example, had served since the Qing period. Danzan, the new Minister of Finance, had significant business interests, and was later labelled a capitalist (Otgonjargal 2003: 54). The rate of reform in the constitutional monarchy was at first rather slow. Although noble ranks, salaries, tax exemptions, khamjalga servants and rights to extract corvée service were all technically abolished in 1921-1922, there was no effective enforcement and in practice rather little changed in the country as a whole. A few banner princes were dismissed, to be replaced by other nobles, and in 1922 commoners were permitted to hold the post of tuslagch – the administrative assistant to the banner prince. But the Manchu law code remained in place until around 1925, and basic rural administrative structure changed rather little. The smallest unit was a group of nominally ten households – the aravt. Several of these were contained within a unit

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named the bag, which, notionally at least, contained around 50 households. Three or so bags made up the sum (meaning ‘arrow’), which was supposed to include about 150 households. The khoshuu (banners) contained several sums with anything from a few hundred to a few thousand inhabitants, and were grouped into the larger province-like territories termed aimag. But splits began to appear in the new leadership. In 1922 Bodoo, the first Prime Minister, and Grand Lama Puntsagdorji were charged with plotting to seize power with the help of the Inner Mongolian freebooter Togtokh Taiji among others, and executed. During the years of constitutional monarchy the MPP began to build itself into a genuine political force. In 1921 the party only had 220 members, but by 1925 had grown to over 4,000, of whom over 700 were nobles or lamas (Otgonjargal 2003: 32). Comintern retained its influence and Buryat and Kalmyk Soviet citizens were particularly prominent in party posts. When the Jebtsundamba Khutagt died of illness in May 1924 the party was eager to take firmer control of the state and a few weeks later the Mongolian People’s Republic was proclaimed.

Part IV Making Mongolia Modern From the outset the Mongolian People’s Republic was a modernist project, looking to the USSR for inspiration. Its constitution, adopted in November 1924, was based on a Russian draft, following the Soviet model and introduced a form of popular democracy – not, to be sure, the ‘bourgeois’ multiparty type, but the Leninist variety of one-party state rule based on an exclusive notion of ‘the people.’ The Mongolian term chosen as equivalent to the Russian notion (narod) was ard, a term that primarily meant commoners and excluded princes and senior churchmen (Nordby 1988: 82). Theoretically, then, the people’s democracy was the rule of the commoners, but since such a broad category was little more than an abstraction with no political voice of its own, in practice it amounted to the rule of the party that claimed to represent their interests. To mark the advent of the new order the capital’s name was changed from Niislel Khüree (Urga) to the more revolutionarysounding Ulaanbaatar, meaning ‘Red Hero.’ In terms of classical Marxist theory, Mongolia represented something of an anomaly. The evolutionary sequence proposed by Marx and Engels placed Mongolia at the feudal stage. Since socialism, with its dictatorship of the proletariat, was supposed to emerge from the capitalist stage, it might seem that Mongolia was not yet ready for socialism. However, in 1920 Lenin had argued that with Soviet help ‘backward countries’ could

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develop towards communism (Stolpe 2008: 246). As the f irst satellite state of the USSR, Mongolia became the test bed for this Leninist project of ‘bypassing capitalism’ – advancing from feudalism to socialism in one bound. The third congress of the Mongolian People’s Party (MPP) held in August 1924 began to lay the basis for policy to remake Mongolia as an egalitarian, socialist, and scientifically educated society. It was also the setting for the dramatic clash between the commercially minded Danzan, the Congress chairman, and the Buryat revolutionary Rinchino. Eventually, Danzan was charged with plotting a coup and executed. However, despite the success of Rinchino’s radicals within the MPP and the purging of some ‘rightists,’ the Prime Minister, Tserendorj, leaned politically to the right and state policy remained anything but revolutionary. This was the era of the New Economic Policy in the USSR, which permitted a limited amount of market activity, and in Mongolia there was no real attempt to transform the economy. Commerce continued to be dominated by Chinese, British, American and German companies (Atwood 2003: 71), and trade with the USSR accounted for less than 15% of the country’s imports and exports (Otgonjargal 2003: 72). The church and party continued to work in an uneasy alliance. Technically the country’s highest legislative body was the State Great Khural (Assembly), which included representatives of both. Although there was some anti-communist activity among lamas, and a monastic-led insurrection in Ulaangom in 1925 that had to be put down by force, the MPP still considered the Buddhist establishment too powerful to be challenged directly, and left it largely in place. However, both sides engaged in a low-intensity war of propaganda, with the MPP seeking to turn the ordinary lamas against the senior ecclesiastical dignitaries and monasteries circulating anti-communist texts. The enormous wealth of the Jebtsundamba Khutagt was divided with two-thirds going to the state and one-third back to the monasteries, and the party delayed the discovery of the ninth reincarnation of the Jebtsundamba Khutagt until it became irrelevant. In 1928 the situation changed abruptly. In the USSR Stalin had defeated Bukharin, Rykov and the Rightists, and embarked on a huge collectivization drive. The Comintern sent a team led by Schmeral, a Czech activist, to set the MPP on a similar course. The Seventh Party Congress obediently purged itself of Rightists once more, and launched a raft of radical policies. The aristocracy was, for the first time, really targeted and the large herds belonging to more than a thousand noble households were confiscated and distributed to poor herders or ad hoc cooperatives.

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However, the Buddhist establishment was larger and better organized than the nobility and a much more formidable opponent for the party. The huge monastic livestock holdings, administered in units named jas, contained more than three million livestock, and were vital to the national economy and the livelihoods of tens of thousands of ecclesiastical dependants. Confiscation, then, was not a viable option; instead the jas became subject to progressive taxation linked to their size, and regulations were introduced to force monasteries to lease more livestock out under süreg tavikh (herd placement) arrangements whereby the herders of monastic livestock were granted a more generous share of the livestock products. Steps were taken to reduce the numbers of lamas. A tax was levied on lamas of military age, and those who chose to leave the clergy were entitled to take livestock from the jas funds and exempted from military service for three years. But the collectivization policies of the Seventh and Eighth Party Congresses turned out, in retrospect, to be hopelessly unrealistic and doctrinaire. The party sucked in thousands of inexperienced new members, many of them illiterate poor herders, who struggled to make sense of the revolutionary policies. The 400 rural collectives that were hastily established with confiscated livestock were entirely alien to local pastoralists, and generally lacked anyone able to manage them properly. The results were disastrous for the rural economy, which lost some seven million head of livestock – a third of the national total – as a result of mismanagement or because owners slaughtered their animals rather then see them collectivized (Bawden 1968: 311). Private firms, particularly transport and retail enterprises, were nationalized. But the state retail and transportation systems were entirely incapable of filling the vacuum, and the result was a national shortage of goods. Non-Soviet economic enterprises were all but eliminated and by 1930 the USSR accounted for 90% of Mongolia’s exports and 75% of its imports. The attack on the monasteries was stepped up in 1930, tax rates on jas funds reached prohibitive levels and in some areas religious images were destroyed and ecclesiastical property forcibly redistributed. The rush towards secular socialism was a near-fatal blunder for the MPR regime and the backlash brought Mongolia to the verge of civil war. Armed revolts broke out throughout the country, largely organized by the monastic and lay nobility, and thousands were killed (Morozova 2002: 66). Some rebels looked for outside help and made contact with the Japanese and the Pancham Lama in China, and the revolts were only put down with the help of the Soviet army. Thousands of households fled the turmoil, and

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as much as 10% of the population may have migrated to Inner Mongolia at this time (Bulag 1998: 14). By 1932 it was clear that the revolutionary crusade had been a costly mistake. As Comintern agents themselves noted, at that time ‘lamas remained the cultural leaders of the Mongolian population’ (Morozova 2002: 37) and the MPR regime was not yet strong enough to defy them. The USSR did not want instability in its new satellite state and the MPP was allowed to change course completely. The rightist Genden became Prime Minister and the 1929-1932 policies were condemned as ‘leftist deviation.’ The party launched the New Turn Policy designed to reverse the most disastrous of the earlier mistakes. Most of the collectives were disbanded and livestock distributed between poor households, private pastoralism was permitted and encouraged with loans and grants. Attacks on monasteries and their remaining property was forbidden, and those lamas forcibly secularized were allowed to re-join the clergy. The number of lamas rose to 115,000 in 1934, 10,000 more than there had been in 1918 (Morozova 2002: 37, Otgonjargal 2003: 15). The jas funds, although much depleted, were subject to monastic management once more and allowed to grow. Some emigrants were persuaded to return with promises of pardons and good conditions. The rapid expansion of the party was now reversed and membership, which had swelled to 44,000 in 1932, was shrunk back to just 8,000. Other policies, however, were not reversed. Rural administration had seen a number of changes, mostly in the direction of generating units that might be better able to fulfil their state obligations. In 1927 the bag units had been abolished, and in 1929 the aravt ten-household units replaced by khorin units of 20, and the sums doubled to include 300 households. The party had found the old aimag and khoshuu-level administrations impeded their policies, and abolished the khoshuu in 1931, reorganizing the old system of 5 aimags with 513 sums into 13 aimags with 311 sums. The rightist phase of the party was, however, short-lived. From their base in Manchuguo, the Japanese were extending their influence into Mongolian territory. In 1934 they armed anti-Chinese Mongolians in Chakhar, Inner Mongolia, and the following year Japanese troops clashed with those of the MPR near Lake Buir in the north-east. There was widespread speculation that the Japanese would make a bid for control of Outer Mongolia. The Soviets were unhappy with the independent-minded Genden, who tried to subordinate the party to the government, resisted Russian influence, and quarrelled with Stalin, and so they looked for a more dependable Mongolian leader to resist Japanese expansion. In 1936 Gendan was accused of plotting with the Japanese and ousted by a pro-Soviet faction led by Choibalsan, the

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Deputy Prime Minister. Genden was sent to the USSR for ‘medical treatment,’ where he was arrested and shot in 1937. Choibalsan, however, made good use of his backing by Moscow. Over the next few years he used the Soviet-trained security services and accusations of treachery and Japanese collaboration to eliminate all his political rivals. He became Minister of Internal Affairs, Minister of War, Commander-in-Chief, and in 1939 Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs. These were the years of the Great Purges in the USSR, and Choibalsan earned his later tag as the ‘Mongolian Stalin’ by decimating the party, army, government and clergy using orchestrated show trials and extrajudicial executions. A ‘special sovereign commission’ was established to judge political crimes and in 1937-1939 sentenced around 30,000 people to death, approximately 4% of the entire population (Otgonjargal 2003: 74). The numbers of Soviet troops in Mongolia increased, and with their support the long-deferred showdown with the monastic establishment could begin. This time the attack was waged more skilfully. Senior lamas were charged with treason and show trials began in 1936. A sustained anti-Buddhist propaganda campaign was launched, supported by the establishment of new medical centres and secular schools to tempt people away from the monasteries, which were closed one by one on some pretext or other. The lower lamas were secularized using a combination of coercion and economic inducements, such as grants of livestock. Thousands of the higher-ranking lamas were shot. By 1939 the monasteries had been virtually wiped out. The pastoral sector, which still dominated the economy, had revived since the fiasco of the first collectivization campaigns, and the national herd stood at about 25 million animals. The various redistribution campaigns had resulted in a less unequal ownership pattern. In 1927 over 60% of herding households owned fewer than 20 bod (‘large animal’ units) of livestock (equal to one horse or cow, seven sheep, ten goats or two-thirds of a camel). By 1939 this proportion had shrunk to 40% and those in the middling wealth bracket of 20-100 bod had grown to 55% (Bawden 1968: 396). This time there was no attempt to collectivize herds and the rural economy seems to have absorbed the final demise of the monastic jas funds without too much disruption. From the late 1930s the political situation stabilized as the dictatorship of Choibalsan hardened into a ‘cult of personality’ along Stalinist lines. Sukhebaatar, who had died of illness in 1923, was elevated to revolutionary sainthood, to fill the role of a Mongolian Lenin. The party, which had been renamed the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party, became increasingly obedient to the leadership, and less and less a forum for inter-factional struggle. Choibalsan was concerned with preparations for war with Japan,

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and military expenditure peaked at over 50% of state spending in 1938 (Bawden 1968: 378). In August 1939 the Japanese invaded Mongolia’s eastern borders, where they were defeated at the Battle of Khalkhyn Gol by Soviet and Mongolian troops under Zhukov. Educational and cultural reforms, guided by Soviet advisors, pressed ahead. From 1941 the Cyrillic script was introduced for written Mongolian, and the classical script phased out. There had been some small but significant investment in the 1930s, mostly funded by Russia. A wool mill and leather factory were built, and five coal mines opened. In 1930 there were 300 workers employed in industry in Mongolia, and a single hospital; by 1940 there were 140,000 industrial workers and ten hospitals (Namjim 2000a: 52, 473 (Vol. 1)). There were also about 200 schools of various sorts in operation, and five newspapers with a circulation of 62,000 (Bawden 1968: 380). But as the USSR became locked into total war with Nazi Germany it could no longer invest in Mongolia, the pace of changed slowed. Instead, Mongolia began to support the Soviet war effort by supplying large quantities of livestock produce, particularly horses, meat and wool, some of this as donations. In 1941 the compulsory delivery quotas of the ulaan tölöblögöö (red plan) were introduced and herding households had to supply livestock products to the state. Imports shrank to next to nothing by 1943, food was rationed and consumer goods were in short supply. Victory against Germany in 1945 allowed the Soviets to turn their attentions to the Japanese. The Mongolian army took part in the Soviet offensive that rolled the Japanese forces back in Manchuria and eastern Inner Mongolia. One of the rewards for Mongolia was a large number of Japanese prisoners of war, who were put to work constructing railways and buildings in Ulaanbaatar. The Yalta Conference between Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt established the spheres of influence of the superpowers, and Outer Mongolia was placed within the Soviet sphere (Jagchid 1979: 235). The Guomindang Chinese government formally recognized the independence of the MPR in January 1946, and this was later confirmed by the People’s Republic of China. Choibalsan died in 1952, to be succeeded by the party General Secretary Tsedenbal, a Russophile from western Mongolia. The political climate again ref lected that of the USSR and in the mid-1950s Khrushchev’s critique of Stalin allowed Tsedenbal to condemn Choibalsan’s ‘cult of personality,’ although he continued to keep the party in line by purging any serious rivals. Soviet troops were withdrawn and relations with China were good, so that both its neighbours supplied Mongolia with aid and investment.

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The state now set about the collectivization of rural society once again, but this time it was far better prepared. A few ‘producers associations’ had been established in the 1940s, but the bulk of the pastoral sector was composed of private households, mostly managing herds of from a few dozen to a few hundred livestock in size. This seemed far from ideal, both ideologically as a vestige of non-socialized property relations, and economically as an inefficient sector of smallholders lacking economies of scale or technical support. The collectivization campaign proper began in 1953, when the structure of the new ‘rural economy collectives’ (khödöö aj akhuin negdel) were finalized and a series of measures imposed to make pastoralists join them. Taxes and the state delivery quotas were pushed up and up for wealthy private herders, while the negdels received the best pastures and heavy investment – winter sheds, veterinary support, and transportation. By 1959 almost all pastoral households had joined them, many reluctantly. However, there were benefits; households could retain livestock for their domestic needs, 50 head of livestock per household and 75 in Gobi regions, which was as many as the poorer families had to begin with. Members were paid a wage for the days they worked for the collective per year (typically around 150), and payment for this work quickly overtook personal livestock as the principle source of income. Further investment in the collectives in the 1960s and 1970s led to mechanized hay production, motor transport, mobile shops and other benefits. The total number of livestock fell slightly and stabilized at 20-24 million for the next three decades, but productivity did significantly increase (Namjim 2000b: 363-365 (Vol. 1)) and livestock produce fed the growing urban populations and the new industrial sector that by 1960 had overtaken agriculture as a source of national wealth (Namjim 2000b: 604 (Vol. 2)). Large-scale mechanized wheat farms were also established, and by the 1960s grain production could satisfy domestic consumption. The collectives (negdels) were amalgamated until, by the 1960s, most of the 300-odd sum rural districts supported a single collective, except for those that had state farms (sangiin aj akhui) instead, principally the districts that carried out large-scale crop raising or specialized livestock production. A central settlement of a few hundred households was developed in each sum and the several hundred pastoral households were organized into production brigades that moved to different seasonal pastures in an annual cycle as instructed by the negdel managers. State policy reflected a Leninist commitment to the integration of urban and rural life. The negdel collectives and sum local governments became vehicles for bringing elements of urban lifestyles to pastoralists. Sum centres had a boarding school, medical

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clinic, post office, collective headquarters, motor pool, police station, local government offices, and a soyolyn ordon (cultural palace), which hosted visiting entertainers, talks and films. As salaried members of collectives or state farms pastoralists became, by any standards, much more wealthy than all but the richest pre-revolutionary commoners. But they were also subject to state control and programmes of improvement on an unprecedented scale. Households were subject to a series of vigorous ‘cultural campaigns’ (soyolyn dovtolgoon) to remake practices in the home in line with modernist concepts of hygiene and cleanliness (Stolpe 2008). The possession and use of items such as soap, towels, toothbrushes, toothpaste, washbasins and white cotton sheets were installed in Mongolian homes and subject to an inspection regime of spot-checks and penalties. The home was reshaped in this era, with novel items installed within and alongside old forms, and householders held to new standards of modernist respectability. The Sino-Soviet split of the late 1960s led to the return of Soviet troops, their numbers rising to over 100,000 by the early 1970s. Mongolia now became entirely dependent on the USSR and Comecon for large-scale investment in urban centres, public services and industry, but was not disappointed. Construction accelerated and in the 1970s and 1980s national income grew of an average annual rate of about 5-6% (Namjim 2000a: 31). A comprehensive medical and educational system was put in place, major mining and industrial facilities built, such as the copper and molybdenum mine in Erdenet, and the pace of urbanization was rapid. In the 1920s only a few per cent of the population lived in towns, but by 1986, 54% of the population was urban. The Gorbachev era of the USSR ushered in a new era of change. In 1984 the veteran Tsedenbal was replaced as President by the reform-minded Batmönkh, who launched his own variants of glasnost and perestroika. As in Russia, however, this led to demands for fundamental political change. In 1989, at a meeting of the party’s youth wing, the Mongolian Democratic Union (Mongolyn Ardchilsan Kholboo) was founded, which aimed to democratize and reform the system by calling for multiparty elections and a re-examination of the past. The following year the Mongolian Democratic Party was formed and ten activists went on hunger strike. The result was extraordinary. Barely a week later the entire Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP) leadership resigned and in July the first multiparty elections were held. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the MPRP won easily, taking 357 of the 430 parliamentary seats in the Great Khural and 31 of 50 seats in the Small Khural, while the remaining places were shared between the five opposition parties.

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In 1992 a new constitution was adopted and the words ‘People’s Republic’ were dropped from name of the state, which became simply Mongol Uls (Mongolia). The Great and Small Khurals merged to form a single 76-seat parliamentary body – the Great State Khural. In the elections that followed the MPRP won 71 seats, but Ochirbat, elected as President in 1990, left the MPRP and won as the presidential candidate for the opposition parties, providing some sort of political balance. The collapse of the USSR and Comecon had a devastating effect on Mongolia’s economy. Soviet aid, which has been estimated as amounting to 37% of Mongolia’s GDP, was reduced in 1989 and stopped altogether in 1991 (United Nations Systems in Mongolia 1999: 6). Mongolian trade halved, exports falling from US$832 million in 1989 to US$370 million in 1991. The shock was mitigated somewhat when Western nations, Japan, and international financial institutions stepped in to provide aid equivalent to about 15% of GDP in 1991 and 1992. Following Russia’s lead, Mongolia embarked on a crash course of privatization. Economic disruption led to the closure of state enterprises, a collapse in living standards, declining public services and rising levels of unemployment. Real wages halved between 1990 and 1992, and declined by a further third in 1993. A small wealthy strata emerged but income-poverty increased from almost zero in 1989 to 27% in 1994. Real expenditure on health services decreased by 43% from 1990 to 1992, and the education budget was cut by 56% (World Bank 1994: 19-41, Griffin 1995: 31-33, Robinson 1995: 4). The negdel collectives were dissolved in 1991-1993 and the livestock and other assets divided between the members as private property. Although pastoralists gained livestock, the dissolution of the old system meant the loss of the guaranteed income, motorized support for pastoral movement and deliveries of winter fodder that the negdels had supplied. This dramatically altered the nature of the pastoral sector, breaking up the concentrated herd ownership, large-scale movement systems and specialist support operations the collectives had organized. It also trebled the number of workers directly reliant on pastoralism for their livelihood from 135,000 in 1989 (less than 18% of the national work force) to nearly 400,000 in 1996 (nearly 50% of the working population). Livestock numbers rose as pastoralists hoarded livestock to try and improve their food security. From 1990 to 1996 the national herd increased from 26 to 29 million head. However, the efficiency of pastoralism declined; the survival rates of offspring fell by 5-10%, and livestock totals were only able to rise because levels of marketing and consumption had fallen (National Statistical Office of Mongolia 1999: 95, 45, 92, Statistical Office of Mongolia 1993: 6). The price of staple foods rose quickly as the

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grain harvest dropped from 718,000 tons in 1990 to less than 240,000 in 1996. As most of the Soviet-era industries collapsed, the wider economy became heavily dependent on a handful of export commodities – copper, gold, and cashmere. In the mid-1990s, for example, the copper and molybdenum mine in Erdenet accounted for 60% of the country’s exports alone (Bruun and Odgaard 1996: 25). Like the first, Mongolia’s second (‘democratic’) revolution was about far more than political representation. It brought about the transformation of the nation’s political economy and the introduction of new models for modernist development – in this case those of Euro-American capitalism. This transformation was, in many ways, a rolling process that unfolded throughout the 1990s and, to some extent, is still underway as the new private and corporate forms of ownership mature and shape the wider economic and political environment. The work collected in this volume attempts to shed light on some of the diverse aspects of the historical processes by which the New Mongolia has been constructed amid the ruins of the Old.

2

Mapping and the Headless State Rethinking National Populist Concepts of Mongolia

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. Since rulership generally applied to subject peoples more consistently than territories, a map

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of the people of this decentralized dynastic realm might have represented a better strategy than charting its lands. But in any case, this would have generated a fluid picture of political control rather than the largely stable boundaries and homogenous national spaces of the era of the nation-state. The current distribution of populations described as Mongolian, then, reflects the legacy of the Borjigid project of rulership and the division of their subjects and territories between the Bogd Khan monarchy and the Chinese regimes that succeeded the Qing. The designation of any particular sets of persons and territories as Mongolian has always been a political practice, and it continues to be. Originally it indicated subjects of the Chinggisid project of rulership and later of the Mongolian nationalist one. Political processes have thrown up alternative sets of claims – such as the Pan-Mongolist movement of the early twentieth century – and the discourse of ethnic identity might be used to generate new inclusive political categories. But the map of Mongolia can only ever reflect the implicit or explicit notion of political society held by its makers, and this is something that seems bound to contestation and change.

Mapping Mongolia and Constructing an Ethnoscape A short, constructivist answer to the question, What is the extent of Mongolia?, would be, simply, the territory successfully claimed by a state bearing that name. Of course the recognition of these boundaries might be said to represent a political act in accepting the international status quo, but we need not express a view as to the legitimacy of this arrangement. This is now what we have by way of recognizably Mongolian territory, like it or not. Alternatively, one could adopt the tacitly national populist project of attempting to trace the extent of territories inhabited by people who could be claimed to be Mongol. This would be to participate in constructing what, following Appadurai (1990), we might term the imagined world of a particular ethnoscape – a vision of people grouped into ethnonational categories, sometimes in motion, sometimes at rest in given territories. Appadurai is concerned with deterritorialization: the shifting, unstable nature of a human world in continuous movement. But in the dominant imagination of populations and territories, both stability and movement in this ‘-scape’ are described in terms of ethnonational peoples, be they a ‘Mongolian minority’ or an ‘Irish diaspora.’ And this conception of human collectivities has its roots in a broader mode of imagination that I describe as ‘national populist,’ not to dismiss it but to locate it in a philosophical tradition

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that sought to identify peoples as sets of persons sharing a (contested) set of characteristics. However, the more carefully one examines this process of identification, the more clearly it becomes an ideological project linked to the emergence of a particular school of political thought in the West. As Hobsbawm, Gellner, Anderson, and many others have shown, the national peoples of today were largely constructed in relatively recent historical time. The history of Inner Asia shows nothing much like distinct peoples with discrete territories. As a result of projects of imperial and aristocratic rule over the last eight centuries, peoples and territories that might be claimed as Mongol are widely distributed over Inner Asia and indeed further abroad – from Yunan, for example, where there are officially recognized residents belonging to the Mongolian minzu (minority nationality), to Afghanistan where the Hazara claim Mongol descent, and Kalmykia on the Caspian steppe. As a result of more recent nationalist projects, a number of these territories and persons have some form of Mongol national status.

The Notion of a National People As Martin Thom (1990) points out, the concept of the nation that emerged in the nineteenth century was powerfully influenced by debates between monarchists and populists over whether a nation is constituted by its citizenry or its rulers.5 The populist notion, propounded by the French philosopher Ernest Renan, lived on in the work of Fustel de Coulanges and his pupil Émile Durkheim; the notion of both nation and society that developed in twentieth-century social sciences reflects the victory of this populist politics over the ancien régime. Durkheimian thought bears the imprint of Renan’s nationalism, particularly his concern with solidarity and the collective conscience. One can almost see Durkheim’s work as elaborating Renan’s conception of the nation for use as a general theory of human aggregation. Here, the nation, or society, stood for the people or Volk as a whole, with its own generalized culture, traditions, and form. In this populist imagination, human aggregates were not simply the subjects of a ruler but social and cultural collectivities, and 5 As Hobsbawm notes, the concept of the nation is historically very young; it emerged during the Age of Revolution in which new elites, particularly in France and America, began to articulate a new political vocabulary to express the common interest of members of the state in opposition to monarchical identification of the state with the monarch of the ancien régime. ‘The “nation” so considered, was a body of citizens whose collective sovereignty constituted them as a state which was their political expression’ (1990: 18-19).

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this was reflected in the emergence of various forms of folk studies. Sociology and particularly ethnology6 took as their objects of study the cultural and the social as mass or at least collective phenomena, conceived of in the populist mode very different from the royalist historians of an earlier era. But as Hobsbawm (1990) shows, in the age of populist national politics, the notion of shared kinship was an important element in the new ideologies of mass mobilization. The idiom of familial and fraternal relations, projected onto the ‘family writ large’ of the nation, became a dominant theme. Those engaged in the intellectual and political project of nation construction made claims of national unity based on the idea of common descent. In the socially heterogeneous and divided region that was to become Albania, for example, Albanian nationalists such as Naim Frasheri (1846-1900) claimed, ‘All of us are only a single tribe, a single family; we are of one blood and one language’ (cited in Hobsbawm 1990: 53-54). In this historical imagination, tribes were the proto-national groups, the natural units or subunits of a given Volk.

Imagining the Proto-nation The birth of Europe came to be envisaged as the Völkerwanderung – the ‘Wandering of Peoples.’ In this imagination, ‘peoples’ appear as proto-nations, discrete populations in movement. This generated a sort of billiard ball model of history in which prenational tribal peoples moved as discrete integral units across Eurasia to collide with and displace each other (e.g., Davies 1997: 215). This vision of history has survived the numerous studies showing that ‘tribes’ such as the Franks or Saxons were political projects including a wide and usually heterogeneous assembly of large and small noble houses and their subjects (Yorke 1990). When these Germanic peoples migrated into or invaded parts of the Roman empire, the historical record shows the process to have been very different from the vision of discrete population units displacing each other. The Germanic elites frequently negotiated an authorized position within the imperial apparatus, typically as allied local rulers ( foederati) who received a subsidy in return for the obligation to provide military support to Rome. 6 Assuming some more or less homogenous cultural and social entity as its object of study (an ethnos), classical ethnology reflected ethnonational historical thought, concerned with internal cohesion and peoples as cultural wholes.

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Any neat boundaries between native inhabitants and invading tribes quickly disappear. The iconic Alaric the Goth, for example, who sacked Rome in 410 CE, was a Latin-speaking member of a Romanized Gothic aristocracy who commanded an army raised within the borders of the empire. The result of the Germanic invasions on Europe was not the replacement en masse of one human population with another, but the insertion of new aristocracies and their military followings into the existing order of the Roman provinces. Thus the Germanic tribes were not discrete bodies of kinsmen tracing common descent. They were, instead, the political entourages, and frequently the conquest projects, of noble families (Wolfram 1988: 6). They displaced or intermarried with Roman elites, and the membership of their political formations was recruited from all sorts of sources, often from Roman subjects who preferred the new masters to their old ones. As Wolfram notes, ‘From the first appearance of the Gothic hordes on Roman soil, they attracted people from the native lower classes. At the time of the migration this attraction was a great advantage because it alleviated a constant shortage of manpower. […] [The] Roman lower classes had been willing […] since the third century: “to become Goths”’ (1988: 8). Just as in Europe, ruling elites in Inner Asia were frequently more mobile than their subjects. Historical accounts that might be interpreted as the migration of an entire people often refer to the movement of rulers and their entourages. In 105 CE, for example, the northern Xiongnu were defeated and apparently ‘displaced’ by the Xianbe who ‘occupied all the old territories of the Hsiung-nu [Xiongnu]’ (Jagchid and Symons 1989: 35). However, the Chinese sources make it clear that many of the inhabitants of the formerly Xiongnu territories took on the political identity of their new rulers. ‘The northern Shan-yü [Chanyu (emperor)] took flight and the Hsien-pi [Xianbe] moved in and occupied his land. The remainder of the Hsiung-nu [Xiongnu] who did not go with him still numbered over 100,000 tents and all styled themselves Hsien-pi [Xianbe]’ (Barfield 1989: 87). The Xianbe as a political entity had come to occupy all the old territories of the Xiongnu, but if there ever was anything like a Xiongnu Volk, it was not displaced by another such body.7 7 Such an account sits uneasily with the tribal model. What of the solidarity of common descent? Had all these supposed kinsmen of the Xiongnu emperor suddenly invented corresponding genealogical links to the Xianbe ruler? The usual interpretation was to take this as a feature of the tribal federation. The Xiongnu tribe proper ruled, as first among equals, many other tribes. With the defeat of the Xiongnu core, these other tribes could join the Xianbe confederation.

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Like the Germanic invasions of the western Roman empire or the Norman expansion in the Middle Ages, the Mongol conquests also introduced a military aristocracy in the subject territories. The empire expanded as its armies advanced, but the numbers of Mongols (whoever is meant by that designation) involved were relatively small. Most Mongol armies numbered in the tens of thousands, the majority of whom were often drawn from subject allies such as Tatars, Khitans, and Türks. Although some troops were placed as garrisons in conquered territories (Allsen 1987: 207), most were generally withdrawn after campaigns. After Batu’s conquest of Russia and Eastern Europe in 1238-1241, for example, the bulk of the Mongol army was withdrawn and the Golden Horde rapidly acquired a Turkic character. This was an imperial, not a colonial process. The aristocracy installed in this way was not a homogeneous ethnic stratum of Mongol tribesmen superimposed upon the subject peoples, but noble Mongol families such as the Chinggisid ‘white bone’ (or noble) houses that continued to rule the Kazakhs until Tsarist times. Far from becoming an imperial elite, the Mongol commoners often found themselves entirely impoverished by the process of conquest, so that some ended up having to sell their wives and children into slavery to meet the military and other obligations owed to their lords (Atwood 2004: 506, Khazanov 1983: 247). Sociological terms developed in the age of popular nationalism are a poor guide to understanding the history of Eurasia. Anderson’s dynastic realm seems to describe the situation better: These days it is perhaps difficult to put oneself emphatically into a world in which the dynastic realm appeared for most men as the only imaginable ‘political‘ system. For in fundamental ways, ‘serious‘ monarchy lies transverse to all modern conceptions of political life. Kingship organizes everything around a high centre. Its legitimacy derives from divinity, not from population, who, after all, are subjects, not citizens. In the modern conception, state sovereignty is fully, flatly and evenly operated over each square centimetre of a legally demarcated territory. But in the older imagining, where states were defined by centres, borders were porous and indistinct, and sovereignties faded imperceptibly into one another. Hence, paradoxically enough, the ease with which premodern empires and kingdoms were able to sustain their rule over immensely heterogeneous, and often not even contiguous, populations for long periods of time. (Anderson [1983] 1991: 19) But as Khazanov (1983: 152) notes, the notion of nomadic confederation is inappropriate since the polities concerned are generally formed by conquest.

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As Leach notes (1982: 41), societies are political units, in practice, and they are more clearly a product of common rulers than common cultures. And Gellner points out that the notion that people are bound to live in units defined by shared culture is a relatively recent one. ‘Culturally plural societies often worked well in the past: so well, in fact, that cultural plurality was sometimes invented where it was previously lacking’ (1983: 55). But in anthropology, the political construction of the social has often been backgrounded by the powerful heritage of classical ethnology, which assumed some more or less homogenous cultural and social entity as its object of study (the ethnos) and tended to regard peoples as cultural wholes.

Rulership and the Production of Peoples The nation-state is conventionally contrasted to the empire. The former is seen as a unitary political entity in which cultural forms have been made relatively uniform and largely correspond to the jurisdiction of the state (Gellner 1983), whereas the latter is seen as a political assemblage, with one or more subject societies under the rule of a central power.8 But when we dispense with the fiction of the tribe as a proto-national ethnic unit, it becomes clear that polities such as the Yeke Monggol Ulus were in some sense imperial projects from their earliest days. The Mongol tribe was micro-imperial even as it was formed by the various nobles who swore fealty to Chinggis Khan in 1206 (see Skrynnikova 2006: 88). The problem is that in the age of national populism, empires tended to be conceived of as conglomerates of Volk, distinctive peoples pictured in the nationalist mould. As a result, translators of the Secret History of the Mongols (Cleaves 1982) have generally translated the word ulus as ‘people’ because it was used for political units that included populations. But the description of collective identities in the Secret History does not match the ethnonational notion of peoples very well. The term kitad, for example, is used for the Jin dynasty and its subjects (kitad irgen), and it encompasses in one category people who were culturally and linguistically diverse and would now be described as Khitan, Chinese, and Jürchen (De Rachewiltz 2004: 889). Since they were all subjects of the Jin dynasty that had replaced the Khitan ulus, they were all included in the term kitad. The term Monggol ulus is used for a set of 8 Doyle, for example, defines the term in this way: ‘Empire […] is a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society’ (1986: 45).

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noble families and their subjects.9 But there was no pre-existing ethnonym for the people included in the new state, although it is clear that there was some notion of their distinctiveness since it was also called ‘the ulus of the felt walled tents’ (Cleaves 1982, § 202), indicating the common use of yurt (ger) dwellings. The early uses of the term Monggol only appear confusing if one is looking for a people or tribe in the traditional sense. The Secret History § 52 records that Ambagai Khan ruled over qamug Monggol, which means ‘all the Mongols’ (De Rachewiltz 2004: 296), and in this context the Mongols are clearly distinct from all their rival steppe powers such as the Kereyid, Tatar, Merkid, and Naiman. But after the establishment of Chinggis Khan’s state, the Monggol ulus included almost all of the subjugated steppe peoples; but it is improbable that the Monggol ulus absorbed these other peoples in only a few years. Some suggested that the designation Qamag Mongol Ulus must have been the formal name of the earlier, smaller state ruled by Ambagai Qan, although there seems to be no evidence for this (De Rachewiltz 2004: 296). But the recognition of aristocracy allows us to see that since the term Monggol indicated a set of ruling houses rather than a distinctive Volk, their ulus could bear their name whether it was large or small, just as we might use the term Norman to designate both the great noble houses of medieval western Europe and the realms they ruled. Indeed in the Chinggisid era, the term ulus (often translated as ‘people’ or ‘nation’) meant something very much like patrimony, domain, or appanage (De Rachewiltz 2004: 758). Jackson, for example, defines it as a ‘complex of herds, grazing-grounds and peoples granted to a Mongol prince; used especially of the larger territorial units held by Chinggis Khan’s sons and his descendants’ (2005: 367). A Monggol ulus, then, was defined by the identity of its rulers, not some form of ethnic or tribal identity among its subjects. It has been argued that the meaning of the term ulus changed from people when the Mongols were but simple nomads to the appanages of princely rulers when they became conquerors in the years of empire (De Rachewiltz 2004: 758). So when the Secret History records that To’oril Khan told Temujin, ‘I will reunite for you your divided ulus’ (§ 104), it was translated as ‘people’ (e.g., Cleaves 1982: 38, De Rachewiltz 2004: 34) because it was supposed to be in the pre-state era. But when Ögödei Khan admits that one of his mistakes was to have had ‘the girls of my uncle’s Odchigin’s ulus brought to me’ (§ 281), it is understood to mean a patrimonial domain (De 9 The Secret History (§ 202) records the names of the lords of the 95 minggan, or thousand units of the Mongol ulus that Chinggis Khan established in 1206.

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Rachewiltz 2004: 217). But it seems more logical to assume that the authors and readers of the Secret History understood the term ulus in a consistent way throughout the text and that it referred to a domain including people, land, and property defined by the rule of a lord.10 As bodies of people required rulers, so Bodonchar, the ancestor of the Mongol nobility, was recorded as saying, ‘[I]t is right for a body to have a head, and for a coat to have a collar’ (Secret History § 33) when he encounters people who have no aristocracy, before promptly subjugating them. A key aspect of imperial or royal power was the right to reorder domains, to apportion peoples and territories to subordinates and descendants as appanages. This was done by the Türk Qahgans, the Naiman Khan Inancha Bilge Khan in the late twelfth century (Atwood 2004: 397), and Qabul Khan when creating the Jurkin obog, and by many Chinggisid rulers. Far from being an unusual practice springing from the ‘distorting effects’ of nomads conquering sedentary civilizations, this administrative constitution of units seems to have been an enduring feature of steppe life; indeed, the units created in this way were reproduced independent of effective imperial overlordship, as in the case of the Oirad and the largely independent Borjigin Mongol domains of the pre-Qing period. As Atwood writes, ‘After the fall of the Mongol Empire, appanage systems continued to divide the Mongols into districts ruled by hereditary noblemen. The units in such systems were called tümen and otog under the Northern Yuan dynasty (1368-1634), ulus or anggi under the Oirads and Züngars, and khoshuu (banners) under the Qing dynasty (1636-1912). While the systems varied, they all combined the idea of patrimonial rule and the union of pasture and people’ (2004: 19). That is not to say that there was no concept of distinctive Monggol identity. From the time of the Chinggisid empire onwards, the domains of Mongol rulers formed a meaningful political category, and there is mention of qamug Monggoljin keleten, ‘all people of the Mongol tongue,’ in an earlyfourteenth-century text (De Rachewiltz 2004: 296). For administrative reasons, subjects of the empire were placed in a series of political categories that distinguished Mongols from others. Under the Yuan, for example, there were four ranked administrative categories: first Mongols, then Western and Central Asians, then Northern Chinese, and lastly Southern Chinese. But these were political as much as ethnic categories, largely concerned with eligibility of appointment to government office and based on the polities absorbed into the Mongol empire. Although the Khitans probably spoke a 10 The other term translated as ‘people’ was irgen, which also had the meaning of subject (De Rachewiltz 2004: 303) and, like ulus, was clearly a term that implied political relations with a lord.

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Mongolic language, for example, they were placed in the Northern Chinese category rather than in, or next to, that of the Mongols. Rather than primordial ethnic peoples, we can see structures of power that formed and shaped social fields, creating boundaries and applying designations. The most enormous of these projects – the Great Mongol Realm (Yeke Monggol Ulus) of Chinggis Khan – left us with the term Mongol. The breakup of the empire did not do away with the term Mongol because the Borjigid aristocracies that it had established retained it, and they did not require a centralized state structure to continue to rule their local domains. This lack of centralization has tended to be mistaken for tribalism – it seemed as if in the absence of the state the nomads must organize themselves through kinship structures and preserve their tribal Mongol identity (Sneath 2007). But, rooted as it is in evolutionist colonial-era thought, the discourse of tribe has generated highly misleading readings of the history of Inner Asia and has tended to obscure the importance of aristocratic power in the recorded history of the steppes. If we look more carefully, however, we can find clear evidence for a sort of headless state – that is, an aristocratic order that may or may not be united under a single overlord but that included many of the characteristics generally associated with a state.

The Headless State On 20 September 1640, a great assembly was held in western Mongolia. It was attended by the most powerful lords of the eastern Eurasian steppes – the Zasagtu and Tüshiyetü Khans of the Khalkha (Outer Mongolia); the Oirad rulers Erdeni Baatur Khung-taiji, Khoo-örlög Taishi, and Güüshi Khan; along with some 20 other senior nobles. They were meeting to form a new ‘state’ (törö) and to draw up its code of laws. But although it was described using the word for a state, the political formation they created would seem impossible in terms of the Weberian model of the idea-typical bureaucratic state. It had laws, rulers, and subjects, but it was to have no capital, no centre, and no sovereign. It was a distributed, headless state formed by independent nobles (and their subjects) who shared an aristocratic social order and a common law code, the Monggol-Oirad tsaaji. The standard historical narrative has represented both Oirad and Mongol society of the time as tribal (e.g., Soucek 2000: 170). This is understandable as there was no identifiable imperial state ruling their territories at that time. There had been little by way of real political centralization among

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the Mongol princes since the collapse of the Yuan dynasty at the end of the fourteenth century. In the sixteenth century, the Khalkha Mongol territory was divided among three dynasties: the Tüshiyetü Khans, the Zasagtu Khans in the west, and the Setsen Khans in the east. At this time the Oirad rulers controlled much of western Mongolia and what is now northern Xinjiang, and the clashes between them and the Chinggisid Mongol princes continued. But, perhaps spurred on by the growing power of the Manchus in the east, the leading Mongol and Oirad lords had decided that it was time to put aside old grievances and form a new political union. The confederation endured for 48 years before fracturing as war broke out between the Oirad Galdan Khan and the Khalkha Tüshiyetü Khan Chakhundorji, which led to Galdan’s 1688 invasion of Mongolia. The Borjigid Mongols of Khalkha swore fealty to the Qing in 1691 and replaced the Mongol-Oirad code with a set of similar laws, the Khalkha Jirum, in 1709. But the Oirads continued to use the 1640 law code, which remained in force among the Volga Kalmyks until 1892 when the tsarist colonial government abolished the nobility’s authority (Atwood 2004: 389). Riasanovsky ([1937] 1965: 47) notes that it was the most widely applied of Mongol laws, apart perhaps from those of Chinggis Khan himself, for which we have only fragmentary records. The Mongol-Oirad laws of 1640 closely resemble an earlier, sixteenthcentury code made by Altan Khan and are part of a tradition of state that stretches back to the Chinggisid era, if not earlier. It is the closest thing we have to what would be conventionally described as tribal law. But the political entity that was governed by this law was not an empire in the conventional sense, and it was certainly nothing like a centralized state. The territory of the union was not even contiguous, for it included the domains of Khoo-örlög Taishi on the Volga some 3,000 km to the west, which later became the Kalmyk Khanate. It is hardly surprising that the Monggol-Oirad tsaaji has generally been treated as a treaty rather than the charter of a new state, since it matched so few of the criteria of the state as it is usually conceived. But the union described itself unambiguously as törö, which Humphrey and Hürelbaatar (2006) describe in this period as meaning ‘state,’ ‘sovereignty,’ or ‘government,’ indicating a concrete political formation as well as a principle of rulership. The Mongol-Oirad union can be described as a confederation, not the tribal confederation of Morgan, but a joint project of rulership by powerful aristocrats. Core features of the state as conceived of in nineteenth-century social science are present: codified law, a hierarchy of political offices, stratification and property in the form of institutionalized

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rights over both resources and people. The provisions of the law stipulate punishments for various offences, usually livestock fines in units of nine and five. But for the aristocracy these fines included subject households, which were listed along with other possessions so that they are indistinguishable from property. The code provides evidence of the entire apparatus of state other than centralized authority; it mentions courts (örgüge), judges ( jarguchin), military conscription, and a hierarchy of officials. There were distinctions within the nobility and a series of subaltern ranks, and this hierarchy and administrative structure were common to both Mongol- (i.e., Chinggisid-) and Oirad-ruled domains. The most senior figures were the ‘great lords’ and ‘sons-in-law’ and grouped with them in this stratum were the ‘officeholding’ nobles, the yamutu noyad. The term yam indicates a senior office of state and was later used for the ministries of government. At this time, however, it may be that the office referred to membership in a senior council (Atwood 2006: 216) or may have simply been the rulership of the largest administrative divisions, the ulus or anggi (noble appanages), which were themselves divided into otogs – the peoples and pastures allocated to a noble (Dylykova 1981: 117), usually of a few thousand households in size and described by Atwood as ‘the basic unit of Mongol socio-political life’ (2004: 430). They seem almost identical to the banner unit, which is also mentioned at this time and later became the basic Mongol administrative unit under the Qing.11 The rulers of these otogs may also have counted as office-holding nobles, or they may have been categorized in the next class down, the ‘lesser nobles’ (baga noyad) and their sons-in-law (tabunang). All of these lords seem to have belonged to the ruling ‘bones’ – Borjigin in the case of the Mongols and the Choros, Galwas and other non-Chinggisid noble houses in the case of the Oirad. They raised taxes, levied military forces, and enforced the law in their own domains. Beneath them there were a series of ranked officials who administered the common subjects on their lord’s behalf. The otog officials (tüshimed, erkheten) ruled subjects grouped into units of 40 households (döchin), headed by an official named a demchi, and these were divided into twenties (khori) headed by a shülengge, and these into groups of ten households, with a head (Buyanöljei and Ge 2000: 256). Subjects were further classified into three ranks: the good, middle, and base; slaves (bo’ol) had a separate legal status. 11 Monggol. The otog seems to have also been called a khoshuu in some documents (Bold 2001: 96), and it seems they were similar if not identical administrative units from the references in the code. See Buyanöljei and Ge 2000: 258.

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This form of regulation penetrated every level of social life, including all manner of personal conduct.12 Fines were stipulated for failure to report a theft, failing to pay a court fee, impersonating an official, insulting a social superior, and inappropriately placing wood in a domestic fire. The regulations extended to the size of dowries and wedding feasts for people of different ranks, the age of marriageable girls, and the number of marriages that should take place within the administrative units of 40 households each year. This set of laws, so similar to other Mongol codes that survive, cannot be seen as somehow exceptional. It shows that almost all the operations of the state could take place in local domains ruled by lords with or without an imperial state centre. If we set out to map this headless state, we would have to include the areas ruled by all the signatories of the code – almost all of what is now Mongolia; much of Inner Mongolia; parts of Qinghai, Xinjiang, and Gansu; and far to the west the outlying region of the Caspian steppe which later became Kalmykia. If the confederation had not broken up, perhaps we would today be engaged in the project of mapping Mongol-Oiradia. But history took a different course, and since the Borjigid allied with the Qing who destroyed the heart of Oirad power, the Züngar Khanate, there is really only the Kalmyk state to remember the Oirads by, since most of the other Khoshuud were absorbed back into the Mongol category in Qing times.

Constructing the Mongol Nation The contemporary concepts of the Mongol people and nation emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As noted above, the term ulus had originally indicated the patrimonial domain of a Mongol lord. Over time, political, cultural, and linguistic distinctions may have generated collective identities that resembled the notion of peoples in some ways. As Atwood notes (1994: 8), Mongol chronicles of the seventeenth century speak of ulus in the sense of a realm, associating it with both people and territory,13 12 As Durkheim might have remarked, ‘The state exercised its tyranny over the smallest things’ ([1893] 1964: 159). 13 Perhaps influenced by Buddhist cosmological notions of the great continents, these sources describe the world as divided geographically into great realms or countries described as ulus. The Erdeni tunumal neretü sudur oroshiba, the 1607 biography of Altan Khan, for example, speaks of how he pacified the ‘great realms of Mongolia and China [Monggol khitad khoyar yekhe ulus].’ See Atwood 1994: 9.

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and Elverskog (2006: 17) argues that in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century documents, ulus is used to mean a particular community under a given state. However, the ulus was so clearly a political entity, regularly used to translate the Chinese guo (dynasty), for example, that another term was needed to express the notion of the Mongols as a Volk – a national people. The term that was first taken up by early-twentieth-century Mongolian nationalists was Monggol obogtan – meaning those of the Mongol obogs (houses, families). This term appears in seventeenth-century texts such as the Altan Tobchi where it is used to describe the original establishment of the Mongol line. ‘Börte-chino […] taking a girl called Goa Maral who had no husband, became the Monggol obogtan’ (Munkh-Erdene 2006: 58). In the new discourse of Mongolian nationalism that emerged in the twentieth century, these historical references to common origins were used to build the notion of common ‘blood, race, descent, and the mysteries and mystifications of biological alikeness,’ the basic features that Clifford Geertz defines as central to the notion of nation or nationality (2000: 231, cited in Munkh-Erdene 2006: 59). The term obogtan, although useful for establishing the notion of common Mongol identity, did not provide a very good match for the concept of nationality itself, and the Mongolian political elites of the early twentieth century had to fashion the current notion out of a number of terms such as ugsaa (origin, descent), yazguur (izagur root, origin), and ündes (ündüsü root, base). As Atwood (1994: 19-20) points out, up until this point these terms were used primarily to describe the legitimate ancestry of the Mongol nobility.14 Yazguurtan, for example, was another term for the aristocracy, since having good origins indicated noble birth. When casting back for records of common ethnic origin, then, the Mongolian nationalists could only find accounts of ruling lineages. As 14 Atwood writes, ‘Ugsaa derived ultimately from the word ug (stump, base, origin, or beginning and, as an adjective, original, basic, or initial). It was primarily used in the Qing period to mean a lineage, as in khaan-u ugsaa (royal lineage). Ündüsü had a similar primary meaning (root, beginning, origin, base or, as an adjective, original, basic, fundamental or principal). It was often used as a term to describe the legitimate ancestry of the Mongol nobility, as in phrases such as khad-un ündüsü, “the origin/lineage of the sovereigns.” Along with ijagur [izagur], another term primarily meaning “root” and later applied to royal lineages in particular, these three terms, combining and recombining in a variety of binomes, formed the main lexical resource out of which the post-1911 terminology of nationalities (as distinct from countries) would be formed’ (Atwood 1994: 21). During the twentieth century, the favoured term for nationality became ündüsüten rather than obogtan, probably because of the influence of Zhamtsarano, the prominent Buriat-Mongol nationalist, who perhaps sought a more open and inclusive term (see Munkh-Erdene 2006: 61).

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Munkh-Erdene notes, ‘the Mongols’ “origin myths” were tied to the Chinggisid royal lineage that had established the Mongolian state and had been ruling the Mongols ever since’ (2006: 62). Historical Mongol texts included a great deal of genealogical information, but it almost all concerned the nobility, unsurprisingly perhaps, since for aristocrats descent was the basis for their position. When it came to the ‘original ancestor,’ the texts were concerned with the origins of the rulers, not the subjects. So the Dai Yuwan Ulus-un bichig (Record of the Great Yuan Ulus), for example, translated into Mongolian from Manchu around 1640-1644, states that ‘The ancestor of the Mongol people is Bodanchir,’ that is, Bodonchar, the ancestor of the Borjigin aristocracy. Indeed the very notion of Monggol was in many ways defined by Borjigin rule. Mongol chronicles such as the Altan Khürdün Mingghan Khegesütü written around 1739 describe the Oirad nobility’s break with the Chinggisid rulers in the late fourteenth century as the separation of the Oirad’s ug ündüsün (lineage/root) from the Monggol. After this political act, the Oirad are written of as distinct from the Mongols, although they continue to be included among those speaking Mongolian languages (Monggol kheleten). Being properly Mongol, then, meant to be properly ruled by Borjigid. The concepts of Borjigin and Mongol were so strongly connected that sometimes the terms are intertwined – as in the title of the 1732 chronicle written by the Kharchin nobleman Lomi, the Monggol-Borjigid obog-un teükhe (History of the House of the Mongol-Borjigid). As Atwood puts it, ‘[Chinggis Khan’s] descendants, the taiji class, were the only full members of the Mongolian community’ (2004: 507). Mongol commoners did not share common descent with the Borjigid, nor could they even do so in theory since descent from Bodonchar was the basis of aristocratic status. Grigorii Potanin, a Russian explorer who travelled through Mongolia in 1876-1877, recorded a number of origin myths of Mongol commoners, and these were nothing like those of the nobility (Munkh-Erdene 2006: 69) but involved mythical creatures who were generally not even human. But since the Monggol ulus was defined by its rulers rather than its subjects, Bodonchar could be spoken of synecdochically as the ancestor of all the Mongols, although it transpires that he was, more precisely, only the ancestor of the Borjigin nobility. Since the notion of the Mongols as a unity was inseparable from the project and personnel of rulership, this presented no contradiction. As Munkh-Erdene shows, ‘the Mongolian nobility with its Chinggisid legitimacy was the symbol of Mongolian statehood. […] [T]he elite tradition was a “national” tradition’ (2006: 74). Like yasu (bone), the word ündüsü that was used to generate the

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term for nationality (ündüsüten) was another term indicating noble lineage. The ‘lineage of the Mongols,’ then, really only meant the aristocracy. Thus in 1912, for example, the ruling princes of Ulanchab wrote a letter protesting the new Chinese Republic’s plan to incorporate Mongolian regions into China. They wrote ‘if [we Mongols] become the citizens [irgen] of the Chinese Republic [zhong hua irgen ulus], and the five races [töröl] unite and Mongol can no longer be our distinct name, then the bone-lineage/nationality [yasu ündüsü] of the Mongols [Monggol khümün-ü], born from Heaven in ancient times, will probably be obliterated’ (Munkh-Erdene 2006: 85-86). But this aristocratic political discourse was fast being transformed by the new ideologies of ethnic nationalism. One of the principle architects of the Mongolian nationalist lexicon was Tsyben Zhamtsarano, a Buriat nationalist and ethnographer trained at St. Petersburg University, who became a powerful influence on the young Mongolian People’s Republic after it was established. Zhamtsarano translated European notions of nationhood into a Mongolian context. He identified the different Mongol polities as tribes, i.e., as Mongolskie plemena in Russian. These were at a pre-national stage, but ‘spoke the various dialects of the Mongolian language and were dispersed throughout the vast land of Russia, China and Tibet, sometimes, called Monggol khelten and Monggol tuurgatan’ (Munkh-Erdene 2006: 90). He called for the establishment of a Mongol nation, arguing that all new states (ulus törü) were formed by a people sharing a common language (khele), ancestry (izagur), religion (shashin), customs (yosu), teachings (surtal), and territory (orun) (Atwood 1994: 23). The Mongolian independence movement constructed 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. As Gellner notes, ‘[n]ationalism is, essentially, the general imposition of a high culture on society’ (1983: 57), and in this case high culture included the tracing of descent back to Bodonchar (Munkh-Erdene 2006: 91). Kinship was extended downwards to embrace the commoners, and in the new discourse the subjects of the Borjigin lordly lineage became themselves members of a political category conceived of as a sort of lineage-nationality – not so much a new imagined community since the aristocratic notion of the Mongol polity already existed, but a political community imagined in a new way – as a body with shared kin origins.

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Soviet Transfigurations The notion of the polity, the ulus, was transformed during the Soviet period so that it resembled the Soviet version of the nation-state. Mongolian constitutions define the ulus in a way that is reminiscent of Stalin’s notion of a nation. It had a territory and a tör – political leadership or state proper. But a nation also required a national people, an equivalent for the Russian narod. The first Mongolian term used was arad, an old term that meant ‘commoner,’ which had rather too specific a position in the old political order. So the compound term arad tümen was devised, meaning something like ‘myriad commoners,’ to reflect the notion of the whole people, the masses required by the new political order. This was a new concept, since the aristocratic political discourse had not constructed the polity with reference to a single general people. Subjects had appeared in discrete categories. There were the nobility (taijnar and yazguurtan), the shar (members of the Buddhist monastic establishments), and the khar (secular commoners or arad). Political statements were constructed with respect to these categories rather than to a general and inclusive national people. As late as 1934, when a politically active senior lama sought to address the Mongolians of Inner Mongolia, he issued four separate pamphlets addressed to the taijnar (princes), the lamas, the youth, and the people (commoners), respectively.15 The reconceptualization of the Mongols did not stop at the national level. As Bulag (1998: 31-37) shows, the creation of ethnicity was another aspect of the socialist nation-building process. A set of Mongol terms was chosen to translate the key elements of Soviet theory on the historical stages of ethnic communities. The Russian rod (clan) was translated as obog, plemya (tribe) as aimag, narodnost’ (ethnic group/nationality) as yastan, and natsiya (nation) as ündesten. These terms were organized according to the Marxist version of the nineteenth-century evolutionary scheme by which tribes were made up of clans. In addition, however, following the USSR in which the state citizenry was made up of peoples of many ethnic groups or nationalities, Mongols were registered as members of ethnic or national minority groups – yastan.16 This formed part of a wider vision by which ‘backward peoples would be upgraded, so as to merge with more 15 This was the Janggiya Khutugtu, one of the most senior incarnate lamas of the period (see Yang and Bulag 2003: 88-89). 16 There are seventeen notionally Mongol yastan and four groups considered Turkic: the Kazakh, Uriankhai, Uzbek, and Tuvans. See Hirsch (1997: 267) for the evolutionist scheme of narodnost’ and natsional’nost’.

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progressive nationalities to become a Soviet nation’ (Bulag 1998: 32). These became official identities and the internal passports of citizens of the MPR recorded their yastan, such as Khalkha, Buriat, Barga, Torguud, or Zakhchin. Like the tribe, the concept of ethnic group is rooted in the notion of kinship and common descent (Hobsbawm 1990: 63). But it is very clear that these ethnic groups were not autochthonous kinship communities but politically defined categories that had been historically formed by rulers. The Zakhachin (Borderers), for example, of southern Khovd Province, originated as a Zünghar otog (administrative division) formed from a diverse set of subjects charged with the duty of acting as border wardens. After their lord surrendered to the Qing, they were formed into a banner and assigned duties to support the Manchu amban at Khovd (Atwood 2004: 617). They remained administratively distinct and in the Soviet area were judged to be sufficiently distinct to be labelled a yastan. In this case, the relatively late incorporation of former Zünghar subjects by the Qing has left us with historical records that make clear the administrative acts by which groups of people acquired distinctive political identities that were later used as grounds for their identification as ethnic groups. But the conquest and relocation of populations date from the earliest historical times in Inner Asia. In any era the political landscape would represent the cumulative product of countless comparable acts of designation and allocation, great and small. It is hard to imagine self-structuring autochthonous kinship groups surviving this process intact, even if they had ever existed.

Conclusion By way of a thought experiment, let us imagine that Normandy had survived as an independent polity long enough for its elites to form a state of that name in the twentieth century. It would be rather clear to us that the boundaries of the Norman nation would be a matter of political happenstance. We are familiar with the notion that in many important respects, the term Norman only properly refers to the aristocracy descended from Rollo and his Norse companions, but the term could also be used to mean their subjects – as in ‘the Norman army.’ The idea of an ancient and unitary Norman people would be rather obviously a political claim – since the Norse invaders were a small minority and it was simply the act of conquest that distinguished persons who became Norman from their neighbours who became French. Any specific cultural content that might be used to identify the new Norman nationality would be far from distinctive. In religion, dress, and habits they

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resembled their neighbours, and the language they came to speak was not Norse but something closely related to regional dialects of French (with some Norse words). If this seems a little far-fetched, it is worth remembering how similar this story is to the actual history of France. The ‘land of the Franks’ was created by conquest in an almost exactly analogous way. The descendants of the originally Germanic Frankish invaders, like the Normans, ended up speaking the Latin-based language of their subjects with some Germanic words. (This language was itself the result of Roman conquest and can hardly be thought of as indigenous either.) In the early modern period, the state established by the kings of France became the basis for the claims of French nationalism. But as Hobsbawm (1990: 60) noted, as late as 1789, 50% of Frenchmen did not speak the French language at all. This was not unusual; the common languages of European nations did not somehow evolve naturally but had to be constructed and popularized through processes of imposition and education. By analogy, when we approach the Mongol nation we are bound to treat the idea of a distinctive pre-existing people with some caution. As Golden (1982: 73) notes with regard to the term Türk, for a long time the term Monggol was a political rather than an ethnic identification. It was originally applied to the relatively small dynastic realm ruled by Qabul Khan, and when Qabul’s great grandson, Chinggis Khan, conquered the other steppe polities of his time and established the Great Mongol Realm (Yeke Monggol Ulus) in the thirteenth century, he extended this political term to encompass hitherto separate domains. A brief look at the process of identification at this time shows no discrete peoples with distinctive features. The Mongol rulers spoke a language thought to have been closely related to that of the Khitans, who had ruled much of this region from the late ninth to the early twelfth century, and members of other polities such as the Tatars and perhaps Merkid probably spoke similar languages. We know very little about the languages spoken by the subjects of the original Monggol ulus, but they may well have been diverse. Some of the oldest Mongol subjects are described as Uriangkhan or Uriankhai, a term usually taken to mean Tuvan-speaking groups. When Chinggis Khan set about conquering his neighbours, then, his subjects may well have included Uriankhans speaking a language less like his own than his Tatar enemies. After incorporation into the Great Mongol dynastic realm, these same Tatars could be identified as Mongols with respect to outsiders, although the earlier and better known term Tatar was widely used in Russia and Europe to mean the Mongols themselves and their steppe subjects.

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Although most of the inhabitants of what was to become Mongolia seem to have shared similar mobile pastoral lifestyles (suggested by the phrase ‘the ulus (domain) of the felt walled tents’), they seem to have spoken different languages. The Naiman, ruling the west, probably spoke a Turkic language, not a Mongolic one and this may well have been true of the Önggüd, early members of the Yeke Monggol Ulus, living in what is now Inner Mongolia. It is even possible that some Kereyid, who in many ways formed the centre of Chinggis Khan’s new steppe kingdom, spoke a Turkic language since the names of many of their rulers appear to be Turkic. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century conception of national peoples resembled Stalin’s famous def inition: a historically constituted stable community sharing language, territory, and common culture. But until the age of national populism, the putative content of the ethnonational notion of a people was not necessarily important for processes of political identification. When the Mongol princes conquered the distant territories of Russia and established the Golden Horde, they quickly came to speak Turkic and converted to Islam. But their descent from Chinggis Khan made them both Mongol and legitimate rulers with claims to high office, and this heritage of rulership was more significant that language, habits, or cuisine. This was also true of the Mughal dynasty founded by the Timurid prince Babur, for example, that came to rule much of the Indian subcontinent. Babur was a Persian-speaking Muslim who had never seen Mongolia, but he and his descendants Akbar and Jahangir thought of themselves as Mongol and Chinggisid, rather than Indian or Persian (Balabanlilar 2007: 4).17 The dynastic name Mughal was a Persian rendering of the word Mongol, and it was a marker of Chinggisid descent rather than language, religion, territory, or anything much resembling contemporary notions of culture. How might this perspective help us develop an answer to the question, What is the geographical extent of Mongolia? First, it seems to me that it helps to clarify the terms of the question and reminds us that any answer will represent a political claim of some sort. Today it is probably true to say that the relevant notion of Mongolia is the territory inhabited by persons who may be described as Mongol in the currently dominant discourse of nationality. But at the time of its emergence, the discourse of Mongolian nationality applied primarily to groups and territories with indigenous Chinggisid aristocracies; it was then extended during the era of the communist Chinese and Mongolian People’s Republic governments to include those who could be claimed as Mongol using the new ethnonational criteria. 17 The author is grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers of this volume for this reference.

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Since the Pan-Mongolist movement failed to generate a wider viable national claim, categories such as the Buriat and Kalmyk remained distinct, reflecting their legacy of non-Chinggisid rule. We are left, then, with political processes that support two main categories of Mongolian nationality: citizenship of the state of Mongolia and the minzu policy of China. Theoretically we could generate maps that would show the places largely inhabited by people in these categories and, of the two, the map of Mongols in China would, of course, show far less by way of homogenous and continuous Mongolian territory. We would see blobs of all sizes scattered across the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, Liaoning, Gansu, Qinghai, northern Xinjiang, and so on. But, although historically this may represent a very low ebb in terms of territory that could be termed Mongol, it is far from unprecedented. Before the advent of the nation-state form in Inner Asia, the territories that might be called Mongolian (i.e., ruled by Borjigid and later Chinggisid rulers) were also frequently far-flung and discontinuous. In any historical era, then, mapping Mongolia would be a profoundly untidy political exercise.

3

The Rural and the Urban in Pastoral Mongolia

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.18 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.19 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 18 Mongolia’s urban settlements have been shaped by the nation’s relationship with Russia, and most of the buildings are unmistakably Russian or Soviet in style. Some remnants of the earlier Qing period architecture, Chinese- and Tibetan-style buildings, can be found, however, mostly former monasteries or official residences for high officials or lamas. 19 They could also be described as ‘a system of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed towards acting as structuring structures’ (Bourdieu 1977: 72).

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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. However, it is helpful to separate them analytically so as to describe recurrent themes in Mongolian social change. This dualistic treatment of rural and the urban culture should not be seen as any sort of reformulation of modernization theory in which the urban comes to stand for ‘modern’ and the rural is understood as ‘traditional.’20 These contrasting cultural sectors are both ‘traditional’ in the sense that they resemble historical predecessor forms. Both are also contemporary and subject to change, although this has tended to be noticeably less rapid in the case of the ‘rural-localist’ sector.21 The 1990s saw Mongolia plunged into economic crisis. At the beginning of the decade the state launched a series of reforms designed to introduce a market economy, but for a number of reasons living standards collapsed. Urban families faced soaring prices, declining urban services and amenities, and increasing unemployment as state industries closed. Rural families have struggled to cope amid rapidly rising food and transportation prices, and the recent dissolution of the pastoral collectives created a series of problems for pastoral households. What we see in Mongolia at present is two apparently contradictory trends. On the one hand increasing de-urbanization; a decline in urban centres throughout much of the country, buildings and apartment blocks abandoned in favour of traditional felt tents (ger), a decline in urban and industrial occupations, an increasing number of people returning to pastoralism, a decline of mechanization, an increased use of animal transport, the decay of schools, clinics and so on. On the other hand we see a new form of market-driven urbanization – an increasing flow of people moving into 20 Modernization theories, such as that developed by Talcott Parsons, base their approach on the distinction between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ social forms. They argue that to successfully develop their economies, underdeveloped societies must have institutions created that fulfil the functions that economic and social institutions perform in the West. See Hoogvelt 1978: 51-66. 21 The use of firearms for hunting, and recreational use of distilled alcohol have been part of the value system of this complex for some time, for example, but were introductions and represent an aspect of its gradual change.

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The Rur al and the Urban in Pastor al Mongolia

Figure 3.1  MongolianMongolian Urban andUrban Ruraland Population, 1990-2002 Rural Population 1990 - 2002 2600000

2200000

1800000

1400000

1000000

600000

200000 0

1990

1995 Ulaanbaatar Population Non-Ulaanbaatar Urban Population

2000

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Rural Population Total population

the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, most of whom swell the ranks of the great districts of gers where about 40% of the city population now live. These trends are reflected in national statistics shown in Figure 3.1. In the face of steadily rising total national population, the number of urban dwellers outside Ulaanbaatar has fallen from 1990 to 2002, and the rural population, after an initial rise in the early 1990s, has not increased since then. The population of Ulaanbaatar, however, has increased throughout the period. An explanation of these changes requires an examination of the nature of urban life in Mongolia and how it has developed in relation to the pastoral lifestyle that surrounds it. The collapse of the Soviet-inspired state socialist political and economic order, which had supported the smaller urban centres, is the immediate cause of these trends. But at a deeper level one can see that urban and rural lifestyles occupy particular places in Mongolian culture; indeed these form part of enduring sets of relations between complexes of values, norms, and knowledges – between the different ways of being Mongolian. These have become increasingly polarized in the last few decades and seem set to diverge in the future.

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Historical Centre-Rural Relations in the Pre-Soviet Era Mongolians trace the origins of the their nation to the polity founded by Chinggis Khan in the early thirteenth century, in which common pastoralists were ruled by an aristocratic elite. The nobility was necessarily oriented towards the political centre – the khan and his court – their social position, both as aristocrats and officials, was dependent upon their genealogical and political relationship with the ruling house of Chinggis Khan. Commoners, however, related to the political centre almost entirely through their hereditary lords. They were tied to their administrative districts (Spuler 1972: 41),22 and so, unlike the elite who were expected to travel to court, the commoners were generally bound to remain in their localities for much of their lives during peacetime, at the political periphery.23 For centuries the primary political centres were great encampments; the entourages of steppe rulers, made up of hundreds or thousands of tents.24 Those that became sufficiently large and complex tended to become fixed settlements with buildings, workshops and agricultural fields. In the thirteenth century Chinggis Khan’s capital of Karakorum grew into a city in this way, but this urban centre faded away with the decline of the Chinggisid ruling house. By the end of the sixteenth century Buddhism had spread to most of Mongolia from Tibet, sponsored by rulers such as Altan Khan of the Tümet. The early leadership of the Buddhist church was inextricably linked to the ruling houses of Mongolia, at first virtually all of the senior reincarnations to the leading positions of the Buddhist church were discovered among the high nobility. As the political centres embraced Buddhism, so did those in the peripheries that were oriented towards them.25 It took some time, 22 Spuler argues that the laws of Chinggis Khan decreed that ‘Nobody shall leave the unit of a thousand, a hundred or ten to which he is assigned. Otherwise he himself, and the leader of the unit that has accepted him, shall be executed.’ 23 In time of war, of course, male commoners of f ighting age would leave their localities for extended periods of time, but the rest of the population, who reproduced Mongol society, remained behind. 24 I do not wish to imply that steppe society has ever been bounded, cut off from the societies around it. Rather such centres existed in a wider set of social fields extending across the steppes of what is now Mongolia, and these were flexibly conf igured around political centres. The ultimate centres of power, towards which the elites are oriented, have often lain outside the steppe. 25 I do not mean to imply that rural-localist culture was not independently subject to external religious influences, but we have little historical evidence to illuminate the matter. There must have been converts among commoners serving their lords abroad or in urban centres, but such persons were located in the elite-centralist complex, rather than rural locales.

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however, for the pre-Buddhist ‘shamanic’ religion to be eliminated from the ‘rural-localist’ sector of the culture, indeed in some areas, such as remote Khövsgöl, elements of it are said to remain to this day. We know that Buddhist rulers such as Altan Khan had to use considerable force to suppress the old faith, killing and persecuting shamans, and burning their ritual objects. One of the most striking consequences of the Buddhist era was the installation of the monastery as a central institution in Mongolian life. These became enormously important ritual, economic and political centres, and throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they formed the hubs of small but growing urban complexes. This new Buddhist centralist culture was also literate, having inherited the adapted Uighur script from earlier Mongolian traditions of state. Literacy was soon to become a major component of the centralist orientation, the knowledge and use of writing spread with the introduction of monasteries throughout the region. In the seventeenth century the whole region came under the control of the powerful Manchu (Qing) empire. The ultimate political centre now became the Manchu emperor and the Qing court in Beijing and the Mongolian aristocracy intermarried with the Manchu nobility. However, another, much more immediate political centre remained in Mongolia, in the form of the Jebtsundamba Khutagt, the head of the Buddhist church of Outer Mongolia – who had been instrumental in the Mongol submission to the Manchus in 1688. The Manchu introduced the administrative division between Inner and Outer Mongolia and created local political centres in Uliastai, where the Manchu governor resided, and in Niislel Khüree, the seat of the Jebtsundamba Khutagt. In this period the Mongolian elite became increasingly oriented towards the centre of power in Beijing, adopting elements of Manchu dress and lifestyle, and often aspiring to high office in the Qing court, particularly in the military. The commoners, however, largely retained the norms and values of ‘rural-localist’ pastoralism. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the settlements that did emerge were clusters of dwellings around centres established by the Buddhist church or Manchu state. Urga, which later became the present capital Ulaanbaatar, began life as the great encampment around the Jebtsundamba Khutagt. At first it remained mobile, a city of tents that moved every few years, and only around 1778 did it settle in the location where Ulaanbaatar now is.26 The two other principal urban centres of the period, Uliastai and 26 The history of the city is dated from 1639, when monastery was founded nearby, on the banks of Lake Shireet.

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Khovd, were both founded as military camps, and became administrative centres later.27 Alongside the various officials posted there by the Manchu court (ambans) the Mongolian nobles who ruled pastoral districts also maintained their own offices ( jasaa) in these administrative centres, each with their own staff. These towns, and the other smaller settlements such as those of the monasteries, were also centres for trade where the Chinese merchant firms maintained shops. Around these establishments clustered craftsmen, farmers, petty traders, day labourers, impoverished vagrants and thieves. Apart from the various official buildings and Chinese shops, most of the dwellings were tents (ger) in small fenced enclosures, and a few humble houses made of mud brick or wood. As the Chinggisid empire did before them, the Manchu-Mongol administration established fixed relay stations along important routes manned by households who supplied accommodation and steeds for travellers on official business. These, along with the various agricultural schemes established by monasteries and the Manchu state, were the other main sites for fixed settlements. Representations of urban life reflected its association with various official institutions, and the despised vagrants and beggars (frequently represented in negative terms as lazy, thieving opportunists) (Bawden 1968: 93, Gillmore 1893: 157). High status still attached to lords with their large encampments in the steppe; but, by the nineteenth century much of the nobility had permanent residences, as did almost all the senior lamas. The town, then, was the site of public duty, poverty, commerce and the wide range of consumer goods that had to be brought into the steppe from outside. It was there that many Mongolians encountered the Chinese, who had a reputation for sharp trading practices, and notions of the urban and rural continue to reflect these themes. The pastoral lifestyle is associated with authentic Mongolian culture, simplicity and tradition. The city is still regarded as the site of political power, foreign influences, chicanery and commerce. Rural and central society was integrated by the sociopolitical order. Land, livestock and persons of the commoner class were constituent elements of the patrimonial domains of the ruling nobles and Buddhist monasteries that had been given similar estates. These administrative units, khoshuu (banners) operated as political economies in their own right. Commoners were assigned to different activities as alb – the customary obligations subjects owed to their rulers. 27 Khiakta, the other principal urban centre, grew as a result of politically regulated trade relations with Russia. See Bawden 1968: 94.

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The pastoral system of an ecclesiastical khoshuu in what is now Bayanhongor aimag (province) provides an example of the way in which the administration integrated the monastic centre and the pastoral steppe. In Bayanzürh Uulyn Khoshuu at least 70% of the population were involved in herding the huge herds belonging to the monastery which governed the banner.28 These subjects were divided into groups depending on the monastic livestock they were allocated, and assigned different seasonal movement routes to make best use of the pastures and conditions throughout the district. Specified amounts of livestock and produce was delivered to the monastery every year and the surplus kept by the herding households. Other monastic subjects were assigned the task of raising crops in the more fertile areas where this was viable, so the khoshuu also had its own supply of grain (Simukov 1936: 49-53). Mongolian pastoralism involved a series of specialist artefacts, skills and techniques, most of which were located, learned and practiced in the pastoral household (örkh or ail). But these practices were utilized as part of wider sociopolitical system that included the framework of rights and obligations, both settled and mobile specialist activities. In the early nineteenth century the well-known nobleman, Prince Togtokhtör (To-Wang), for example, attempted to establish watermills, textile shops, mines, and tile and brick works in his khoshuu, and assigned subjects to work in these enterprises (Bawden 1968: 180). Togtokhtör was unusually ambitious, and few khoshuu supported such a diverse range of activities. But his efforts reveal the importance of the lord of the banner in managing (and sometimes developing) his fief as an integrated economic unit. In 1911 the Manchu Qing dynasty collapsed and Outer Mongolia declared its independence under the head of the Buddhist establishment, the Jebtsundamba Khutagt. The Jebtsundamba, or Bogd Khan (Holy King), had his ecclesiastical seat at Urga, and this became the new capital. Although the official capital in the Qing period had been Uliastai, Urga was bigger, and had been treated as if it were the capital in many ways. The town itself was the hub of an ecclesiastical complex; a hundred monasteries and temples

28 Lamyn Gegen was the title of the reincarnate high lamas (khutagt) who was the head of the monastery that also bore this name. Brown and Onon’s map of the Bogd Khaan period (1976: 880) names this as the banner of the subjects of Erdene Bandid Khutagt. Their map for 1925 gives the new (secular) name of the district as Bayanzürkh Uulyn Khoshuu. Today the territory of the khoshuu is included in six sums of Bayankhongor aimag: Bayangov’, Bayanlig, Bogd, Jinst, Ölziit, and Erdenetsogt. Simukov (1936: 49) notes that at its height the monastery owned more than 10,000 camels, as well as large numbers of other species of livestock. See Sneath 1999b.

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of various sizes were located in the vicinity of Urga, with a total population of around 20,000 monks (Gilberg and Svantesson 1996: 21). The revolutionary political and social upheavals of China and Russia began to present challenges to the old order; the political elite began to imbibe one form of the modernism that was to replace Buddhist patrimonialism as the dominant political philosophy. In 1921 the Soviet-backed Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP) wrested control of Urga from Baron Ungern-Sternberg, the opportunistic and apparently deranged commander of White Russian forces who had seized the city a few months earlier. By 1924, after the death of the Jebtsundamba Khutagt, the MPRP and its Soviet backers were firmly in control of the country. The name of Urga was changed to Ulaanbaatar, ‘Red Hero,’ to reflect the political loyalties of the new state. The political philosophy of the new regime was a Mongolian variant of Soviet ideology, and was markedly modernist, based firmly on a belief in the superiority of a technological and institutional complex that resembled that of the most economically developed nations. In the Soviet case, of course, there is also the belief in inevitable and necessary progress towards ‘socialism.’ The new revolutionary Mongolian elite rapidly identified the Buddhist establishment as the only important indigenous rival to its power.29 Its ruthless elimination of the monasteries in the late 1930s left the revolutionary government in undisputed control of the country, and its administrative and educational institutions quickly replaced those of the church. This was certainly not a smooth or uncontested process. In 1929 the MPRP launched a series of half-baked collectivization policies (subsequently labelled the ‘Leftist Deviation’), the shambolic results of which revealed that most local rural people regarded the revolutionary new politics of the centre with bewildered apathy or outright antipathy (Bawden 1968: 308-310). These attempts to simultaneously eliminate the monasteries and collectivize noble and monastic livestock led to widespread armed revolt, and the new state had to abandon its collectivization drive in 1932. But by the end of the decade the MPRP had effectively eliminated and discredited the Buddhist establishment. The fact that this was possible in a relatively short period of time is another example of the adaptability of the elite-centralist sector of the culture, and its articulated relation to the ‘rural-localist’ sector. Despite the enormous importance of Buddhism in popular culture, the new ‘party of the 29 At f irst lamas had been included in government. Bodoo, for example, the f irst premier of the Mongolian revolutionary government, was a lama. He was executed in 1922 for being a ‘counter-revolutionary.’ See Sanders 1987: 28.

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state’ used its political centrality to displace its rival. It managed to recruit over 30,000 members within a few years (Morozova 2002: 66), even though many of the early recruits had little or no interest in, or comprehension of, the content of its strange new political philosophy (Bawden 1968: 300). The articulated nature of this relationship meant that rural life survived this wholesale ideological change with minimal change in a number of respects. Historically, the orientation of the rural-local towards political centres has proved to be more enduring than the particular content of the ‘regime of truth’ that these centres represent.

Rural and Urban in the State Socialist Era The Mongolian state undertook an ambitious programme of urbanization and industrialization, supported by enormous investment from the Soviet Union. Urbanization was extremely rapid. In the 1920s only a few per cent of the population lived in towns, but by the end of the 1980s, 57% of the population were urban (Statistical Office of Mongolia 1993: 3, Gilberg and Svantesson 1996: 20). In 1935 the population of Urga was 10,400. Fifty years later (1985) it had become 50 times bigger – over half a million people, a quarter of the entire population of Mongolia (Gilberg and Svantesson 1996: 21). The state socialist political system generated a local variant of the dominant Soviet political culture, and integrated the Mongolian elite, to some extent, into the national elite of the USSR. The new political culture was generated from a fusion of the dominant culture of the superpower and that of Mongolia. This was Marxist, modernist, and urban, oriented towards the political centre in Moscow. These values were powerfully promoted by the educational system and the mass media, as well as the administrative discourse of the political class. However, it would be misleading to represent this field of knowledge as uniform and totalizing. A completely different series of values and dispositions coexisted with this centre-focused complex; that of the rural-domestic orientation. Although offering contrasting aspirational content, notions of worth, aesthetic value, and personal fulfilment, they both continue to exist within a wider cultural frame that casts them as complimentary rather than contradictory, and are generally viewed as such by those drawn to either complex. Indeed, they are both held to be valid ‘ways of being Mongolian’ by most. The city is both advanced and sullied, rural life both backward and wholesome. Early attempts to collectivize pastoralism in the early 1930s had been so unpopular that the programme was abandoned. In the 1950s and 1960s,

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however, collectivization was introduced more gradually and successfully. The territory of Mongolia was divided into over 300 rural districts (sum), and most of these supported a single collective farm (negdel) which controlled land use and raised livestock in line with state planning. Some districts had state farms (sangiin aj akhui) instead, including the regions that carried out large-scale crop production. The sum generally consisted of a central settlement of a few hundred households and a large area of grassland in which pastoral households kept livestock, living in felt tents (ger) and moving to different seasonal pastures in an annual cycle. These families herded the collective or state farm livestock alongside a smaller number of their own personal animals. The collectives also owned machinery for transportation and hay-cutting services that were used to support pastoral households. An essential element of the thinking behind these programmes was a Leninist commitment to the integration of urban and rural life. Alongside the collectivization campaign went a programme to establish urban centres in each of the rural districts (sums). Many of these sum and aimag (province) settlements were located on the sites of old monasteries – often these buildings had housed the first revolutionary local government offices. Physically then, as well as culturally, the party and state institutions of the new elite occupied the place of the old in rural life. The negdel collectives and sum local governments became vehicles for bringing a number of supposed benefits associated with the town to pastoralists in every district. Each sum centre had a school, medical clinic, post office, collective headquarters and motor pool, police station, local government offices, and housing for families based there. These centres also maintained a soyolyn ordon (cultural palace), which hosted visiting entertainers, lectures, and showed films. These became important social centres, and have been sorely missed in many districts where they closed in the 1990s, along with other local services, as a result of reform. The last few decades has seen an increasing separation and contrast between the value systems of the urban and rural orientations. They can now almost be considered two distinct sub-cultures. The modernist-centralist scheme that emerged during the state socialist period valued educational achievement as a route to the lifestyle and values of the urban centre. The aspirational direction was towards occupations in government, academia, the military, and industry. High position in the administration was allocated the highest status, along with heroic national figures such as cosmonauts. Lower but worthy status was assigned to workers in industry and agriculture, and these should be interested in introducing new technological innovations wherever possible. The appeal was relatively non-gender specific; although

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senior party posts were still largely held by older men, the espoused ideology was one of gender-neutral meritocracy. The rural-localist subculture’s normative framework emphasized competence at a range of rural skills and capabilities. Most of these skills remain subject to the traditional division of labour and although there is some overlap there are different repertoires for the two genders. Those appropriate for men are mostly concerned with herding the more distant animals, while women’s skills are largely centred on the household. Tough, uncomplaining reliability is highly valued, along with the inclination and ability to help family and friends. Aspirations are multiplex and tend to change with age. For young men, for example, wrestling, breaking horses and hunting are often particularly valued, for older men the ownership of large numbers of livestock, particularly racing horses. Young women are respected for being skilled, helpful, polite and well-dressed; and older women for having many children and a prosperous lifestyle. A wide network of friends and kin is particularly valued in both rural and urban contexts. In the state socialist period virtually all children attended school, but within a given pastoral household different children often had very different trajectories. Some, generally the most educationally able, would aspire to higher education, leading to administrative and urban salaried positions. Others were considered to have a stronger interest in, or aptitude for, rural sub-culture and look to pastoralism or other ‘traditional’ rural occupations.

The ‘Age of the Market’ The political changes that swept through the Soviet Union and its satellite states in the early 1990s thrust Mongolia into an era of economic reform. The government launched a series of policies designed to create a market economy based on private property. The economic advice that former Sovietblock nations received resembled the stabilization and structural reform packages recommended for poor countries by the IMF and the World Bank in the 1970s and 1980s (Nolan 1995: 75). It included price liberalization, cutting state subsidies and expenditure, currency convertibility, privatization of public assets and the rapid introduction of markets. These policy recommendations were based on the notion of a ‘transition’ from what was seen as an ineff icient and moribund centrally planned economy to the presumed efficiency and dynamism of the free market. The aim of reform was to ‘emancipate’ the economy from the political structure, and allow it to assume its latent ‘natural’ form, composed of

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private property and the market. This market economy, it was assumed, would tend to generate growth if given the chance. A bright economic future was predicted for Mongolia at that time – the government talked of the country becoming the fifth Asian Tiger within five years (Odgaard 1996: 113). In 1991 Mongolia began a huge programme to privatize state and collective enterprises through the issue of share coupons (tasalbar). In rural districts the reforms included the dissolution of the collectives (negdel) and later most of the state farms (sangiin aj akhui), which managed the bulk of pastoral and agricultural production. The ‘age of the market’ (zakh zeeliin üye) as Mongolians called the postsocialist period, saw Mongolia plunged into economic crisis. The worst disruption occurred in the early 1990s, when incomes plummeted. The World Bank estimated that real wages halved between 1990 and 1992, and then declined by a further third in 1993 (World Bank 1994: 19).30 Official figures showed that income-poverty increased from almost zero in 1989 to 27% in 1994 (Griffin 1995: 31-33, and World Bank 1994: 35) and a 1998 survey of living standards suggested that over 33% of Mongolians were living below the poverty line (United Nations Systems in Mongolia 1999: 5). Social services were cut; real expenditure on health services decreased by 43% from 1990 to 1992, and the education budget was cut by 56% (World Bank 1994: 41, Robinson 1995: 4). Further reductions followed and social service spending has remained low since that time (United Nations Systems in Mongolia 1999: 5). The official figures for unemployment increased rapidly in the early 1990s, and actual unemployment was estimated at 15% in 1997 (CIA 1998).31 The rate of inflation shot up and stayed in triple figures from 1991 to 1993, before gradually falling to around 8% in 2000 (National Statistical Office of Mongolia 2003: 97). In part this economic crisis was the result of the loss of Soviet aid (some estimates suggest this amounted to as much as a third of GDP or more),32 which was reduced in 1989 and stopped altogether in 1991. The Soviet trading 30 Griffin (1995: viii) estimates the decline in average incomes at around 30% over that period. IMF data suggest a smaller decline in average incomes of about 25% (Griffin 1995: 5). The United Nations Development Programme and the Asian Development Bank estimates suggested a decline of 34% in GNP per capita from 1989-1992 (Griffin 1995: 25). 31 Official figures show unemployment increase from 10,300 in 1989 to reach 80,000 in 1996, but an article in the Mongolian daily Ardyn Erkh suggested that the true unemployment total approached 90,000. See Ardyn Erkh, 27 September 1996, no. 193 (1411). 32 Bruun and Odgaard (1996: 26) give the estimate of 30%, while some estimates are even higher. The United Nations Systems in Mongolia (1999: 6) estimates that this assistance represented, on average, 37% of annual GDP.

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block, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, also collapsed at this time, and Mongolian trade fell dramatically (exports declined from US$832 million in 1989 to US$370 million in 1991). However, to some extent the place of Russia as aid donor and economic advisor was taken over by Western nations, Japan, and international financial institutions. Between them these donors provided support equivalent to about 15% of GDP in 1991 and 1992 (Griffin 1995: 6) and by 1996 official aid had risen to represent 25% of GDP (Bruun and Odgaard 1996: 26). Levels of aid dependency have remained high and in 2001 aid was still more than 20% of GDP (National Statistical Office of Mongolia 2003: 87, 297). The loss of Soviet aid, then, can only be held partially responsible for Mongolia’s crisis. As Griffin (1995: 12-13) argues, one of the reasons for the severity of the economic collapse was the nature of the reform policies carried out at the time – in particular, the rapid privatization programme. The situation stabilized to some extent in the mid-1990s, with GDP seeing some positive growth in the second half of the decade. But living standards remain well below those in the socialist era.33 At the end of a decade of market-oriented reform Mongolia’s national economy is heavily dependent on a handful of export commodities – copper from a remaining Russian-Mongolian joint mining venture at Erdenet, gold, and cashmere. The economy has become increasingly reliant on pastoralism, which in 1998 accounted for 88% of the total output of agriculture. The relative importance of the agricultural sector increased as the other sectors of the economy declined. In 1989 agriculture contributed just 16% of total GDP, for example, but by 2000 this had risen to 33% (National Statistical Office of Mongolia 2001: 82). In rural districts the dissolution of the collectives began in 1991 and was complete by 1993 with most of the livestock and other agricultural resources becoming the private property of the members of the collectives. However, the pastoral economy could not be simply and successfully ‘emancipated’ from the sociopolitical structure with which it has, historically, long been linked. The effect of decollectivization was to collapse the large-scale pastoral operations that the collectives had organized, and expand the 33 As Odgaard (1996: 106-108) notes, there is significant variation in estimates of the decline in Mongolian GDP that has occurred since the reforms started, and these may be politically motivated. At face value the 1994 IMF and World Bank Mission estimates show the 1989 GDP to have been 3.6 billion (World Bank 1994: table 3.1), more than three times the level of US$1.1 billion in 1998. However, it is thought that the 1989 figures, based on artificial exchange rates, overestimate the real GDP. Odgaard (1996: 105) gives estimates showing a decline in both National Income and in per capita GDP of 35% from 1990 to 1993.

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primarily subsistence-oriented small scale economies of pastoral households. This meant a loss of a number of economies of scale that the collectives had provided – in particular, mechanized transportation and supplies of winter fodder. It also dismantled the state procurement system which had provided Mongolian urban consumers and industries with relatively cheap and reliable supplies of pastoral produce and given pastoralists guaranteed markets for their products. Decollectivization eliminated the jobs of most of the workers in the sum centres. They were given a share of the collective’s assets, in most cases livestock, with which to make their living, so that the number of people relying directly on pastoralism increased dramatically. The number of registered herders more than trebled since reforms began, from 135,420 in 1989 (less than 18% of the national workforce) to 407,030 in 2001, almost 50% of the working population (National Statistical Office of Mongolia 2002: 66, 145, Statistical Office of Mongolia 1993: 6). This change appears to be an enduring aspect of reform as there is little prospect of rapid growth in employment in other sectors of the economy – indeed, the number of jobs in manufacturing, industry, construction, transport and communication have all declined by around 25 to 50% since 1990. The only sector of the economy, other than pastoralism, that saw an increase in employment was wholesale and retail trade, and this remains small – accounting for 10.8% of national workforce in 2001, a relatively modest increase over its level of 7% in 1989 (Statistical Office of Mongolia 1993: 7, National Statistical Office of Mongolia 1999: 45). This is also affecting the patterns of pastoral land use as many of these ‘new herders’ still have dwellings in the settlement at the sum centre and tend to be much less mobile that the established pastoral households who were part of specialized herding brigades in the collective. A common coping strategy is for such households from the centre to pasture their livestock relatively near to the settlement during the summer months, and then have some or all of their livestock herded by relatives or friends among the pastoral families in more distant pastures for the rest of the year. The effects of these changes on grassland ecosystems have yet to be seen, but recent research from Inner Mongolia and other regions where pastoralism has become sedentary suggests that lower livestock mobility in these conditions is more damaging to pasture land (Tserendash and Erdenebaatar 1993: 9-15, Humphrey and Sneath 1995: 8-13, Williams 1996: 307-303). In the past the cheap fuel that the Soviet Union had supplied to Mongolia had meant that mechanical transport, a key factor in such a huge and thinly populated country, was affordable and widely available to local government,

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national services and productive enterprises alike. As the price of petrol increased rapidly in the 1990s, transportation became increasingly expensive and links between the scattered rural population and urban centres have declined. Medical and veterinary treatment is now much less accessible for most pastoralists, and it has become more costly and difficult to visit kin in the towns. The collectives used to cut hay mechanically, using tractors, and then distribute it by truck to pastoral households for use as winter fodder. Since decollectivization individual households have had to cut hay by hand as best they can, and transport it themselves – often using animal carts. This is physically demanding work, and households without active adult members or the money to buy hay find it difficult or impossible to gain sufficient winter fodder for their animals. In the collective period the pastoralists were often moved on the longest legs of their annual migration by collective truck, which greatly eased the difficulty of these distant movements. The dissolution of the collective motor pools and the increase in fuel costs have made seasonal movement much more difficult for most pastoral families, who have increasingly had to rely on animal transport. This is one of the reasons for a general decline in the amount of pastoral movement. There has also been a reduction in the regulation of access to pasture, which had been overseen by collective and state farm officials. Many herding families have become less inclined to make arduous, long-distance moves between seasonal pastures, not only because of the difficulty of transportation but, in some cases, for fear that their best pastures may be used by others if they vacated them. Pastoral livelihoods became increasingly insecure and herd managers have had to worry about maintaining basic food supplies for their families. This made many of them unwilling to sell more than a minimum number of livestock, in case they may need them for food in the future. High inflation also damaged pastoralists confidence in the security of cash savings, so that accumulating livestock became an important goal for most livestock owners. This was one reason for the increase in livestock numbers throughout most of the 1990s. From 1990 to 1998 the national herd had increased by over 20% from 25.9 to 31.9 million head (Statistical Office of Mongolia 1993: 28, Ministry of Agriculture and Industry of Mongolia 1998: 2). Despite the increase in livestock numbers, however, the efficiency of pastoralism has declined since decollectivization. Survival rates of offspring have fallen by around 10%. However, the numbers of livestock consumed and marketed has declined even more dramatically (by about 20%), so that livestock totals rose nevertheless (National Statistical Office of Mongolia 1999: 83-84).

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Far from being able to market and purchase more than in the past, many pastoral households are increasingly subsisting on their own produce and marketing only their surplus (if they have any) – particularly wool and cashmere, which they can collect without loosing livestock. The pastoral sector is now atomized and largely devoted to subsistence production. Many herders find it difficult to continue to make the seasonal moves that the collectives had supported. In some regions the tendency of pastoralists to stay all year near their best pastures has been exacerbated by insecurity over rights to use pasture land, which used to be enforced by the collectives. Decollectivization has made Mongolian pastoralism highly vulnerable to the adverse climatic conditions. In the unusually severe winters of 1999-2001 six million livestock were lost, almost a fifth of the national total. By 2002 the national livestock total had fallen to 23.9 million, almost ten million lower than its peak in 1999 of 33.6 million (National Statistical Office of Mongolia 2003: 138). Across the country some 2,000 households were left without any livestock whatever after the first winter, and many more saw their livelihoods destroyed in the second. These zud (disasters caused by severe weather) were the result of unusually dry summers followed by savagely cold winters in which temperatures dropped as low as –46C. However, such harsh climatic conditions are known to occur from time to time, and the collectives had developed a number of measures including coordinated movements and deliveries of fodder that had kept losses reasonably low and protected herder’s incomes. The scale of the recent livestock losses, and the underlying problem of barely viable herding households, reflects the weakness of the atomized and de-mechanized pastoral sector that has emerged in Mongolia’s era of ‘transition.’ The most striking transition that rural Mongolia has experienced has been from a middle-income to a poor country, as if the process of development had been thrown into reverse. This is certainly how pastoralists I knew in Gov’sumber and Khövsgöl aimags saw it, and most of them had become understandably nostalgic for the collectivist past. They described the country as having lost decades of improvement, with conditions beginning to resemble the 1940s.

De-urbanization and the Expanding City Another aspect of the recent changes has been a process of de-urbanization. The old regime had promoted the particular Soviet form of urbanization, fostering the rapid growth of cities and towns, and establishing settlements

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in the sum centres. The post-socialist economic crisis was particularly destructive for activities associated with urban lifestyles, such as office and industrial employment, health and educational services which had been heavily reliant on the Soviet connection. The collapse of formerly state-run enterprises and the dissolution of the pastoral collectives threw thousands of employees out of work, forcing many of them to herd livestock to make a living. This helped create a flow of people from urban centres into rural districts. From 1992 to 1995 the urban population declined by around 4% (50,000 people), while the rural population increased by over 15% (150,000) (Statistical Office of Mongolia 1993: 3). Since then this trend has receded somewhat. By 1998 the total urban population had crept back to a little more than its 1990 value (1.2 million), and by 2001 it had risen to nearly 1.4 million. However, this has been in the face of a steady rise in the population of Ulaanbaatar, and the urban population outside the capital was still 10% lower in 2001 that in 1990, at 585,000 (see Figure 3.1). It is recognized that the growth of Ulaanbaatar has been the result of difficulties of making a living in rural districts. The capital city appears to many Mongolians to be the one place that still has some money and offers some economic opportunities, particularly in the informal sector. Between 1991-1998, 70,000 people moved to Ulaanbaatar,34 and since then the flow has quickened. In the following three years more than 50,000 people moved to the capital, swelling the population to over 812,000 by 2001. Although Ulaanbaatar had grown rapidly throughout the state socialist period, this was a very different flow of people, carefully regulated by the government and directed towards the employment needs of various state industries. Unauthorized migration to the city was firmly restricted. The new form of urbanization is market-driven and very much unplanned. Indeed it is widely felt to be undesirable, and is associated with increased vagrancy and crime. Most of the new urban immigrants move into the districts of felt tents (ger) in small wooden enclosures on the outskirts of the city, where around 40% of the population now live – some 270,000 people or more. Under the old regime the plan had been to shrink these districts and re-house all the inhabitants in newly built accommodation by 2010. Now there is no prospect of this; the present government and international aid organizations aim only at expanding electricity and water supplies in these districts, and perhaps putting in a new sewerage system. The other important feature of the new form of urbanism is that rather than urban life coming to the rural, as it did in the old regime, now rural 34 President Bagabandi mentioned these figures in a public speech in March 1999.

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lifestyles appear in the city. New migrants to Ulaanbaatar frequently lack waged employment and many struggle to keep some livestock for subsistence (Janzan and Enkhtsetseg 2001: 236). The number of livestock within the (expansive) city limits of Ulaanbaatar has increased to an estimated 300,000 in recent years and there are reports that this is causing pastoral degradation. Within the rural localities the economic crisis has created a decline in almost all the occupations associated with urban life (Gundsambuu 2001: 194-195). In Renchinlkhümbe sum, north Mongolia, for example, about half the working population were employed in non-pastoral occupations in the collective period. When the collective closed most of the residents became directly dependent on livestock for their subsistence – over 70% of the population were officially classed as herders in 1996, and over 20% were classed as unemployed. Only 6.5% of the sum population were employed in non-pastoral sectors. As the government reduced education funding teachers’ salaries and morale dropped. Schooling the children of mobile pastoral families had posed some difficulties for the state socialist regime, but these had been largely overcome by the provision of boarding facilities for children during term time. By 1996 this system was in crisis, and where school boarding facilities still operated it had become usual for herding families to be charged a sheep for each child staying in the dormitories. This livestock was sold to finance the food and fuel necessary to feed the children while they are away from their families. In the district of Khankh (the neighbouring sum to Renchinlkhümbe), for example, the secondary school had been forced to stop teaching the final year of school education (the tenth grade) to reduce its costs. Most people had developed a sort of despondent resignation to the decline in standards, although one local administrator did complain bitterly to me about the miserable food that the schoolchildren were having to eat.

Representations of Urban and Rural Life Recently a popular Mongolian comedy television programme showed a young urban couple who found themselves unexpectedly visited by the husband’s country cousin. Having failed to persuade his urban relative to come out drinking or riding with him, the young herdsman sits disconsolately on the floor of the well-furnished apartment, staring listlessly at the horseracing and wrestling on television, and dreaming of his family on the steppe. When the embarrassed silence begins to stretch, his host disappears into the kitchen to help his wife prepare a meal and discuss ways and means

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of getting their guest to leave. The herdsman is temporarily cheered when his hosts return, beaming, to announce that the meal is ready. But the final scene shows the hungry herdsman staring, crestfallen, at a beautifully presented, but entirely alien, green salad. Although the appeal of the city has a powerful draw for some rural people, particularly the young, there are many who openly prefer the pastoral lifestyle. ‘We like it because we are continuously moving and living in clean fresh air,’ was a typical comment by a middle-aged herder I knew in Gov’sumber aimag, southern Mongolia, ‘we couldn’t live in the city’ his wife added. Like other pastoralists I knew, the couple complained that they got headaches if they stayed in the city, and felt short of air. Pastoralists talked of the beauty of their natural surroundings, that they couldn’t imagine living in the city in ‘cages.’ They also stressed, with some pride, that rural children grew up hard-working, warm-hearted, practical and competent at a wide range of tasks, unlike city children who (despite their educational opportunities) they thought of as prone to laziness, acquisitive and faddish consumerism. Since the collapse of the social control enforced by the old regime, in the 1990s the city also became associated (or perhaps re-associated) with vice and crime, a perception that was shared by many urbanites who felt increasingly threatened. However, problems of lawlessness are a much more general problem, even if they are felt most acutely in the city. Rustling and livestock theft also became a serious problem in rural districts in a way that would have been unthinkable in the 1980s. Urban representations of rural life are mixed and uneven. Certain aspects are commonly valorized – a perceived closeness to nature, hospitality and sincerity, and the association with the ancient roots of a distinctive and glorious national culture. The poet Ch. Battömör (2003) for example, writes of the loss of this integrity and generosity in his mournful poem ‘Bi Khotyn Khün’ (‘I’m a city person’) in which he evokes traditional rural values by their negation in his lament of urban life. On the other hand, a widely disseminated aspect of elite-centralist thought conceives of ‘culture’ (soyol) in terms of a gradient of refinement and sophistication. In this discourse rural people are depicted as having a low ‘cultural level/standard’ (soyolyn khemjee), whereas high education and the social milieu of the great cities bestows ‘high culture.’ Rural culture is often denigrated for the very traditionality that is celebrated in other contexts, and the pastoral lifestyle is commonly described in terms of poverty and backwardness (Baatar 2000: 131) Urban (khotyn) and rural (khödöönii) settings are frequently spoken of as contrasting categories. Urban living, particularly in the cities proper of Ulaanbaatar, Erdenet and Darkhan, is extraordinarily different from pastoral

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lifestyles, with a range of conveniences far beyond pastoral expectations – central heating, electricity, hot water, TV, telephone, public transport and so on. Despite these many contrasts, however, most Mongolians are familiar with both lifestyles to some extent. Social and kinship networks cross the boundaries between the rural and the urban so that virtually all pastoralists have urban relatives and friends. The speed with which urbanization had been carried out in the 1950s-1970s meant that most urban residents at that time had been born in rural localities, and the large families usually contained rural and urban members. Rural exposure to global and national television and other media images has not increased very markedly over the last decade; the decline in incomes slowed the rate at which rural families bought televisions. But more or less slowly, television imagery is becoming more accessible throughout the country, making rural residents virtual, if not physical, participants in urban life. Within a rural district (sum) the mobile households remain closely linked to those in the central settlement, creating a social field that includes both mobile and settled life. In the collective period various sum-based institutions such as state farms, collectives, schools, health and administrative centres helped integrate settled and pastoral society. People moved to and from mobile and settled sections of these rural institutions, and the children circulated – pastoral children staying in the settlement to attend school, children from the settlements staying with their pastoral relatives in the summer. In some respects almost all the members of the rural collectives, settled and mobile, were pastoral, in that they were intimately involved with pastoral activities, although these were principally carried out by the specialist herding households. In this way it makes better sense to speak of a society with a mobile sector, than of a separate mobile pastoral society. This is still largely true, kinship and friendship relations continue to knit sum society together. But in the case of the true urban centres – the cities (Ulaanbaatar, Erdenet, Darkhan,) and aimag centre towns, this interconnectedness seems set to diminish as transportation costs rise, and economic integration and school attendance falls.

Conclusion History has left Mongolia with contrasting ways of life that have virtually become sub-cultures, and this polarization is not diminishing as a result of the collapse of the old communist regime that helped shape their current forms. The new market modernism appears to be having just as powerful

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an ideological impact as its Soviet predecessor, and the association between the ‘modern’ and the urban remains. As with previous epochs, in the postsocialist period change in the elite-centralist wing of the culture has been more rapid, with some noticeable change in the content of the aspirational scheme. Well-paid positions in management have generally become the most attractive vocations, and for much of the new elite occupations with Western international connections have become even more desirable than those with Russian ones. In the capital city, where most foreigners live, a growing leisure industry supports bars and nightclubs, and this has become an attractive sector to many young Mongolians. Small-scale commerce has become a central activity for many urbanites, but it is generally still held in low regard and valued for the goods it provides rather than as an occupation in its own right. There is a strong tendency for the children of those with urban occupations and higher education to seek and attain high levels of education themselves (Ward 1995: 33-40). As state schooling provision declines, educational opportunities have become increasingly limited to those already financially and educationally advantaged. Substantial fees are now payable for university and college education, for example, and this puts them beyond the reach of many Mongolians. Given that the costs of education are increasing, a common strategy for rural families is to select only some of their children to pursue education, and to take others out of school early to concentrate on pastoral work. This trend does not, of course, reduce the attraction that urban life holds for many with rural backgrounds. Indeed the attraction of Ulaanbaatar, in particular, has led to an expanding sector that we might term the ‘urban periphery’ – the ger district is a form of urbanism with only some of the characteristics and amenities associated with the ideal urban lifestyle. This is by no means a new or unique lifestyle and many aimag and sum centres have long had substantial ger districts, but these had been seen as areas in the process of being fully urbanized and replaced with built accommodation. Now the urban periphery has become the most rapidly expanding part of the metropolis. Although it seems that the rural and the more elite urban sub-cultures are becoming more exclusive and entrenched, this polarity has not yet developed to the extent that most individuals locate themselves in either of the two cultural sectors exclusively. These sets of values and skills coexist and may be emphasized to a greater or lesser extent by individuals as context demands. Although they may live in the city, for example, many of the older government and MPRP administrators appear to be at least as familiar

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with ‘rural-localism’ as they are with ‘modernist-centralism.’ Indeed, one reason, I would suggest, for the recent electoral success of the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party has been their greater access to, and use of, rural-localist value systems.35 As these cultural sectors polarize, however, under the influence of global media and the international education of the young Mongolian elite, individuals with a comprehensive command of both complexes become rarer.

35 N. Bagabandi, the MPRP candidate, easily won the 1997 presidential elections with more than twice the popular vote of his principal opponent, and the MPRP will won a landslide victory in the 2000 parliamentary elections.

4

Proprietary Regimes and Sociotechnical Systems Rights over Land in Mongolia’s ‘Age of the Market’

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

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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). Livestock numbers began to rise. Pastoralists valued herd wealth in its own right and now relied upon their domestic animals for subsistence, so increasing herd size became a matter of food security. From 1990 to 1998 the national herd increased by over 20% to nearly 32 million head (Statistical Office of Mongolia 1993: 28, Ministry of Agriculture and Industry of Mongolia 1998: 2). However, the efficiency of pastoralism declined. By 1998 survival rates of offspring had fallen by around 10%, and livestock totals were only able to rise because levels of marketing and consumption declined by about 20% (National Statistical Office of Mongolia 1999: 83-84). The exports of livestock and livestock products collapsed,36 incomes, public services and living standards declined dramatically (World Bank 1994: 19, Griffin 1995: viii). The number of people living below the poverty line increased from almost zero in 1989 to over 33% in 1998 (United Nations Systems in Mongolia 1999: 5, World Bank 1994: 41). One of the reasons for Mongolia’s economic crisis was the loss of Soviet aid, which was reduced in 1989 and stopped altogether in 1991 (some estimates suggest this had amounted to a third of GDP or more) (Bruun and Odgaard 1996: 26, United Nations Systems in Mongolia 1999: 6). However, Western nations, Japan and international financial institutions took the place of Russia as aid donors and economic advisors to some extent. Between them these donors provided support that rose to represent 25% of GDP by 1996 (Bruun and Odgaard 1996: 26). The loss of Soviet aid, then, can only be held partially responsible for Mongolia’s crisis. As Griffin argues, one of the reasons for the severity of the economic collapse was the way in which a new regime of private ownership was rapidly and destructively introduced (Griffin 1995: 12-13). There have been some ‘winners’ in this revolution, but all the rural Mongolians I know now stress the relative wealth, security and convenience that the collective period offered, and contrast these with the low buying power and uncertain future of the ‘age of the market’ (zakh zeeliin üye). This was one of the reasons for the landslide electoral victory of the ‘old communist’ MPRP, which won 72 out of 76 parliamentary seats in the July 2000 election. 36 In the collective era Mongolia exported 25,000-40,000 tons of meat, 25,000-30,000 tons of livestock, and over 60,000 head of horses each year. Meat exports in 1998 amounted to only 7,500 tons, and livestock and horse exports have become insignificant (National Statistical Office of Mongolia 1999: 144).

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The dissolution of the state socialist planned economy transformed the value and characteristics of the elements that had composed it – particularly property. Livestock, land, machinery, and other ‘assets’ took on values and potentials to the extent that they could be fitted into whatever new networks of production and distribution actors could establish. Pastoralism has now begun to fail to provide basic food security for a growing number of households. The dissolution of the collective farms made over a quarter of a million former collective and state workers directly dependent on small holdings of livestock. In the harsh winter and spring (zud) of 1999-2000 Mongolia as a whole lost some three million livestock, around 10% of the national herd, more than 2,000 households saw their entire livestock holding wiped out. A second winter disaster in 2000-2001 pushed the total livestock losses up towards six million and destroyed the livelihood of thousands more pastoralists. The scale of these losses, and the underlying problem of barely viable herding households, reflected the weakness of the atomized and de-mechanized pastoral sector that emerged from the reform of economic and proprietary regimes.

Proprietary Regimes, Pastoralism and Land The collectives (negdel) had been largely introduced in the 1950s, and each one managed pastoralism in an entire local government district (sum). They typically included something in the order of a thousand households, about half of which were specialist mobile pastoralists living in encampments throughout the district, and the other half did support and service jobs in a central settlement. Pastoral households were organized into small groups (often of close kin) called bases (suur), and these were grouped into production brigades (brigad) and sections (kheseg). Households were assigned livestock to herd and received a regular income. The collectives owned the bulk of the livestock of the district but herding households were allowed 50 or in some regions 75 head of their own to supply domestic needs. Pastoralists would move livestock to different seasonal pastures, and when necessary collective managers would employ the pastoral technique of otor, by which livestock are repeatedly moved over distant and lesser-used pastures at times of fodder shortage, as a method of intensively feeding them (Humphrey and Sneath 1999: 233-264). The collectives also maintained machinery for transportation and hay-cutting services that were used to support the herding ‘bases.’ Pastoralists were generally moved on the longest legs of the annual migration by collective trucks, and hay was delivered to

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help feed livestock during the difficult months of winter and early spring. This coordination and support of pastoralism is generally viewed as a very positive aspect of the old system by herders, and has been sorely missed since the advent of the ‘age of the market.’ Brigades and sections were allocated seasonal pastures. Land was ultimately ‘owned’ by the state, use was managed by the collective management, and pastoral households generally made use of a recognized area of pasture within the areas allocated to their group. Of these the use of winter pastures (övöljöö) was most exclusive and associated with given households and suur (bases), which usually had animal shelters and stockpiles of dried dung there for heating. The winter and spring is the most difficult time of the year for livestock, and someone grazing animals near another’s winter site had to leave sufficient land untouched for the household(s) assigned to it to feed their animals over the winter months. In other seasons there was generally considerable flexibility as to exactly where families would camp within the seasonal pastures allocated to their group. The negdels were dissolved in 1991-1993 by issuing share coupons (tasalbar) which could be used by employees to claim a share of the enterprise as their ‘private property.’ Livestock, machinery and other agricultural resources were distributed between the members. The land, however, remained a public resource used by local pastoralists, and was, theoretically, regulated by local government. This was seen as anomalous by development economists of the Asian Development Bank and other advisors to the Mongolian government. The registration and titling of land was thought to be a necessary precondition for an effective market in land, and such a market was assumed to be the best way of realizing productive potential. In this discourse private agricultural and pastoral producers are bound to maximize the returns on their investments and land is cast as another economic asset that producers must own in order to protect and invest in it. In 1994 the Asian Development Bank (1994: 33), for example, complained: ‘Currently, there is no private ownership of land. As a consequence, land tenure insecurity causes disincentives to invest in land improvements.’ The Asian Development Bank strongly advocated a new Land Law which would allow the private ownership of land ‘to provide positive incentives to herders, farmers and others to maximize production and to protect land from damage or degradation.’37 37 The idea that private ownership should be introduced to protect land from degradation is an old theme in the debate over public land. Garrett Hardin (1968) promoted this approach with his description of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ – reviving an argument f irst made in

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However, the new legislation met with fierce resistance. Many Mongolian parliamentarians were unhappy with the notion of privatizing land, particularly those considered ‘conservative’ in the context of the post-socialist political arena, such as members of the former ruling Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP). In the early 1990s parliamentary opposition repeatedly delayed the new land legislation. In order to get the bill through the parliament (Ulsyn Ikh Khural) in November 1994 the more contentious clauses concerning outright private ownership were dropped. But another piece of legislation, the Land Payments Law, was developed by which ‘possession’ (ezemshikh) of campsites and pastures would be leased to individuals by the state. This sidestepped the issue of outright ownership but still allowed for exclusive private rights to land. ‘Certificates of possession’ (ezemshigchiin gerchilgee) could be issued to individuals and companies, giving them long-term exclusive access to land. In 1996 the Mongolian Democratic Union (MDU), a coalition of more economically liberal parties, defeated the MPRP in parliamentary elections. The new government began the implementation of the land allocation provisions in 1998. But the bill remained controversial and in May 1999 some MPs expressed fears that the best pasture land would be acquired by the rich, to the detriment of poorer herders. Others accused the government of pursuing the legislation at the bidding of the Asian Development Bank in return for large loans,38 and one MP declared that land privatization could result in ‘civil war.’39 While this was widely seen as exaggeration, it reflected genuine fears that privatizing land would precipitate disputes over land claims throughout the country. In the late 1990s Mongolian public opinion swung heavily in support of socialist ‘conservatism,’ amid general disenchantment with the MDU. N. Bagabandi, the MPRP candidate, easily won the 1997 presidential elections with more than twice the popular vote of any other candidate, and the MPRP won a landslide victory in the 2000 parliamentary elections. Among nineteenth-century England. Hardin’s argument was widely rejected by pastoral specialists who found that his model was a poor guide to understanding the public-access grazing systems found in most existing pastoral societies, in which land use is generally limited by a variety of social and environmental constraints. See Feemy et al. 1990, McCabe 1990. 38 The Prime Minister, J. Narantsatsralt, found it necessary to publicly deny the charge. ‘The ADB [Asian Development Bank] loan and the development, approval and implementation of the law are two separate things,’ he told the Ödriin Sonin (Daily news). See A. Delgermaa. The UB Post, 1 June 1999, no. 22 (159): 2. 39 This was the colourful O. Dashbalbar. See N. Oyunbayar, The UB Post, 14 July 1999, no. 28 (165): 3.

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pastoralists there was widespread unease at the notion of privately owned pasture land, and considerable support for the ‘conservative’ line. But many have also become concerned with protecting their use-rights to pastures, since the tight control of land use that local officials used to exercise in the past has decayed since decollectivization. However, the notion that land could be bought up and owned outright by individuals, particularly outsiders, remains deeply unpopular. To date Mongolian local administrations have been slow to divide and allocate grazing land. Most districts (sum) have only issued certificates for seasonal campsites (principally övöljöö, ‘winter’ sites) (Fernandez-Gimenez and Batbuyan 2000: 8). These are point locations, rather than swathes of land, but they entail an implicit right to the pasture within a radius of several kilometres around the site. So far the certification has tended to simply legitimate existing use-rights to the seasonal pastures that households had been allocated in the past. The law was designed, however, to go much further than this, and implementation has only just begun. What is emerging is a proprietary regime in which pasture land is neither open access public property nor private ownership. Instead the state has created private rights to locational elements of what is still conceived of as a wider system of pastoral movement. Although movement between pastures has generally declined and become more difficult to arrange since decollectivization, these övöljöö sites are still thought of as wintering places. The ezemshigchiin gerchilgee (certificates of possession) might themselves be considered a new form of property, but if so it is very clear that they represent a set of prerogatives and liabilities with respect to one site within a wider system of land use. This may change, of course, if long-distance pastoral movements continue to decline and pastoralists switch to year-round use of winter pastures as has tended to happen in Inner Mongolia (China) where pasture has been divided and allocated to individual households or small groups (Sneath 1998: 1147-1148). Even so, however, Mongolian notions of land will not change overnight.

Notions of Land in Historical Perspective When the new revolutionary government of Mongolia gained power in 1921-1924 it inherited a society in which pastoralism and the political order were inextricably linked. Historically, extensive pastoralism in Inner Asia relied upon a particular configuration of rights over resources. Rather than absolute individual ownership, mobile pastoralists depended upon public

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access to resources under the jurisdiction of a local political authority that regulated their use. Indigenous Mongolian notions of land ‘ownership’ can be described as custodial in that agencies had conditional rights to use territory and always within a wider sociopolitical framework. Indeed, in the past, land, livestock and people were constituent elements of sociopolitical domains ruled by district authorities. 40 From the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries Mongolia was part of the Manchu Qing empire. Territory was divided into administrative districts called ‘banners’ (khoshuu) ruled by hereditary lords or, in some cases, Buddhist monasteries. In this period Mongolian society was composed of a ruling aristocracy and subordinate classes that roughly corresponded to ‘commoners,’ ‘freemen’ and a category of personal servants. 41 The common subjects were tied to the khoshuu politico-territorial units and were required to render corvée service to local authorities. Pastoral families generally moved to different seasonal pastures with their livestock in an annual cycle, and land use was regulated by banner officials. The Buddhist church, nobility, imperial administration, and some very rich commoners owned large numbers of livestock which were herded for them by subjects and servants who generally received a share of the animal produce in return. Overall patterns of land use were managed by the noble or ecclesiastical district authorities. The operations organized by the wealthy herd owners could be highly sophisticated and involve specialist herders moving large, single-species herds to selected pastures so as to make best use of the local ecological resources at given times of the year (Simukov 1936: 49-55, Bawden 1968: 181). The proprietary regime for land was complex and consisted of various prerogatives held by legal persons at different levels in the sociopolitical order. Authority over the use of land was ultimately vested in the Manchu emperor. 42 The actual unit for pastoral land management was the khoshuu ruled by the zasag noyan (‘banner prince’ or lord). Although the emperor 40 In the thirteenth century the Mongolian polity founded by Chinggis Khan had been composed of units termed myangad (thousands), from which a nominal one thousand soldiers could be levied. These were administrative units with their own territory, ruled by lords who also commanded the military contingent that could be drawn from them. It seems that the use of pasture land was assigned and regulated by the lord of the myangan and his officers. See Dawson 1955: 94, Ch’i-ch’ing 1978: 10. 41 The English terms are rough translations: The albat or sumyn ard correspond roughly with ‘commoners,’ darkhad with ‘freemen,’ and khamjilga and shabi with ‘personal servants.’ There were also some slaves (bool). 42 For example, the emperor had the right to give land to groups such as the Barga in what is now Khulun Buir, Inner Mongolia. See Lattimore (1934: 158-160) and Tubshinnima (1985: 90-95).

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retained the formal right to allocate land, in everyday life the right to use pasture land was at the discretion of the banner prince and his officials, who acted as custodians of both people and land. Within the khoshuu, the herdsmen were assigned to smaller units (sum), and subunits (bag). The territory of the khoshuu generally contained a number of different areas of pasture used in winter, spring, summer and autumn. These seasonal pastures were divided between the various sums and bags, and the exclusive use of the winter pasture (övöljöö) was the most strictly enforced. In many cases the summer pastures for all the sums of the khoshuu were in the same general area, and the allocation of land was often very flexible, with few restrictions on exactly where families could camp. When necessary herders would go on otor and this necessitated a good deal of flexibility in access to seasonal pastures. In adverse climatic conditions in one area, herders were allowed to use neighbouring areas of pasture. Rights to land use were described in terms of entitlements to move herds or stay with them in a given locality, and this is reflected in the records of legal petitions made to the Bogd Khan, the ruler of Outer Mongolia after the collapse of the Qing in 1911. For example, in one document banner officials insisted that several commoners move with their animals south of a river, but by giving the officials over 160 sheep and 20 roubles the plaintiffs obtained permission to stay on the better northern side until the weather became warm (Rasidondug and Veit 1975: 142, 124). What was being acquired in this way was in no sense the ownership of the land, but rights to use territory at a certain time in the annual cycle. The zasag (banner prince) and his officials could and did often reserve the best pastures for their own use, but there remained a notion that the land of the khoshuu was managed by the Zasag for the general welfare of its members. And there seem to have been some limits on the powers of the banner prince if he tried to challenge established practice of his subjects (Bawden 1968: 90-91). Proprietary rights were not limited to human agents. Imperial and princely jurisdiction over land was subject to the approval of spiritual authorities. The gazryn ezed (‘masters’ or ‘owners’ of the land) are spiritual entities considered to be in control of the weather and environmental conditions of each locality of the natural world. Such spirits were, and still are, propitiated in annual ceremonies held at ritual cairns, called oboo. These ceremonies reflect the notion that humans do not hold land as they do Sanjdorj (1980: 1) takes a Marxist line and states that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ‘the land […] was the property of the feudal classes.’

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other mundane possessions, but must enter into relations with the spiritual powers of the locality to ensure favourable conditions. The oboo ceremony embodied and enacted the relations between human and superhuman forces associated with the land. As such they were highly political acts, denoting those who were the legitimate representatives of the human community as they stood in relation to the supernatural world. Just as subjects had obligations towards the secular authorities, so they did towards the spiritual authorities of a locale. The good will of these authorities could not be taken for granted. There is an account of a local gazryn ezen becoming angered in the late nineteenth century, as a result of a dispute over the rights of foreigners to make use of Mongolian land. The result was adverse local conditions and livestock losses (Pozdneyev 1971 [1892]: 412). In fact ‘ownership’ and ‘owner’ are poor translations for the role that actors played in the network of prerogatives and liabilities surrounding land use. The term ezen, usual translation of ‘owner,’ also means ‘head,’ ‘ruler,’ or ‘master/mistress.’ This is a concept that applies to asymmetrical relations entailing obligations and expectations at several different social scales. It is used at the level of the domestic group (where the geriin ezen is the head of the household; at the level of some large resource or enterprise (land, a herd of animals, or a factory may have an ezen); and in the past it was also applied at the scale of the whole polity – a common term for the Manchu emperor was Ezen Khan. Rather than an owner of land in the conventional English sense, an ezen is one with control of and responsibility for the resource, and like a head of state or household, this has a custodial aspect. These indigenous notions of land and the wider social order which framed them have remained important throughout the twentieth century. The relation was transformed, but retained as the state built the centrally planned command economy. The way that pastoralists were eventually successfully integrated was through the introduction of large politico-economic territorial units – the collective and state farms. A new revolutionary political language replaced the earlier aristocratic and Buddhist discourses. However, many elements of the habitus of pastoralists and their masters remained. The everyday term used for collective or state animals was alban mal (‘official’ animals) and the root of this term translated as ‘official’ is alba – the feudal obligation owed by pre-revolutionary subjects to their lord. Indeed, in the pre-revolutionary era the term for a common citizen or serf was albat – ‘one with duty.’ In both periods these related terms referred to the obligations that pastoralists had to their superiors. As important as the conceptual continuities, many of the practices of pastoralism were retained. The collectives and state farms regulated and directed land use, owned

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most of the livestock in the district, organized specialist herds of livestock and enforced movements between seasonal pastures. The introduction of state and collective property and control of land, then, was not a radical conceptual break with the past, but represented a new formulation of earlier political relations. The political underpinnings of regimes of ownership are very clear when expressed in Mongolian terms. The Mongolian term for the ‘economy,’ for example, is ediin zasag – composed of the word zasag (prince, ruler, government) and the term ed – which means both ‘possessions’ and ‘thing,’ ‘article,’ or ‘item.’ ‘Economy’ in Mongolian could be literally translated as the ‘governance of possessions.’ It is rather a good parallel, then, with the notion of proprietary regime itself. Here the definition of the economic sphere depends, quite literally, on a notion of political authority. Even the term generally used to translate the English term land in Mongolian (gazar) has a perceptibly different meaning. A broader more inclusive term than land, gazar can also mean ‘place’ or ‘office’ (government, zasagiin gazar, for example, is the place/office of zasag). Other terms describe types of land, classified by their use – bilcher for grazing land, khadlan for haymaking fields, zuslan, namarjaa, övöljöö, and khavarjaa for summer, autumn, winter and spring pastures, respectively. This ideation emphasizes land use, rather than a common substance that can be owned and possessed; indeed, what the international development literature terms in English the Land Law is in fact the gazar edlengiin khuul’ (land use law). The most widely used term for private land is khuviin gazar. Khuv’ is the term used for the concept ‘private’ and means a share, portion, allotment, as well as personal or individual. The verb khuvaah means to divide or apportion. So, items of personal property are explicitly part of wider fields – be they domestic, district or state political economies.

A History of Contested Proprietary Regimes for Land The current Mongolian debate reflects the awareness that Mongolian culture, indeed the existence of Mongolia as a political entity, is the product of a history of contested proprietary regimes for land. The modern Mongolian nation was formed in the course of a struggle waged by pastoral society and its elite to resist the loss of proprietorial control of grazing land to Chinese agriculture. In the Qing period Mongolian systems of extensive pastoralism, and the associated regime of land rights, faced a direct challenge in the form

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of Chinese agriculture. Agriculture did not necessarily undermine this ‘pastoral’ regime but in certain circumstances actually complemented it. Farming practices could be contained within the wider sociopolitical frame that supported pastoralism, and nobles and monasteries frequently organized crop cultivation to provision the local banner economies, often with imported Chinese labour. Traditional Mongolian agricultural methods relied upon the joint use of cultivated land, under a central authority who allocated land each year to the farming households (Erdenebaatar 1996: 104-106). In what is now Uvs aimag (province), north-western Mongolia, for example, agriculturists had no permanent plots, and cultivation was carried out by groups under the direction of an angiin daamal (section head). These heads would meet to decide on the area to be cultivated and this was divided between the various groups who ploughed and worked on the allocated land. Interestingly, because the agricultural products were divided between the participating households rather than supplied to the state, this was termed khuviin tarialan and so could be translated as ‘private/personal’ farming. But it was clearly based upon the joint use of ‘public’ khoshuu land. This was personal farming without private land. However, on the border of Mongolian pastoralism, in Inner Mongolia, Chinese agriculture entailed a quite different social, political and economic complex, one that generated permanent change in land use and entailed the transformation of land into transactable, rent-generating, commercial forms of property. This complex of rights over land encroached upon and frequently permanently displaced both Mongolian pastoralism, and ultimately the wider sociopolitical structure of Mongolian life. Owen Lattimore, describing the early twentieth century, notes that ‘[t]hroughout Inner Mongolia, the Chinese were encroaching and the Mongols were being wiped out. The [Mongolian] princes were supported by the Chinese authorities […] in the domains that were left to them; but at the same time they were forced to yield fresh grants of land to the Chinese every year’ (1934: 27). The spreading agricultural areas broke up the remaining pastoral lands and reduced or eliminated pastoral mobility, so that the Mongolians themselves turned to agriculture. It became increasingly profitable and common for the banner prince to sell or mortgage prime land to agriculturalists for profit. Chinese colonization did not necessarily destroy the principle that khoshuu land was in some sense ‘common,’ administered as part of the social whole of the administrative unit. In the Khorchin territories in the Liaoning region, where Inner Mongolia meets Manchuria, there was little or no transfer of land by mortgage to individuals. Instead, colonization was a public enterprise on terms negotiated between the Mongolian authorities

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and heads of Chinese settler communities. Areas of banner land were turned over to the agriculturalists on long or permanent lease. The income from land rentals went into a banner fund, divided among the zasag, officials, and subjects. However, it was the elite, Lattimore notes, that benefited most from this revenue (Lattimore 1934: 83). The material rewards available to the elite for diverting public land drove this process forward despite the constant disapproval by the Manchu court, who valued the pastoral lifestyle of their Mongolian subjects as an excellent source of cavalry. The result was an increasing impoverishment of the poorer pastoralists who were faced with shrinking pasture land. Popular resistance to this process frequently took the form of largely hopeless armed revolt in the regions subject to land appropriation. It was as part of this tradition of armed resistance to the Chinese that the struggle for Outer Mongolian independence was waged, and led to the declaration of an independent Mongolian state in 1911. It was the failure of the existing social order to resist Chinese appropriation of territory that provided the impetus for the Mongolian revolutionary and independence movements.

Pastoralism as a Sociotechnical System Property can be understood as part of the wider social and material networks that generate its value – in short, it is an element of a sociotechnical system. Following Pfaffenberger (1992) I use this term to mean a system of activity that links techniques and material objects to the social coordination of labour.43 By recognizing that technology and resources are inextricably bound up with social form, work such as that by Lansing (1987) and Pfaffenberger (1992) on pre-colonial irrigation systems in Bali and Sri Lanka, respectively, have shown how efficient productive techniques were lost as a result of political changes to property relations. This sociotechnical systems approach is of heuristic value in understanding Inner Asian pastoralism. Mobile pastoral techniques can be seen as part of larger sociopolitical systems and require the integration of complex social and material systems as much as any agricultural irrigation system does. A series of specific techniques and instruments have been developed by pastoralists working in the Inner Asian environment. These included a form of highly portable housing the ger (yurt) with its lightweight stove, techniques such as seasonal moves and otor foraging forays, a wide repertoire 43 For further discussion of pastoralism as a sociotechnical system, see Sneath 1999b.

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of specialist skills, and a host of other devices such as the uurga (pole-lasso) and concave wooden emeel (saddle). The primary site of these skills, tools, and techniques was generally the örkh or ail (household, encampment), but a second and frequently more important context was the district political economy and the larger-scale pastoral activities in which households engaged. In the collective era, mechanized haymaking, delivery, transportation, marketing, and retail operations formed part of this complex. Even domestic-centred pastoral practices formed part of wider sociotechnical systems that included the jural framework of rights and obligations, district authorities, institutions of land use, and associated concepts of land itself. Of course, these configurations were also hierarchical political formations, and there is no doubt that the religious and political ideologies of both the pre-revolutionary and the collective eras served the interests of the managers of the politico-economic structures. But these systems of knowledge were not merely instruments of domination; they reflected a much wider range of human experience, including the technical constraints on production imposed by an ‘environmental’ externality – be that conceived of in spiritual or in materialistic terms. Based as they were on pastoral mobility and general access to land these sociotechnical systems tended to maintain and support these aspects of land use, and this seems to have provided very real benefits for pastoralists. Large-scale systems of pastoral movement appear well suited to making optimum use of available forage resources, and can provide useful economies of scale. By moving livestock to different seasonal pastures pastoralists are able to make use of the different ecological and climatic conditions to get the best results from pastures in the different seasons. As in successful pastoral systems elsewhere, the ability to move livestock in response to changing climatic conditions is a key method of avoiding livestock losses and making the best use of available resources (Behnke and Scoones 1993). Pastoral sociotechnical operations reflected the different orientations of the agencies engaged in them. Households need to provision themselves, that is, operate in a ‘domestic subsistence’ role. Many of these requirements could be met by each pastoral family herding relatively small numbers of several species of domestic livestock – sheep and goats for meat and winter clothing, cattle for milk, horses for riding and camels for transportation. But larger operations were conducted by various herd-owning agencies such as monasteries, nobles, government offices, Chinese shops, and rich commoners in the pre-revolutionary period, and the collectives in the Soviet era. Such operations were based on control of large numbers of livestock and had different goals – generally to generate a good supply of produce and

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livestock for the owners. This ‘yield-focused’ role made use of the economies of scale by which large herds could be herded with little more labour than small ones and the benefits of large-scale movement and other pastoral techniques possible by coordinating labour – such as specialized care of large single-species herds. These operations were based upon particular relational modes; in the pre-collective period these could be either alb, the obligations that commoners owed district authorities, or süreg tavikh (herd placement), a contractual arrangement in which herding households had obligations to supply a certain quota of produce but kept the surplus for themselves. In many ways these institutions were comparable to the way in which the collective assigned livestock to herding households. In both cases it engaged the household in a wider system of operation and oriented them to producing surplus. These two roles overlapped and supported each other, to some extent, so that in the collective case this surplus could be increased by extra inputs such as winter fodder and mechanical transport. These larger systems could export large amounts of produce and support subsidiary economic activity in both the collective and earlier feudal pastoral economies. 44 But domestic-subsistence operations are poor at exporting surplus outside local networks and the recent expansion of this aspect of pastoralism has led to a build-up of herd size instead. Exports of meat and livestock fell rapidly with the dissolution of the collectives – by 1992 the total had sunk to one-fifth of the 1985 figure, and has hardly improved since then.

The Transformation of Value The change of ownership regimes from collective to private collapsed most of the larger sociotechnical systems that had been constructed. Many types of property possessed the particular characteristics and values they did because they were parts of these wider systems. Livestock gained from privatization could be relied upon to provide some sort of income even when divided into small herds owned by individual families. But mechanical devices such as tractors and welding equipment, on the other hand, saw their utility and value transformed. They had been supported and operated as part of the 44 By the end of the nineteenth century, Outer Mongolia was probably exporting at least one million sheep units of livestock to China each year – about 5% of the total national herd. In the collective era, the Mongolian state was also able to procure and export about 5% of the national herd, by my estimate. See Sanjdorj 1980: 91, Statistical Office of Mongolia 1993: 45, 82, State Statistical Office of the MPR 1981: 221.

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collective’s economy, and their utility has often become minimal in the new rural environment. A typical example is the case of three brothers living in Renchinlkhümbe, a remote district in northern Mongolia. As former technical support staff in the collective, the three brothers had obtained about 200 animals each in the decollectivization process, and had to turn to herding to make ends meet since they lost their jobs. The two elder brothers, Pürev and Bat-Erdene, used to be tractor drivers, while Batbayar, 45 the youngest, was a welder who had learnt his trade in the army before returning to work for the local collective for seven years until decollectivization in 1993. In addition to their small herds of livestock, all three brothers managed to secure their equipment from the collective during the privatization process. Batbayar has his welding gear and his brothers have a tractor each – a remarkable set of apparently expensive assets which, one would have thought, should make them relatively wealthy men. But the character and value of this property was transformed with the changing economic regime. The tractors stand idle, outside their gers, and are hardly ever used. When they are used it is to haul the family’s possessions to new seasonal pastures. When I first got to know the brothers in August 1996, they were preparing to cut hay by hand, despite the fact that they also had the grass-cutting machinery needed to do this by tractor. The main obstacle, they explained, was the expense of diesel and spare parts (when they were obtainable at all). I asked why they did not cut enough hay to sell to local families and cover their costs, but the brothers found such a plan impractical. The really good hay fields were a long way from the pastures they relied on for subsistence herding. The haymaking areas that could be used by local families were smallish patches of rather sparse hay, spread out over a large area. This meant that it would be very expensive to cut significant quantities of hay by tractor and transport it, and the brothers couldn’t afford sufficient inputs to do this. Even if they had, very few local families were wealthy enough to be able to afford such costly hay. Instead, local men spend an exhausting fortnight or so in late August, working dawn to dusk to cut hay by hand. Some of this hand-cut hay is sold by those families who most badly need cash. A full truckload of hay (around two tons) sold for about 30,000 tögrög at that time (US$55), a considerable expense to most pastoral families, and one to be avoided if at all possible for domestic economies with cash shortages.

45 The name and certain details of the informants have been changed to protect their anonymity.

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When property is considered as a constituent element of one or more sociotechnical systems it becomes clear how the value of such assets have been transformed by recent reforms. The collective and state forms of property had been central components of an integrated complex of sociotechnical systems. When the collectives were dissolved, the larger systems collapsed, leaving only domestic systems, now atomized and operating with assets transformed in value and potential by the new economic conditions. This has caused a whole series of problems for herding families, many of whom now have difficulty marketing their produce, and who no longer have the support of hay or transportation that the collectives provided. The organization of otor movement, and the regulation of access to pasture, which had been overseen by collective and state farm officials, has declined. Without mechanized transport and managerial imperatives, pastoral movement has declined. The lack of hay reserves and collective motor pools that could have been used to deliver fodder and move livestock is one of the principal reasons for the disastrous losses of livestock in 2000-2002.

Distribution of Liabilities in the New Pastoral Sector As Verdery (2004) argues, it is revealing to analyse new proprietary regimes in terms of the distribution of liabilities, rather than simply goods and assets. In this case property rights became stakes in a wider system or network of operations including objects, resources and the organization of labour. This also brought a share in the risk that this network might collapse or operate unsuccessfully. The new pastoral sector has proved to be extremely vulnerable to bad weather. This was made tragically clear in the winters of 1999-2001 when Mongolia lost some six million livestock, a fifth of the national total. These zud (disasters caused by severe weather) were the result of an unusually dry summer followed by a savagely cold winter in which temperatures dropped as low as –46C. Losses were concentrated in some regions – one province, Dundgov’, was particularly badly affected, losing more than a quarter of its livestock. Across the country some 2,000 households were left without any livestock whatever after the first winter, and many more were left with unviably small herds. These losses had a traumatic effect on the national mood. Newspapers described the spectacle, shocking for Mongolians, of herders going to find their livestock carrying axes and knives, rather than pole-lassoes,

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because all that is left for them to do is to hack meat from the piles of frozen carcasses. 46 The sad reality is that although these two years have seen unexpectedly harsh conditions, these crises were entirely predictable. Severe weather of this sort occurs periodically in Mongolia, and a number of measures had been developed to mitigate its effects. Mobility was an important technique; herds were moved from the most badly affected localities to areas where conditions were better. This could be done rapidly in the collective era as managers could use teams of trucks and coordinate movements centrally. The collectives and state farms also stockpiled hay, which could be used to provide extra fodder for exhausted animals, and this also relied upon the motor pools for distribution to pastoral encampments. The livestock losses themselves are in fact less important than their differential effects on the livelihoods of pastoral households. Even in the hardest hit regions, total herd numbers could, under the collective system, be expected to recover in a few years. However, the post-socialist pattern of livestock ownership made half the Mongolian population directly dependent on their own herds for subsistence – a massive distribution of risk. Some herds were wiped out entirely, and the poorest households had so few livestock to begin with that they were vulnerable to any sort of loss. In the collective era even these dramatic levels of livestock loss, should they have somehow occurred, would not have threatened the basic food security of pastoralists. Risk, as well as property, had been centralized – firstly by the negdel and secondly by the state itself, which stood behind and ultimately underwrote the collective’s operation. If livestock were lost they were generally accounted for as collective livestock rather than personal animals, which was one reason why ‘private’ livestock raising appeared so efficient in the collective period. Although individual herding households might lose some income if livestock losses prevented them from fulfilling their plan, liability for losses was spread throughout the collective, and indeed soft budget constraints meant that the collective’s liabilities were shared to some degree by the entire centrally planned economy. But the tiny, independent pastoral producers that have been created by the privatization of pastoralism now face starvation if their livestock die. The Mongolian government, made acutely aware of this by recent events, has begun to develop systems for spreading risk that are compatible with the neoliberal economic reforms. In March 2001 the government began

46 For a newspaper report, see D. Sainbayar, Önöödör, 13 February 2001, no. 36 (1193): 3.

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debating a new Livestock Insurance Law in the hope of reducing the risks to pastoral producers. 47 Currently social networks have a powerful effect on the distribution of both opportunities and liabilities. Those with close kin in different sectors and regions are generally able to rely on them for help in times of trouble. This was part of the way in which families coped in the state socialist period, making extensive use of networks to obtain access to goods and services that were not available in any sort of market. In the pre-revolutionary period the incorporation of many pastoral households into a series of economically significant relations seems to have distributed risk to some degree. Contemporary social networks also connect poor households to wealthier families, and this can provide a support network for many of the most vulnerable. However, such social resources are far from evenly distributed, and those without good networks are more vulnerable. In some remote districts shortages are region-wide, so that very few people have sufficiently widely extended networks to get what is needed.

Joint Property New institutional settings for property emerged during decollectivization. A form of joint property, for example, appeared in the early 1990s as the larger state and collective operations were dismantled. The government made provision for the formation of enterprises termed ‘cooperatives’ (khorshoo or khorshoolol), to be formed by members pooling their shares of the collective to gain joint ownership of some section of the old negdel. Again, the property involved here can be seen as a notional share in some system that might still operate. Some of these were medium-sized productive operations based on a former collective resource, such as a vegetable-growing or hay-cutting operation, or a small diary. Together with what remained of the collectives, these represented all that was left of pastoral and agricultural productive institutions larger than the household. But the ability of these smaller operations to survive in the new economic conditions was limited. An example of this type of enterprise was the Bayan Tsagaan khorshoolol in Bayantumen sum, Dornod. Founded in April 1993, it was a relatively small organization – composed of ten families, all of whom were kin (Humphrey and Sneath 1999: 157-158). The cooperative was formed around a set of former 47 For newspaper report, see Ödriin Sonin, 14 March 2001: 2.

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collective assets – some vehicles, a large winter animal enclosure, some haymaking and potato fields. The membership was based upon the kin network of the man who was central to its formation. The khorshoolol was described as a temporary and experimental formation, which might be disbanded if it was not seen to be working well. By 1996, however, the Bayan Tsagaan had been disbanded. Indeed, since they were formed, the majority of productive enterprises of this type have gone bankrupt or ceased trading, and the average number of staff and livestock holdings of the surviving enterprises has declined since they were established. Of the 370 that had been established throughout the country by 1992, less than half (173) still existed in 1998. 48 A second type of rural cooperative (khorshoo) also emerged immediately after privatization. These were marketing cooperatives; small-scale voluntary associations of pastoral households set up to sell their produce and deliver the consumer goods the members ordered in return. Several of these were established in almost every district in Mongolia, often one in each bag sub-district. The joint property in this case consisted primarily of trading capital and in a few cases a vehicle or building. These fared even worse than the productive enterprises, however, and virtually all of them had collapsed within two or three years of their founding. In the pastoral districts of Renchinlkhümbe and Khankh, for example, all of the khorshoo that had been formed had ceased operating by 1994. In Khankh the privatization of the local collective began in 1990 and three cooperatives (khorshoo) were formed, named Zul (Lamp), Bayan Uul (Rich Mountain), and Jimst (Fruitful). By 1994 they were all bankrupt or had ceased to trade, although they retained a nominal existence in the local government records. In 1996 Zul and Jimst still retained tiny holdings of animals (four cows and two yaks, respectively), but these were simply the final remnants of the cooperatives’ trading capital and were animals herded by the founders alongside their other livestock. The clientele of the cooperative were generally drawn from the members of a given production brigade of the old negdel, now renamed bag. In Bag Number 2 the Bayan Uul khorshoo was formed in 1992 by a retired military officer named Batsuur – the sort of respected senior figure that local families could trust. Around 35 households were members of the cooperative, about half the total number of households in the sub-district (bag). For two years the cooperative had bought livestock products from the member 48 Of these only 109 owned livestock, the average holding being a modest 1,780 head (Khödöö Aj Akhuin Khorshoologchdyn Ündesnii Kholboo [National Association of Agricultural Cooperative Members] Statistical Department, personal communication, July, 1999).

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households and marketed them, bringing in exchange consumer goods that the households required, mostly from the aimag centre of Mörön. But in 1994 the cooperative had gone bankrupt due to a lack of khörön (capital and resources). Bayan Uul went under for a number of reasons. Transportation quickly emerged as a major problem; produce had to be transported to the aimag (province) centre of Mörön and consumer goods purchased there. At first it had been assumed that the khorshoo could use the usan zam (water road), a regular ferry service that had run the length of Lake Khövsgöl. However, this service became increasingly expensive and unreliable, and instead the passage had to be made using the long and very poor road down the lake edge. The increased costs soon exhausted the khorshoo’s trading capital. Members became increasingly unwilling to supply produce on credit. The wider national economic climate also made it extremely difficult for the cooperatives to survive. Credit was a particular problem, as interest rates rose to 15 or even 20% per month and banks became increasingly unwilling to lend money as levels of bad debt rose. Most families faced a cash shortage and preferred to trust what produce they had with relatives or friends. The prices paid for pastoral produce to the member families in the first year of operation were disappointing; as the cooperative could not offer the purchase price of the goods up front, the number of families prepared to market their produce through the khorshoo dwindled – to a group largely composed of Batsuur’s family and friends. By 1993 there was already a good deal of ill-feeling among the membership of Bayan Uul cooperative and it became increasingly diff icult to persuade people to give up their time to administer and work on the khorshoo operation, since there was no available money to pay them. Ragchaa, the accountant, had come in for a good deal of criticism, and in 1994 he resigned and moved out of the district. Batsuur declared Bayan Uul bankrupt (dampuursan); all its assets had apparently been expended in its last year of trading. The other cooperatives in the sum had also ceased trading by this time, although they had not formally declared themselves bankrupt. But the failure of the cooperatives also indicates the importance of the institutional settings in which property exists – institutions that may form part of sociotechnical systems but that also extend beyond them. In the case of the Bayan Tsagaan khorshoolol, despite the fact that it was a formally constituted productive enterprise based on joint property, it nevertheless rested on the social institutions of kinship – all of the members were relatives of the founder. The primary institutional focus remained the household.

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The membership’s commitment to the cooperative was mediated by their obligations towards their own immediate family and close kin. Members had little hesitation from withdrawing their investment if this ever seemed to be in the best interests of household, family and friends. This cooperative joint property, then, was rather unstable; it tended to be converted into another form – in this case ‘private’ household property when it became clear that the cooperative sociotechnical operation was failing. This illustrates the importance of institutional underwriting of such systems. Looking at the institutional frames of the various pastoral institutions that have operated successfully in Mongolian history, it is striking that they were all sociopolitical institutions, as well as economic. It was not simply the narrowly economic functions that the old collectives or their predecessors supplied that guaranteed their continued existence. Their depth in social and political dimensions provided them with the stability and the ability to command the labour they needed. Unlike the cooperatives, membership was not voluntary or conditional on any short-term benefit. In an analogous way, membership of the household (örkh) is also largely unconditional; its miniature ‘citizenship regime’ entails a wealth of social obligations. These were secure institutional bases for sociotechnical operations and their associated forms of property. Of course, the newly ‘private’ property of pastoral households is a form of joint property, too. The örkh is generally the unit for ownership, although the head of the family has managerial responsibility for its property. Household members generally talk of the household assets as ‘ours,’ but will tend to refer to the property of another family using the name of the household head – ‘Dashdorj’s livestock’ or ‘Dolgor’s house.’ In the post-socialist era the only pastoral institutions that have been increasing their livestock holdings have been certain pastoral households managing their ‘private’ herds. This small stratum of wealthy pastoralists seems to be in a position to re-establish some larger pastoral operations and reap the benefits of economies of scale and extensive systems of pastoral movement. In 1992 there were reported to be seven households with more than 1,000 head of livestock. By 1998 this number had risen to 955, of which 33 had more than 2,000 animals. 49 Of course, these are still very modest holdings in comparison with the rich of the pre-revolutionary period, and many are likely to have lost livestock in the last two winters. However, the rapid increase of herd size these households have been able to achieve 49 For a newspaper report, see Zasagyn Gazar Medeel, no. 2 (63) 1992; Zasagyn Gazar Medeel, I sar, II doloo khonog, 1996.

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is impressive. The richest of these households, that of Khenmedekh of Sergelen sum near Ulaanbaatar, had accumulated 2,358 animals by the end of 1995, and had over 2,800 in 1999. In 1996 Khenmedekh employed four herdsmen, and by 1999 had expanded his operation to include seven hired herders who worked for him under contractual arrangements very similar to the historical süreg tavikh relations. Khenmedekh owned and maintained a truck and jeep, and he and his employees maintained a wider system of pastoral movement than most of the other nearby households. It might be that in the future an increasing number of wealthy owners like Khenmedekh will accumulate sufficiently large livestock holdings to establish intermediate-scale pastoral operations, drawing on the labour of poorer pastoral households. However, it is likely to take a very long time for such operations to become large enough to include the bulk of pastoral households. Such wealthy and successful pastoralists represent a very small minority – in 1998 only 2% of herding households owned more than 500 livestock.50 The bulk of the pastoral sector is composed of households with tiny herds. More than two-thirds of livestock-owning households owned fewer than 150 domestic animals – the sort of herd size needed to successfully make a sustainable livelihood in pastoralism (Government of Mongolia and United Nations System 1998: 6). These poor pastoralists are generally the most vulnerable to shocks such as zud, and many thousands have had their livelihoods destroyed in the last two years.

Conclusion Particular technologies – industrial or pastoral – may be seen as crystallizing an associated property regime. In this chapter I have tried to show how forms of property, their value and character, are constructed by wider sociotechnical networks and the citizenship regimes that permit their operation. The first half of the twentieth century saw the Buddhist patrimonialism of pre-revolutionary Mongolian society displaced by Soviet modernism, and then in the 1990s, another major transformation as the state adopted policies inspired by market liberalism. Each of these discursive systems entailed proprietary and citizenship regimes within which rights to land 50 60% of herding households (165,000) had less than 100 animals, 37% (102,000) had less than 50, and about 12% (32,000) had less than ten (National Statistical Office of Mongolia 1999: 96).

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were constructed in a particular way. In the pre-revolutionary period land was the subject of spiritual authorities and its use by herders regulated as part of the sociopolitical system of the khoshuu. In the collective period ‘ownership,’ or rather jurisdiction over, land was identified with the secular Mongolian state and the virtually sacred Mongolian nation, and the use of land regulated by local collective and state farm management. In both periods regimes of property and of citizenship were constituent elements of the pastoral sociotechnical systems that provided the productive base of the rural economy. The recent market-oriented reforms can be seen to have disassembled an integrated pastoral system and created an atomized pastoral sector of subsistence-oriented pastoral producer households. The primary means by which this was achieved was through the introduction of a new regime of ownership that transformed state and collective property into private property. The originally exogenous technological elements such as trucks and hay-cutting machinery, which had been relatively successfully integrated into the collective structures, were detached and frequently unable to fulfil the function they had served. Large-scale systems of extensive land use have decayed, and the results have been a pastoral sector poorly adapted to the Mongolian environment – as the extent of recent livestock losses have demonstrated. The current controversy over private rights to land reflects both the history of the region and the resilience of indigenous attitudes towards land. In pre-revolutionary and collective eras, proprietary regimes for land reflected the requirements of mobile pastoral sociotechnical systems that were established by elites in both periods, and in the past these systems have been antithetical to institutions of transactable private land ownership. The last time that Mongolia engaged with a commercial market for land, during the Manchu Qing period, it became highly profitable for local officials to transform public pastoral land into private agricultural property. This led to a progressive impoverishment of the pastoral majority and the enrichment of a wealthy minority. Although most of Mongolia’s steppeland is unsuitable for agriculture, it is conceivable that land conversion from public to private ownership will again become profitable for a minority at the expense of the majority, and it is perhaps unsurprising that the Mongolian political debate has expressed these fears. Decollectivization also generated short-lived forms of joint property held by cooperatives and other enterprises, but these lacked the institutional and obligation depth of the domestic group. In the end the operations of the household were looked on as the primary site for both property and

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subsistence. Mongolia is in the process of developing a new relationship between public and private rights to land. The future form of the pastoral sector is likely to depend upon the degree to which this new proprietary regime can be integrated into viable sociotechnical operations and the institutional frames that underwrite them.

5

Political Mobilizationand the Construction of Collective Identity in Mongolia

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, MunkhErdene 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.51 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,52 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).53 51 There are different positions on the nature of the ulus (the term now used to mean nation or state), for example, in various historical periods. Atwood (1994), Munkh-Erdene (2006), and Elverskog (2006) do argue for the existence of some sort of collective Mongol identity indicated by the term Monggol ulus (and in Munkh-Erdene’s case also by the term obogtan). 52 The word khoshuu actually means ‘snout’ or ‘wedge’ and seems to be derived from the term of a military unit, since all such civil administrative units were simultaneously units for military muster. The equivalent Manchu term (gûša/güsa) was translated as ‘banner.’ In the mid-eighteenth century there were 86 khoshuu in Outer Mongolia, but the number increased as a result of administrative reforms to 118 in 1911. See Shirendev and Natsagdorj 1968: 6-11, Boldbaatar and Sneath 2006: 296-307. 53 As Elverskog has shown (2006: 16-17), the overarching category of the ‘Mongols’ was not the primary political identity for those, such as the Khorchins, who later came to be described by that term.

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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.’54 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. As Gellner (1983: 57) notes, ‘[n]ationalism is, essentially, the general imposition of a high culture on society,’ and in this case high culture included the tracing of Chinggisid descent.55 Munkh-Erdene (2006: 91) points out that ‘the terms and concepts of the Chinggisid lineage had became the lexical and conceptual underlying model and archetype of the Mongolian nationality lexicon. […] The Mongol nobility presented at least a putative descent community that came down from time immemorial, a primordial community.’ Kinship, then, was extended downwards to embrace the commoners, and in the new discourse the subjects of the lordly Mongolian lineages became themselves members of a political category conceived of as a sort of lineage-nationality – not so much a new imagined community, since the aristocratic notion of the Mongol polity already existed, but a political community imagined in a new way – as a broad social mass with shared kin origins. This form of historical and political imagination was a significant element of the Soviet variant of modernism exported to Mongolia, akin to the roots of the ‘ethnonationalism’ described by Verdery (1996) in her wider 54 In 1912, for example, the ruling princes of the Inner Mongolian administrative region of Ulanchab wrote a letter protesting at the new Chinese Republic’s plan to incorporate Mongolian regions into China. They wrote, ‘if [we Mongols] become the citizens [irgen] of the Chinese Republic [zhong hua irgen ulus], and the five races [töröl] unite and Mongol can no longer be our distinct name, then the bone-lineage/nationality [yasu ündüsü] of the Mongols [Monggol khümün-ü], born from Heaven in ancient times, will probably be obliterated’ (Munkh-Erdene 2006: 85-86). Descent from Heaven is a distinctive mark of rulership, not available to commoners. Thus the ‘lineage of the Mongols, born from Heaven’ indicates noble line, not mass ethnicity (Sneath 2007: 171-174). 55 The Chinggisid aristocracy, the Borjigid, traced descent from one of Chinggis Khan’s ancestors, Bodonchar.

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study of state socialist societies.56 However, although the assumed reality of ethnic groups became a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy in the state socialist era, they were associated with the backwardness of the past; the values to be aspired to were the Soviet goals of fraternal socialism (bratskii sotsialism) and proletarian internationalism (proletarskii internatsionalizm). But such political orthodoxy formed only a part of a wider form of historical imagination that might be termed ‘national populism.’57 By this I do not mean any particular political ideology, such as that characterized by Germani (1978: 116) as authoritarian movements based on class alliance between elites and a largely urban proletariat. Rather, I use the term more inclusively to indicate the intertwining of the nationalist and populist modes of imagination.58 Following Kaplonski (1998: 36), I use Liah Greenfeld’s notion of national identity as deriving from ‘membership in a people’ in which each member ‘partakes in its superior, elite quality’ with a resulting perceived homogeneity so that ‘a stratified national population is perceived as essentially homogenous, and the lines of status and class as superficial’ (Greenfeld 1992: 7).59 As Laclau (2005: 154) notes, ‘the construction of the “people” is the political act par excellence.’ Both nationalism and populism, then, require this construction, although, as Canovan (1981: 294) notes, the ‘exaltation of this ambiguous “people” can take a variety of forms.’ The imaginative project of Soviet-inspired nation-state construction required a Mongolian equivalent for the Russian concept of narod or ‘people.’ At first the term that was found was ard – a term that originally meant ‘commoner.’ The pre-revolutionary political discourse had not constructed the polity with reference to a single general ‘people.’ Subjects had appeared 56 Verdery (1996: 63) writes: ‘Sharing a kinship-familial metaphor, socialist paternalism and ethnonationalism as state-subject relations have a certain affinity.’ As Brubaker (1996: 17) notes, the Soviet state ‘repressed nationalism, of course; but at the same time […] it went further than any other state before or since in institutionalizing territorial nationhood and ethnic nationality as fundamental social categories.’ 57 We might consider this background understanding to be what Bourdieu calls doxic, referring to his notion of doxa – the universe of the undisputed. He writes: ‘Every established order tends to produce […] the naturalization of its own arbitrariness. […] This experience we shall call doxa, so as to distinguish it from an orthodox or heterodox belief implying awareness and recognition of the possibility of different or antagonistic beliefs’ (Bourdieu 1977: 164). 58 Laclau, following Worsley (1969: 245), notes ‘by “populism” we do not understand a type of movement – identifiable with either a special social base or a particular ideological orientation – but a political logic’ (Laclau 2005: 117). This logic entails a conception of the ‘people’ as a political force. Donald MacRae (1969: 168), for example, describes populism as based on the ‘belief in a community and (usually) a Volk as uniquely virtuous.’ 59 Greenfeld (1992: 11-12) distinguishes between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ nationalism, and the characterization discussed here reflects the logic of the civic type.

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in discrete categories. There were the nobility (taij nar/yazguurtan), the shar (members of the Buddhist monastic establishments), and the khar (secular commoners or arad). Political statements were constructed with respect to these categories, rather than to a general and inclusive national people. As late as 1934, when a politically active senior lama sought to address the Mongolians of Inner Mongolia, for example, he issued four separate pamphlets addressed to the taij nar (princes), the lamas, the youth, and the people (commoners), respectively.60 In 1924 the Soviet-backed revolutionary administration established the Bügd Nairamdakh Mongol Ard Uls (literally the ‘All Reconciled Mongol Commoner’s State’). The Mongolian term for republic means ‘all/everyone reconciled,’ so the new composition was an attempt to render ‘People’s Republic’ (Narodnaya Respublika) into Mongolian. But the word ard, although used as part of the compound term for People’s Republic, could not be convincingly transformed into ‘people.’ So the compound term ard tümen was used, meaning something like ‘myriad commoners,’ or ‘whole people,’ to reflect the notion of the masses required by the new political order. One of the principle architects of the Mongolian nationalist lexicon was Tsyben Zhamtsarano, a Buryat nationalist and ethnographer trained in St. Petersburg University. At this time Soviet activists, in particular, the Comintern, were creating a new vocabulary for ‘revolutionary’ national and ethnic groups. Zhamtsarano’s work can be seen as part of this wider project, which in effect translated European notions of nationhood into a Mongolian context. He identified various different historical Mongol polities as ‘tribes,’ that is, as mongolskie plemena in Russian. These, he claimed, were at a ‘pre-national’ stage, and he called for the establishment of a Mongol nation, arguing that all new states (ulus tör) were formed by a people sharing a common language (khel), ancestry (yazguur), religion (shashin), customs (yos), teachings (surtal) and territory (oron) (Atwood 1994: 23). This fitted well with the dominant notion of nationality, expressed by Stalin (1970: 60) thus ‘A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.’ 60 This was the Janggiya Khutugtu, active in the Ordos region. The term used in this document for ‘people’ (khümün ard [person commoner]) was an unfamiliar one – a direct translation of the Chinese term ren min. This suggests that no Mongolian term came readily to the Khutagtu’s mind, despite the fact that the Mongolian People’s Republic had been using its own term – ard tümen – for some time (see Yang and Bulag 2003: 88-89. Neither did Buddhist prayers utilize the notion of a general ‘people’ in the political sense, instead they used a yet broader category – khamag am’tan (all living creatures), including both humans and animals.

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The Mongolian term found to translate natsiya (nation) was ündesten, a term derived from the word for ‘root’ (ündes), used historically to describe the legitimate ancestry of the nobility (Atwood 1994: 19).61 This also reflects Liisa Malkki’s point that the arborescent root metaphor is a central element of nationalist discourse and imagery (Malkki 1992: 27). Mongolia itself was described as the ‘motherland’ (ekh oron), and a concept of ‘homeland’ (nutag), in which people have their roots, became a core value in the national political culture.

The Construction of Ethnicity Nationalism and ethnicity can be seen as constructed reciprocally, and as Alonso (1994: 391) notes, the anthropology of ethnicity suggests that ‘ethnicity is partly an effect of the particularizing projects of state formation.’ As Bulag (1998: 31-37) shows, the creation of ethnicity was another aspect of the socialist nation-building process, as new notions of collective identity were applied to the different categories of subjects within the state. A set of Mongol terms were chosen to translate the key elements of Soviet theory on the historical stages of ethnic communities. The Russian narodnost’ (ethnic group/nationality) was translated as yastan.62 Following the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, in which the state citizenry was made up of peoples of many ethnic groups or ‘nationalities,’ Mongols were registered as members of ethnic or national minority groups – yastan.63 These became official identities and the internal passports of citizens of the Mongolian People’s Republic recorded their yastan. The vast majority were registered 61 The term ündesten can also be used to translate natsionalnost, with regard to the peoples of the USSR, for example, and in some contexts natsionalnost can be translated using another Mongolian term – ugsaatan (race/nationality). I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers of this paper for pointing this out. Interestingly, the term ugsaatan (from the root ugsaa, meaning descent/ancestry) also used to mean people from noble families, since their descent was of evident importance. 62 The term rod (clan) was translated as obog. In historical accounts these terms were organized according to the Marxist version of the nineteenth-century evolutionary scheme by which tribes were made up of clans. The standard historical treatments in both Mongolia and Inner Mongolia followed the Marxist evolutionary scheme, with a kinship system/society (urag töröliin baiguulal) giving way to class relations and private property. See Gongor [1970, 1978] 1991, Rinchin 2001. 63 The census of Mongolia carried out in 2000 registered 23 notionally Mongol yastan (including the Khalkh) and four groups considered Turkic: the Kazakh, Urianghai, Uzbek and Tuvans (Dashbadrakh 2006: 135). See Hirsch (1997: 267) for the evolutionist scheme of narodnost’ and natsional’nost’.

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as Khalkha, making up 79% of the Mongolian population in 1989 census. There were 25 other yastan ethnic categories were identified, the largest of these, according to the 1989 census being the Dörvöd (55,000), Bayad (39,000), Buryat (45,000), Dariganga (29,000), and Zakhchin (23,000), and Uriankhai (21,000).64 The Kazakhs, many of whom had moved into the territory of what became the MPR in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, are now counted as a separate nationality (ündesten), although full citizens of the Mongolian state. They numbered over 120,000 in the 1989 census, most of them living in the far west of the country, in the province of Bayan Ölgii (Khurmetkhan 2007: 52). Like the tribe, the concept of ethnic group is rooted in the notion of kinship and common descent (Hobsbawm 1990: 63), or, as Alonso (1994: 392) puts it, the ‘false precept […] that ethnic groups are genetically pure breeding populations with distinct, homogeneous, and bounded cultures.’ Indeed, it is very clear that the yastan ‘ethnic groups’ were not autochthonous kinship communities, but politically defined categories that had been historically formed by rulers. When the Qing Kangxi emperor became overlord of the region known as Khalkha, the domains of the three khans who submitted to him became the three aimags (domains/administrative divisions) of what was to become Outer Mongolia. In the early eighteenth century a fourth Khalkha aimag was created. When, later that century, the Qing conquered the western Mongol Zünghar principality, by a mixture of military and diplomatic means, a set of new elements had to be fitted into the Qing administration. In addition to the four Khalkha aimags that were the core of the Outer Mongolian dominions of the Qing period, there came to be two Dörvöd aimags, seven Uriankhai and two Torguud khoshuus, and one khoshuu each designated Zakhchin, Myangad and Ööld.65 The relatively late incorporation of former Zünghar subjects into the regions that came to be Outer Mongolia left us with historical records that make clear the administrative acts by which 64 In the latest census carried out in 2000 the number of people registered as Khalkha had risen to 1.93 million, over 81% of the national population, while the numbers for the Kazakh had fallen to 103,000, after many of them moved to Kazakhstan in the early 1990s in response to the call by Kazakh President Nazarbayev for migration back to the homeland. In the 2000 census the ethnic population f igures were as follows: Dörvöd 67,000, Bayad 51,000, Buryat 41,000, Dariganga 32,000, Zakhchin 30,000, and Uriankhai 25,000. The larger of the other yastan included the Darkhad (19,000), Ööld (15,000), and Torguud (13,000) (National Statistical Office of Mongolia 2002: 50, Dashbadrakh 2006: 135) 65 When the Bogd Khan declared the independent statehood of his realm in 1911 it was composed of six aimags, and a total of 118 khoshuu and 56 ecclesiastical estates, subject to the Bogd Khan himself and other senior clergy. See Shirendev and Natsagdorj 1968: 6-11.

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groups of people acquired distinctive political identities that were later used as grounds for their identification as ethnic groups in the Soviet era. The Zakhchin (Borderers) of southern Khovd province, for example, was originally the name given to a Zünghar administrative division formed from a diverse set of subjects charged with the duty of acting as border wardens. After their lord surrendered to the Qing they were formed into a banner (khoshuu) and assigned duties to support the Manchu official at Khovd (Atwood 2004: 617). They remained administratively distinct and were labelled a yastan in the Soviet era. Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, the newly elected President of Mongolia, is of the Zakhchin ‘ethnic group.’ The electoral success of politicians from ‘ethnic minorities’ suggests that Mongolia’s political discourse is not dominated by the ‘Khalkh-centrism’ described by Bulag (1998: 137), since sub-national ethnicity has not proved to be a barrier to high office in the post-Soviet period. Politicians identified with ‘minority’ backgrounds have attracted plenty of ‘Khalkh’ voters, and there are, as yet, no political parties based on ethnicity or religious domination.66

Parliamentary Democracy and the Discourse of Corruption After the ‘democratic revolution’ of 1990, in which protests and a hunger strike by a new generation of political activists led to the resignation of the Soviet-style government and constitutional reform, Mongolia introduced a multiparty parliamentary system. Although the old Soviet-style ruling party, the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP), won over 80% of the seats, it nevertheless chose to share power with the fledgling opposition parties, and introduced further political reforms, including a new ‘nonSoviet’ constitution in 1992 (Sanders 1992). This placed Mongolia on a sort of middle road between parliamentary and presidential political systems (Munkh-Erdene 2010). The MPRP went on to win the 1992 elections but was defeated for the first time in 1996 by the Democratic Union coalition. The MPRP remained, however, the dominant political force in the country and swept back to power in a landslide victory in 2000. The opposition parties did better in the 2004 elections, which led to a hung parliament 66 As one of the anonymous reviewers of this paper pointed out, although the publication of the ‘ethnic origins’ of politicians has been relatively unusual, it has happened from time to time, and at least one popular newspaper (Zuuny Medee) has printed information on the ethnic backgrounds of members of parliament elected in 2008. The number of elected politicians from ‘ethnic minorities’ appears to have been roughly in proportion to their populations.

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and a coalition government, but the MPRP was returned to power in the 2008 parliamentary elections amid accusations of electoral fraud and, for the first time, violent riots leading to some loss of life and a national state of emergency. The final electoral result however, endorsed by international observers, gave the MPRP 46 of the 76 parliamentary seats to the Mongolian Democratic Party’s 27. Despite this outright majority, however, the MPRP chose to include their opponents in the new government. The leader of the MDP, Norovyn Altankhuyag, was appointed First Deputy Prime Minister. Six of the fifteen ministers of government are Democratic Party candidates – representing some 40% of posts. When one includes one deputy chair of the Ikh Khural, three of the seven chairs of standing committees, and three of the eight sub-committee chairs, it is clear that the Democratic Party has a good deal of representation. The Democrats could take further comfort from the victory of their candidate, Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, in the 24 May presidential election, creating another axis along which power has to be shared between the major political parties.67 From its outset, then, Mongolian parliamentary system has tended to be ‘consociational’ (Lijphart 1999), marked by a certain amount of inclusivity and power-sharing, despite occasionally bitter political in-fighting.68 The victors have generally tried to avoid outright polarization of the political class, cutting their opponents in on some portion of the available positions. This meant that in the early years of the new system the political struggle was not a fight to the death for either camp, and bitter though the arguments were, the system had a chance to stabilize without any major challenges to the system as a whole. There has been some quite wide-ranging change-overs of top posts in the public sector as a result of a change in the ruling party of government, but there has also been a good deal of continuity. Similarly, there is a mixture of opinion represented by television channels and newspapers with different political stances spanning the spectrum of party politics.69 67 Although each incoming president must suspend their party membership, they are still commonly associated with their former party, at least with regard to their political networks. 68 This is the sort of system that advocates of power-sharing (consociational) political systems such as Lijphart (1999) advocates. Consensual democracy of the sort found in Switzerland and Belgium, he argues, is a better system than the majoritarian ‘winner-takes-all’ system of Britain and the USA – and this is particularly true in divided or potentially divided societies. 69 Mongolian parliamentary democracy has gained considerable recognition in the West. Scanning across the various maps made showing political systems in post-Soviet Eurasia, Mongolia stands out as one of a few nations considered to have ‘a system like ours’ by major Western powers. Tables drawn up using Western criteria for democracy generally put Mongolia in the ‘fully democratic’ category. For example, the US-based Polity IV Database, whose funders include the CIA, rank each nation on a scale of +10 to –10 in terms of levels of democracy/

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Despite this apparent stability, however, the parliamentary system has to contend with powerful undercurrents of political tension. On 1 July 2008, rioters set fire to the headquarters building of the MPRP following allegations of electoral fraud. Five people died in the riot, and a state of emergency was declared. Of course, Ulaanbaatar is no stranger to protests, and allegations of voting fraud on the part of both the MPRP and the Democratic Party (or any of its almost innumerable predecessors or coalitions of the moment) have marred almost every election. But the riot of 1 July was very different, both in the fact that people lost their lives and the extent of the destruction. Mongolia’s parliamentary, semi-presidential democracy survived; and in the end the boundaries of acceptable political protest were re-established. But the incident revealed some hidden, or at least potential, tensions. Protesters and spectators that I talked to in the square that day expressed a mixture of grievances. There were particular complaints about the conduct of the election, of course, but there was also a wider frustration with the political process and a suspicion that those in power were more concerned with lining their own pockets than serving the public good. Anecdotal though this is, it reflects a wider set of public anxieties and debates in the country, which has been very evident in the national press. Mongolia’s situation is in many ways unique, but other post-Soviet societies have also seen the rapid introduction of a market economy and the rapid emergence of wealthy new elites.70 As in much of the former Soviet world, there has been a rapid increase in perceived corruption (avilgal ).71 It has become commonplace to think of bribery as an everyday part of Mongolian life – particularly among the relatively small new elite of wealthy businesspeople and politicians. autocracy. Mongolia has been ranked as +10 since 1997. This database is quite influential, used by academics such as Quan Li and Rafael Reuveny (2003). 70 Although we might dispute his notion of ‘completed democracy,’ Rose (2001: 106), for example, writes: ‘Corruption is the greatest obstacle to progress in postcommunist countries. The longer a regime uses free elections as a facade while those inside government use elected off ice to enrich themselves, the greater the divergence will become between those countries making progress toward the completion of democracy and those going nowhere. Moreover, the longer corruption persists at the elite level, the greater the likelihood that the mass of the electorate will become indifferent to dishonesty, or decide that the only way to deal with a corrupt state is to benefit from lawbreaking oneself, whether in the form of avoiding taxes, smuggling, or corrupting civil servants and elected representatives.’ 71 The term now commonly translated as ‘corruption’ is relatively new – avilgal, derived from the root verb ‘to take’ (avakh) and closely related to avilgalakh – to make illicit profit, extort money, or be covetous. By the end of the 1990s it seemed that most Mongolians had to give some sort of inducement to get things done, and a government survey of 1,500 Mongolians showed that over 70% thought corruption had become widespread in the post-Soviet era, while only 7% thought it had been widespread in the state socialist period (Sneath 2006: 89).

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This is linked in the popular imagination with the post-Soviet era – the ‘age of the market’ (zakh zeeliin üye). This discourse of everyday corruption should be distinguished, however, from the long-standing expectations and practices of gifting and mutual assistance within social networks, or tanil tal. These were well-established means of providing and receiving help and goods through family and friends in the state socialist period, and this was not generally seen as corrupt. In the ‘age of the market’ cash payments have become increasingly important and perceived corruption has mushroomed, but mutual help within social networks are still generally thought of in rather different terms than perceived corruption among the rich and powerful (Sneath 2006: 100-101). This public perception reflects both the corruption scandals that have continuously appeared in the press and the bitter experience of the privatization of state assets, which appeared to generate fortunes for a few while the majority were left with next to nothing.72 This was seen as corrupt in the wider sense, and has informed widespread notions of ‘moral decay’ (yös surtakhuuny yalzral) since the collapse of state socialism. There is a pervasive suspicion of an elite who are said to be ‘eating money’ (möngö idekh), that is, embezzling the public wealth. As the July 2008 riots showed, a danger of power-sharing and consensus building is that the public may begin to worry that a self-interested elite is monopolizing both political and economic power. There is particular concern about the growth of mining operations, many of them foreignowned, and seemingly the only sort of economic enterprises that have flourished while other industries have suffered. There is a fear that foreign companies are extracting the mineral wealth of the country, perhaps by buying off Mongolian politicians to do so. Public cynicism and discontent has been fed by the perception of a rather too-cosy accommodation between domestic and foreign big business on the one hand, and a political class 72 The media has represented corruption as a process whereby private wealth and commercial interest undermines state planning for the public benefit. Under the headline ‘City Strategic Planning Destroyed,’ the Ödriin Sonin describes the way that a ‘land mafia’ in the city government obtained permission for private land developments that contravene the necessary health and safety regulations (Ödriin Sonin, 19 December 2001). But articles also describe the ways in which businesses have to give bribes to operate. A survey of 375 companies in 2001 found that 44% reported that they always or sometimes paid some sort of extra payment or bribe when dealing with government agencies (Önöödör, 11 November 2001). Transparency International gave Mongolia a score of 2.7 in its 2009 ‘Corruption Perception Index,’ placing it within the most corrupt third of their world league table alongside, for example, Kazakhstan and Bolivia (see http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2009/cpi_2009_table).

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meshed together by myriad private understandings and arrangements on the other.73 However, despite a significant level of public disillusionment with the political class, electoral participation has remained reasonably good, by Western standards. Although the 2004 parliamentary election turnout was just over 60% (Tuya 2005: 68), the 2008 parliamentary election and 2009 presidential elections enjoyed voter participation of 76% and 74%, respectively. In general, nationwide political parties such as the MPRP and MDP, with their powerful youth, women and student organizations and their influence over public media, continue to dominate political identification and mobilization in Mongolia. In this process, appealing to rural voters is of crucial importance. The number of parliamentary seats assigned to different constituencies tends to slightly favour rural districts.74 Politicians have tried to retain the loyalty of their constituencies, the majority of which are rural, by stressing both their local links and struggling to win resources for their own districts. This pork-barrel aspect of politics has drawn the critical attention in the Mongolian press.75 Politically, the most salient sub-national form of collective identity is locality, rather than ethnicity. Since territories are divided into nested series of named administrative districts, in most cases locality is conceived of in terms of units of government. This need not be seen as a recent development; forms of regional political identity were of central importance in the past. During the Qing period, for example, Elverskog (2006: 134) argues that the khoshuu (administrative district/principality) became the primary political identity for Mongols of all social classes. Quite early in the history of the Mongolian People’s Republic the khoshuu units were judged to be impeding 73 Ödriin Sonin, one of the leading national newspapers, for example, ran an article entitled ‘D. Zorigt Leads the Parliamentary Rich in Wealth [UIKh dakh’ bayachuudyg khöröngööröö D. Zorigt khoshuuchilj baiv],’ listing the wealth and business interests of the richest members of parliament based on 2008 figures, noting that Dashdorjiin Zorigt, the richest, had an annual income of over 1.2 billion tögrög (about US$1 million) – an astronomic sum by the standards of most Mongols (Ödriin Sonin, 30 January 2010). 74 Most provinces (aimags) have about one parliamentary seat for between 10,000 and 20,000 voters, whereas in the city there are generally over 20,000 voters per seat. In general the MPRP has retained stronger support in the rural districts than the city, reflecting its genuinely nationwide party network of ‘cells’ (üür), which other political parties have struggled to match. 75 In an article headlined ‘Going Forwards? Or Stepping Backwards? [Uragshlakh uu? Urakh uu?],’ for example, the journalist P. Enkhjargal complains that the Democratic Party increasingly resembled the MPRP, and that the amount of money members of parliament of both parties were directing towards their own constituencies was rising to one billion tögrög (about US$1 million) and was set to reach US$2-3 billion in 2012 (Niislel Times, 24 February 2010, Sonin.mn).

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the social and economic development policies of the revolutionary state and abolished. Instead Mongolia’s territory was divided into 13 (later 18) provinces (aimags), composed of between about 10 and 30 districts (sums).76 The importance of ‘roots’ in local homelands is a central theme in Mongolian public life. With the collapse of Soviet communism as a viable political ideology, nationalism became one of the central features of the new political culture.77 The state celebration of Mongol tradition almost appeared to fill the gap left by the implosion of Marxist-Leninism. In both the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, the ‘homeland’ was elevated to the point of becoming a sacred principle. State-sponsored culture endlessly celebrated the saikhan ekh oron (beautiful motherland) in literature, song, poetry and art.78 The logic of people rooted in their native places also applied to parts of the nationstate, and the notion of the nutag (local homeland) plays an important role in the imagination of community. Politicians of all stripes have been keen to present themselves as having rural roots, with a strong sense of tradition. Partly this was to overcome perceived distance between the political elite and the bulk of the voting public, and to find common ground with which to connect to them, partly it was to appear fully Mongolian in a post-Soviet climate that celebrated Mongolian nationalism and identified the national people with the image of the traditional pastoral family.

Collective Identity and Local Homelands Although nationality has undoubtedly become a fundamental political category, other collective identities are important. Linguistically, collective identity is produced in a number of ways. Perhaps the most common method is using a collective noun derived from category name using the suffix -(ch) uud as in Mongolchuud (the Mongols), or in some cases -nar, as in taij-nar 76 New provinces (aimag) have been established in recent years bringing the number to 21, with a total of 338 sum districts. 77 This is comparable, to some degree, with what Linz and Stepan (1996: 401) describe for the former Soviet autonomous republics in which ‘the elites in charge of most of these newly independent states appealed to the nationalism of the dominant group in each republic.’ In the Mongolian case, however, this was largely an appeal to a civic Mongolian nationalism rather than a sub-national ethnic consciousness. 78 See, for example, works such as Gaitav’s Saikhan ekh oron (1978). The influential poem ‘Minii nutag’ (‘My homeland’) written by Dashdorjiin Natsagdorj, one of the founders of Mongolian literature, was published in the journal Mongol Ardyn Ündesnii Soyolyn Zam (National cultural path of the Mongolian people) in 1934.

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(the princes). The other usual way is using the suffix -ha 4n,79 which can be applied to nouns and personal names to distinguish a set of people, such as neg nutgiinkhan (the people of one locality/homeland) or Dorjiinkhon (the people of Dorj). The use of such a term need not imply the existence of a real social group. One could describe almost any category of people in this way; for example, one could speak of the people of one block of flats (neg bairnykhan), but this need not mean this set of people know each other or feel a common identity.80 There are a set of collective identities, however, that are widely recognized as social groups. Firstly there are members of a household, the domestic group (örkh/ger bül/am bül). These are often referred to by the name of the household head which is commonly the father, but might be the mother or even eldest brother, if they are seen as heading the household. There are terms for a somewhat larger family grouping, such as töröl which, like a number of terms describing relatedness such as khamaatan (relative), is somewhat vague, but generally means a group of bilateral kin.81 Another term, akh düü, is very flexibly employed. Although having a technical meaning of ‘senior and junior siblings’ it can be used rather like the English phrase ‘kith and kin’ and is often applied to non-kin to describe close friends and neighbours. There are also terms that indicate descent udam, udam ugsa (family/lineage), generally traced patrilineally, but not necessarily. In line with the re-imagining of a national people of common origin, people may speak of the Mongols as a whole as Chinggis khany udam (descendants of Chinggis Khan), whereas in technical terms only the former aristocracy, the Borjigid, could historically make that claim. Residential proximity, social links and shared life experience are a rich source of common identity terms, and are at least as important as 79 The a 4 is used to indicate the four possible vowels that may be used in line with Mongolian vowel harmony. 80 If one constructed a term such as ‘book people’ (nomynkhon), for example, the meaning might be a matter for speculation – anything from the Muslim notion of the ‘people of the book,’ to people with books or who are like books, and so on. 81 One may also speak of oiryn töröl (close kin) and somewhat like the usage of the English term ‘immediate family’ this is also a rather vague term with no very clearly agreed boundaries. Aff ines (khürgen) or even cousins or others who might otherwise be described as ‘distant kin’ (kholyn töröl) might be described as oiryn töröl if they were socially very close and – for example – usually lived in or nearby the family. A similar usage is described by Vreeland (1962: 155) and Mongolian language dictionaries of the eighteenth century, such as the Khorin naimatü tayilburi toil (Dictionary of twenty-eight volumes), describes the descendants of one grandfather as a töröl (Namjilma 1988: 1614).

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genealogical connection. The people of an encampment (khot, khot-ail) can be spoken of as a collective group; for example, ‘manai khotynkhon’ (the people of our encampment). The membership of this group will vary according to the households making up the encampment, and may include both kin and non-kin (Humphrey and Sneath 1999: 175). Some terms are used for people of the same locale, such as golynkhon (literally, ‘the people of a river’), but the most common locality-based terms are words for the people of an administrative unit. This is constructed from the name of the particular province (aimag), district (sum) or sub-district (bag), in the usual way, for example, Bürenkhaanynkhan (people of Bürenkhaan district). Common membership of the sum administrative district and bag sub-district is a relatively strong basis for claims of collective identity and mutual solidarity. These are actual social groups; their members lives are intertwined at some level or other. The children attend the same sum school, and the local government generally organizes various events such as an annual bayar naadam sporting festival. In some cases, however, disappeared administrative districts remain important. There have been larger local events organized in the name of an old khoshuu administrative district – for example, in Gov’ Sumber aimag the sum districts of the territory that had once been Borjigin Vangyn Khoshuu organize an annual ‘Borjigin Naadam’ near the aimag centre of Choir.82 The aimag (province) also forms an important basis for claims of collective identity, particularly for people in Ulaanbaatar, where it is commonly the primary term with which to describe one’s törsön nutag (birthplace/ homeland) (since unless one is talking to people from the same province one’s particular sum locality is unlikely to be relevant).83 Interestingly, these aimag (roots) are important even for those born in the city, so that one’s parent’s province of origin becomes a form of second-hand rural identity. Of course, this also reflects kin networks, since urbanites usually have numerous relatives and family friends in their parents’ aimags. 82 Similarly, at a bayar naadam and ovoo ceremony held in what is now Bürentogtokh sum in June 2008, those attending were described as Bürenkhaanykhan. This appeared unsurprising, since Bürenkhaan was the name of the bag where the ceremony took place. But in fact the category Bürenkhaanykhan included a number of people from a different sum altogether, and it turned out that there had been a separate Bürenkhaan sum up until the 1970s, when it was divided between two sums (Tsagaan Uul and Bürentogtokh), forming a new bag within each one. But the older identity remained, and the term referred to all those living in the bags that had used to form the old sum. 83 This is commonly spoken of using the same -nha 4n suffix, so one might talk of Selengiinkhen, or the slightly more formal term Selengechüüd to describe the people of Selenge province.

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Networks continue to be of vital importance for accessing resources and opportunities, and the claims of regional and local collective identities are often seen as highly influential. Such claims are reciprocal. Politicians may stress their local roots to appeal to rural voters, but they also have to demonstrate their commitment in return – through visits, ceremonial participation in public events, and the channelling of resources to their constituency. Chimediin Khürelbaatar, for example, a former economist and MPRP member of parliament from Uvs aimag, was Minister of Fuel and Power from 2007 to 2008 and was said to have packed the ministry with people from Uvs during his time there. Whatever the truth of this particular rumour, it reflects the widespread impression that regional connections are politically important. This is not a new perception. In the state socialist era the ruling circles of the party were identified with particular regions and aimags. Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal, for example, Prime Minister from 1952 to 1982, was from the western aimag of Uvs, and during his time many western Mongols advanced to senior positions in government (Bulag 1998: 92). Interestingly, since the collapse of state socialism local homeland identities have given rise to a new institutional form. The 1990s saw the rapid growth of the nutgiin zövlöl (local homeland councils). These organizations were established to operate as fundraising and lobby organizations, and also serve as a central node for personal networks that can link rural inhabitants to figures with a local attachment. Most were formed in the 1990s, many of them at a time of the sixtieth or seventieth anniversary of the foundation of the administrative district concerned. Officially classified as non-governmental organizations (töriin bus baiguullaga), a nutgiin zövlöl sprang up to represent every aimag and some sums in the national capital. Many other sum districts which do not have such representation in Ulaanbaatar have established nutgiin zövlöl in the provincial aimag centres.84 These councils approach figures linked to the locality that have become successful in business, politics or some other sector, and ask them to join the nutgiin zövlöl. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the largest and most active of these organizations are aimag councils operating in Ulaanbaatar. These typically have a management committee (udirdakh zövlöl) of around 10 to 25 members, and then a larger membership of 30 to 60 or so active members who help organize events and campaigns. The main aim of these organizations is to 84 It seems that many of these local sum councils operate without formal national registration or authorization as ‘non-governmental organizations’ (töriin bus baiguullaga).

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exert influence, rather than recruit large numbers of rank-and-file members, and in this they are quite unlike political parties or civic movements. The membership typically includes politicians (particularly members of parliament), business people (particularly the very wealthy), artists, academics, and now, increasingly, lamas. Since wrestling is the national sport, successful wrestlers are regional or national celebrities, excellent candidates for nutgiin zövlöl membership. Horse racing is another important national sport, so well-known horse trainers (uyaach) might also be invited to join. Those with official honours or decorations (gav’yaat) are routinely recruited. These circles of influence are, one might say, a quite self-conscious elite, in the original Paretian meaning of the term – that is, those with a high perceived level of achievement in a range of different vocations. The aimag level nutgiin zövlöl will do such things as raise funds, organize competitions, hold sporting events and give prizes to leading scholars, business people, etc. Much of their work is dedicated to promoting networking and inducting new members. They may also sponsor the publication of local histories, and ‘Who’s Who’ volumes of famous people from their aimag or sum. The sumyn zövlöl are similar but smaller, and generally less influential and wealthy, but they operate in a similar way, albeit on a smaller scale. They hold meetings around the New Year and frequently receive a visit from the head of the sum district government, to hear reports as to the situation in the sum and perhaps give him or her the benefit of advice and exhortation.

Identity and Ceremony Some of the most visible mobilizations of collective identities take place in public ceremony. In the post-Soviet period, one of the most important of these has been the ceremonies carried out at ovoo – ritual cairns decorated with wooden posts covered in prayer flags, usually located on ritually significant hills and mountains. These rites (takhilga) are carried out at both the national and local level. One of the duties of the President is to attend the most important of these mountain ceremonies, now held at five locations, each one carried out every four years or so. The first of these official state ovoo mountain rites was conducted at Mount Khentiikhan (also known as Khankhentii or Burkhankhaldun) in Khentii aimag in 1994, and the following year another ceremony was inaugurated at Mount Otgontenger in Zavkhan aimag. In 2004 the Altan-Ovoo ceremony in Sukhbaatar aimag became a state rite, and the following year Mount Altan Khökhii in Khovd

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aimag was added to the list.85 The most recent addition, at the time of writing, was Mount Sutai on the border between Gov’-Altai and Bayan-Ölgii aimags, inaugurated in 2008. These mountain ovoo ceremonies, although ostensibly a revival of Buddhist rites carried out until the suppression of the religious establishment by the revolutionary regime, form part of a series of rituals of state that have been devised and installed since the 1990s as part of the project to build a distinctive national brand of public culture. Costumes and props have been devised for these events, including presidential regalia, a ceremonial guard of honour, and the white and black standards of the state (töriin süld). These are reconstructions of those used by Chinggis Khan to symbolize civil and military command, respectively, and used in public ceremonies such as the opening of the national games (naadam). So it was that when the Altan Khökhii ceremony was due to take place on 6 July 2009, the newly elected President Elbegdorj arrived by helicopter to officiate. Although the worshiper-spectators and lamas (the most senior of which, Khamba Lam Choijamts, had been flown in from Gandan Monastery in Ulaanbaatar) had been carrying out rites for some three hours by the time Elbegdorj arrived, it was the presidential appearance that was the real focus of the event. At these events, state symbolism is at least as prominent as Buddhist imagery. Since the (male-only) rites carried out at this particular mountain had a martial association, the black süld military standard had also made the journey from the capital and was ceremonially placed by the ovoo, in front of the fluttering Buddhist prayer flags and khadag silk scarves. Alongside the chanting lamas using drum and bell there was a ceremonial military band and a troupe of musicians with national instruments and costumes. Another recently introduced national symbol, the töriin ikh num (Great Bow of State), was also incorporated into the rites, and at the designated moment a national champion archer stepped forward to shoot an arrow high over the heads of the crowd. The entire event was coordinated by a well-known television presenter from the capital, who acted as master of ceremonies, using a PA system. The President made a speech stressing the importance of the ovoo ceremony in the democratic era for celebrating Mongolia’s traditions, history, people and environment. At the front, in seats of honour, sat national and local 85 I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer of this paper for the following information: A newspaper report (Zuuny Medee, 3 July 2007) stated that the state ceremonies were inaugurated by President Ochirbat in 1995. The decree issued by President Bagabandi (26 April 2004) on state worship ceremonies listed the mountains of Burkhankhaldun, Bogdkhaan, Otgontenger and Dariganga Ovoo, which appears to be another name for Altan-Ovoo, Sükhbaatar aimag.

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politicians, as well as representatives of the nutgiin zövlöl. The ceremonial guard of honour paraded the Mongolian national flag, accompanied by the Khovd aimag flag and, since the mountain was almost on the border between the provinces, the flag of the neighbouring aimag of Uvs. The sum districts also hold much smaller, local, ovoo ceremonies, although the main attraction is really the annual bayar naadam sporting contests of wrestling and horse racing that are held after the ritual – a long-standing feature of rural Mongolian life dating back to the state socialist period and beyond. Indeed, the ovoo ceremony (when it takes place) is a relatively recent addition to a sporting and social occasion. The district governor or other local dignitary will usually officiate, and a lama will often be brought in to conduct the ovoo rite itself, but in many cases the event will be sponsored and paid for by one or more wealthy patrons.86 Sometimes this role is rotated among local families and officials. Sometimes a ceremony may be sponsored by a family in remembrance of a deceased parent, literally following the saying: ‘Etseg ekhee dursakh, uul ovoogoo takhikh’ (‘Remember one’s father and mother, make offerings at the mountain ovoo’). Such local ceremony also reflects the importance of the nutag (local homeland) for urban elites. A large ovoo ceremony and naadam (games) held in a sum district of Khövsgöl aimag in 2008, for example, turned out to be sponsored by the three brothers in memory of their late father, who had lived there. Two of these were famous wrestlers, now based in Ulaanbaatar, and the third a successful businessman living in the aimag centre of Mörön. Although technically a rite for the local savdag deities, the gazryn ezed (masters of the land) of the particular area, many of those attending were friends and family of the brothers from the national capital or provincial centre with little to do with the locality. As in the case of the state ovoo rites, such ceremonies are valued as expressions of national and local traditions, rooted in the landscape of the nation-state.

Ethnic Mobilization in the Post-Soviet Period The ‘ethnic groups’ (yastan), although identified and constructed in the state socialist era, had generally been diminishing in importance as collective identities during the late Soviet period. But from the 1990s ethnicity began to gain greater visibility, as part of a process presented as the revival of traditional culture and a rediscovery of ‘roots’ covered over by Soviet 86 Increasingly, local political party branches are becoming involved in such takhilga events.

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modernism. There was also a sense in which collective identities of all sorts were being used in the search for mutual-help networks in the often precarious post-Soviet economic and social turmoil. Yastan membership carries with it some sense of relatedness and common origin, but only for a certain proportion of people. Many Mongolians do not think of their ‘ethnic’ designation as particularly important, whereas most are very conscious of their locality identities. This is more true for some yastan than for others. Buryats represent a particularly prominent and cohesive category. Significant numbers of Buryats appeared as refugees moving into Mongolia from Russian territory at the start of the twentieth century and were targeted by the early revolutionary regime for suspected counter-revolutionary activity. This history of political persecution and familiarity with Russian culture made them a relatively distinctive grouping, naturally associated with the Buryat Republic in Russian territory, which produced publications in a distinctive dialect. Projects to revive Buryat ‘traditions’ emerged quickly in the early 1990s. Even in this case, however, as a political force Buryat identity seems less important than locality – politicians such as Sanjaasürengiin Oyuun cultivated local support of Buryats in Dashbalbar sum, her father’s birthplace in her Dornod constituency, for example, but there was never any attempt to form a Buryat-wide political block. In the 2004 election, as a leading figure in national politics, she fought and won a constituency in Ulaanbaatar, far from these Buryat rural family ‘roots.’ Party organizations, then, represent more powerful forces for political mobilization that ethnic or even regional identification. This is even true of the Kazakhs, who as the second official nationality of Mongolia, occupy a more ambiguous position in the landscape of nationalist imagination. After all, the Kazakh’s have ‘their own’ country, virtually neighbouring Mongolia, and as a Turkic-speaking group with an Islamic heritage, form a far more visibly different category of distinct subjects within the nation-state. To date, however, there has been thankfully little by way of adversarial ethnonational mobilization. There are Kazakhs members of both the MPRP and opposition parties, and Kazakh MPs represent areas such as Bayan-Ölgii, where many Kazakhs live, but these have not successfully formed a political bloc. There are a number of Kazakh cultural organizations, often with links to Kazakhstan and other Islamic nations, but these are not as yet party-political formations. Ethnic mobilization as a cultural project, rather than a party-political one, is anything but a spent force. Take, for example, the Khotgoid yastan, numbering something over 7,200 in the 2000 census and living mostly in southern Khövsgöl and northern Zavkhan aimags. In Qing times there had been four

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Khotgoid khoshuus, and in the 1930s these were divided into sum districts in two aimags – Zavkhan and Khövsgöl.87 Members of these eleven sums were registered as Khotgoid unless they were included in one of the other official ethnicities. Intellectuals such as Prof. Ch. Dagvadorj of the National University of Mongolia, and Dr. S. Chuluun of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, have worked hard in recent years to promote their collective identity, and celebrate a distinctive culture, history and literary heritage.88 Raising awareness and historical education are key methods, and books on the Khotgoid heritage have been given to local schools. These efforts have been highly appreciated by politicians who can claim membership of this particular yastan, such as the former Mongolian Prime Minister Sanjaagiin Bayar. Although born in Ulaanbaatar himself, his father Sanjaa was a historian from Tömörbulag sum, Khövsgöl, one of the Khotgoid districts, and Bayar himself has sponsored and supported the recent establishment of a Khotgoid cultural centre in Ulaanbaatar. This identity is valorized by the figure of Chingünjav, a national historical hero whose eighteenth-century rebellion against the Qing was portrayed as a valiant early attempt to win Mongolian independence (Kaplonski 1993). This can be seen to be part of a wider trend by which academic knowledge producers, particularly in history and ethnography, have responded to a perceived demand for ethnic identification and mobilization. Many people are not particularly concerned with such yastan identities, but in recent years, some whose parents were registered as Khalkh have now rediscovered their Khotgoid roots.89 Interest in the yastan has grown and several local schoolteachers in Bürentogtokh sum, one of the districts originally within a Khotgoid khoshuu, were keen to study and teach Khotgoid customs.90 87 Far from an ethnically pure population, again the historical record shows that the Khotgoid were originally a heterogeneous group that became the subjects of a particular ruler – the seventeenth-century Khalkha prince Sholoi Ubashi Khung-Taiji (1567-1623), younger brother of Laikhur Khan. He campaigned against the Oirats and conquered territories and subjects in the north-west of what is now Mongolia, which his descendants continued to rule until Gendün Daiching submitted to the Qing in 1694. The Manchus became overlords of the Khotgoid principality, dividing it into four khoshuu to be ruled by Gendün Daiching and his descendants (Atwood 2004: 310). 88 Dr. Chuluun, for example, whose 2004 doctoral dissertation and subsequent several works were on the Khotgoid, has been active in engaging politicians and organizing related activities such as the 2010 three-hundredth anniversary of Chingünjav’s birth. 89 As in the case of a recent visitor to the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the National University of Mongolia, for example, who had come to find an academic who worked on the Khotgoid since she herself was keen to rediscover her Khotgoid roots. 90 A schoolteacher who advocated the study of Khotgoid customs described them as ‘closely related people’ (oiryn töröliin khün), indicating the association between shared descent and the yastan (ethnic group).

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Conclusion In the era of parliamentary politics, ceremony and public ritual continue to play an important role in projects to reconstruct tradition, assert collective identity and deploy concepts of belonging. Here we see particularly clearly the terms of collective identity used normatively to indicate sets of people who ought to feel some sort of commonality within a particular discourse – be it kinship, ethnonational history, or locality. Although the concept of a national people has been deeply and powerfully installed in public culture, the mobilization of other forms of collective identity, and the claims by politicians and others to mutual loyalty and solidarity, largely remain as such – claims and projects. They are by no means always successful. Some people are concerned with ethnic history and identity, but many others are not. Indeed, beyond the immediate networks of family and friends, the collective identities that seem to have generally the most importance are largely those of locality – the sum and aimag administrative districts. The mobilization of collective identity can take many forms – claims of common ethnicity or locality may be rooted in institutions, such as state-produced districts and their zövlöls; but they may also be generated by smaller sets of households using the idiom of descent or relatedness. There are also new projects of mobilization. One example is the recently established Ongi Golynkhon Khödölgöön (Movement of the Ongi River People), established in 2001 by Ts. Mönkhbayar, a herdsman from Uryanga sum in Övörkhangai aimag. This is a political activist group formed for the protection of the Ongi River from pollution caused by the numerous small mining operations that had been licensed to mine for gold in the river basin, and whose waste was polluting the river. Indeed, increasing demand for water by mining operations threatened the future of the river, which feeds Lake Ulaan Nuur. Water is a vital resource for herders, and the complaint that acquisitive mining companies were destroying the livelihoods of rural people struck a powerful chord in public opinion. The River Ongi runs from the foothills of the Khangai Mountains in Övörkhangai aimag into Dundgov’ and then Ömnögov’ aimags to the south. To mobilize support across eight sums in three provinces Mönkhbayar used the term golynkhon (people of a river) and the movement has been remarkably successful. The organization has a website and boasts a membership of 1,600 people. It has gained some global media recognition and Mönkhbayar has won an international award – the 2007 Goldman Environmental Prize. Interestingly, the aims have become wider than just protecting the supply of water in the river. The organization aims to promote cultural heritage, including the

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three monasteries on the river, and has recently published a book for use in schools about both the environment and the people of the river basin.91 We can see collective identities in Mongolia as discursive claims, rather than a series of ‘social building blocks’ that fit neatly inside each other, from household to region to nation. The terms used for collective identities are employed flexibly, referring to a wide range of categories of people, and applied to different contexts and modes of imagination – national, regional, ethnic, religious and so on. The range of social groupings referred to in this way are often overlapping and incoherent – in the discourse of ethnonational tribalism the members of the Khotgoit yastan might appear unitary, but they belong to different aimags and sums, each a potentially significant identity in the context of regionalism or social networks, and represented by different nutgiin zövlöls. The same persons might be referred to as members of more or less inclusive kinship categories – bilateral horizontal töröl or vertical descent udam, members of encampment or residential units, or members of work-unit communities of non-kin (khamt olon).92 In each case these are context-specific groupings, dependent on a particular discourse or point of reference – be it as strangers in a capital city, activists in an environmental movement, or participants in national or local ceremony. We can see each as projects of mobilization, including the micro-mobilization projects of households concerned with common descent and stressing their local rural roots, using the idiom of descent or relatedness.

91 The organization forms part of a wider association, the Mongolian Rivers and Lakes Movement (Mongolyn gol, nuuruudyn khödölgöön). There is a similar environmental protection organization, the Khövsgöl Lake Owners (Khövsgöl dalain ezed), who fight pollution of the lake by oil and phosphates. I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers of this paper for this point. 92 The term khamt olon (many together) may be compared to the Russian kollektiv (collective).

6

The Age of the Market and the Regime of Debt The Role of Credit in the Transformation of Pastoral Mongolia93

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 93 This chapter draws upon material collected by the Oral History of Twentieth-Century Mongolia project funded by an AHRC grant (AH/E002277/1).

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of monetary economy. But many things are provided for others using nontransactional 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. Close relatives of herding households can expect meat in winter, and dairy products in summer, and this is often a significant proportion of a household’s total livestock product.94 In the collective era, all sorts of goods and assistance were obtained from relatives and friends through what was termed tanil tal (‘networking,’ literally ‘friend/acquaintance side’). Although these practices have declined markedly since that time they remain important. One might term such transfers an ‘economy of favours,’ ‘indigenous service economy’ (Gell 1992), ‘exchange network’ or ‘field of reciprocity,’ but they are not talked of as such, and the relationships are substantially distinct. These sorts of transmissions are so common and expected that they can be seen as materializations of the social relations themselves, a result of expectations and obligations generated by kinship and friendship connections. As I have argued elsewhere (Sneath 2006), rather than transactions, we can see these as enactions of aspects of persons and roles for which the language of obligation and expectation is more appropriate than the idiom of exchange. Social relations with strangers may also be materialized in transfers. In everyday rural life expectations of hospitality (zochlomtgoi zan) entail routine material transfers to others. Old friend or complete stranger, any visitor to a herding household may expect to receive tea, dried curds and other snacks, at the absolute minimum, and usually a meal and night’s stay, if needed. If consumables are visible then a guest may help themselves, and the way to ask for something is simply to ask if there is any (bainuu?). Transfers of this sort can be very substantial, but they do not produce debt. We might apply the term to one of these relationships and ascribe a feeling of indebtedness to one or other party, but in reality the term ör (debt) could not be properly applied to this relationship. A quite different vocabulary is used for obligations (üüreg) and favours (ach).95 94 See Sneath (1993) for a more detailed account of rural networks in the late state socialist and early neoliberal period. 95 Gift giving remains very common, for example, and does not answer to transactional logic. In most cases presents are seen as legitimate ways of showing gratitude or respect and are defined in appropriate terms, for example, beleg (gift), to ‘honoured the hand’ (gar tsailgakh). A middle-aged man who was engaged in obtaining a university place for his son gave a substantial gift to an educational official, but, he explained ‘this was not a bribe, but he helped me in this matter so I ‘honoured his hand’ (gar tsailgakh), I wanted to express my gratitude.’ Literally ‘ene n’ kheel khahuul’ bish kharin minii ajilyg büteej ögsön uchraas garyg n’ tsailgaj, ööriinkhöö

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Mongolia’s ‘Age of the Market’ The neoliberal reforms of the early 1990s dismantled Mongolia’s state socialist economy and plunged the country into a deep economic crisis. The security of employment in state enterprises evaporated, poverty and unemployment soared. Families were forced to develop diverse coping strategies to make ends meet in the new climate. The ability of most people to help members of their networks declined. The cousin who used to be able to get leather from his work in the boot factory had lost his job, if his relatives needed some they would have to buy it. The truck driver who used to take his friend’s children to school had no fuel to make the trip, unless the family could find the cash for him to buy some. Relations of mutual help became entangled in monetized logics, and since many people now needed cash, the most common requests for help became appeals to borrow money. Almost everyone, then, became enmeshed in monetized webs of obligation now quantified in terms of cash.96 The rapid growth of lombard – pawnbroker shops – in the 1990s reflected this new reality. Pawning valuables became a common strategy for people thrust suddenly into the margins of poverty. The use of the lombard tended to become cyclical; people would surrender items as security for a loan, later when they found the money they would pay off the debt and interest and reclaim their property, only to find that they were forced to pawn valuables again when their money ran out (Højer 2012). As they became more established, however, commercial banks began to offer personal loans, particularly for larger sums. This process of collateralization is one way in which new assets, resources and values have been produced. All sorts of things became economic resources that had not been available to such a discourse in the past. Land, for example, became a real or potential economic resource since the advent of a programme bayarlasan setgeliin ilerkhiilel bolgon ögsön gej yar’j baisan yum’ (see Sneath 2006: 99). This is entirely different from the conceptual vocabulary of transaction; indeed, if it was described in such terms it would be considered unambiguously corrupt. 96 These personalized debts between family and friends can also sever relationships. In 2010, for example, the man I shall call ‘Dorj’ was the executive director of a company in Ulaanbaatar importing kitchen goods and had saved a considerable amount of capital. He decided to help six of his unemployed friends by buying each a taxi for around $3-4,000 (4-5 million MNT), each on the understanding they would repay this over a year or so by paying $16 (20,000 MNT) each working day. Within a few months none of the six were able to keep up these payments, but since he understood they had genuine financial difficulties he was reluctant to press them to repay. His friends started avoiding him because of their embarrassment and the result was the loss of both his capital and this set of friends.

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of privatization that began with urban land and is now interacting in complex ways with the rights to the still largely public pasture land. All sorts of items moved into the commercial realm if they could be made collateral for loans, at first the apartments privatized in the 1990s, then plots of land as they became forms of property; even fashionable mobile phone numbers and desirable number plates have become valued so that they can be used as collateral. The contemporary regime of debt has emerged along with two sorts of insecurity. The first is the familiar uncertainties of market fluctuation. The changing prices of products that people rely upon for their livelihoods may face households with unexpected falls in income. In the global recession of 2008, for example, the prices of cashmere plummeted, causing a sharp reduction in rural incomes. Cashmere has become one of the few livestock products that is still exported in the neoliberal era and commands good prices. Mongolian pastoralists have doubled the proportion of goats in their herds since the early 1990s, and most have become heavily reliant upon the income from cashmere sales. Since 1992 prices have boomed and bust three times, dropping from around $100 a kilo in the peaks to about half this value in the troughs. The prices paid to pastoralists are much lower, of course, but follow the fluctuations, so the prices they could expect dropped from $42 a kilo in 2007 to just $12 a kilo in 2008 (Marin n.d.: 13), and bounced back to around $40 a kilo in 2010. Similar market fluctuations affect all businesses, of course, creating comparable – if usually less dramatic – fluctuating fortunes for urban households. The other sort of risk is environmental, and this is a particular problem for pastoralists. Harsh winters and summer droughts can lead to the loss of very large numbers of livestock. Many households have lost their entire herds as the result of extreme weather, and in such situations herders are often forced to take on debt. This problem, what Marin (n.d.: x calls ‘double exposure’ – to both market and environmental risks – has helped fuel a new regime of debt in Mongolia.

The Old Regime of Debt In the twentieth century Mongolia experienced two transformations of social order; in the 1920s from aristocracy to Soviet-style state socialism, and in the 1990s from modernist socialism to neoliberal democracy. Each of these transformations introduced new state orthodoxies and associated political economies. Although in general the introduction of Soviet modernism was the most far-reaching transformation, when it came to

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the organization of animal husbandry, upon which most rural inhabitants rely for their livelihoods, there were certain ways in which the neoliberal era represented a more radical break with the past. The new regime of property and citizenship that was introduced was one in which district authorities were no longer able to command labour to maintain local political economies (Sneath 2004). In other ways, however, Mongolia’s ‘age of the market’ has produced features that resemble the pre-revolutionary political economy. One of these is the role of debt. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century Mongolia became enormously indebted to Chinese firms, within the Qing empire. In the late nineteenth century the increasingly impoverished population struggled to pay the interest owed on debts, which in some districts exceeded the total capital value of all the property in the unit (Bawden 1968: 203). Historians consider the burden of ever-accumulating interest a major cause of the social unrest that fuelled the struggle for independence and led to the foundation of the Mongolian state in 1911 (Bawden 1968, Sanjdorj 1980). In pre-revolutionary Mongolia commoners, aristocrats and local government all borrowed heavily, at high rates of interest, from Chinese merchant f irms who traded consumer goods for livestock products. These f irms operated in each of the principalities (khoshuu) that made up the Mongol territories of the Qing and the later independent Bogd Khan state. They had become closely intertwined with the aristocratic state, financing various occasional needs of princely administrations, and supplying all sorts of consumer goods to their subjects. These firms became, in effect, partners (albeit ultimately junior ones) in the administration of the aristocratic state. Indeed, khoshuus generally appointed one such merchant house to be its tünsh – partner or associate – to act as its principle banker and favoured commercial agent. The khoshuu as an administrative unit frequently serviced a debt with their tünsh, and nobles often took personal loans amounting to thousands of silver taels (ounces). However, they often managed to get some or all of this debt transferred to their subjects (Atwood 2004: 97, Bawden 1968: 100 and 203, Sanjdorj 1980: 80). The crushing poverty and dismal living standards of the hopelessly indebted commoners of Mongolia struck nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European travellers as extreme. This regime of debt left its mark: the saying goes ‘Örgüi bol bayan, övchingüi bol jargal’ (‘To be without debt is to be rich; to be without illness is to be fortunate’). Much of the commoner debt was produced in particular ways. The dominant commercial transactional form at the time (one which emerged again in the 1990s), was ‘barter trade’ in which merchants took useful goods

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out to pastoral encampments and traded them directly for livestock or livestock products. Silver and other forms of cash held limited appeal for people several days ride from any place where you can purchase goods, and mobile pastoralists have long tended to want to acquire the goods they need on the spot. However, these ‘barter’ transactions were monetized in the sense that the values of the items traded were calculated in terms of money prices and translated on the spot into goods, so that the difference could be made up using one of the various currencies in circulation (the main ones being silver, tea, and sheep). Frequently, however, pastoralists needed goods that they could not pay for, and ran up debts. Partly this reflected the pastoral cycle – products such as wool and cashmere only appear in certain seasons and this might not coincide with needs. The merchant houses also specialized in loans of currency – the main ones being silver and tea blocks – that might be needed to pay tax liabilities. They would often leave the livestock traded in this way for the pastoral household to herd for them, and under these arrangements, which reflected the established süreg tavikh relations for leasing out herds, the offspring of their animals also became their property. If these livestock were lost as a result of bad weather or other causes the household would be left with the debt, which would increase in line with the expected growth of the herd. The Mongolian language reflects the reproductive logic of these property relations. The term for the interest generated by a loan is khüü (son, boy or child). Indeed the term for finance is sankhüü – composed of san (treasury/wealth) and khüü (son/interest), since it entailed managing the growth of wealth. By the nineteenth century merchant houses owned huge numbers of livestock.97 The debts mounted, and by the early twentieth century it had become so enormous as to defy any realistic prospect of repayment, despite enormous livestock exports (Onon and Pritchatt 1989: 4, Atwood 2004: 97). However, the debt itself was overtaken by political events. The Soviet-backed Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party gained power in the early 1920s, eliminating the aristocratic and monastic elite, and expelling Chinese merchant firms and their debts in 1928. At first the new state struggled to construct any sort of centrally planned economy, but it made rapid progress after World War II when Soviet investment fuelled the growth of industry and urban centres. Pastoralists were, eventually, relatively successfully 97 Sanjdorj (1980: 91) notes that in the late nineteenth century, Chinese traders were taking 25,000 horses, 10,000 cows, and 250,000 sheep from the area of Ikh Khüree (Urga) alone every year. It seems likely that throughout Mongolia as a whole something like 5% of the total livestock wealth was exported each year, much of this likely to have been interest on debts.

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integrated into the new national economy through the introduction of large politico-economic territorial units – the collectives (negdel) and state farms (sangiin aj akhui). Introduced largely in the 1950s, the collectives and state farms managed pastoralism (and some agriculture) in each local government district (sum). They typically included something in the order of a thousand households, about half of which were specialist mobile pastoralists living in encampments throughout the district, and the other half worked in support and service jobs in a central settlement. Pastoral households were organized into small groups called bases (suur’), and these were grouped into production brigades (brigad) and sections (kheseg). Households were assigned livestock to herd, and received a regular income. The collectives owned the bulk of the livestock of the district but herding households were allowed a certain number of livestock (50, in the 1980s, or in some regions, 75) of their own to supply domestic needs. Brigades and sections would move livestock to different allocated seasonal pastures, and when necessary collective managers would employ the pastoral technique of otor, by which livestock are repeatedly moved over distant and lesser-used pastures at times of fodder shortage, as a method of intensively feeding them (Humphrey and Sneath 1999: 233-264). Land was ultimately owned by the state, use was managed by the collective management, and pastoral households generally had recognized areas of pasture within the areas allocated to their group. The collectives also maintained machinery for transportation and hay-cutting services. Pastoralists were moved on the longest legs of the annual migration by collective trucks, and hay was delivered to help feed livestock during the difficult months of winter and early spring. This coordination and support of pastoralism is generally viewed as a very positive aspect of the old system by herders, and has been sorely missed since the advent of the ‘age of the market.’ The collectives used their own accounting systems. Salaries and bonuses earned by the negdel members were held as credit against which pastoralists could buy goods from the collective’s ‘mobile shops’ that toured the encampments by truck. If they needed money in paper currency (belen möngö [ready money]) they would withdraw it from the financial department of their collective or state farm. This was the collectives answer to the Chinese merchant houses barter trade, and it was thought of as successful, since wages were relatively high and Mongolia’s integration into the Comecon trading block brought a selection of industrial products to the pastoralist’s door. These might have been considered unimpressive by Western European standards, but were nevertheless very welcome to rural Mongolians. Staples were rationed

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and subsidized, and since luxuries were generally in shorter supply than state salaries, personal debt did not present itself as a significant problem.98

Dismantling State Socialism 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 neoliberal 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. As Ferguson (2009), the term neoliberalism has a range of different meanings, ranging from a synonym for capitalism to certain modes for the creation of subjects. Here it can serve to describe the macroeconomic doctrine, described by Harvey (2005: 2) as advocating the liberation of individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an 98 Informants interviewed as part of the Oral History of Twentieth-Century Mongolia project often described the collective era as one in which they did not have debts. A 43-year-old music teacher and former herder from Malai sum in Ömnögov,’ for example, noted that people ‘didn’t have debts, so at that time their salaries were all spent on their own living [costs] and their children’ [ör shirgüi ingeed tukhain üyeinkhee tsaling odoo ööriinkhöö am’drald ür khüükhdüüddee büren zartsuulaad] (interview 080823A). A 67-year-old retired herder from Altanbulag remarked ‘we would buy clothes for our children and food and drink and next month’s salary meant we never had any debt’ [Khüükhdüüddee khuvtsasyg n’ avch ögnö khool undyg n’, daraagiin tsalin boltol yeröösöö ör tavikhgüi] (interview 080502A). One informant (080810A) did describe the obligation to work for the collective as a debt (ör), but this was unusual.

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institutional framework appropriate to such practices […] if markets do not exist (in areas such as land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution) then they must be created, by state action if necessary. But beyond these tasks the state should not venture. State interventions in markets (once created) must be kept to a bare minimum.99

The programme to privatize collective and state enterprises began in 1991. 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 property 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. A quarter of a million former collective and state workers became directly dependent on small holdings of livestock. 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. Livestock numbers began to rise. Pastoralists valued herd wealth in its own right and now relied upon their domestic animals for subsistence, so increasing herd size became a matter of food security. From 1990 to 1998 the national herd increased by over 20% to nearly 32 million head. However, the efficiency of pastoralism declined.100 The exports of livestock and livestock products collapsed, incomes, public services and living standards declined dramatically (World Bank 1994: 19, Griffin 1995: viii). The number of people living below the poverty line increased from almost zero in 1989 to over 33% in 1998 (United Nations Systems in Mongolia 1999: 5). Pastoralism began to fail to provide basic food security for a growing number of households, and a steady flow of people moved into the semi- and informal economies of peri-urban peripheries, particularly the vast city of yurts and shacks around Ulaanbaatar, the geriin khoroolol. 99 As a political position this generally entails, as Ferguson (2009: 170) puts it, ‘a valorization of private enterprise and suspicion of the state, along with what is sometimes called “free-market fetishism” and the advocacy of tariff elimination, currency deregulation, and the deployment of “enterprise models” that would allow the state itself to be “run like a business.”’ 100 By 1998 survival rates of offspring had fallen by around 10%, and livestock totals were only able to rise because levels of marketing and consumption declined by about 20% (National Statistical Office of Mongolia 1999: 83-84).

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Distribution of Liabilities As Verdery argues (2004: 140), new proprietary regimes can be analysed in terms of the distribution of liabilities, rather than simply goods and assets. In this case the new property rights became stakes in wider systems that included objects, resources and the organization of labour. This also brought a share in the risk that this network might collapse or operate unsuccessfully, and new pastoral sector was extremely vulnerable to bad weather. This was made tragically clear in the winters of 1999-2001 when Mongolia lost some six million livestock, a fifth of the national total. These zud (disasters caused by severe weather) were the result of an unusually dry summer followed by a savagely cold winter. Losses were concentrated in some regions – one province, Dundgov’, was particularly badly affected, losing more than a quarter of its livestock. Across the country some 2,000 households were left without any livestock at all after the first winter, and many more were left with enviably small herds. Since then major livestock loss from gam (drought) and zud has become an endemic feature of the pastoral sector. The zud of 2010 was one of the most sever, causing the loss of more than eight million livestock (United Nations Development Programme 2010: 1). Although zuds are the result of unexpectedly harsh conditions, these crises were entirely predictable. Severe weather of this sort occurs periodically in Mongolia, and a number of measures had been developed to mitigate its effects. Mobility was an important technique; herds were moved from the most badly affected localities to areas where conditions were better. This could be done rapidly in the collective era as managers could use teams of trucks and coordinate movements centrally. The collectives and state farms also stockpiled hay, which could be used to provide extra fodder for exhausted animals, and this also relied upon the motor pools for distribution to pastoral encampments. The livestock losses themselves are in fact less important than their differential effects on the livelihoods of pastoral households. Some herds were wiped out entirely, and the poorest households had so few livestock to begin with that they were vulnerable to any sort of loss. In the collective era even these dramatic levels of livestock loss, should they have somehow occurred, would not have threatened the basic food security of pastoralists; total livestock numbers always recovered and collectives were restocked from other districts. Risk, as well as property, had been centralized – firstly by the negdel and secondly by the state itself which ultimately underwrote the collective’s operation.

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But the tiny, independent pastoral producers that have been created by the privatization of pastoralism now face destitution if their livestock die. Half the Mongolian population had become directly dependent on their own herds for subsistence in a massive distribution of risk. The Mongolian government, made acutely aware of this by recent events, has begun to develop systems for spreading risk that are compatible with the neoliberal economic reforms. In March 2001 the government began debating a new Livestock Insurance Law in the hope of reducing the risks to pastoral producers. However, the result was that the World Bank launched a livestock insurance programme with the aim of combining the insurance products of commercial companies with a government-financed safety net, and this has led to a pilot scheme that was begun in three provinces in 2006 (Maul and Skies 2006). It remains to be seen if these will have a positive effect, but there is considerable public scepticism about its prospects. Along with the new political economy came a new citizenship regime in which the associated neoliberal ‘arts of government’ are also in play.101 The pastoralist has been pressed to become the ‘responsibilized’ citizen that Ferguson (2009: 172) describes, supposed to be operating as a miniature firm, ‘responding to incentives, rationally assessing risks, and prudently choosing from among different courses of action.’ Much of this comes from the transnational politics of the World Bank and other development agencies whose offers of funding are generally irresistible to domestic Mongolian politicians, but whose formulation of the problem and proposed solutions reflect neoliberal doctrine. The overall result of macroeconomic reform has been the introduction of market mechanisms into new areas of social relations. In this case it has been extended to include access to another scarce resource – timely money.102

101 Ferguson’s analytical distinction between the ideological project of neoliberalism on the one hand and neoliberal ‘arts of government’ on the other (2009: 166) is helpful in this case since Mongolian political culture is diverse and as a political doctrine neoliberalism still has to contend with elements of reformed socialism. However, when it comes to the mechanisms of the ‘post-socialist’ political economy introduced since the 1990s, Mongolia can certainly be said to have entered an era of neoliberalism. 102 The expansion of commercial credit could be seen as a mechanism of neoliberal rationalization in that it represents an ostensibly transparent market for timely money, just as in his study of the industrial city of Belaya Kalitva, Collier (2005: 373) describes state budgets as ‘technological mechanisms through which neoliberalism seeks to rationalize and reengineer the institutions of Soviet social modernity.’

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The New Regime of Debt Debt has become such a very common condition in rural (and urban) Mongolia that to be free of it is something of a dream. As the saying goes, ‘Öglöö bosod örgüi baikhshig saikhan züil ügüi’ (‘Nothing is so beautiful as waking up in the morning free of debt’). Baatsagaan sum, for example, is a rural district in the province of Bayankhongor aimag, some 700 km south-west of the Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar. In 1991, after the dissolution of the district’s collective farm (negdel),103 a short-lived marketing cooperative was founded named Tsagaan Eej.104 Cooperatives of this type (khorshoo) were established all over the country at this time in an attempt to bridge the gap between the new private rural producers and the markets for their produce. These cooperatives typically took bank loans for start-up costs such as trucks to move the produce to market, and almost all went bankrupt in the mid-1990s in the face of spiralling interest rates and rising prices for costs such as fuel. Since then pastoral households have engaged directly in the market as atomized individual producers. The most successful of these have over a thousand head of livestock, but there are only a handful of such wealthy households. Most middle-income households have a few hundred sheep and goats and smaller numbers of larger animals, typically between 10 and 30 cattle and horses. Poor households have fewer livestock, often just a few dozen sheep and goats, and some work herding the animals of richer households. Formal debt (ör) was rare in the collective period, but ‘borrowing’ (zeel), however, was very usual. People would routinely lend goods to family and friends within their networks. Forms of pooling goods and labour were also very common. Production brigades (brigad) frequently undertook jobs that one of the member households needed doing on a rotational basis, such as sawing logs or repairing enclosures. This might be done as often as once a week, with each household benefiting in turn. Brigades would also often find ways of making extra, informal, income, by using scrap materials to make fencing, for example, and selling it. This money was usually put into a joint fund (dundyn san), often in a bank account with the brigade head and

103 In the state socialist period all rural districts supported a collective (negdel) or state farm (sangiin aj akhui). The Baatsagaan collective was named Choibalsangiin Zam (Choibalsan’s Way) after the Mongolian Premier Khorloogiin Choibalsan, Prime Minister from 1939 until his death in 1952. 104 This means ‘White Mother’ – a reference to Lake Böön Tsagaan in the district.

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accountant as signatories, and was spent from time to time for weddings, funerals and other expenses as agreed at brigade meetings. From being virtually unknown in the collective period, debt is now ubiquitous. In rural districts most shops sell goods to customers on informal credit, particularly if they know and trust them. With the local economy fuelled in this way by credit in various forms creditworthiness becomes of critical importance for households. Trust is generally sufficient for the members of networks, including shopkeepers. However, banks have more formal methods of producing security, and the result is a process of collateralization by which herders’ possessions become priced without ever being on the market. The values created in this way, however, are very low. In Baatsagaan in 2011 a sheep was typically valued at 15,000 MNT ($12), and a cow at 75,000 MNT ($60) around a third of the market price.105 A large fully furnished yurt (ger) is valued at just $240 (300,000 MNT), again a fraction of the usual cost. The banks will generally only make loans to pastoralists who can put up a certain number of livestock as security, typically 75 sheep and goats (bog mal [small animals]). With other collateral such as gers, winter shelters or vehicles, loans are generally given up to 60% of the value of the security. Since around 30% of pastoral households have fewer than 50 head of livestock, there are many rural people who, in theory, should not be able to get credit. But since those with the greatest need for timely money often lack collateral, it is common for people to take out ‘double loans’ (davkhar zeel), that is, bank loans in the names of others, usually close relatives, who have better security. Since they often find it hard to secure loans pastoralists pay higher premiums as a result. Interest rates of 2.8% a month were usual for loans to herders representing an annual interest rate of around 34% a year.106 Rates as ‘low’ as 2.3% a month could be charged those with particularly good records of repayment and security, but this was relatively rare. Interestingly, these rates approach the 3% per month that was the usual rate of interest charged by the pre-revolutionary Chinese merchant houses, considered blatantly exploitative by historians (Bawden 1968: 98). All but the richest households in Baatsagaan have bank loans. Most take these out in late August and early September to pay for their children’s school fees, the costs of repairing wells and procuring animal fodder for 105 Marin (n.d.: 11) found that valuations could be much lower than this. He reports extraordinarily low bank valuations from Dundgov’ in 2007 – just 1,350 MNT for a sheep and 8,000 MNT for a cow (about $1 and $8, respectively – a tiny fraction of the normal price). 106 Inflation averaged 12% from 2007 to 2012.

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the winter. They aim to repay them in late April to June with the proceeds of cashmere and wool sales. The seasonal nature of market income, then, is one source of the need for loans. The other major reason, however, is the systemic risk posed by climatic variation. Zuds struck the district in 2000, 2004 and 2010. In sub-district (bag) Number 1, for example, livestock numbers totalled 37,000 in 2003 and fell to just 8,000 after the 2004 zud. Over the following years the total rose to 25,000 but fell back to 12,000 in 2010. These huge losses pressed some families deeply into debt. Having lost all their livestock, one household, for example, received a loan to buy 30 sheep and goats from the World Bank restocking programme shortly before the 2010 zud. The head of the household had hoped to build a herd of a thousand or more. Despite his making every effort to look after his livestock, he lost every single animal. Without any other prospects he joined the thousands of Mongolians who go every year to try their luck and the gruelling and dangerous work of illegal ‘ninja’ gold mining.107 The combination of zud and bank loans led to two other households in the sub-district having their collateralized herds seized and driven away. One household had several adult children and had taken out loans to fund their marriages using their parent’s herd as collateral. In the aftermath of the zud the household head was unable to keep up with the repayments so that all their remaining livestock were seized by the bank. In the second case a well-respected herder in his 60s had several hundred livestock before the zud killed all but 60 of his sheep and goats. He had taken a bank loan the year before to cover medical costs as a result of a motorcycle accident. Unable to keep up with the repayments on his bank loan his entire herd was seized. As Solongo, the sub-district governor put it, ‘If you ask why herders borrow money, it is because of these many recurring zuds; when herders livelihoods fall they borrow money.’ Loans, then, reflect needs, not investment opportunities. This was echoed by her friend Narantuya: ‘Someone who has a thousand livestock does not take out loans. They are not like us who have 107 The term ninja became the standard name for these miners who hand-dig tunnels for soil that can be panned for gold without any formal mining licenses. The term appears to have come from the resemblance between the green bowls they carried on their backs and the characters in the popular TV cartoon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Ninja mining has become an important source of supplementary income for people of the district, particularly for those desperate for cash. Groups of three or four friends or sometimes relatives travel to gold fields in Gov’-Altai province some 250 km to the east. They usually buy essentials on credit from a shopkeeper whom they know and end up in another cycle of debt and repayment as they come across small finds of gold from time to time.

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only a few livestock and worry about our livelihoods. […] Obviously, if the livestock are really good people will not take out loans.’108 Herders also take loans to pay for vehicle hire so that they can move to fresh pastures – either as part of expected seasonal movement, or to make the additional movements to fatten livestock when the usual pastures are insufficient (otor). The need for movement depends upon the weather. This is true throughout Mongolia, but is particularly the case in the more arid regions in and around the Gobi, where rainfall variation is at it highest. Marin (n.d.: 10), for example, has shown that in Dundgov’ debts increase in harsh years and are closely linked to the need to undertake otor.109

Neoliberalism and the Promise of Credit In neoliberal theory – used here in Harvey’s utopian sense – credit should function to facilitate investment in agricultural production, just as it would in industry or commerce, allowing greater productivity and eventually enhanced living standards. The extension of agricultural credit is advocated by the World Bank and international development agencies as a technical requirement of rural development. Something that resembles the neoliberal promise is materializing for some wealthier people. New shops and businesses have sprung up in places near large existing or future markets, such as Khanbogd sum near the major new copper mine being constructed at Oyu Tolgoi. Loans have allowed local entrepreneurs to invest in stock and machinery in the approved way (Tsolmon 2010: 14). Although such enterprises fail all the time and bankruptcies remain common, the anticipated flow of new mining wealth promises many success stories.110 A small strata of wealthy pastoralists are also in a 108 Solongo: ‘Yaagaad malchid zeel avdag gekheer ene olon davtamjtai zud turkhan bolood malchdyn am’jirgaa dordokhloor zeel abch baigaa yum.’ Narantuya: ‘Myangat malchin khün zeel avakhgüi ee. Ted nar chin’ bid nar shig tsöökhön maltai am’jirgaa yaanaa gej baigaa bish […] Mal ikh saikhan baival khümüüs zeel avakhgüi sh dee.’ 109 Debt levels seem to reflect this variability. Total outstanding debt to commercial banks in Dundgov’, for example, was 11,963 million MNT in 2007 (National Statistical Office of Mongolia 2008: 165), which works out at just under 1 million MNT ($750) per household. 110 Some aid agencies also offer soft loans, and these may be gratefully accepted. Bold, for example, is a 78-year-old former electrical engineer living in the northern province of Bulgan aimag. He had acquired 12 hectares of agricultural land but until 2007 he had been unable to buy the equipment needed to farm it, since he could not raise a loan for the necessary equipment. Even the agricultural KhAAN bank had immediately dismissed his case on the grounds of low security. However, in 2007 Bold managed to get a loan of about $1,700 (2,160,000 MNT) from the

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position to reap the benefits of investment by exploiting economies of scale and extensive systems of pastoral movement. The wealthiest few households in most districts have over a 1,000 head of livestock, and the wealthiest few in each province have over 2,000.111 The wealthiest owners typically employ hired herders, parcelling out livestock to other pastoral households to herd for them. They frequently own and maintain motor vehicles, sometimes trucks, which can allow them to move further and more often to make use of distant pastures, and to bring in fodder when they need to. This signals the emergence of larger-scale private herding businesses, drawing on labour and capital to operate reasonably successfully in the terms of new economy (Sneath 2004). However, it is unlikely that under present conditions such operations will ever become large enough to include the bulk of pastoral households. Such wealthy pastoralists represent a small minority – in 2007 less than 2% of herding households owned more than 1,000 livestock. The bulk of the pastoral sector is composed of households with small herds. Around two-thirds of livestock-owning households own fewer than 150 domestic animals – the sort of herd size needed to successfully make a sustainable livelihood in pastoralism. These poor pastoralists are generally the most vulnerable to shocks such as zud, and are therefore both the most likely to need credit in times of trouble. In what, following Collier (2005), we might call ‘actually existing neoliberalism,’ most loans are used to pay for goods that are consumed (often necessities in times of hardship); they cannot increase productivity. Pastoral families typically take loans of between 500,000 and one million tögrög for a year (approximately $400-800). Interest payments simply become an added drain on the household’s income. The virtuous cycle of loans allowing improved productivity and greater wealth is a minority scenario. The great majority face a vicious cycle of poverty leading to debt and further poverty. Despite positive GDP growth for over a decade the percentage of international evangelical development organization World Vision, which was offering loans to the poor without collateral. He managed to market three tons of potatoes as a result and was required to repay only about $1,000 (1,296,000 MNT). In 2011 he was given another loan in the form of a tractor and trailer worth about $4,000 (5,200,000 MNT), again without collateral. However, although the trailer was functional the tractor needed repair and had been sitting unused for several months, since Bold did not have the money needed to repair it. He admitted that he was not sure if he would repay the World Vision loan, and since there was no contract or collateral for it he was not sure that he would have to. But this was a very rare situation; most borrowers dream of finding a source of financial aid with such beneficial terms. 111 In 1998 there were reported to be 955 pastoral households with more than 1,000 head of livestock, of whom 33 had more than 2,000 animals. By 2007 these numbers had trebled to 3,181 and 170 households respectively.

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the population estimated to live below the property line has increased from 33% in 1998 to over 39% in 2010 (CIA 2012). Another driver for personal debt has been the promise of future payments. Mongolia’s economic future has increasingly become associated with the mining sector that came to account for between a quarter and a third of GDP (National Statistical Office of Mongolia 2008: 137). Multinational mining corporations showed strong interest. Rio Tinto, for example, entered protracted negotiations with the Mongolian government for the rites to exploit an enormous copper deposit in Oyu Tolgoi. Widespread fears of exploitation and heated debate within government and the public media slowed the process, but in 2010 Rio Tinto finally gained rights to begin mining as part of an agreement that allowed the Mongolian government to purchase up to 34% of the project. In its long campaign to win mining rights, Rio Tinto had predicted that the Oyu Tolgoi development would increase the GDP of Mongolia by a third, and in the 2009 election campaign both political parties began to offer voters a direct hand-out from the money that Rio Tinto has promised.112 As a result, since 2011 all citizens receive a monthly income from the government of 21,000 MNT (about $17). This has provided a lifeline for poor rural households since it can go a long way towards covering the cost of staple items such as flour.113 Banks have been quick to seize the opportunity of offering loans on the grounds that households would be able to repay them from future government hand-outs, and banking credit has expanded.

Conclusion William Sites (2000) coined the term primitive globalization by drawing upon Marx’s ([1867] 1990) notion of primitive accumulation – the historical process by which the state uses its power to separate producers from the land in the feudal an early modern period, as in the enclosure of common land in England. Sites argues that although twenty-first-century capitalism does not require further accumulation of capital in this way, for globalization to proceed people need to be dis-embedded from ‘conditions that would 112 In 2009 the ruling party (MPRP) offered every citizen a handout of 70,000 MNT (around $60), but when the rival Democratic Party offered to distribute more a bidding war drove the final promise up to 1.5 million MNT (around $1,200). 113 In 2011 a 50 kg sack of flour cost 38,000 MNT (about $30), for example, which is about enough to feed a herding household for a month when supplemented by animal products.

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otherwise impede short-term economic activity’ and integrate them into global markets (2000: 121), and he draws our attention to the important role of the state in this process. In the neoliberal era of Mongolia the state very rapidly accomplished ‘primitive accumulation’ of capital through privatization, judging, realistically enough perhaps, that it had little choice.114 It has also gone a long way towards ‘primitive globalization’ by thrusting its citizens into global markets, both to sell what they produce and to buy what they need. These needs now include credit. To in-debt can be to dis-embed – since it engages the borrower in a wider series of economic relations. With the expansion of credit, Mongolian pastoralists are now increasingly subject to national and international financial markets as well as the global markets for their commodities. Whatever else they have done, the various risks and liabilities that have been privatized, along with livestock, are efficient at producing the need for credit. In 2010, for example, there was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the eastern provinces of Dornod and Sukhbaatar. Herd owners rushed to vaccinate their herds and most had to take out loans to do so. In Sukhbaatar aimag over 1,500 pastoral households took out loans from a single bank, representing 17% of all herding households in the province. These loans averaged more than 1.1 million MNT (approximately $900) each (Batzayaa 2010). With typical annual interest rates as high as 34% this is a considerable debt burden for most pastoral households.115 The new regime of debt is by no means restricted to the rural economy – it is a general feature of the new Mongolia. The total level of outstanding loans owed commercial banks in Mongolia has risen steadily from just under 63 billion tögrög in 1995, to 606 billion in 2005, and in 2007 stood at just over two trillion tögrög (National Statistical Office of Mongolia 2002: 101, 2006: 134, 2008: 165), representing a debt of over three million tögrög ($2,400) for every household, in the country where the average monthly wage is around $170. Timely money is a scarce resource. But, as Verdery notes, resources are always ‘made scarce within a given system of values and power relations’ (2003: x). The extension of credit is generally presented as a way of helping pastoralists; the World Bank and other development agencies are keen to promote microcredit schemes as means of combating poverty within the 114 Mongolia’s economy had relied upon Soviet inputs that collapsed in the 1990s. Some estimate this amounted to as much as a third of GDP or more (United Nations Systems in Mongolia 1999: 6). 115 This is by no means unusual. Throughout Mongolia pastoral households owed some 57 billion MNT to commercial banks in 2010, which represents an average debt of around $400 assuming 30% of pastoral households are judged too poor to be credit worthy.

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discourse of neoliberalism. Whatever the efficacy of extending credit and microfinance as a long-term means of reducing poverty, one powerful side effect has been to expand the opportunities for capital, and to create income from liquid assets. Although advanced as a solution to the variability of income and associated risks, debt exposes households to new sorts of risks. The fluctuating fortunes of international financial markets can change the availability and interest rates on loans so as to threaten livelihoods just as a zud or falling cashmere prices can, as many found to their cost in the early 1990s when interest rates increased so quickly as to put many enterprises out of business. We can only hope that market failures will not coincide with environmental shocks, since if they did Mongolian pastoralists would be facing a ‘perfect storm’ in their struggle to provide for their families. Mongolia’s historical experience of debt is as a hugely powerful mechanism for extracting wealth from a progressively impoverished population. The challenge will be to prevent history from repeating itself.

7

Reading the Signs by Lenin’s Light Development, Divination and Metonymic Fields in Mongolia

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

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variant of modernism and set about installing all the trappings of the Soviet vision of the nation-state.116 Urbanization was rapid. In 1935 the population of the capital Ulaanbaatar was just over 10,000. Fifty years later the capital had become 50 times bigger, home to over half a million people – a quarter of the entire national population (Gilberg and Svantesson 1996: 21). Mongolia developed a local variant of the dominant Soviet political culture, and the national elite became highly familiar with the lifestyles and values of the USSR. State ideology was Marxist, modernist, and urban, oriented towards the political centres of Ulaanbaatar and, more distantly, Moscow. If we approach these transformations in terms of the Mongolian ‘social imaginary’ we could describe its colonization by a particular variety of state socialist modernism. But, as discussed in the introduction of this issue, there are a number of reasons for thinking critically about the Taylorian concept and seeing to what extent we can go beyond it. In this chapter I set out to examine two apparently contrasting cases in terms of the linkage between items of technology and the work of the imagination. The first case concerns the impact that the introduction of electric light had in rural Mongolia as a result of a Soviet-era electrification programme designed to create the sorts of imaginative perceptions that the modernist state advocated. Secondly, I discuss the imaginative effects generated by Mongolian techniques of scapulimancy whereby the shoulder blade of a sheep is used to generate signs for divination, practices that would appear senseless or meaningless if Soviet-style modernism had successfully colonized the imaginations of state subjects.

Electricity and the Cult of Light In his 1920 address to the Eighth All-Russia Congress of Soviets, Lenin insisted on the critical importance of electrification for the broader project of Soviet development: Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country. […] I recently had occasion to attend a peasant festival held in Volokolamsk 116 Here I use the term modernism to indicate a general ideological orientation towards ‘modernity in its many guises – fascist, socialist and capitalist’ (Verdery 2002: 20). This reflects the common heritage of both Leninism and liberalism, ‘the belief, inspired by modern science, in the inf inite progress of knowledge and in the inf inite advance towards social and moral betterment’ (Habermas [1981] 1990: 342).

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Uyezd, a remote part of Moscow Gubernia, where the peasants have electric lighting. A meeting was arranged in the street, and one of the peasants came forward and began to make a speech welcoming this new event in the lives of the peasants. ‘We peasants were unenlightened,’ he said, ‘and now light has appeared among us, an “unnatural light, which will light up our peasant darkness.”’ For my part, these words did not surprise me. Of course, to the non-Party peasant masses electric light is an ‘unnatural’ light; but what we consider unnatural is that the peasants and workers should have lived for hundreds and thousands of years in such backwardness, poverty and oppression under the yoke of the landowners and the capitalists. You cannot emerge from this darkness very rapidly. What we must now try is to convert every electric power station we build into a stronghold of enlightenment to be used to make the masses electricity-conscious, so to speak. (Lenin 1966: 515-516)

Lenin’s vision rolled out, long after his death, beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. In Mongolia the electric light became a central symbol of modernism, and indeed of the particular political project of Leninist state socialism. Elderly herders told me that when electricity was first introduced to their rural district centres in the 1930s and 1940s they had called it Ilyichiin Gerel – ‘Lenin’s Light’ – the electrification policies were attributed to him personally. Of course electricity had powerfully captured the imagination throughout the industrial world, Lenin’s huge electrification drive reflected the excitement and imaginative possibilities generated by the technology. But why did electric light fire the imagination and leave such an impression on popular culture in a way that the less spectacular but arguably more genuinely transformative application of electricity such as the telegraph? It is, I think, to do with the spectacle or light, the visible transformation of dark surroundings that it affords. Brighter, whiter than flame, silent and cool, it banishes shadows and transforms the night. But it works by means that are not evident to the eye – an invisible flow along wires, something quite unlike the movement of physical substances with which we are familiar. The American humourist James Thurber recalled his grandmother putting dead bulbs in empty sockets to stop the electricity leaking. She ‘lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house’ (Thurber 1963: 168). This new form of light was ideally suited as a vehicle for the particular imaginative construct of modernity and progress (khögjil, devshil) as it was powerfully produced by the new revolutionary state of Mongolia. The

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Figure 7.1  Light bulb made to commemorate Lenin’s electrification programme

Source: Ssorin-Chaikov 2006: 215

associations of light with transcendent, higher orders has a long history in Mongolia – indeed, the eminent Mongolian historian Bira argues for a ‘cult of light’ dating back to Zoroastrian influence (Bira 2001: 333-334), and Humphrey (2007: 186-189) describes the central importance of light in shamanic practices. Whatever the origins of these attitudes, by the early twentieth century there was a powerful association between light and higher understanding – as the English term ‘enlightenment’ denotes. These associations suffused the language. The term gegeersen, for example, meant (and means) ‘enlightened,’ and the verb gegeeruulekh means ‘to educate or enlighten.’ The title of a Khutagt – the reincarnate senior lama of the Buddhist church – was Gegeen, a word that means ‘daylight, brightness, splendour, brilliance.’ When Lenin’s electrification programme was transplanted to the Soviet satellite state in the 1930s, the light of socialism began to shine over Mongolia, both metaphorically and physically. The artwork of the revolutionary era tapped into the ideological potentials of the old idioms and the new technology. Propaganda images typically contrasted brightly illuminated figures of the revolution with dark and shadowy counter-revolutionary and

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feudal opponents. Over the following three decades electrification spread beyond the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, to the towns and then the remote rural centres across the vast nation. The central settlement of Bugat sum (district) in Gov’-Altai aimag (province), for example, did not have electricity until 1969. A diesel-powered generator was installed by the negdel (collective farm) to supply the administrative offices and public buildings, and this was later upgraded so as to supply private households. Seventy-eight-year-old Lkhasüren remembers the moment when the new electric lights were switched on and an old herdsman named Lkhamsüren came to the central sum settlement to see them for the first time. He was delighted at the sight, saying, ‘Now we have eternal zul [offering lamps].’117 Zul is the term for a clarified-butter lamp, commonly placed before the images of Buddhist deities as an offering, and as a result the word carries overtones of the sacred. This was not a unique response to the new technology. Lkhasüren’s mother, for example, had been nine years old when she had accompanied her parents on a religious pilgrimage to the capital city, then named Niislel Khüree or Bogd Khüree and shortly thereafter renamed Ulaanbaatar (Red Hero) by the Soviet-backed revolutionary regime. When they came to the mountain pass of Shar Khöv and looked down on the city, the first place to have electric lights in the country, the sight made a lasting impression on her. She imagined there were thousands of zul shining below her in the darkness. Lkhasüren himself first saw electric light when he went to the aimag (province) central settlement to begin military service in the late 1940s. In the evening he visited the home of a doctor named Buryat, an acquaintance of his family, and was amazed by the electric light that the doctor had hanging from the roof of his ger (yurt). ‘I thought “this incomprehensible, lovely thing.” It was just like day.’

The Story of the Serenen’s Light Bulbs The Mongolian playwright, Lamjavyn Vangin, told the story of a rural district where an electric generator was installed for the first time. On 10 July 1954 the work was complete and the public space of the Soyolyn Töv (Cultural Centre) could at last be lit with modern lights. A grand meeting and celebration were to be held, but the day before the opening the management of the collective found to their horror that although everything else was 117 Odoo mönkhiin zultai bolj gyalaij. Since the verb gyalaikh means to be happy but also means to shine, glitter or sparkle, the English term delighted seems an appropriate translation.

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in place, no light bulbs had been delivered. Suddenly, a 60-year-old herder named Serenen appeared with two big boxes. He said that they were electric bulbs, but Dalha, the chairman of the collective, thought he was joking until they opened the boxes to find them full of vintage bulbs dating from the 1920s and 1930s. Serenen eventually explained that 20 years before he had gone to visit his younger brother who lived in the capital. He was amazed to see the electric lights there and when he went to the shop he found to his amazement that the marvellous light-emitting bulbs were not very expensive. He calculated, to his delight, that if he spent all his money he could afford a hundred of them. This was far too good an opportunity for the herdsman to pass up. Thinking of the glory with which he could hand out these marvels back in his home on the steppe he promptly bought the lot. He was enormously disappointed to find that simply tying these devices to the ceiling did not make them light, and his educated brother – with great difficulty – made him understand that he needed the entire infrastructure of electrical generation and supply to make them work. It turned out that these were not individual, but social, marvels. He returned to his distant encampment ashamed of his stupidity and hid the bulbs to prevent his blunder being known. The story presents a number of themes. It illustrates the mystery and magic of the new technology to those unfamiliar with it. But the tale of Serenen and his electric bulbs is also used by Vangin as a parable for the socialist transformation of society. By the early 1950s most of rural Mongolia had been collectivized, but as this was nominally a voluntary process there were still ‘refusenik’ livestock owners who held out against the process and continued to herd independently. Serenen is cast as a stubborn old recluse, known locally as an antisocial loaner. People are surprised when he joins the local negdel – the state-sponsored district collective farm. When he provides the bulbs they are astonished and when he eventually admits his ancient folly he is fully integrated as a valued local character. It is as if the same curious whims of chance that made some people misunderstand the nature of socialist modernity and nurse private grievances, had provided a chance for them to redeem themselves and contribute to the joint project of modernity in their local community. You can’t hoard the wonder of Lenin’s Light. But you can play your part in the wider social movement of building modernity.

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Mapping the Imagination As discussed by Holbraad, Pedersen and Sneath (2009), cognitive scientists do not treat imagination as something detached from what might be called the ‘perception of reality.’ While pre-Kantian approaches treated imagination as ‘a faculty that makes present what is absent’ (Axel 2003: 121), the Kantian tradition has placed the force of imagination as central to our experience of the world. The cognitive semantics approach of Johnson (1987) and Turner (1996), for example, treats imagination as insinuated into perception itself. This approach offers a number of terms that can serve as starting points for an anthropological exploration of the imaginative effects of technical procedures (Casson 1983). Turner sets out a number of terms mentioned in the introduction: image schemas (patterns that combine perception and imagination to form understandings); sequences (the recognition of several events that are governed by the same image schema, to form very basic acts of narrative imagination such as ‘throwing’ or ‘lighting a candle’); and narrative (the creation and ordering of a sequence of acts of imaginative perception) which, as Turner (1996: 4) notes, is a fundamental instrument of thought.118 Then there is parable (the expression of one story through another) and metonymy (when one item stands for some other article of thought), which parable requires to generate its ‘second order’ message. Clearly, all of these notions could be brought to bear on the account of Serenen’s electric light bulbs. The operation of electric light was so different from the image schema and sequences of flame and spark, sun and moon, that the herder misunderstood the strange objects involved. This understanding could only be gained through a strange new narrative in which many of the key terms were bound up with the grander stories of modernization. And, just as the wonder of Lenin’s Light did in the early days of electrification, the story of Serenen’s bulbs itself invites a wider interpretation – standing as a parable of the advance of scientific socialism and a symbol of imagined futures. The wonder of electric light becomes metonymic for modernity.

118 These roughly correspond to the categories that Casson (1983) describes as ‘object schemata,’ ‘event schemata,’ ‘metaphor,’ and ‘narrative’ in cognitive anthropology.

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Metonymic Fields and the Reading of Signs Drawing on this conceptual repertoire I suggest that we could consider certain phenomena as metonymic fields – devices or schemas that invite the attribution of pattern and interpretative narrative, fields for the projection of narrative.119 All sorts of objects and technical procedures seem to act in this way in certain circumstances. In the case of Cuban gamblers searching for premonitions described by Martin Holbraad (2007), the metonymic fields may take almost any form – such as a car number plate or a fallen candle. But some artefacts are deliberately metonymic, and this is particularly clear in the case of divination, where techniques are designed to allow the reading of signs (cf. Turner 1996: 20). An example of this, and one which Serenen would undoubtedly have been more familiar with than the electric light bulb, is the Mongolian art of scapulimancy called dalaar mergelekh (divination by means of the dal) or just dal tavikh (placing dal). Dal is the word for the shoulder blade of a sheep, and the number 70, which in Mongolian is often taken as a general term for a large number. Some say that the dal got its name because of the scores of signs that it could show. The practice dates back at least as far as the thirteenth century when the Mongol emperor Möngke Khan himself read the dal, as witnessed by the Franciscan missionary William of Rubruck in 1254. Because of its antiquity it has been associated with ‘shamanic’ practices, although it was widely used by Buddhist lamas in later periods. The great Buddhist scholar Sum-pa mKhan-po Ishi-Baljur (1704-1787) wrote a text on the practice (Atwood 2004: 489), for example. Such divination techniques appear as instances of traditional superstition in modernist discourse, just the sort of practice to be eliminated in the process of modernization symbolized by the electric light. However, as technologies that generate imaginative effects it is interesting to examine, for a moment, the dal and the light bulb in the same frame. The scapula of a sheep is a distinctive flat, roughly triangular bone, with a wide, smooth and slightly curving surface, and a ridge running down from a socket at one end. The basic technique of dal divination is to clean the flesh from the bone and place it in a fire until it becomes dry with some charring and cracking. It is then removed for study. The cracks and marks caused by the heat of the fire are studied, and their location and orientation 119 I use metonymy rather than metaphor since this process concerns signs rather than symbols, and as Leach argues (1976: 15), signs seem to more readily correspond to metonymic rather than metaphoric association.

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Figure 7.2  Altankhüü reading a dal, Khövsgöl aimag, 2008

read for signs. There are specialists, who are well known for the accuracy of their readings, but this is a generally accessible technology, open to any who chooses to learn the art. Altankhüü, for example, is a 67-year-old herdsman of modest means living in Arbulag sum, Khövsgöl aimag, who read the dal for me in June 2008. Although he would not usually do so when reading dal, Altankhüü described the topography of the scapula, since I was keen to learn about his technique. One of the long edges is the ‘cold region’ (khüiten muj), the other as the ‘hot region’ (khalüün muj). The bone is expected to burn and crack from the wide flat end, if this cracking is roughly parallel with the main axis of the bone this indicated the questioner’s path is clear ahead, whereas cracks running crossways suggested difficulties. If cracking appears from the ‘hot’ side it can indicate that one will receive news from one’s relatives, if cracking shows from the ‘cold’ side one should expect news from non-relatives. The cold side also indicates dangers and difficulties, and if it is burnt or cracked someone who has lost livestock will probably never recover them. The ridge of bone that runs down the scapula, roughly perpendicular to the flat surface, he calls the ‘livestock kind’ (malyn omog) since that is where most information about animals is found; if this ridge is damaged the livestock will become weak and ill, if grease gathers there someone looking for lost

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livestock should find them. The sharp tip of the bone ridge he calls the ‘person kind’ (khünii omog), and if it breaks away this indicates illness and bad fortune. The bone’s socket he calls the ‘encampment’ (khot). The other side of the scapula, which has no ridge, he terms the ‘god of the entrance’ (üüden tenger), and if it is wide and concave it indicates livestock numbers should increase well. Altankhüü placed the dal in the stove with no ceremony whatever, and some 30 minutes later extracted and studied it for information on how the trip of the group I was with would turn out. The cracking was evident along the wide end of the bone, as expected, but the malyn omog-khünii omog ridge was undamaged and, since there was no cracking from the cold side, he said that we faced ‘no obstacles’ (saadgüi), and our road was clear ahead. This news was greeted with satisfaction, and a certain amount of relief. Altankhüü’s method is in some ways different from that described by Erdenechuluun, a somewhat wealthier 50-year-old herdsman living about 30 km away in the centre of Arbulag sum, whom I consulted later that month. Erdenechuluun’s scheme was more complex, and I can only summarize it here. Some elements of the method resembled Altankhüü’s; for example, the same edges of the bone were described as ‘cold’ and ‘hot,’ and cracking from the cold side also indicated misfortune – specifically that lost or stolen things, typically livestock, will not be recovered. Also, the wide flat edge at the bottom of the bone was called the ‘high side’ (deed tal) and cracking here from the ‘hot’ direction meant one would receive news soon. However, there were also important divergences from Altankhüü’s account. Rather than ‘encampment’ (hot), for instance, Erdenechuluun called the scapula’s socket the ‘cauldron’ (togoo). Nor did he divide the perpendicular ridge into human and livestock zones (malyn omog/khünii omog) as Altankhüü had done. Instead the whole ridge was to be read as a single indicator in the context of the particular subject. Furthermore, Erdenechuluun indicated a number of specific locations with more particular meanings, independent of the hot-cold axis. Cracking of the narrow neck or ‘collar’ (khüzüü) of the bone indicated stolen livestock and inescapable illness, for example, and on the ‘straight road,’ not far from the wide edge, he identified a rectangular area of a few square centimetres in size that he called the ‘encampment’ (khot). Cracking here could suggest death, particularly for people born in certain years. Similar divergences in dal technique are evident in the many specialist texts on the subject that have been in circulation since the early twentieth century at least. Figure 7.3 shows a scheme for the interpretation of dal

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Figure 7.3  Interpretive plan for dal collected in Inner Mongolia, 1938

collected in 1938 from Inner Mongolia.120 It is one of several diagrams reproduced by Bawden ([1958] 1994) in his study of two texts describing dal divination, although not itself translated. It shows names for different parts and features of the dal, they have evocative names – such as ‘the collar,’ (khüzüüvch), ‘the forehead of joy’ (bayar magnai), ‘the saddle bow’ (emeeliin büüreg) and so on. The annotations speak of the ongony zam – the spirit path – revealed by the cracks, and of the many various meanings of them appearing in different parts of the scapula – such as ‘Good for movement; bad for illness; lost things will be found,’ or ‘If the pot is full all is good.’ The text that accompanies the diagrams describes the (Buddhist) prayers to be made and the method for reading the dal. Parts of the bone have particular names – the socket is the ‘cauldron’ (togoo) or ‘cauldron’s mouth’ and five areas on the flat surface are identified as those of the ‘emperor’ (khaan), ‘lord’ (noyon), official (tüshmel), ‘self’ (öör), and ‘slave’ (bool), reflecting the status hierarchy of pre-communist Mongolia. A second set of five areas are identified as those of ‘the enemy’ (daisan), ‘heaven’ (tenger), ‘water spirits’ (lus), ‘protection’ (iveel), and ‘the departed’ (nögtssön) (Bawden [1958] 120 For reasons of consistency, here I render all Mongolian words as transliterated from their current Cyrillic spelling, rather than having to introduce different spellings for words originally appearing in the classical script.

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Figure 7.4  A contemporary plan for dal in a pamphlet, Ulaanbaatar, 2004

1994: 122-125). This is a richly evocative field, and an elaborate and entirely specific fund of knowledge is required to make use of it. Figure 7.4 shows another scheme for dal, this time from a printed pamphlet describing the technique used by a Mongolian diviner (üzmerch) in 2004. It too names – in much less detail – five parts of the shoulder blade with evocative titles: Burkhany Oron (realm of god); Lusyn Oron (realm of water spirits); Tengeriin Oron (realm of heaven); Daisny Oron (realm of enemies); Erlegiin Oron (the realm of Erleg, king of the dead). This text includes elaborate rules for the selection of the correct type of scapula to match the client of the diviner, and describes white (auspicious) and black (inauspicious) ways (zam) in which the various parts of the field can be indicated. At first glance it appears that these two systems are similar. Many of the names given to parts of the dal surface resemble each other – both have terms for ‘heaven,’ ‘the enemy’ and ‘water spirits’ in common. But on closer inspection it becomes clear that the schemes do not correspond. The place of the enemy, for example, appears in completely different locations in the two schemes, as does that of the water spirits, while many of the locations noted in one scheme do not appear at all in the other and terminologies and descriptions differ widely. This variation is not just a matter of different times and location. Bawden ([1958] 1994) studied two manuals collected during

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the same 1938 expedition to Inner Mongolia and found major discrepancies between them. These written schemes are different again from the two methods described by Altankhüü and Erdenechuluun in Khövsgöl. For example, apart from Erdenechuluun describing the hollow at the top of the bone as the ‘cauldron’ (togoo) and designating the edges at ‘hot’ and ‘cold,’ almost none of the other descriptive terms are the same as either of the diagrams. Furthermore, there are some points of direct contradiction. Erdenechuluun had explained that if there were cracks across the ‘neck’ (khüzüü) of the scapula (the narrowest section just below the socket) this was one of the least favourable signs (e.g., in the case of missing animals it indicated they had been ‘lassoed’ and therefore stolen by others). In the 1938 text, however, the term for that part of the bone is collar (khüzüüvch), which has some positive associations. The significance is entirely different – cracks here indicate that people will recover from illnesses and that lost things will be found. But uniformity of schema is not a requirement of the dal. Erdenechuluun later commented that his system might well be different from the ones I could find in books, but that this was to be expected since every reading varied depending on the particular people and questions concerned. Of these systems, only that of Altankhüü bares any obvious similarities with the account of pre-Buddhist thirteenth-century Mongol scapulimancy given by William of Rubruck, in which lengthways straight cracks showed that the way was clear to act, while horizontal or circular cracks indicated reasons to hesitate (Dawson 1955: 164). Most of the prescriptions listed in the 1930s manuals are Buddhist, in the sense that they recommend suitably pious offerings, prayers and so on. But the layout of the dal metonymic field itself does not seem to reflect a specifically Buddhist logic. Cosmological themes appear, alongside those of social status and mundane objects such as pots, as cues for individual acts of interpretation regarding journeys, illnesses and finding things. This does not seem to be a system built up from the logics or contents of a particular Buddhist or pre-Buddhist cosmology. Instead the essence of the practice is a technical one – this particular method of creating an object suitable for interpretation by treating a shoulder blade of a sheep with fire, and the technique may be used to make rather different metonymic fields. Recalling the involvement of imagination in all perception, then, the reading of a metonymic field such as the dal is not some extraordinary act of hyper-imagination, but a rather particular instance of the everyday interpretative reading of objects from bus timetables to the facial expressions of others – an observation that would accord with my informants’ everyday

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uses of dal. The dal is not surrounded by the aura of the supernatural or sacred, little or nothing is done to mark off the activity from everyday tasks. The scapula is referred to by the same term (dal) whether it is being boiled up for soup or used for divination (mergelekh), and the diviner is not qualified by any special status other than the reputation for being good at reading the dal. There are, in fact, dozens of different divinatory techniques in use in Mongolia, including systems that use coins, matches, stones, coffee grounds, playing cards, and candles. Although the schemes and particular narrative elements for each technique are very diverse, similar principles are used for all of them. In each case a field is created from which information is read as the result of a process of determination beyond human control – such as the fall of stones or the cracking of hot bone. The techniques generate a rich field of possibilities for evocative association and narrative, the variations observed become patterns that are read for relevance to the questioner’s situation. These readings may take some time, as patterns and combinations afford a very large potential number of indicators, each a candidate for metonymic significance. The narrative often uses parable, so that the White Way to the Realm of Erleg Khan is an evocative micro-narrative which may be read as a parable for the clearing of troubles ahead of the questioner, and so on.

Conclusion As Axel (2003: 119) points out, in his work Imagined Communities, Anderson was not concerned with which communities are imaginary and which ‘real,’ since all communities are the products of imagination, rather he was concerned with the style in which a given community was imagined. Similarly, in the Kantian tradition there is no reason to separate acts of imagination from other acts of cognition, but we may try to describe what styles of imagination are linked to particular technical operations. And whereas the starting point may be heuristically located within the technical operation itself, be it the reading of a dal or the illumination of a light bulb, the imaginative outcomes are indeterminate – who knows what narrative will be revealed by either? For Merleau-Ponty the concept of style represented the way in which one gives meaning to the features and preconditions of the life one leads (Gilmore 2005: 307). Thus the artist’s style is a quality that he or she is typically unable to articulate, but nevertheless pervades his or her work, giving

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it sense and direction.121 Furthermore, it is already at work in perception itself. ‘Perception stylizes because it cannot help but to constitute and express a point of view’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 237). If we accept this notion of style as organizing and shaping perception, we can very well think of it as a structuring principle of imagination, particularly as imagination (in the post-Kantian sense that it is used in the introduction to this special issue) is a part of perception itself. However, unlike the artist’s own unique style, as Merleau-Ponty describes it, different contexts and circumstances evoke different styles of imagination for a given actor, as does engagement with different genres of literature or humour. In the Leninist vision, electric light was metonymic for development and enlightenment, if one doubted that modern society was in the process of becoming, and the dark old days of oppression were receding into the past, one had only to look at the bright lights shining out from the cultural centre. The electrification programme was designed to generate scenarios that could be read in this way within the broader narratives of state socialist modernism. The political narrative of the leadership and the spectacle of electric light together constituted a technology of the imagination – they were designed to combine to create the sorts of imaginative perceptions of the world and its future that Lenin had so powerfully proclaimed. But was the effect of this, and all the other changes wrought by the modernist state, to colonize the imagination of Mongolians? The very different imaginative style of scapulimancy, along with other forms of divination, coexisted with modernism, and show no signs of dying out in Mongolia. Pamphlets describing divinatory techniques circulate widely, and a whole section of the street leading to the capital’s main monastery is occupied by rows of kiosks housing fortune tellers of various kinds, where clients often queue to consult an expert of their choice. So many habits of the mind would have us place Lenin’s Light and scapulimancy on different sides of various dichotomies – modernity and tradition, material and spiritual, present and future, fact and myth. But as Pigg (1996) showed, this ‘modern’ perception of the world is not incompatible with practices commonly described as shamanism – the logics of the one are by no means displaced by the other. We may ask, then, how are the imaginative impacts of these two technologies conditioned, what are the modes or styles by which they inspire potential and possible futures? In attempting to answer these questions we make apparent different sorts of contrasts than those 121 The author is grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers of this chapter for his or her extremely helpful comments on this point.

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presumed by the classical traditional/modern contrast. In the case of dal the same technique is central to the production of rather different metonymic fields. These do not require standardization or conformity; they may differ from one reader to another, and each can be read to generate an infinite number of narratives in answer to particular questions. Electric light, on the other hand, is but one of a vast, diverse series of technical items that were meant to be read as metonymic emblems of the same grand narrative – modernity. Soviet modernism dealt in universal truth claims and notions of causation by which practices such as divination and fortune telling represented the false promises of ‘superstition,’ to be refuted alongside the more elaborate confidence trick of organized religion. By contrast, the ‘style’ of dal divination is not that of an ideology or belief system, but, like practices described as shamanic in Siberia and Buryatia, is essentially a set of magical techniques requiring no personal commitment to any single religious cosmology or political ideology (Willerslev 2007: 138, Humphrey 1998: 417). Although marginalized by Soviet ideology, such practices of divination did not represent a direct challenge to the political order, in the way that institutionalized monastic Buddhism was judged to be. Whereas public religious activity was almost entirely eliminated during the Soviet era, continuing in secret if at all, dal divination remained a popular and relatively open practice. It operated in the register of private rather than public truths, sketching possible outcomes in the personal narratives of selves, their anxieties, hopes and relations with others. As a technique without wider ideological claims, the style of imagined futures that such divination engendered did not compete directly with the grand narrative of Soviet modernism; its truth claims were more local and particular. But the imaginative possibilities that divination implies are not necessarily more limited than those of modernism. Foretelling the future implies extramundane processes of causation and fate that to some degree reflect life’s mysteries since they are not immediately apparent, or readily explainable using the publicly dominant systems of knowledge. As an imaginative style divination may be employed alongside grand narratives such as that of modernism, without necessarily raising the question of commensurability. So, card-carrying members of the Soviet-style Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party would consult dal even in the days of Soviet high modernism, and Altankhüü was himself a model herdsman in the days of the local collective (negdel) who won a state-funded trip to Moscow in the 1960s for his exemplary work. Different styles or imaginative registers are implied by dal divination and the technologies associated with modernism, but this did not make them incompatible.

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On reflection the phrase ‘colonization of the imagination’ does not seem a particularly convincing one. We can, of course, recognize that something like this process has taken place over the last 70 years. Modernist thought has become fundamental to the understanding of world in Mongolia, as in so much of the globe. At the level of parable – meta-narrational overarching interpretation – the grand visions such as modernity appear powerful and totalizing. These are the interpretations that seem to be implied by a hundred other stories, from switching on the light bulb to booking an aircraft ticket. But this seems a rather partial account; because we are also faced with the rich diversity of other narrative genres and metonymic fields. None of them need displace the other. In Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, we may engage with several of them before visiting a diviner famous for using a ‘modern’ technical device – a pocket calculator – to tell fortunes,122 and all the while experiencing ‘Lenin’s Light’ as the glow of modernity. The metaphor of colonization implies a bounded space being filled up with particular ideologies; but one of the qualities of imagination that is apparent here is the seemingly limitless capacity for elaboration and addition. Imaginative engagement is rich and rewarding, an end in itself. In this sense it is reminiscent of Merleau-Ponty’s (1964: 165) notion of vision as ‘a means which invents its own ends.’ Imagination is not only an instrument of perception and anticipation – it generates its own goals and motivations. Rather than regarding it as another realm in which to map conquest and dominance, we may find it more rewarding to explore the ways in which we continuously expand our vistas through the multiplication of imaginative styles.

122 Morten Pedersen has made a study of this divination technique as a subject for a future publication.

8

Ritual Idioms and Spatial Orders Comparing the Rites for Mongolian and Tibetan ‘Local Deities’

Introduction Comparison of the la rtse and obo (ovoo, obuγ-a, oboo)123 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.124 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 123 These are common alternative spellings, the transliteration from Cyrillic script being ovoo (used in other chapters) and from classical script being obug-a. Here I choose obo, following Bawden and Birtalan. I write contemporary Mongolian place and personal names using the standard transliteration system for the Cyrillic script. When quoting words and passages from sources written in the classical script, I transliterate these and include the Cyrillic transliteration in square brackets. 124 Some should be offered white foods, such as dairy products and rice, not meat or alcohol; while at those obos associated with khar-a luu [khar luu] ‘black’ spirits, offerings should include these ‘black’ items. The usual Mongolian terms for rice and dairy products both include the word tsagaan (white), while khar (black) has been associated with both alcohol (khar arikh) and meat (see Secret History § 167, Cleaves 1982: 91). However, the term tsagaan budaa appears to be a translation of Chinese term baimi (white rice), and may not be the original Mongol term, which is apparently kept in Ordos as duturga (U. Bulag, 2005, personal communication).

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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 rite had been adapted to better reflect the current political order – women attended in large numbers, for example, and the importance of the national sacra was indicated by the use of a Great Bow of State fired by a national champion at the end of the ritual. The history of these obo rites is a product of the relationship between Mongolia and Tibet, and the worship of mountain and other local deities can be read as an index of notions of political and territorial order. In the Tibetan case Petech (1988) and Diemberger (1994) describe the association between ceremonies carried out at ritual sites on sacred mountains and royal jurisdiction over given territories. In his study of yul lha local deity worship in Dolpo Schicklgruber (1998: 100) argues that mountain gods and their characters can be seen as abstractions of the social order. He describes yul lha as usually mountain deities that are the ideal centre of a clearly def ined community in a clearly def ined area, iconographically depicted as mythological heroes in the style of a traditional warrior, bound by oath to protect Buddhist doctrine, watching over the social order and morality. In exchange for regular worship and offerings they act as protectors of the area. They or rather their goodwill are the precondition for the settlement of the area. (Schicklgruber 1998: 99-100)

This analysis closely resembles the one I offered for contemporary Inner Mongolia obo rites which employ a symbolic logic to place the spiritual ‘masters of the land’ under an obligation to favour the worshippers in a way that is analogous to patronage (Sneath 2000: 245-247). The rites and offerings at the obo, I argue, allow the people of a given locale to petition the local spiritual authorities for good conditions – timely rain, good pasture, mild winters, herd increase and so on. This is necessarily a political act, as

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it also recognizes the human authorities entitled to represent a particular group of subjects in their dealings with local deities. But there is a limit to what studies of contemporary practices can reveal about the past, and to explore the history of the obo and its relationship with Tibetan ritual requires the study of historical texts that shed light upon its origins.

Texts on the Foundation of an Obo As Heissig (1954) and Bawden (1958) have pointed out, the eighteenth century was a time in which the monastic establishment was concerned with satisfying the demand among the Mongol nobility for Buddhist ritual. Probably the best-known texts describing the foundation of obos and the rites of worship are the eighteenth-century works of the Mergen Diyanchi Lama 125 of the Urad studied by Banzarov (1955), Heissing (1954), Bawden (1958), and Evans and Humphrey (2003). The Mergen Diyanchi Lama explains that such is the demand from worshippers for a practical manual for the construction of obos and the worship at them that he has reluctantly agreed to write one. He adds: Now there has been a great deal of chatter in our land about the erection and worship of obos, and so on, and it is rumoured that there was an ancient rite, but so much apart, this ancient rite was never widely diffused in our country, and no original text of it has been seen, nor have books of regulations been composed by learned scholars in our own quarter. Though there was an ancient Mongol text from the olden days, it would be difficult for its practical application and reading to be understood, and I myself asked about it, but was unable to hear about it, and since the specialists are without knowledge of it, I wrote this sourceless text. The fact that it escaped my attention will, on becoming known, be a matter of endless shame to myself and of disgust to scholars, but it is impossible to refuse those who have said that they wish to have worship made to obos. (Bawden 1958: 27)

The text describes the Mergen Diyanchi Lama’s solution as to the problem of providing proper instructions on the construction and worship at the obo. 125 Here I follow Bawden and Birtalan in writing of the Mergen Diyanchi Lama rather than using a title such as Gegeen.

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It is particularly interesting, then, to examine a text on the obo that was written about a century earlier. It would be tempting to imagine this might be a copy of the ancient text that the Mergen Diyanchi Lama searched for in vain, but this seems unlikely. However, it does represent an example of the earlier writings on the obo that the venerable lama refers to.

The Text Obugan-u egüdku jang üile selte orusiba Obugan-u egüdku jang üile selte orusiba [Ovoony üüdekhiin zan üil selt orshiv] (Rites and so on for the establishment of an obo) is now kept in the Mongolian National Central Library (manuscript location 5109/96, registration number 79380) and was the subject of a detailed study by U. Erdenetuya (2002: 1-5).126 It was hand-written sometime between 1649 and 1691 on Chinese paper. (A translation of the text is found in the addendum at the end of this book.) Comparison of this text with the Mergen Diyanchi Lama’s provides a number of revealing insights. It is very clear that the model – or at least one very powerful model – for these new plans for obos were Tibetan rituals. Both the Mergen Diyanchi Lama’s text and the 1649-1691 one are full of elements that must be drawn from Tibetan examples. The image of the garuda bird (the kite-like king of the birds and steed of Vishnu in Indian mythology), for example, is to be set on the central wooden post of the obo. Both texts include this Tibetan term, which is described in Tibetan texts as nesting in the tree atop Mount Sumeru (Stein 1972: 209). Both texts also require that 21 smaller birds be placed around the garuda, as well as lapis lazuli, silk, and a series of trees that are described in genealogical terms. Juniper is described as the ‘father of trees,’ bamboo the mother, tamarisk as the son,127 birch the (maternal) uncle, willow the daughter. The 1649-1691 text also lists a number of blessings that an obo will bring to worshippers and notes, ‘[i]n addition to this it is said that there are many benefits for followers [of these rites] as taught by Teacher Badmasambava.’ This reference to a figure closely associated with Tibetan Nyingma-pa traditions is also found in the Mergen Diyanchi Lama’s text (Bawden 1958: 36) and suggests that both authors were looking 126 I would like to thank U. Erdenetuya for introducing me to this text, discussing it with me, and allowing me to reproduce it. 127 In Mergen Lama’s text this is tamarisk, whereas in the 1649-1691 text the plant is ‘balqun’ – which although I cannot positively identify appears is similar enough to balgu (tamarisk) to be the likely meaning.

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Figure 8.1  Plan for the obo from Mergen Diyanchi Lama’s text Plan for the obo from the Mergen Diyanchi Lama’s text

6 cubits

16 cubits

0

16

Scale (cubits)

32

Figure 8.2  Plan for the obo from the 1649-1691 text

Plan for the obo from 1649-1691 text

Placed somewhere: 13 ‘following’ (khoinoos daruul) accompanying obos

size of 18-khana ger

0

16

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Estimated scale (cubits)

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to existing Tibetan ritual for models in drawing up this manual on obo construction. This reflects other key Buddhist references such as the garuda bird and Mount Sumeru that also imply Tibetan connections. Such a body of ritual might, or might not, have been combined with indigenous Mongolian innovations or elements from some older set of practices. It is particularly interesting to examine the differences between the texts. In general the Mergen Diyanchi Lama’s text describes a more elaborate approach to construction, more complex sets of assemblages of ritual items and sutras, and seems to contain more Tibetan references. The formula in the 1649-1691 text is somewhat less scholarly, and is perhaps closer to the Mongolian vernacular of the time. The size of the obo, for example, is described as that of a ger (yurt) made with 18 qanatu [khana] (sections of yurt wall) in the 1649-1691 text. The Mergen Diyanchi Lama, however, does not rely on such vernacular measurements but gives precise dimensions in tohui [tokhoi] cubits. The 1649-1691 text makes no mention of the three layers on top of the obo, which the Mergen Diyanchi text describes and gives dimensions for. The 1649-1691 text simply describes the four obos at the cardinal directions as lesser (öcüken [öchüükhen]) obos and describes them as sentinels or watch-posts (qaragul [kharuul]), whereas the Mergen Diyanchi Lama shows his erudition by comparing the sentinel obos to the four great continents of Buddhist cosmology. This suggests that the author of the 1649-1691 text might have been less well versed in Tibetan Buddhist ecclesiastical literature than the learned Mergen Diyanchi, and there is evidence to suggest that his views might reflect the interests of the Mongolian aristocracy to a greater degree. Because one of the most striking differences between the Mergen Diyanchi and 1649-1691 text is the way in which the spatial arrangement of obos reflects the secular sociopolitical hierarchy. The Mergen Diyanchi Lama, whose own position rested on ecclesiastical rather than royal structures, notes that ‘much is said about the erection of a royal obo upon the summit of a high mountain,’ but he himself suggests that there is no need to do so.128 The venerable lama might have been commenting on the 1649-1691 text itself, because it does instruct that royal obos qan kömün-ü obug-a [khan khömüünii obo] should be built on the summit of high mountains. 128 The passage reads: ‘Now further, in the erection of an obo, much is said about the erection of a royal obo upon the summit of a high mountain, but in the ordinary run of events, since obos in this land of ours are made as a shrine and receptacle in which will dwell the gods and dragons and eight classes of the lords of land and water […] as to the question of what terrain may be appropriate, one should erect them […] upon majestic, elevated ground […] such as to make the whole mass of the people fall to their knees when assembled’ (Bawden 1958: 28-29).

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Figure 8.3  Notional location of different classes of obos based on the 1649-1691 text

Furthermore, it insists that two entirely different obos should be built for the two broad classes of royal subjects – nobles and commoners. The obo for noble lamas and ordinary nobles (toyin blamas ba yerü noyad-un obug-a [toin lam ba yör noyodyn ovoo]) should be located on high terraces or plateaux, and the obos for commoners and ordinary people (qaracu yerü-yin kömün-ü obug-a [kharts yöriin khömüünii ovoo]) should be located in low mountain passes. A comparable separation between obos for different social strata is also mentioned in one of the early Tibetan texts that may predate both the Mergen Diyanchi Lama and 1649-1691 text. The text by Blo bzang nor bu shes rab studied by Gerasimova (1981) and Birtalan (1998) describes five types of obos, including ones for royalty and commoners.

Ritual Order and Political Space This vertical separation reflects a ‘logic of the concrete’ linking senior status with elevation and size. This is so familiar as to have become almost invisible to us. As Leach (1972: 335) notes, ‘[T]he very words we use in English indicate how deeply ingrained is the idea that this kind of social relationship can be represented in the “logic of the concrete” by differences of relative level,

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above – below.’ The way in which we express concepts of differential social importance is governed by an underlying metaphorical scheme in which the location of items signify their relative importance, and by which ‘high’ is conceived of as more senior than ‘low.’ In almost any description of the social ranking, we make use of this metaphorical foundation by which location and posture denote social importance. The ‘cult of height’ and the participation of certain mountains in what Berounsky and Slobodnik (2003: 265) term ‘ruling power’ in the Tibetan case appears to rest on idioms that are also found in Mongolia long before the 1649-1691 text was written. The Secret History of the Mongols records that at least one mountain – Burkhan Khaldun – was an object of worship in twelfthcentury Mongolia, although in this case the ceremony described appears to be an innovation on the part of Temujin after the mountain saved his life by offering him a place of refuge. He is recorded as announcing that every morning he and his descendants would sacrifice and pray to the mountain. The only ritual mentioned, however, is a relatively simple matter of hanging his girdle about his neck, taking his hat in his hand, striking his breast and making nine obeisances before offering a libation in a way that almost certainly conformed with established notions of ceremonial homage of the time (see Cleaves 1982: 37, De Rachewiltz 2004: 33). But it seems very likely that traditions of sacred mountains existed at that time, as De Rachewiltz (2004: 253) suggests. It is known that the Kitans of the tenth-to-twelfth-century Liao state had a number of holy mountains which were the seats of different gods. One of which, Mount Mu-yeh, was a central site of worship for the entire Kitan people, at which annual rites were conducted. The Kitans had other annual ceremonies, and many of these were festive rituals that included sporting contests of wrestling, archery and polo (Franke 1990: 406). White was a sacred colour, and it is interesting to note its association with divinity in la rtse and obo ceremonial texts. It seems probable, then, that annual rites of some sort with associated contests of archery, wrestling and equestrianism were at least well-known in Mongolia, if not universally practised. There is no mention in either of the texts of a pre-existing obo or other structure. The instructions on how the place for the foundation of the obo was to be chosen, and the base marked out, suggests that these rites were not designed to be a method of Buddhist sanctification of existing sites, although this may of course have happened in practice. But it is interesting to note that some archaeological work on early Scythian mortuary sites suggests that the use of piles of rocks to help preserve items buried beneath them was a well-understood steppe technique that was applied to the burials of leading figures, perhaps so as to preserve their remains (Asanbekov et

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al. 2002). Given the widespread use of rocks to mark graves in the Orkhon Turkish period and the possibility that there was a tradition of noble burials on mountains in twelfth-century Mongolia (suggested by De Rachewiltz 2004: 593), it might well be that the construction of cairns as mortuary sites was a practice that was known long before the ‘third wave’ of Buddhism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – particularly among powerful lineages with good reason to manifest the importance of an ancestor. But we need not assume such continuities to see the appeal that the new or transformed obo practice might have for the Mongolian elite. Stein (1972: 206) notes that the Tibetan cairns represent what he describes as ‘warrior deities of the mountains’ and also called ‘gods of the country’ (yul lha), ‘gods of the males’ (pho lha) or ‘warrior gods’ (dgra lha). One can certainly see the appeal to the Mongol warrior nobility of rituals of this type – the worship of local deities that could preserve distinctive elements of local political mythology while fitting into the well-established Tibetan categories. The notion of ‘masters of the land’ gajarun ejed [gazryn ezed] in Mongol or sa bdag in Tibetan, seems also to be an indigenous Mongolian concept – a reference is made to them in the thirteenth-century Secret History of the Mongols.129 Although there is no mention of any sort of markers associated with these entities or rituals directed towards them, it suggests the concept was a familiar one and that a fund of local myths may have already existed to draw upon. We can detect a certain disdain for the practice, at least on the part of the Mergen Diyanchi Lama who specifically notes that he is writing his manual at the request of others. One could imagine, then, that these demands might come from Mongol noblemen who might have been aware of the martial lha tse rituals and found it a particularly attractive practice. We can appreciate the appeal to nobles of earning merit in the eyes of the Buddhist establishment through rituals towards distinctively local topological and perhaps mythological figures portrayed as warrior gods. Particularly if this involved the creation of spectacular ritual structures that marked royal or noble rank. However, by the time of the Mergen Diyanchi Lama if not before, there were senior members of the monastic establishment that had little interest in the marking of royal rank with mountain-top obos, and who were more concerned with ensuring local practices followed ecclesiastical teachings. 129 The lords and masters of the water and land – gajar usun-u äjät qat [gazar usany ezed khad] – are mentioned in the Secret History (§ 272) (see Cleaves 1982: 212, Pelliot 1949: 112). These particular spirits (located in China) were said to have become angry and caused the illness of Ögödei Khan.

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Throughout the period described by the 1649-1691 and the Mergen Diyanchi Lama texts, then, the ecclesiastically sanctioned obo was a popular, spreading and, it appears, a somewhat contested ritual form. The obo can be treated, perhaps, as a ritual technology with powerful political applications that developed and spread as the Tibet-oriented monastic establishment interacted with Mongol elites.

Inter-related Politico-Ritual Idioms in Mongolia and Tibet The institutions of local deity appear well-adapted to the ritual expression of territorial orders, they seem distinguishable from the monastic tradition in Tibet, and probably predate widespread monastic Buddhism in Mongolia. Could they represent a class of politico-cosmological notions common to both parts of Inner Asia? At the level of state administration there are a number of parallels in the ways in which the centre and constituent parts of the polity are constituted and oriented. The Tibetan state made use of administrative distinctions between eastern and western ‘horns’ since the time of Song Tsen Gampo’s seventh-century empire if not before. Polities of the Mongolian steppe display parallel distinctions, some of them extremely ancient. The administrative space of the Xiongnu empire of the third century BCE was described in the Han shu as the ‘four horns’ and ‘six horns.’ Since that time steppe polities have persistently utilized similar idioms of spatial orientation and distribution, such as the tölis and tardush (eastern and western wings) of the sixth-century Turkish empire. The stong sde ‘thousand-districts’ were fundamental administrative units of Song Tsen Gampo’s state (Uray and Uebach 1994: 913). These were grouped into the ‘four horns’ ru bzi of Tibet: the gyon ru (left horn), g.yas ru (right horn) and dbu ru (central horn). The ru lag (additional horn) was added in the eighth-century Du Song period. Such administrative units of 1,000 also appear to be an Inner Asian politico-military form of very long standing. Sima Qian in the Shi ji records that the Xiongnu were administered in units of 1,000. The myriad (minggan) was the basic administrative unit of the Jurchens of the twelfth-century Jin state (Crossley 1997: 27), as was the mingan [myangan] unit of Chinggis Khan’s thirteenth-century Mongol empire. The administrative divisions the early Mongol state resembled Song Tsen Gampo’s more closely than either the Xiongnu or Jurchen in that 1,000 units were grouped into a ‘right hand’ (western) a ‘left hand’ (eastern) and a ‘middle’ units of 10,000 (tumen). These administrative forms are clearly

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different from the Chinese jun-xian tradition in which ‘commanderies’ ( jun) are made up of ‘county’ districts (xian) of a notional 500 hearths – as can be seen from the study of areas in which one system replaced the other – such as eighth-century Dunhuang (Takeuchi 1994: 856). The division into the centre, the right and the left are also military institutions of very long standing. As with other steppe institutions, such as the unit of 1,000, it would thus combine administrative and military functions, or at least would conceptually match these requirements. This suggests that idioms and notions of military-civil statecraft have been widely borrowed and adapted by the state-building elites in Inner Asia since very early times.130 The Mergen Diyanchi Lama’s text also reveals this orientation of the body and the body politic to the south, and the organization of space into left (east) and right (west). The four sentinel obos are both described as having two companion obos, and it is clear from the text that Mergen Diyanchi Lama assumes without explicitly stating, that these are located to the left and right of each sentinel. It becomes clearer to see why both texts compare the obo to a glorious warrior facing his enemies. From very ancient times military-administrative organization had been bound up with the ordering of space, and the ritual practice of the obo reflected such orders.

Conclusion The rites to local deities can be read as expressive of political as well as cosmological orders. In the seventeenth century the 1649-1691 text reveals the way in which the spatial order of the landscape was represented as reflecting the political order, and the way that obo ritual practices reflected both. For the body of opinion represented in the 1649-1691 text, the relatively new Buddhist obos (whether replacing older cairns or not) were to be divided in the same way as political subjects, between royal, noble and commoner. The high mountains were the preserve of royal ritual and the seat of local deities who embody the martial values of great steppe lords. But this ritual order, if not the political one, is contestable and the Mergen Diyanchi Lama appears much more concerned that the new rites should reflect Buddhist scripture than royal distinction. 130 I do not wish to imply that these borrowings were limited to Inner Asian polities. Indeed, it is important to recognize their links to the wider political traditions of East Asian and indeed Eurasian statecraft.

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The mountain and local deities appear to have been part of a repertoire of mutually comprehensible politico-ritual institutions that span Inner Asia. They express a world of order through relations with lordly and/or royal power. Their rites represented an idiom for the expression of the legitimate occupation of territory and the political relations within these territories, and they could also allow for the expression of larger political units. If it seems too speculative to imagine such repertoires existing over such long distances as to link Mongolia and Tibet, and such lengths of time as to connect the thirteenth century with the eighteenth century, it is worth noting the longevity of other political orders – for example, the administrative unit of the 1,000, the southerly orientation of the political body, and division into central, western (right) and eastern (left) administrative units.

9

Nationalizing Civilizational Resources Sacred Mountains and Cosmopolitical Ritual in Mongolia

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,

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one of the five sacred mountains of Mongolia at which state ceremonial is conducted by the Head of State. In the post-Soviet period one of the most important sites for ritual action is the ovoo131 – a stone cairn topped with wooden posts and branches covered in prayer flags, usually located on ritually significant hills and mountains. Rituals (takhilga) are carried out at ovoos at both the national and local level, and one of the duties of the President is to attend the most important of these mountain ceremonies, now held at five locations across the country, each one carried out every four years or so. In this case the area around the ovoo was marked off with a rope perimeter, patrolled by policeman, inside which the participants were carefully arranged with their various sorts of equipment. The lamas spread their holy texts on low tables at which they sat cross-legged and began intoning prayers in Tibetan, punctuating the deep chanting with bell and drum at proscribed moments. Alongside the lamas there was a ceremonial military band and a troupe of musicians with national instruments and costumes, waiting for their part in the day’s performance. The event was coordinated by a well-known television presenter from the capital using a PA system, powered by a noisy diesel generator, and who acted as master of ceremonies, telling the spectator-worshipers what they should do –when to process clockwise around the rope perimeter three times, when to kneel and circle our open hands, palm-up, intoning the ritual response ‘khurai, khurai, khurai’ (‘gather, gather, gather [merit]’). The climax of this phase of ceremony was the presentation of a white horse as seter – an animal consecrated to the deity of the mountain and marked with a ribbon. The crowd had increased to a hundred or more by the time the presidential helicopter arrived at 9.30 and Khamba Lam Choijamts, Abbot of Gandan Monastery in Ulaanbaatar, arrived, followed some ten minutes later, by President Elbegdorj himself, surrounded by male attendants, members of parliament, security men and senior military officers. State symbolism was more prominent than Buddhist imagery, and it was the presidential appearance that was the real focus of the event.132 In the centre of the ovoo the white standard of the Mongolian state (tsagaan tug) had been placed, higher than the fluttering Buddhist prayer flags and khadag silk scarves. 131 Ovoo is the transliteration from the current Cyrillic version of the word. The term is also often written oboo or obo to reflect the spelling in the classical script which may be transliterated as obug-a. 132 Several elements of the ceremony, for example, were rehearsed before the arrival of the President, while the lamas were conducting rites, and only performed in earnest after Elbegdorj had appeared.

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Figure 9.1  The seven burkhan images are taken to the ovoo and the khar süld

Photo: The author

The white standard is the most important of the sacred state objects that were produced in the 1990s, designed as replicas of Chinggisid imperial regalia. Made of white horse hair with a golden cap on the top of a tall staff, the standard is kept in the Government Palace in Ulaanbaatar and publicly displayed at important state events such as the annual national games, usually surrounded by eight smaller standards of the same design to form the full ensemble of nine. The standard on the ovoo was one of these smaller eight, or a replica, brought and placed on the ovoo for the ceremony. The white standard is thought to be the peacetime banner of the Chinggisid rulers, replaced in time of war by its counterpart the khar süld – the black standard of the army. The rites carried out at Altan Khökhii were for ‘fierce deities’ (dogshin burkhan) and were of a specifically martial character. For this reason, it was declared, women were not allowed to attend the rites and the khar süld had also made the journey from the Ministry of Defence in the capital, accompanied by senior military officers. The national and local politicians took up seats of honour near the ovoo, and behind these sat other dignitaries. The ceremonial guard of honour, dressed in their exotic red and blue designer uniforms, goose-stepped forward in a line towards the ovoo, their line indicating an order of precedence.

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Figure 9.2  The President places a khadag on the ovoo

Photo: The author

First came the Mongolian national flag, followed by the khara sülde, the provincial Khovd aimag flag and, since the mountain was almost on the border between the provinces, the flag of the neighbouring aimag of Uvs. Seven guardsmen followed, each carrying a framed image of one of the burkhan (deities) propitiated by the rites, which they placed around the sides of the ovoo. The first and largest of these images was of Ochirvaani (Vajrapani) the most prominent of the protector deities, depicted with a blue body amid his halo of flames. The President made a speech in which he declared that the revived worship of tenger (heaven/sky) using ‘pure and ancient mountain ovoo ceremonies’ (önö ertnii ariun yoslol) was one of the many works of traditional state and religious cultural improvement that democracy had brought to Mongolia.133 He stressed the importance of the ceremony for celebrating 133 He said: ‘Ardchillyn büleen salkhi khökh Mongolyn tal nutgiig maan’ iveej Mongoly tör ulamjlalt zan zanshil, shashin soyoloo degjeej talaar olon ajil khiisnii neg n’ uul ovoonykhoo tengeriig taikh önö ertnii ariun yoslol, zanshlaa sergeesen savdal yum.’

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Mongolia’s traditions, history, people and environment in the democratic era. The spectator-worshipers were instructed to kneel while a beautiful calligraphic scroll was brought out and burnt on a gleaming silver brazier as an offering to the deities. The President and several politicians tied khadag honorific silk scarves on the branches of the ovoo, bowing to it and pausing for a moment with a bowed head, as if at a cenotaph. Another recently introduced national symbol, the töriin ikh num (Great Bow of State), appeared to start to draw the ceremony to a close. A national champion archer stepped forward to shoot an arrow high over the heads of the crowd towards the west to cries of ‘Khurai khurai khurai!’ and ‘Mongol uls mandtugai!’ (Long live Mongolia!), prompted by the master of ceremonies. These mountain ovoo ceremonies form part of a series of rituals of state that have been devised and installed since the 1990s, as part of the project to build a distinctive national brand of public culture. Costumes and props have been devised for these events, including presidential regalia, a ceremonial guard of honour, and the white and black standards of the state. The first of these official state ovoo mountain rites was conducted at Mount Khentiikhan (also known as Burkhan Khaldun or Khankhentii) in Khentii aimag in 1994, and the following year another ceremony was inaugurated at Mount Otgontenger in Zavkhan aimag.134 In 2004 the AltanOvoo ceremony in Sukhbaatar aimag became a state rite, and the following year Mount Altan Khökhii in Khovd aimag was added to the list. The most recent addition, at the time of writing, was Mount Sutai on the border between Gov’-Altai and Khovd aimags, inaugurated in 2008. The ceremonies are ostensibly a revival of Buddhist rites carried out until the suppression of the religious establishment by the revolutionary regime. Although state nationalism has sought to trace connections back to Chinggis Khan wherever possible, the immediately pre-revolutionary society was the theocracy of the Bogd Khan, the eighth Jebtsundamba Khutugt, head of the Buddhist establishment. Much of what is considered ‘tradition’ (ulamjlal), then, dates from the Qing and Bogd Khaan periods,135 and Gelugpa 134 The ovoo rite was adapted to better reflect the current political order – at the Otgon Tenger ceremony carried out in 2003 by President Bagabandi women attended in large numbers. 135 The Fifth Diluv Khutagt noted the existence of relics thought to be standards of Chinggis Khan in the banners of Achit Van and Targan Baatar Van. Ovoo ceremonies held for them were called Süld Tsengekh (Rejoicing of the Standard). Both had ceremonial texts and, interestingly, the standards could be viewed only by commoners, not by nobles (Lattimore and Isono 1982: 157-159). The Bogd Khan apparently sent Tüsheet Van Chagdarjav to Ordos to safeguard Chinggisid relics in 1915. He returned with the ‘white banner of the unified state’ (tsagaan tug) and the

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Buddhism is seen as the principle national religion. The richness of ritual form and symbolic content of the mountain ovoo ceremonial, then, reflects the knowledge and practices of pre-revolutionary Buddhist culture.

The Historical Ovoo as a Civilizational Product In some respects, the rites carried out at the ovoo have become some of the most visible and widely attended forms of ritual gathering in Mongolia. Although the institutional and physical structures of Lamaist Buddhism are far more prominent, ovoo rites are not only conducted for the state mountain offerings, but are carried out along with traditional sporting events (naadam) in local districts (sum) throughout the country every year, and are also sometimes organized by families privately. Outside the monastery, then, the ovoo can be seen as the principle site for spiritual ritual. In the pre-revolutionary period the ovoo ceremonial was a central feature of ritual life. They were conducted by religious and secular authorities throughout the Inner and Outer Mongolian banners136 (administrative units) of the Qing empire, as well as the Deed Mongol banners of Khökhnuur (Qinghai). The cairn that made up the ovoo was not itself the object of worship, rather it was a site at which offerings could be made to deities, to dragon spirits (luu) that govern rain, and to the eight classes of spiritual lords of earth and water of a particular area known as sabdag (Tibetan sa bdag) or the gazryn ezed (masters of the land). Sacred mountains held a particularly important place in the ritual landscape with annual or twice yearly ceremonies (Tatar 1976: 11). Mountain deities frequently had personal herds of livestock to pay for the expenses of their ceremonial activity, and the most important held an official aristocratic rank and had the corresponding salary allocated to them from the Imperial treasury (Bawden 1968: 102). The ceremonies conducted at ovoos reflected the administrative anatomy of the Qing empire. Representatives from subordinate administrative units were expected to attend the ceremonies held by the superordinate authority, so that the subunits of the banners were represented at the ovoo rites held by the banner and the banners were represented at the larger rituals organized ‘black banner of the powerful army’ (khar sülde), which were placed in Ribogejigandanshadublin monastery, later moved to Khujirt when Chinese troops of Xu Shuzheng invaded. The relics disappeared, it seems, during the revolution of 1921 (Sanders 2010: 302). 136 ‘Banner’ is the standard translation of the term khoshuu, the principality or administrative district of the Qing and Bogd Khan periods.

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by the aimag (province) or chuulgan (administrative league) that they belonged to. These practices were an integral part of the spectrum of religious activities presided over by the Gelugpa monastic establishment. Lamas would read prayers and conduct rites at ovoo ceremonies, and specific sutras, offerings and rites were devised for the deities of the sacred mountains and kept in the appropriate monasteries. Monasteries held their own ovoo ceremonies, and would also send lamas to those organized by secular authorities which could be described as ‘lay ceremonies’ by senior ecclesiastical figures such as the Ganjuurva Khutagt (Hyer and Jagchid 1987: 87). Nevertheless the most senior figures of the Gelugpa establishment presided over ovoo ceremonies, including the Panchan Lama. The ceremonies reflected a cosmology in which humans do not hold land as they do other mundane possessions, but must enter into relations with the spiritual powers of the locality to ensure favourable conditions. The prayers made at these ceremonies were often, but not always, in Tibetan and employed the conceptual repertoire of Buddhist philosophy alongside the honorific language and titles used for spiritual and secular authorities. These prayers typically praise and honour the deities concerned and ask for protection from illness, plague, drought, storms, cattle-pest, thieves, wolves and other dangers, and ask for long life, increased herds and good fortune (Heissig 1980: 105-106, Bawden 1958: 38-39, Tatar 1976: 26-33). These rites were not conducted in the name of any national entity, but for the benefit of those presents and sometimes ‘all sentient beings’ (sems can thams cad [Tib.], khamag amitan [Mong.]). In many cases the ceremonies were followed by a naadam – a sporting festival involving wrestling, horse racing, and archery. This was a common event after public ceremonies and was often very costly, since provisions and rich prizes had to be prepared. The ovoo ceremony embodied and enacted the relations between human and superhuman forces associated with the land, or perhaps we should say the territory of a given locale, since it was concerned with cosmological and political jurisdiction of an area rather than an ownable resource. As such ovoo ceremonies were highly political acts, denoting those who were the legitimate representatives of the human community as they stood in relation to the supernatural world. Just as subjects had obligations towards the secular authorities, so they did towards the spiritual authorities of a locale. The good will of these authorities could not be taken for granted. There is an account of a local gazryn ezen becoming angered in the late nineteenth century, and interestingly the dispute centred upon the rights of foreigners to make use of

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Mongolian land. A Russian named Nemchinov was buried in one khoshuu and Pozdneyev noted that the location of Nemchinov’s body near the road was ‘highly unpleasant for the genius, the patron of this locality.’ As a result the next year the khoshuu suffered from a livestock epidemic and drought (Pozdneyev [1887] 1978: 412).

The Returned Ovoo Perhaps because it could be regarded as a lay or at least not an exclusively monastic object, the ovoo survived the anti-religious campaigns of the Soviet era somewhat better than the temples and monastic buildings that were largely destroyed along with the monastic establishment in the 1930s by the young MPRP regime. As a physical structure the more humble ovoo either endured or quietly returned to the landscape in the state socialist period,137 and although the grand and elaborate rituals of the pre-revolutionary period became things of the past, private rites persisted or were reinvented, as was the everyday habit for travellers to circle a wayside ovoo and add a stone to it as they passed. The naadam games, once detached from their original ritual setting, were appropriated by the socialist state as sporting events and celebrations of national culture, held (literally) under the red flag. The first attempts to revive historical public ovoo ritual appeared in Inner Mongolia in the 1980s. While the rituals were essentially abolished in Mongolia in the 1930s, in Inner Mongolia they continued to be performed in some places until the 1950s, before being vigorously suppressed in the Maoist era. In the early 1980s the reforms of the Hu Yaobang period allowed minority nationality cadres to promote a wide range of forms and practices thought of as traditional Mongolian culture and religion. The ovoo ceremony, along with Lamaism, traditional dress and other displays of national identity, were tolerated by the national state, and encouraged and sponsored by the local government of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region. In 1981 one of the Barga banners in Khulun Buir held an ovoo ceremony at the annual naadam games and after this local authorities in Mongolian banner and sum districts throughout Inner Mongolia began to attach ovoo ceremonies to their annual naadam games. The rites were modelled on pre-revolutionary ones but in at least one case adapted to fit with contemporary political 137 The Mongolian scholar Tsendiin Damdinsüren noted that in the late 1950s most people tolerated the ovoo and it was not generally considered an obstacle to socialism (Bawden 1968: 179).

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culture so that women were allowed to attend (Sneath 2000: 244). In the 1980s most ovoo rituals remained all-male events. In Mongolia the vigorous campaigns of ‘cultural revival’ launched by the state after the collapse of state socialism in the 1990s were accompanied by and a widespread public movement to establish institutions and cultural forms that were seen to have been lost or repressed by state socialism. Ovoo ceremonial was one of the most visible and quick to emerge, along with a revived Buddhist establishment that expanded rapidly from the small token monastic institution that had been retained during state socialism at Gandan Monastery in Ulaanbaatar. One of the reasons that ovoo ceremonial was valued was that it was widely represented as essentially pre-Buddhist; an indigenous ‘shamanic’ practice that was later incorporated into the Gelugpa Buddhist tradition.138 Nationalist modes of historical thought project contemporary national entities back in time. In nationalist discourse Lamaist Buddhism was generally cast as a ‘foreign’ Tibetan influence that weakened the Mongol nation and subverted its ‘natural’ unity. In the Soviet-inspired process of national cultural construction the notion that the really indigenous Mongolian religion was ‘shamanism’ or ‘Tengerism’ gained wide currency (see Bumochir 2014). The fact that Chinggis Khan is known to have honoured the sacred mountain of Burkhan Khaldun helped establish the idea that mountain worship dates from ‘shamanic’ times. Indeed, when the first of the state ovoo mountain rites was conducted at Mount Burkhankhaldun in 1994, attended by President Bagabandi, a shaman named Byambadorj conducted ritual.139 The official title of the reinvented sacred mountain ceremonies was the ‘Altan Khökhii Mountain Tenger (Heaven) Worship State Offering Ceremony [Altan Khökhii uulyn tengeriig taikh töriin takhilgyn yoslol].’ The worship is ultimately directed towards ‘heaven’ (tenger) the same supreme deity invoked by the Chinggisid emperors in their famous ‘mandate of heaven.’ The Buddhist rites, and indeed the sacred mountain and its deities, are both means by which the state seeks to propitiate the most ancient genuinely ‘Mongol’ divinity – Everlasting Heaven. They are, like other state ritual, intensely nationalistic, addressed explicitly towards the Mongol nation and designed to invoke a powerful sense of distinctive heritage and identity. 138 As Atwood (2004: 414) notes, this tendency dates from as far back as the work of the nineteenth-century Buryat scholar Dorji Banzarov. 139 After this Byambadorj took the – entirely unofficial – title of ‘State Shaman’ (D. Bumochor, 2014, personal communication).

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The Secular Cult of the Homeland Since the 1980s a vigorous discourse of environmental protectionism has emerged and become a central theme in the public culture of Mongolia. The debate has been energised by the environmental impacts of new projects of land exploitation, particularly mining, including the loss of water resources and the impact of pollution. This has become a powerful force in Mongolian politics, particularly in view of the huge amounts of wealth invested in, and extracted from, the mushrooming mining sector in Mongolia – much of which is dominated by foreign companies. One result of this has been political activism. The Ongi Golynkhon Khödölgöön (Movement of the Ongi River People), for example, was established in 2001 by Ts. Mönkhbayar to protect the Ongi River from overuse and pollution caused by numerous small gold-mining operations in the river basin, and boasted 1,600 members. Water is a vital resource for herders, and the complaint that acquisitive mining companies were destroying the livelihoods of rural people struck a powerful chord in public opinion. In the 2012 parliamentary elections the environmental costs of future mining projects such as the enormous Rio Tinto facility at Oyo Tolgoi became a central issue. International environmentalism has certainly had some influence on public opinion, but the domestic roots of this environmentalism are extensive. In both the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, the ‘homeland’ was elevated to the point of becoming a sacred principle. State-sponsored culture endlessly celebrated the saikhan ekh oron (beautiful motherland) in literature, song, poetry and art.140 Images and narratives of Mongolia as blessed with a beautiful natural landscape was a central feature of national pride. The importance of ‘roots’ in local homelands is a central theme in Mongolian public life. The logic of people rooted in their native places also applied to parts of the nation-state, and the notion of the nutag (local homeland) plays an important role in the imagination of community. Politicians of all stripes have been keen to present themselves as having rural roots, with strong senses of tradition. The sponsorship of ritual deemed to be traditional, including ovoo ceremonial, is one of the most visible methods of demonstrating this ‘rootedness.’ 140 The influential poem ‘Minii nutag’ (‘My homeland’), written by Dashdorjiin Natsagdorj, one of the founders of Mongolian literature, was published in the journal Mongol Ardyn Ündesnii Soyolyn Zam (National cultural path of the Mongolian people) in 1934, for example, and later work included Gaitav’s book Saikhan ekh oron (1978).

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Tibeto-Mongol Civilization: The Buddhist Ecumene of High Asia Before the revolutionary social change of the twentieth century, people living throughout much of High Asia were familiar with a shared constellation of ideational and material elements within a loosely Buddhist cosmology. These included classical literature such as Gesar epic, monastic institutions, painting, sculpture and performance arts such as opera, music and the (tsam/cham) dance and a wide range of cultural forms. Although Tibetan was the common ecclesiastical language, this was a multilingual civilization. Words and titles flowed in all directions (Dalai Lama, for example, is a Mongol title indicating ‘oceanic’ authority, and the word Jebtsundamba is the Tibetan title ‘rJe-btsun Dam-pa’ [Reverend Noble One]). Deities, sacra and ceremonies had both Mongol and Tibetan names.141 Lamas learned Tibetan as a literary language from an early age and would often write in both languages. Pilgrims would make their way from all over this region and beyond to the great Buddhist centres of Lhasa and the sacred mountain of Wutai Shan in northern Shanxi.142 The sacred mountain was one of the most important features of this common civilization, recognizable across Tibet, Mongolia and indeed the wider Qing empire. The history of the ovoo rites is a product of the dynamics of this wider civilization. Indeed, the ovoo institution is very similar indeed to a Tibetan one – the la rtse cairn and its associated rituals for mountain deities. The cairns of stones with their branches and flags look almost identical. The prayer flag used is the ‘wind horse’ common to both Tibet (rlung rta) and Mongolia (khiimor’). 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 aim 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 deities and entities as in the Mongol practice. In both cases the rites allow the people of a given locale to petition the local spiritual authorities for good conditions – timely rain, good pasture, mild winters, herd increase and so on. They were also comparable as political acts, entailing the recognition of the human authorities entitled to represent a particular group of subjects in their dealings with local deities.143 141 The Tibetan ceremony of Danshug, for example, had the Mongol name Bat-Orshil (Lattimore and Isono 1982: 148). 142 These centres, particularly Lhasa, have long been recognized in civilizational terms in Western scholarship (e.g., Stein 1972). 143 Karmay (1998: 423-450) argues that the concept of gzhi bdag/yul lha local deities reflects the territorial divisions of the polity of early Tibetan society. Diemberger (1994) describes the association between ceremonies carried out on sacred mountains and royal jurisdiction over

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There is every reason to believe that although sacred mountains certainly predate Gelugpa Buddhism, both in Mongolia and Tibet, the characteristic ovoo rites themselves emerged as a civilizational product in the interface between dominant Gelugpa Buddhism and other monastic and ‘lay’ traditions. As Heissig and Bawden have pointed out, the eighteenth century was a time in which the monastic establishment was concerned with satisfying the demand among the Mongol nobility for Buddhist ritual (Heissig 1954, Bawden 1958). Probably the best-known texts describing the foundation of ovoos and the rites of worship are the eighteenth-century works of the Mergen Diyanchi Lama of the Urad studied by Banzarov (1955), Heissing (1954), Bawden (1958), and Evans and Humphrey (2003). The Mergen Diyanchi Lama explains that such is the demand from worshippers for a practical manual for the construction of ovoos and the worship at them that he has reluctantly agreed to write one. However, a text on the ovoo exists that was written about a century earlier, and comparison of this text with the Mergen Diyanchi Lama’s provides a number of revealing insights.144 It is very clear that the model – or at least one very powerful model – for these new plans for ovoos were Tibetan rituals. Both the Mergen Diyanchi Lama’s treatise and the earlier text are full of elements drawn from Tibetan examples. Both texts also associate the practice with the teachings of Badmasambava, an eighth-century figure closely associated with Tibetan Nyingma-pa traditions (Bawden 1958).145 This is not to say that sacred mountains or notions of local ‘masters of the land and water’ only appeared with the arrival of an ovoo-building fashion from Tibet. The participation of certain mountains in what Berounsky and Slobodnik term ‘ruling power’ in the Tibetan case appears to rest on idioms that are also found in Mongolia in the Chinggisid period and perhaps even earlier (Berounsky and Slobodnik 2003).146 The notion of spiritual ‘lords of given territories. In his study of yul lha local deity worship in Dolpo, Schicklgruber (1998: 99-100) argues that mountain gods and their characters can be seen as abstractions of the social order. Bulag (2002: 37-41) describes Qing ceremonies for the Xining local deity, used to legitimate and regulate the use of land between Tibetan and Mongolian groups in the Khökhnuur region. See also Sneath (2000: 245-247) on Inner Mongolia ovoo rites. 144 The text obugan-u egüdku jang üile selte orusiba [ovoony üüdekhiin zan üil selt orshiv] (Rites and so on for the establishment of an obo) was hand-written sometime between 1649 and 1691. The text is kept in the Mongolian National Central Library and was the subject of a detailed study by Erdenetuya (2002: 1-5) and Sneath (see Chapter 8). 145 See also Chapter 8. 146 Traditions of sacred mountains of some sort almost certainly existed at that time, as De Rachewiltz (2004) suggests; and the Kitans of the tenth-to-twelfth-century Liao state had a number of holy mountains (Franke 1990: 406).

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the land’ can also be found in the thirteenth-century Secret History of the Mongols.147 But there is no mention of any sort of markers associated with these entities or public rituals directed towards them at that time. Almost everything that we know about ovoo construction and ceremonial resembles practices within the later Tibeto-Mongol Buddhist tradition.148 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ecclesiastically sanctioned ovoo was a popular, spreading and, it appears, a somewhat contested ritual form. It can be considered a ritual technology with powerful political applications that developed and spread as the Lhasa-oriented monastic establishment interacted with Mongol elites.

Cosmopolitical Orders The post-Soviet Mongolian state has instituted sacred mountain rites as indispensable elements of contemporary political practice; they have become a presidential duty and an expression of the nation-building project. It is clear from the history of such ceremony that the historical rites that have inspired the contemporary practice were themselves politically important, but in a very different way. In his study of Latin American indigenous politics, De La Cadena notes that the earth goddess Pachamama considered indigenous to the Andes has been enshrined in the national constitution of Ecuador as an entity identified with ‘nature’ and entitled to human respect. He makes use of the notion of the ‘cosmopolitics’ to suggest that this marks the way in which indigenous movements propose new sorts of political practice that includes ‘nonhumans as actors in the political arena’ (De La Cadena 2010: 364). Firstly, then, we can see that the Buddhist civilization of the pre-revolutionary era was cosmopolitical in the sense that nonhuman entities were included in the political structures and processes of state. Sacred mountains, for example, had aristocratic rank, revenue and private wealth, and were recognized and regularly attended to. Relations with the masters of the land were simultaneously cosmological and political, and the rites concerned reflected both these wider orders. 147 The lords and masters of the water and land – gajar usun-u äjät qat [gazar usany ezed khad] – are mentioned in the Secret History (§ 272) (See Cleaves 1982: 212; Pelliot 1949: 112). 148 There seems to have been a certain disdain for the practice among the monastic establishment. The Mergen Diyanchi Lama notes that he is writing his manual at the request of others. Such requests presumably came from Mongol noblemen who might have found the martial lha tse rituals attractive.

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However, there is another way in which the term cosmopolitical might be usefully applied to contemporary practice. The state sacred mountain ceremonies are only one of the many forms of ritual action oriented towards mountain deities and gazryn ezed. The most frequently conducted rites are those held at local sum districts for national naadam games. These are usually conducted by lamas using the appropriate sutras without the more imposing of the state sacra. However, there are also smaller, more private and exclusive interactions with local deities carried out by female and male ‘shaman’ (udgan and böö). Although they may not invoke the grand themes of national politics in the way that state rituals do, these practices are also cosmopolitical in a local sense in that they speak to everyday relations of power and frequently address questions surrounding the custody and legitimate uses of the local environment. Here I briefly describe two cases: a ‘Sharyn Shashinii udgan’ (shamaness of the Yellow Faith) in Khövsgöl aimag, and a female böö (a term usually used for male shaman) from Ulaanbaatar, performing ritual in Bayankhongor aimag. Each of these practitioners’ rituals perform relations with the landscape in some way. In the f irst case the local deities that are channelled by the medium are identif ied with various localities; more than this, they are to some extent personifications of the place. As ‘masters of the land’ they are at once the supremely indigenous agents and the authorities that must be satisfied if people are to dwell in a particular place. In the first case the ‘shamaness’ represents herself as both the mouthpiece of the local deities and the ‘keeper’ or ‘mistress’ (ezen) of the local ovoo cairn. She is entitled to speak for the mountain – and on one occasion literally did so. In the second case the shamaness arrived from the capital to make contact with local spirits and successfully propitiate them with a view to ending the drought conditions of the region, as well as providing spiritually rewarding images for her sponsor. The woman I shall call Sarangerel is a well known udgan – a term commonly translated as ‘female shaman’ – living in a rural district of Khövsgöl aimag.149 She performs rituals that lead to her possession by spirits, including gazryn ezed, spiritual ‘masters of the land’ or local deities. It would, however, be misleading to describe Sarangerel as a classical shaman since that might imply non-Buddhist belief. She describes herself as Buddhist, literally as a Sharyn Shashinii udgan (an udgan of the Yellow Faith), and the deities that

149 For translation of the term, see Humphrey (1983: 404).

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possess her she terms sakhius (local guardian spirits or deities, within the Buddhist pantheon).150 She is locally famous for her exceptional powers, and her mother was also known to have been an udgan. I met her June 2008 when Sarangerel was living with her husband in remote rural location in a cabin. At the time of my visit Sarangerel was engaged by the campaign team of a local parliamentary candidate to provide spiritual protection for him in a particularly bitter dispute with another candidate in the same party. The two men had nearly come to blows, and the rival candidate was said to have gone to a Darkhan shaman (zairan) to have a curse placed on his rival. The séance began after Sarangerel donned her costume. She drummed rhythmically and chanted continuously, facing the shrine of images on her wall. This was a large glass-fronted box containing a shrine with a burkhan image in the unusual form of two large plastic dragons – representing gazar usny ezed – the luu. A series of local deities were summoned, all of which had specific geographic associations: Agar khairkhan, Shar eej, Tagna talna, Bayan dulaan khairkhan, Dayan deerkh, Dalj, and Otgon tenger. Each spirit, when it arrived, would be consulted by members of the audience who knelt in postures of humility. When asked questions she would shake an antique coin in one hand and then let it fall onto her other palm several times, blowing on it. Supplicants would ask questions as to whether this or that course of action was correct, whether this or that person would be well, and frequently asked for spiritual help to ensure positive outcomes. All the spirits were associated with features of the landscape to the extent that they were identified with them. There names were generally the place names of the feature. First to make an appearance was Shar eej – a local mountain, for example, the third was Dayan deerkh, which was the name of a cave some distance away, and so on. The second onggon to appear was Chandman’ tsagaan ovoo, a nearby hill known by the name of the ovoo on its summit. After answering various supplicants’ questions the gazryn ezen asked for aid: ‘Please help, do nothing to harm me. I’m tired of all the litter around the ovoo and the khadag – people put scarves and litter on the ovoo – it makes me tired. Many people come to the ovoo, some of them bad,

150 Sarangerel’s practice might be compared to that of the (male) gürtüm lama in the prerevolutionary monastic tradition, since both entailed possession by sakhius local deities (Sneath 2000: 30-31), and perhaps with the Tibetan lha-‘bab tradition in which the specialists are often female lay devotees possessed by local deities (Diemberger 1994: 117-123).

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some who are good.’ The following day we all went to the ovoo and cleared the hilltop of litter as best we could.151 The rites were cosmopolitical not only because they included spiritual aid for a parliamentary candidate. They represented an embodiment of indigeneity. Local deities, the gazryn ezed, performed their guardianship of the land through the udgan and voiced the obligations they placed upon the human users and occupants of the land, to keep the ovoo clear of rubbish and so on. Perhaps more importantly for those present that night, the local deities demonstrated through performance their approval of supplicants, and their competence to assist them in matters of knowing and doing. The second case is a ceremony carried out by a shamaness (udgan) named Altantsetseg from Ulaanbaatar in Bogd sum, Bayankhongor aimag in May 2011. Altanstetseg had been brought with her assistant to the district by Bodbayar, a successful visual artist working in Ulaanbaatar in his expensive new Nissan jeep, along with his father, Boldbaatar, who taught painting at a good school in the capital. The party was staying with Boldbaatar’s younger brother and meeting family and friends. Altanstetseg had been carrying out private séances for several families in her host’s network, but the main reason for the visit was to carry out a ceremony to propitiate the local spirits of the land. Bogd sum is home to Orog Nuur, a lake that has all but dried up as a result of several years of drought. The shamanic ceremony was needed to satisfy local spirits and bring rain and better weather to the local environment. The other reason for the rite was the Boldbayar wanted to take photographs of the event to gain inspiration for his next series of artistic creations. He was himself spiritually sensitive and could sense the presence of spirits around Altantsetseg when she entered a trance, he said. The udgan and her assistant cut rather urban, sophisticated figures, in their city clothes and with smart zip-bags for their shamanic equipment – including a headdress with long eagle feathers rather reminiscent of North American traditions. Altantsetseg explained that the gazryn ezed were angry after a long period of improper human activity. This included allowing foreigners to gain access to the mineral wealth of the mountains. This was the reason for the drying up of the nearby Lake Orog and the drought-like conditions 151 Sarangerel also said prayers by the ovoo: Etseg tengerees zayatai (with destiny from the father-heaven) Erdene tsagaan chandmani mini avarch urshuuguurei (Erdene Tsagaan Chandmani may you save and forgive us) […] Um aa hum um aa hum […] Uukh us tani tungalag baihh boltugai (may your drinking water be pure) […] Suukh suudal tani ungulug baikh boltugai (may your dwelling place be beautiful/splendid).

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that had affected the region. The lamas had not properly propitiated the local deities, she said. Shamanism was the ‘national’ (ündestnii) religion of Mongolia, so her shamanic rites could re-establish proper relations so as to appease them. This narrative offered an alternative reading of a common theme in public culture – the need to protect the environment in the face of the perils of mining and the private ownership of land. Among her audience, views on Altantsetseg’s interpretation differed. Some were sceptical, many were silent, but there was a general sense that her claims could not be discounted. It was worth finding out if she could bring rain. In ‘The Cosmopolitical Proposal’ (2005), Stengers suggests the term as a remedy for easy assumptions of a single common world in that it resists integration into a single universal view, and opposes the assumption that politics can be reduced to relations between humans. Both of these are in play in the accounts given by the ‘shamanic’ practitioners of the gazryn ezed that concern them. In this case agentive action is actively extended to powerful nonhuman entities, and for many of the participants in these performances there is no easy assumption regarding the existence or nonexistence of the spirits and local deities involved. The narratives and images presented to them represent possibilities, not certainties, and are respected as such. In this sense even the almost entirely self-referential state ovoo ceremonies allow for a rather narrow form of pluriversal politics. There is no attempt to reconcile secular, Buddhist and ‘shamanic’ interpretations of the ritual, and no requirement to impose a single encompassing logic – provided the interpretation conforms to the notion of national tradition.

Conclusion Pre-revolutionary mountain and local deities were part of a repertoire of mutually comprehensible politico-ritual institutions that spanned Inner Asia. They expressed a world of order through relations with lordly powers. Their rites represented an idiom for the expression of the legitimate occupation of territory and the political relations within these territories. The powerful processes of cultural construction put in train by the Mongolian socialist state and the intensified nationalism and campaigns of cultural revival launched since the collapse of the Soviet system have remade a series of ‘civilizational’ resources as national ones. One example of this are the sabdag or gazryn ezed (masters of the land), the mountain deities that are the objects of ovoo rituals, both the grand ceremonies of state and the local and personal rites of lamas, devotees and ‘shamans.’

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These provide national and local political contexts within which relations with the spirits are meaningful. Just as cosmopolitical ceremonial has been recontextualized as national heritage, so new forms of cosmopolitics have become possible. The notion that human land use might offend the gazryn ezed is not just an entanglement of two distinct discourses – the environmental and the religious. The attitudes and dispositions of spiritual entities have political implications, just as those of humans do. They are already engaged, then, when humans act in the world. But whereas for De La Cadena Ecuadorian cosmopolitics is a step beyond the ‘ethnic’ politics of indigeneity, in the Mongol we see a cosmopolitics that is bound up with notions of indigeneity and national heritage. And, perhaps more interestingly, the cosmopolitical is not a single shared register. Attitudes towards spiritual entities vary between non-religious, Buddhist, ‘shamanist,’ and various more or less eclectic positions. Different constituencies may regard the political sphere as including or excluding spiritual entities. If the term cosmopolitics is to be useful, then, it has to accommodate different understandings of external reality; some of which deny the independent existence and agency of spiritual beings. But the context for much, if not all, ritual engagements with local deities remains the attachments of persons to place conditioned by nationalist notions of the Mongolian homeland (nutag) that are very widely shared. Indeed, it is their ‘nationalization,’ their association with Mongol national identity, that has given the spiritual ‘masters of the land’ political significance that spans the spectrum of public opinion in contemporary Mongolia.

10 Mongolian Capitalism 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.152 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 152 Rising prices for copper, gold and coal fuelled growth in the first decade of the twentieth century, before the drop in global commodity prices in 2008 led to recession. Prices rose again in 2010-2011 and the headline GDP growth spiked again at 17% before falling back to close to zero in 2016.

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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. Poverty reached an estimated 39% in 2009-2010 (Gan-Ochir and Ariun-Erdene 2017: 17), for example, and although this figure fell to 22% in 2014, the 2016 estimate placed almost 30% of the population below the poverty line (World Bank 2017) – living on US$60 a month or less.153 This volatile poverty rate tells its own story about the large number of Mongolians living precariously close to the poverty line, liable to drop below it when the economy stalls. A small number of Mongolians, however, have become extraordinarily wealthy. Press reports suggest that the five richest Mongolians were worth between US$1.0 and 2.3 billion each in 2015, and that the next 40 wealthiest individuals each held between US$100 million and US$800 million (Otgon 2015). The super-rich own an astonishing proportion of the nation’s wealth. Five per cent of the total shareholders own 99.6% of shares listed on the Mongolian Stock Exchange (Bayartogtokh 2017). Sixty per cent of all shares are owned by just 1,000 individuals, and since another 35% is held by the state it is clear that the private ownership of companies is concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority (Baigal 2017).

The Bypass to Capitalism The foundations and trajectory of the new political economy were fashioned in the 1990s, and reflect the process by which the ownership of profitable operations and resources was acquired and concentrated in the new environment created by the ‘neoliberal’ reforms. In terms of policy, the Mongolian administration had followed the advice given to it by the IMF, World Bank and the US Treasury Department rather closely; indeed Reinert (2004: 175) describes Mongolia as a ‘model pupil’ of these Washington Consensus institutions. In theory at least, the transfer of ownership from state to private hands was to be an equitable distribution of national wealth. Four and a half thousand state enterprises were privatized in 1991-1993 through the issue of colour-coded share vouchers (tasalbar) (Nixson and Walters 2006: 1564, Jermakowicz and Kozarzewski 1997: 7). These could be used to bid for shares in the privatized enterprises that were being sold in the newly instituted Stock Exchange. 153 The national poverty line is set at 146,145 MNT a month (World Bank 2017), approximately US$60.

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These vouchers were received by more than 90% of the population, so that almost every Mongolian became, fleetingly, a potential capitalist. They were notionally able to own shares in the newly privatized state enterprises, and were entitled to a tiny portion of their profits. In reality, however, the great majority of Mongolians received almost nothing. The economy was in deep crisis as a result of the collapse of the Comecon trading block, the loss of Soviet aid and, as Griffin (1995: 12-13) notes, the way in which the new regime of private ownership had been rapidly and destructively introduced. Real average incomes halved over this period (Reinert 2004: 159), inflation climbed to triple digits and unemployment soared. Shares in the companies that collapsed in the new market conditions became worthless. Desperate families were forced to sell vouchers or shares simply to get by, and in many of the privatized companies that survived managers were able to gain controlling levels of share ownership by buying up share entitlements or by other, less transparent, means. But this first wave of privatization had not gone far enough to satisfy Mongolia’s influential foreign advisors. Some of the largest and most valuable enterprises remained largely or entirely state-owned. As Rossabi (1975: 80) notes: ‘Despite indications of abuses in earlier privatizations, the international donor agencies lobbied hard to continue the process. The IMF pressed for the privatization of what it referred to as the Most Valuable Companies and threatened to withhold pledged loans if the Gobi Cashmere Company and NIC, an oil company, were not sold.’ A second wave of privatization was launched after the economically neoliberal Democratic Union won the 1996 parliamentary election, with the help of substantial financial support from the US-based International Republican Institute (Rossabi 1975: 68). This time there was no distribution to the general public and the companies were sold directly into private ownership using sealed bid auctions and other methods (Nixson and Walters 2006: 1564). Almost a thousand companies were privatized in this way from 1996 to 2000, including many of the most valuable remaining state-owned enterprises.

Opportunistic Provisioning: Ninjas and the Scavenger Economy The crisis of the 1990s forced a large part of the population to pursue various kinds of opportunistic coping strategies to make ends meet. This created a sort of ‘scavenger economy’ based on finding, acquiring and selling all kinds of resources left over from the collapse of the state-planned economy. Scrap metal, for example, scavenged from closed-down factories, Soviet military

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bases and railway lines became a major source of income (Byambabaatar 2016). In Ulaanbaatar and settlements across the country piles of scavenged materials appeared in the household enclosures (khashaas). Even the bricks and concrete slab sections of blocks of flats made derelict by the collapse of infrastructure and services were extracted and could be seen piled up, ready for sale or re-use. Perhaps the most striking example of this ‘opportunistic provisioning’ was the mushrooming growth of ‘ninja’ mining in the late 1990s. The ninja phenomenon was, in essence, unauthorized do-it-yourself gold mining, and it attracted enormous numbers of people. The World Bank estimated that between 30,000 and 100,000 people were engaged in the activity in the early twenty-first century (World Bank 2006: 1), but the estimates of those involved are vague since many people only worked in the gold fields for a few weeks or months and then returned to other jobs and pursuits in rural districts or the city. It is not clear how the practice got its name. One explanation is that when wearing the large plastic bowls used for gold panning on their backs the miners resembled the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles of TV and film. But others suggest that the term ninja reflected the stealthy, clandestine nature of a practice that was unauthorized or illegal.154 The work itself was gruelling and frequently dangerous; miners would typically dig holes and tunnels by hand to find alluvial earth with gold content, which was then hauled to the surface so that the gold could be separated using a vibrating table or by panning with water. The rudimentary mine shafts could be ten metres or more deep, and since many of them were unsupported they were liable to collapse, causing numerous fatalities (Munkherdene 2011: 42-44). In many cases the use of mercury or cyanide to extract the gold from crushed rock caused additional risks to human health and the environment (Murray and Grayson 2003: 45-46). While it lasted, ‘the people’s gold-rush’ as Grayson (2007: 4) called it, was one of the most important economic developments since the collapse of state socialism. In many regions the majority of pastoralist and unemployed families had at least one member working in the gold fields (High 2008). People journeyed from Ulaanbaatar and rural districts all over the country to the gold fields, and at the most popular sites temporary yurt settlements of thousands of people appeared in the busy summer season, with makeshift shops, bars and service-traders. 154 The term has a faintly derogatory tone, and the favoured name of the practice is bichil uurkhai (micro-mining). International development literature generally uses the term ‘artisanal small-scale gold mining’ (ASGM).

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In many ways ninja mining epitomized the grim realities of Mongolia’s neoliberal era. With the loss of secure and skilled employment, a large proportion of the Mongolian public were driven, literally, underground to seek out precarious livelihoods in a harsh new sector of the informal economy. Ninja mining was also, however, another opportunistic form of scavenging – picking through resources created in the state socialist period to make some money. In the 1970s and 1980s Soviet-Mongolian geological survey work had discovered and mapped immense amounts of mineral resources for future exploitation, including large quantities of ready-to-mine alluvial gold deposits. In the 1990s, in an attempt to create business opportunities and attract corporate investment, the reformist government had launched a Gold Programme and made public the previously secret mineral survey materials of the State Geofund. This, together with the state’s ready granting of exploitation licenses and loans to mining businesses, triggered a company-driven gold rush in 1994 (Grayson 2007: 3). However, this also inadvertently created a new public resource – the knowledge of where to find accessible gold deposits. The collapse of state companies had made many geologists, mining engineers and mine workers unemployed. They had the skills and simple tools needed to exploit this public knowledge resource, but they lacked the wealth needed to buy mining licenses. The collapse of state socialism had undermined both the state’s moral authority and its ability to enforce laws, and the hardships of the 1990s had taught many Mongolians to seize any opportunities for wealth that presented themselves, whether they were technically legal or not. At first, in the mid-1990s, the unauthorized gold digging that emerged was on a relatively small scale, involving mostly former miners and their families. But economic conditions worsened in the country as a whole in 1999 and, as word of the new opportunities spread, illicit mining began to attract tens of thousands of people. Until the neoliberal era, the long history of rights to land use in Mongolia had retained a certain sense of public access, albeit within various limits and forms of regulation. In the state socialist period all land had ultimately belonged to the state as representative of ‘the people,’ and Mongolians had come to feel a certain entitlement to access to their national landscape. In the summer months most families would leave the urban centres and stay with relatives and friends in summer pastures and camps. Those with motor vehicles expected to be able to drive them pretty much anywhere they liked, within reason, and there continues to be a widespread feeling that the Mongolian landscape should remain, in some senses, a public resource. The gold-bearing parts of this landscape became a sort of de facto commons – a resource available for public use. This did not mean, however, that the use of

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land for mining was never disputed or begrudged. Locals frequently resented the arrival of outsiders exploiting resources in their district, and the more established ninja miners often resented newcomers digging in places they thought of as theirs. Quarrels, sometimes violent, were common. The gold rush could not last. The companies who had bought mining licences became increasingly successful at enforcing their legal rights of exclusion, using private security guards as well as the police, and the most easily accessible sites began to get mined out. The result has been an increasingly effective enclosure of the de facto gold-mining commons by private company owners. The numbers involved in ninja mining peaked around 2006-2007, and since about 2009 the numbers have declined. In 2012 the Mongolian Statistical Office (2012: 15) recorded a modest 13,400 people working in the small-scale mining sector. The enclosure of gold-mining commons was emblematic of the new national political economy in the age of the market: the surviving industry and much of the infrastructure of the state socialist era had been transformed from a sort of notionally public asset (state property) into corporate and private property, just as access to gold-bearing land had been. The historical enclosure of common land in England in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries had been termed ‘primitive accumulation’ by Marx ([1867] 1990: 876), a process by which the emerging capitalist class was able to acquire capital in the first place. Rather than a completed phase of capitalism, however, Harvey (2005) sees this as a continuing process that, in the neoliberal era, frequently takes the form of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ meaning the ‘corporatization, commodification, and privatization of hitherto public assets’ (Harvey 2005: 160). Mongolia’s capitalist era began, then, with something like Harvey’s process of dispossession. However, since in some cases new resources had been created and quite what the public had ‘possessed’ is unclear, a better descriptor might be Tsing’s (2015: 1) notion of ‘salvage accumulation’ – the amassment of capitalist wealth through the conversion of material with other histories of social relations. Large parts of the environment, for example, have been made into sources of private mineral wealth.

Ownership for Control: The New Corporate Capitalism Whatever terms we might use for it, it is clear that the state played a fundamental role in the process by which the new property owners came to accumulate their capital. For those with the right connections, the state’s

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privatization programmes presented opportunities to acquire controlling stakes in what was left of the former state enterprises. The old state socialist elite did not systematically reinvent themselves as capitalists, however, with a smooth transfer of public assets into private wealth. This was an opportunistic form of accumulation; privatization was a disorderly and frequently opaque process and the majority of state officials ended up with very little, like the general public. Some senior state managers and bureaucrats did navigate the 1990s to become CEOs of major private companies. J. Oyungerel, for example, was senior accountant of the Petrol Supply Department, Ministry of Transport in the MPR, and ended up CEO of Petrovis, the largest importer of petroleum products in the country (Chinzorig and Batsükh 2012: 310-320). Other members of the super-rich, however, cannot really be considered members of the old nomenklatura. T. Bayarkhuu, for example, the chairman of the large Monsonic Group and business tycoon Kh. Battulga, who won the presidential elections in 2017, had backgrounds in fields such as informal trade and wrestling. However, both were able to form the high-level connections with business interests abroad and politicians at home so as to seize business opportunities when they became available (ibid.: 85-109). Such connections were crucial for many of the new super-rich. The executives of MCS, for example, one of the largest conglomerates in Mongolia today, enjoyed such close contacts with senior levels of government in the 1990s that Rossabi (1975: 61) remarks that ‘distinctions between public duties and private gain became increasingly blurred.’ One of the most widely felt public grievances is that the privatization of property was unfair, dishonest or unjust.155 It is now hard to believe that privatization was ever intended to benefit the Mongolian public as a whole. In retrospect, company ownership seems bound to end up concentrated in the hands of a minority when so many people faced unemployment and collapsing living standards. Those who owned shares in the 1990s generally received no income from them, since most of the newly privatized enterprises could not afford to pay dividends (Jermakowicz and Kozarzewski 1997: 9). This has become a chronic feature of much of the domestic Mongolian economy. In 2017 the chair of the Financial Regulatory Commission noted that despite considerable stock market gains, less than 10% of listed companies paid any dividends, and more than 60% still made no profit or operated at a loss (Bayartogtokh 2017). 155 A common descriptive phrase for the process is ömch khuv’chlal shudarga bus (unfair privatization of property).

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The astonishing accumulation and concentration of share ownership is not, then, primarily a matter of gaining an income from these investments. Rather, it reflects the historical process by which certain people have been able to gain control of the enterprises and assets that became available for private ownership. Of course, this control then permits the owners to occupy senior positions and enrich themselves through executive pay, mergers, deals, and the sale of interests to domestic and foreign corporations. But the chief function of the concentration of ownership has been to allow a tiny minority to dominate the governance of resources and economic institutions.

Nationalism, Socialism and Nutagism Mongolia’s political economy may have become thoroughly capitalist, but the public culture and popular political sensibilities bear the deep imprint of the socialist values of the past. The state socialist period is associated with a generally well-policed and law-abiding bureaucracy and the concept of public service remains strong, despite the decline of many state services themselves. Notions of social justice are informed by socialist imagery. Marked material inequality between rich and poor is still widely viewed as both ethically undesirable and politically dangerous. Corruption, which mushroomed since the end of the state socialist period, is widely seen as an unacceptable side effect of the new mentality of the market which has corroded the ethical standards of state officials.156 As a political doctrine, socialism may have been transformed but it has not disappeared. To date the most electorally successful political party is the former Soviet-style ruling party the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP), now renamed the Mongolian People’s Party. Seen originally as the party of strong state, military and security apparatuses, the MPRP underwent radical political changes in the 1990s, reinventing itself as a democratic socialist party of the centre-left, and embracing liberal market reforms and the privatization of state assets so as to combine the socialist tradition with the presumed benefits of the free market. By jettisoning the specifically Soviet elements of its ideological heritage, which it termed Marxist, the party sought to reach back to a broader socialist tradition in 156 In 1999 a government survey of 1,500 Mongolians showed that only 7.2% of the respondents considered corruption to have been widespread in the socialist period, while 70.2% considered it widespread in the 1990s (see Sneath 2006).

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which it could take its place alongside the likes of the French Socialist and British New Labour parties. Marxist-Leninist ideology in general, and the Soviet project in particular, was renounced, largely on the grounds that it had failed to deliver economic development and the living standards of the industrial capitalist nations. A 2001 party document explained that: ‘Marxist socialism did not pass the test of history. It is not the end of socialism or socialist doctrine though. There have always existed other socialisms and socialist views before, besides, and after Marxism. And they still exist’ (Tsanjid 2001: 23). Instead, the individual creativity of private enterprise should be harnessed for socialist goals, including freedom, social justice and ‘protecting society’ (ibid.: 65). The party presented this as an evolution of the state socialist tradition, rather than a break with it, tapping into the underlying modernism and the historicist notion of progress that remained at the core of Soviet socialism. The 2002 party worker’s election manual summarized the doctrinal change using a handy table in which ‘old socialism’ (khuurchin sotsializm) was contrasted with ‘democratic socialism.’157 In 2010 the party changed its name back to the pre-1924 Mongolian People’s Party (Mongol Ardyn Nam, MPP) and distanced itself further from Soviet socialism, describing itself as dedicated to social democracy. This was not a disavowal of socialism, however, since the party saw social democracy as ‘one of the most advanced types of democratic socialism.’158 This sense of progress, and the need to keep up with the advance of world history, is one of the most fundamental enduring influences of the high modernism of the state socialist era. In many ways, however, the MPP has come to look decidedly ‘post-socialist’ in the sense that Dirlik (1989: 364) used the term to describe the post-Maoist politics of China: ‘[P]ostsocialism […] strives to keep alive a vague vision of future socialism as the common goal of humankind while denying to it any immanent role in the determination of present social policy.’ Emptied-out of much of its original content, this socialism is no longer committed to the rejection of capitalism, but is bent on its promotion, albeit in a socially responsible form. Instead the MPP claims the role of defender of society against the excessive individualism, licence and corruption apparently promoted by its principle electoral opponent, the 157 In ‘old socialism,’ the manual explains, one ideology predominated, with a single party system and the dictatorship of the proletariat, whereas in the more advanced version – democratic socialism – many opinions could flourish, with a multiparty system and democratic government and the rule of law (Khaltar et al. 2002: 13). 158 The phrase is ‘ardchilsan sotsializmyn neg devshiltet khelber’ (Mongol Ardyn Nam (MPP) website, Tüükhen Tobchoo [Historical summary], http://www.mpp.mn/).

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Democratic Party. This takes on a strong nationalist colouring since such corruption is frequently portrayed as selling out the national interest for private profit. Socialism has become, then, a modernist ideology of national social interest, the strong state, law, order and authority. The major alternative political force is the Democratic Party (Ardchilsan Nam, DP), which portrays itself as a centre-right party and a successor of the 1990 protest movement that ousted the one-party state. Formed in 2000 as a coalition of smaller groups, the DP has historically lacked the unity and institutional structure of its rival, but shared a common sense of opposition to the old party of state, a commitment to free market reforms, and an enthusiasm for the national heritage most disapproved of by the Soviet leadership – the imperial glories of the Chinggisid age. This political landscape has produced rival brands of national historical representation, with Chinggis Khan the emblematic national founder regularly championed by the DP, while their opponents tend to favour (in addition) Sükhbaatar and other heroes of the 1911-1921 Independence Movement as the fathers of modern Mongolia. These rival visions have informed struggles over public architecture and urban space, such as disputes over initiatives to remove statues of revolutionary heroes. This ‘battle for public history’ was the backdrop to the double renaming of the central square in Ulaanbaatar, which was changed from Sükhbaatar Square to Chinggis Square in 2013 after DP electoral success, only to have the name changed back to Sükhbaatar Square in 2016 when the MPP returned to power. Despite their differences, however, all the major political parties rely heavily on forms of Mongolian nationalism. The national frame, the vision of a unique country caught between its two giant neighbours, seems to be the fundamental starting point for any type of political imagination. But as with Mongolian ‘democracy’ and ‘socialism,’ conceptions of the Mongolian nation (ündesten) are particular – they are the product of a unique historical process. Although the word itself is older, much of the current meaning of ündesten was formed in the state socialist period when it was used to translate the Russian natsiya (nation/nationality). The core of ündesten is, however, the word for ‘root’ (ündes), which enables the concept to retain a certain sense of exclusive descent and ethnic distinctiveness (Munkh-Erdene 2006: 52-59), giving Mongolian ‘nationalism’ (undesnii uzel) a certain ethnonationalist flavour. The post-socialist political establishment has tirelessly promoted national pride, cultural distinctiveness and independence. After centuries of foreign domination in one form or another, the story goes, Mongolia is once again under the full control of Mongols. The reform policies were, in part, justified

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in nationalist terms, as the price of self-determination and cultural revival. The logic of nationalism locates people as citizens, rooting them in their proper places, making powerful appeals to the loyalty of its subjects. It also speaks to questions of entitlement, stipulating who is entitled to what. This logic informs a particular sense of localism – the ideology of nutagism. As described in Chapter 5, the concept of nutag (meaning ‘homeland’ or ‘territory’), has become a central value in private and public discourse. Invoking an emotional attachment to the ‘home,’ the concept operates at different scales and can be used to mean a locality, district, province or the entire nation (Mongol nutag). The concept has become central to all sorts of cultural and political projects, including the ‘homeland councils’ (nutgiin zövlöl), NGOs dedicated to furthering the interests of localities and provinces. The habit of using personal networks often based on locality and of looking to people that you feel you can trust, has remained strong, and has been bolstered by the pork-barrel aspect of parliamentary politics, in which cultivating links to locality has become a core feature of parliamentary campaigning. This sense of common local interest also resonates with many peoples’ personal experience. One consequence of the scavenger economics of the 1990s was a widespread concern with entitlement to resources and opportunities. Rural districts experienced the influx of a wave of ‘new herders’ (shine malchid) in the 1990s, as the collapse of other employment drove over a quarter of a million people to try and make a living from pastoralism (National Statistical Office of Mongolia 1999: 95). The new herders were often criticized for possessing poor pastoral skills and for moving their livestock onto the seasonal pastures used by locals, grazing off the vegetation they needed. This created numerous disputes between herding households for the local district authorities to try and settle. For many Mongolians it became a manifest reality that access to local resources had to be restricted and protected if there was to be enough left for the original inhabitants. A protectionist, defensive nutagism is readily transposed onto the national scale. What the foreign press has often termed ‘resource nationalism’ (Kleiman 2017: 1) reflects the widespread public sentiment that more and more of Mongolia’s wealth seems to be disappearing to other countries as foreign companies and corrupt politicians cash in on their opportunities to make money. But to date this has not been translated into much by way of state action. Although public and parliamentary unease delayed the government’s final deal with Rio Tinto over the enormous copper and gold mine at Oyu Tolgoi, there has been little effective protectionism in evidence since the 1990s, and raw materials have continued to pour out of the country.

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Capitalism and Oligarchy In the press and public debate it is becoming increasingly common for Mongolians to describe their country’s political order as an oligarchy (oligarkhi), ruled in effect by a small number of super-rich businessmen and their political confidents (Munkh-Erdene 2012). Media reports suggested that by 2017 real power and wealth had been concentrated in the hands of just 30 super-elite families, down from 200 or so a decade before (Baatarkhuyag 2017). Wealth and power are intertwined at the highest levels. The Democratic Party candidate and winner of the 2017 presidential election, for example, was Khaltmaagiin Battulga, one of the richest men in the country, thought to be worth over a billion US dollars (Otgon 2015). The People’s Party has its own business tycoon politicians. Sükhbaataryn Batbold, the Prime Minister and General Secretary of the MPP from 2009-2012, for example, was also described as a dollar billionaire (ibid.). Since the 1990s, corruption (avilga) has become a major theme in public discourse, stimulated by a continuous succession of corruption scandals involving politicians of all parties, in both parliamentary and municipal offices.159 In 2016, the news broke that among the list of offshore account holders found in the Panama Papers were 49 Mongolian names, including those of leading politicians and their families, such as a former Minister of Finance, a vice-chairman of the Financial Regulatory Commission and the son of the Governor of Ulaanbaatar (Mönkhjargal 2016). This managed to provoke outrage in a public already used to corruption scandals, and the following year the newly elected President Battulga called on those with offshore accounts to repatriate their wealth, amid rumours that he himself held large funds abroad. It is understandable, then, that many Mongolians have become somewhat cynical about the nature of politics in their country. Politicians are bound to f ind ways to enrich themselves and those around them, a common narrative goes, and whatever their party affiliations, most are engaged in patronage networks dealing in opportunities for self-enrichment. In this view the super-rich pull the strings of the political parties that typically 159 In 1999, for example, several members of parliament were charged with taking bribes to support a foreign company’s campaign to open a casino, and in 2001 a daily newspaper described a ‘land mafia’ in the Ulaanbaatar city government granting permission for private land developments in contravention of health and safety regulations. The newspaper ran the headline ‘City Strategic Planning Destroyed’ describing the way petrol companies gained permission to build on locations that the technical planning committee had forbidden because of buried water pipes, cables and drains (Ödriin Sonin, 19 December 2001).

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rely on them for financial donations and the support of the TV companies they own. In return the business tycoons benefit from the deals they can make with the help of politicians, sometimes in secret – gaining state loans and contracts, disadvantaging competitors and gaining protection from criminal investigation (Radchenko and Jargalsaikhan 2017). The result is a self-serving political elite who, although theoretically divided into competing parties, connive to divide up opportunities for self-enrichment between themselves. Combining the Mongolian acronyms of the MPP (MAN) and DP (AN) gave the popular name for this formation – manan – the word for ‘fog.’ The implication is that between them the parties have created a haze of misinformation, hiding their shared interest in making money from the state. In this view the major parties have become vehicles for various oligarchs and their factions, and political principles have become irrelevant in the scramble for power. The manan concept was picked up by one of the candidates of the 2017 presidential campaign, S. Ganbaatar, running for a party led by former President N. Enkhbayar that had split off from the MPP in 2010, and which had kept the original Soviet-era name of the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party to mark its objection to the main party’s drift to the right. The fact that Ganbaatar gained 30.61% of the popular vote in the first round, just 0.14% behind the MPP candidate, gives some sense of the public mood. In fact, as Radchenko and Jargalsaikhan (2017: 1053) note, the winning candidate, Battulga (who got 38.64% of the vote in the first round), hijacked the manan narrative for his own well-funded populist campaign. But the amount of collusion and accommodation between political rivals is debateable. If it makes sense to speak of an oligarchic elite, it is one that is riven by bitter factionalism. In 2012 former President and alleged oligarch Nambaryn Enkhbayar was arrested on corruption charges in the full glare of televised publicity. Many of the other most senior politicians and officials have also been investigated for corruption, including President Battulga. Although the Office for Combating Corruption (Avligatai Temtsekh Gazar, ATG)160 has taken some big political scalps over the years (Enkhbayar’s, for example) it is widely seen as an instrument of factional party politics. Almost all senior politicians and officials are potential targets of investigation, since they are bound to have some involvement with moneyed interests, so many see the ATG as just another weapon with which those oligarchs currently in power can attack their rivals. 160 The off icial English language name of the ATG is the ‘Independent Authority against Corruption.’ Here, however, I have used a more literal translation of the Mongolian – the ‘Office for Combating Corruption.’

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Conclusion: From Patrimonialism to Patrimonial Capitalism Like state socialism, capitalism arrived in Mongolia by capturing the state; through a process that, if it was not exactly top-down, was certainly from the centre-out. This national leap of faith has landed Mongolia squarely in a form of capitalism that would, ironically perhaps, have been recognizable to Marx. Since the opportunistic accumulation of the 1990s there has been no ‘trickle down’ of wealth from the rich to the rest of society (Marshall, Nixson and Walters 2008: 19). Instead, Mongolia has seen wealth sucked up to the very top, in a process matching Marx’s law of the ‘concentration of capital in the hands of a few’ (Marx [1844] 1959: 14). The twenty-first-century capitalist system that Mongolia has joined has unprecedented global reach and, in this sense, solidity. How successfully it will be able to deliver solutions for Mongolia’s problems of poverty, debt, inequality and environmental loss is not clear. In his study of capital in the twenty-first century, Thomas Piketty (2014: 1) argues that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge ‘have made it possible to avoid the Marxist apocalypse but have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality.’ Since the 1970s the capitalist economies of Europe and America have generated higher and higher levels of inequality, so that by the twenty-first century the distribution of wealth is about as unequal as it was before WWI.161 This suggests that capitalism’s deep structures point towards increasing inequality, rather than reducing it, and that the problem of poverty is not likely to be solved by the economic growth potential of ‘mature capitalism.’ If Piketty is right, the prospects for raising the living standards of Mongolia’s poor look bleak, since the lion’s share of any increase in national wealth is likely to be appropriated by the very richest segment of the population.162 Piketty’s term for the current economic order is ‘patrimonial capitalism.’ This is a system that, as a result the relentless accumulation of capital in the hands of the richest, is dominated by inherited private capital, rather than the wealth created by entrepreneurship or innovation. In a certain 161 In early-twenty-first-century America, for example, Piketty (2014: 256) notes ‘income from labour is about as unequally distributed as has ever been observed anywhere.’ 162 In the case of the United States, for example, Piketty (2014: 373) writes: ‘[I]f we consider the total growth of the US economy in the thirty years prior to the crisis, that is, from 1977 to 2007, we find that the richest 10 per cent appropriated three-quarters of the growth. The richest 1 per cent alone absorbed nearly 60 per cent of the total increase of US national income in this period. Hence for the bottom 90 per cent, the rate of income growth was less than 0.5 per cent per year.’

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sense Mongolian capitalism is already dominated by inherited wealth, since it emerged from the opportunistic struggle over a form of national patrimony – the enterprises and environmental resources left from the state socialist era. But Piketty devised the term to primarily mean an economy dominated by inherited private wealth and the interests of those who own it. Is this a good description of Mongolia? In some ways it is too early to say. Most of the current generation of tycoons have built their business empires themselves, not inherited them as such. And it should be noted that since the 1990s some sectors of the economy have developed substantially under the current business leadership as a result of direct foreign investment, construction and new technology, particularly in IT, telecommunications and mining. On the other hand, there is every sign that these extraordinary private fortunes will be passed down within the families of the current super-rich. There is nothing much by way of an effective inheritance tax and the ‘oligarchic’ class is already beginning to look faintly dynastic. Corporations often include several members of the same family in senior positions, and N. Nyamtaishir, for instance, said to be the fourth richest men in the country in 2015, passed the position of CEO of one of Mongolia’s largest companies to his daughter in 2016.163 There are also indications that the uber-elite strata is beginning to intermarry. At one point news reports suggested, for instance, that Nyamtaishir’s daughter would marry the son of business tycoon and former Prime Minister S. Batbold.164 Patrimonialism was Weber’s favoured term to describe the aristocratic, feudal order of pre-modern Europe, and this finds a certain resonance with the Mongolian experience. Some have begun to describe the new order as ‘feudal’ ( feodalyn) and commentators such as A. Baatarkhuyag (2017) have directly compared the current oligarchs with the aristocratic grandees of past, charging the 30 great families with carving up the country into so many private principalities. Of course, nothing like the pre-revolutionary order has survived the upheavals of the twentieth century, but Mongolian public life nevertheless bares some faint, refracted traces of the aristocratic culture of the past, which have left their mark on aspirations, value systems and notions of the good life. The MPR had retained certain, highly edited, versions of the values of the old noble class, to be revived in the 1990s as avenues for public display and personal prestige. The high status that horse 163 See, for example, the online announcement: ‘N. Tselmüün MAK Kompaniin CEO bolloo (N. Tselmüün becomes CEO of MAK Company)’ Ikon Next Horizon http://ikon.mn/n/s26 164 For press report, see Sonin News Agency, 2014. ‘Sü. Batbold, H. Hyamtaishir nar khud bolokh n’ (Sü. Batbold and H. Hyamtaishir to become affines)’ http://www.sonin.mn/news/easy-page/33903.

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racing retained, for example, albeit reframed as a ‘national sport,’ fuelled super-rich interest and investment, so that prices for the best horses are said to exceed a $100,000. The ability to trace aristocratic descent came to hold a certain attraction in the post-Soviet era. In 2004, when Mongolians had to choose family or ‘clan’ names for new government identity documents, a large proportion chose Borjigin – the name of the Chinggisid aristocrats (Sanders 2010: 242). This was far more than can have claimed noble ancestry in the usual way, since less that 6% of the population enjoyed this status in 1918 (Otgonjargal 2003: 15). It is possible that new political developments might yet propel Mongolian capitalism in new directions. The public media are diverse, active and offer a continuous critical commentary on public affairs. Much of the voting public is disenchanted and may yet be mobilized by politicians proposing more radical policies in the future. The established parties have also shown some small signs of political reaction against widening inequality; in 2018 the MPP administration replaced the 10% flat tax on income with a slightly more progressive regime in which the top rate was 25% (Gantuya 2018). However, the development of capitalism in Mongolia will also depend on factors beyond the scope of national politics. Firstly, the behaviour of global markets, particularly commodity prices, is likely to be more influential than changes in domestic policy. A sustained spell of growth that generated large numbers of well-paid jobs, for example, would be likely to transform public perceptions of the ‘oligarchy’ and the popularity of the political class, while a sustained slump might well provoke a wider crisis. Secondly, Mongolia remains sensitive to the international political climate. If, for example, an inter-governmental consensus emerged on legislation to regulate and tax global flows of capital and limit its accumulation by the super-rich, the idea of ‘taming’ or at least modifying capitalism in Mongolia would quickly become more plausible. Without this, however, the Mongolian state’s room for manoeuvre seems limited, given the high level of national debt and the extent to which the country currently relies on international finance. Any government that the Mongolian public elects will have to negotiate a continuing flow of credit and investment from abroad if it is to prevent further economic decline. In practice, then, Mongolian capitalism will continue to be powerfully shaped by the ideologies of foreign aid donors, superpowers and international financial institutions. The first of Mongolia’s twentieth-century revolutions saw Buddhist patrimonialism displaced by a national version of Soviet modernism that operated through the state, and imposed new regimes for property and citizenship. The capitalist revolution transformed economic and political relations so

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as to create resources for private ownership, but the concentration of this property in the hands of a tiny elite threatens to recreate the stark hereditary inequalities of the pre-revolutionary order. But both revolutions were driven by modernist visions of national progress. They reflect the enduring public value of two constructs: the polyvalent notion of development (economic, social, cultural) on the one hand, and the nation-state frame (Mongolia) within which it should appear on the other. This dyad continues to be central to the normative projects of imagining Mongolia’s future.

Addendum Obugan-u egüdku jang üile selte orusiba (Rites and so on for the establishment of a new obo) Original Mongolian text reproduced by kind permission of U. Erdenetuya The requirements for the erecting of an obo are The obos of royal persons [should be] on the top of high mountains, and The obos of noble lamas and ordinary nobles on high land terraces The obos of ordinary common people on mountain passes (saddles) Therefore, generally the sort of place for the rituals [should be] With water in front (to the South) and complete [with] land of each type, and [where the] skirts (khoshuu) of mountains meet, visible from near and far, Looking like a sentinel, so as not to harm the benefactor’s bodily elements Like a crossroads where dignitaries and commoners are gathered. Such a place is always very good The benefits of erecting and worshipping at an obo In this life to dispel ghosts and Multiply children and grandchildren and Increase produce, livestock, goods and property, Wipe away impermissible bad ulcers and Ill fortune from others and Three hundred and sixty devils, four hundred and four illnesses, The one thousand and eighty unforeseen obstacles, [let them] cause no harm, obtain good fortune By pleasing the stern authorities, great lords of the land, find rebirth in a great noble lineage In addition to this it is said that there are many benefits for followers [of these rites] as taught by Teacher Badmasambava.

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Now this is the rule for erecting the obo Take armour, quiver, bow, arrow, sword, spear, Split a cedar three cubits long, on it write twenty-one times the heart mantras of Yamandaka, Mahakala, Okin Tngri, and Vanchirbani. Wrap it with multicoloured [silk] gauze and make it a central shaft Make a white baling (dough offering), make eight savdag (Tibetan class of local deities) [images], make twelve years [animal images], A good arrow fletched with eagle feather, a piece of silk, multicoloured [silk] gauze, seven red pearls, Turquoise, lapis lazuli, amber, seashell, cowry shell, silk of five colours, The three taste-types of fat, yoghurt, milk, honey, treacle, raisins, plum, various fruits, The six sovereign remedies and so on, include the medicine of the luus (local deity/water spirit) Create the body of a great king garuda bird and fix it on the top of the central shank, Make twenty-one small birds around it Fill up an urn or good clay bottle with these treasures The three taste types of various medicines and seed of many types of grain, Wrap the [vessel’s] mouth with [silk] gauzes of five colours, Place a wheel of male and female, matter and mind, above and below, Place the bottle inclining its mouth in the direction of sunrise. Now to erect the obo Fill up the area of an eighteen khan (wall section) ger (yurt) with stones, Place a white baling in front (to the South) of the central beam stuck [there] Place around the twelve year [animals] each in a different direction Erect a high body of the obo Around the top place 21 stones on which the six-letter prayer (um ma ni pad me khuum) is written Raise (build) the base beautifully round In the four directions erect four small obos as sentinels Erect 13 obos to follow behind

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Upon those four sentinels place a great juniper bush, father of trees, A bundle of three jointed bamboo, mother of trees, a bundle of balqun,165 son of trees, A big bush, with roots, of birch, maternal uncle of trees, willow daughter of trees and Various trees to be objects of veneration of the obo, Eighty one arrows, eighty-one spears, eighty-one swords and armour [and] quivers, Place bows and arrows, swords, spears and so on to be weapons of the obo, Place a standard and brazier and so on as the equipment of the obo, Fix an animal bristle pennant to a good spear Put on a flag with a picture to the west for multiplying khei mori (prayer flags) Count thirteen bum bsang166 and place about the obo Like a heroic [warrior] person attacking enemies Or a girl or woman person wearing clothes and jewellery It is good if [the obo] has a complete set of the various treasures As the emperor of mountains, the glorious Mount Sumber Readings Read Öljei Qutug Naiman Gegeen and Qarsi-yin Naiman Gegeen, Qas Erdeniyin Naiman Gegeen and Ebügen Emegen Sutra, Gajar-un Jirüken-ü Sutra and Dolugan Qosigun-u Sutra, Altan Dusal, Luusan Chovaka, Luusun Qanggal and then Thirteen Bum Bsangs Luusun Bsangs, Ündüsün Bsangs and so on. Thereupon, lamas imbue [the obo] with blessing, scatter libations [of milk] to consecrate [the obo] Sacrifice chicken and sheep and then a bull and so on, Bring before the obo consecrated (seter) [animals designated for protection] of the four [sorts of] livestock, and put [them] circling [the obo] Invite favour from [the] four directions Tie hair from the slaughtered livestock around the tree branches of the obo, Offer [what is] called the sixth balin to the four directions, Offer a dorma (dough offering) to the [spirit] master of the land Then circle the obo reciting mani (um ma ni pad me huum) Beg blessing of the lamas, gain benediction of [long] life

165 Unknown term, possibly it indicates balgu (tamarisk). 166 Unknown term, possibly a type of incense (bsang is a transliteration of the Tibetan term for ‘incense’).

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Nine riders on white horses [should bring] white food (diary products) and all sorts of food to offer Galloping swiftly from the four directions Spread white silk beneath the teacher (lama) conducting the rites Or else spread a big white felt Bless and assume [form], imagine having become Ochirvaani Hold an arrow in [silk] gauze and intone in this way.

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