The Anti-Social Contract: Injurious Talk and Dangerous Exchanges in Northern Mongolia 9781785332470

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The Anti-Social Contract

The Anti-Social Contract Injurious Talk and Dangerous Exchanges in Northern Mongolia

Lars Højer

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2019 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2019 Lars Højer All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2019015050 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78533-246-3 hardback ISBN 978-1-78533-247-0 ebook

Contents

List of Figures vi Preface vii Acknowledgements x Notes on Transliteration xiii Introduction. Creating Difference from Within

1

Chapter 1. Centralisation and Dispersal: A District in the Market Era 35 Chapter 2. Dangerous Communications: Injurious Talk and the Perils of Standing Out

59

Chapter 3. Safe Communications: Formality and Hierarchy

85

Chapter 4. Morality and Danger: Religious Practices and Buddhist Directions 109 Chapter 5. Concealed Agencies: Divination, Loss and Magical Objects 137 Conclusion 171 References 177 Index 191

Figures

0.1 Chandman’-Öndör District centre in summer, 2006. 6 0.2 Contemporary and pre-revolutionary Chandman’-Öndör District in Mongolia. 8 0.3 Chandman’-Öndör District centre in winter, 2001. 19 0.4 A home in the district centre. 22 1.1 Playing chess in a local shop. 37 1.2 Gathering at the ovoo ceremony. 39 1.3 Cooked mutton prepared for the ovoo ceremony. 41 1.4 At the Alungua statue. 44 1.5 Making hay for the winter. 48 1.6 Herding at the district centre. 50 1.7 Fetching ice at the local river. 51 2.1 Red Buddhist lamas performing a ritual. 64 2.2 The village. 73 2.3 Home close to the district centre. 78 3.1 Preparing meheeriin tos for Tsagaan Sar. 87 3.2 Making libations. 90 3.3 Tsagaan Sar. 94 3.4 Receiving the new daughter-in-law. 99 4.1 An ovoo ceremony at Lake Hövsgöl. 111 4.2 Buddhist readings at an ovoo ceremony. 114 4.3 Red Buddhist lama. 124 4.4 The Dayan Deerh cave. 131 4.5 Medals, school uniforms, suits and ceremonial scarfs at the local school. 133 5.1 Remains of a monastery at the Üür river. 141 5.2 Ataany seter. 159 5.3 The protective charm (names in Cyrillic have been blurred). 163

Preface

I arrived in Chandman’-Öndör District in mid August 2000 with my friend and fieldwork assistant ‘Jenya’, who helped me to settle in with a local family in the district centre and introduced me to the district authorities before going back to Ulaanbaatar a few weeks later. I had previously been to Mongolia four times (for fourteen months altogether), the first time back in 1995, so life in Mongolia and the Mongolian countryside was not unknown to me. Yet I was not used to the ease with which I was accepted by the district authorities. Although rumours apparently did emerge at some point that I was ‘an economic spy’, socialist paranoia of Westerners seemed to have become a thing of the past. The first three months were mainly spent on gaining increased proficiency in Mongolian and becoming acquainted with the people and the area in general. In the village, I settled in the fenced compound (hashaa) of the Mongolian family that was to be my hosts throughout most of my stay. They worked at the local school and nursery and had three children, two of whom had already moved to the capital to work and study. I lived in one of their two log cabins, sharing the small house with their teenage daughter (and a variety of dairy products) for the first four months, and when my wife and son arrived on a cold day in late November, we moved into a Mongolian yurt (ger) set up inside the compound for the purpose. The last months of my fieldwork were spent in a different part of the village in accommodation that was not part of any family’s compound. The fieldwork was carried out mainly in the district centre (sumyn töv) but included frequent trips to the surrounding countryside. Additional fieldwork was carried out in August/September 2002 and also in July 2006, when my family, including two more children, joined me once more. This book took its beginning, one might say, in the classically holistic pretensions of anthropology  – i.e. Chandman’-Öndör District as a whole and at a specific time in history was the point of departure, and the explicit aim of my fieldwork was to let the specific ethnography of this whole inspire the focus of analysis, delving into issues as they emerged. Yet, this book is not meant to be ‘representative’ of ‘a whole’ in any straightforward manner.

viii • Preface

A very particular anthropological interest (misfortune and conflict were the preliminary topics of research), as well as personal dispositions and the incidental nature of fieldwork experiences, obviously came to condition – and make possible  – the outcome of my research. The partial nature of fieldwork, the acknowledgement that it could all have been different, is meant as more than an anthropological mantra. In a village in rural Mongolia, it is impossible to be on an equal footing with everybody, and physical access to people in general is severely limited. People are spread out and on the move, and a Mongolian village (or district) does by no means consist of open huts pointing towards a centre in a panoptical fashion, making it possible for the anthropologist to ‘survey from the middle’, as it were, but is rather made up of a plurality of enclosed family compounds. In addition, Mongols are – for reasons explained in Chapter 3  – not very fond of talking openly about conflict and misfortune, phenomena that remained central to my research. My study is therefore based on in-depth relations with a relatively small number of key informants, coupled with conversations with a large number of acquaintances, extensive observation (including hours of video recordings of celebrations, rituals and religious ceremonies), household visits and interviews with a range of people, especially ‘experts’, on various topics. However, most important to my understanding, I believe, is the fact that I simply stayed in the district for one year and got a sense of the place. I would also like to stress that the book is about more than simply life in a particular setting in the Mongolian countryside. It engages just as much with studies of witchcraft and gossip, post-socialism and economy, ritualised behaviour and exchange and anthropological theory and Mongolian ‘tradition and religion’ as it does with a specific locale in Northern Mongolia, and it is an explicit aim to make a concrete ethnographic contribution to such wider discussions. It should be clear, then, that when referring to ‘Mongolians’, ‘Northern Mongolia’ and ‘Chandman’-Öndör District’, the categories are not meant to be simply descriptive. Mongolia and my place of fieldwork could have been described in other ways, and this book is only one possible framing, and one that is also defined by a very particular theoretical interest. Like all analysis, it is a ‘caricature’ that ‘overdoes’ certain things and downplays others (not everything can be included) while trying to stay faithful to the ethnographic original, as it were. This caricature is produced to create an exaggerated visibility of certain things – i.e. elicit potentials from the ethnography (Højer 2014) – that are also relevant to the anthropological discourse at large. The study thus expresses my work and my tradition as much as their lives, and – in line with this – I will throughout the book make a number of more theoretical digressions from the ethnographic material. It is equally important to stress that ‘Chandman-Öndör District’ is not meant to cover a neatly bounded group of people and a territory simply

Preface • ix

defined by its spatial boundaries, thus opposing it to other territories with other ‘cultures’.1 On the one hand, the setting is almost as much ‘Mongolia around the millennium’ as it is ‘Chandman’-Öndör District a decade after the collapse of socialism’ (and I will draw heavily on ethnography from other areas of Mongolia also); in a sense, one might even say that the district is used as an occasion to write about things that has caught my attention over the years in Mongolia as a whole. On the other hand, the objective has been to address a setting in its specificity (which is neither universal nor particular) rather than simply produce a caricature of ‘an area’ by emphasising its difference from an imagined West (Howe 1999/2000: 59). The setting is not easily described in terms of exoticisms; ‘they’ are not all that different from ‘us’, nor, however, does everything work in quite the same way as I am used to in north-western Europe. It would not be a proper ethnography, I believe, if it did not let the setting speak and if it did not at the same time speak to more than that. As such, the setting is meant to appear ambiguous and indeterminate, and it is my hope that the following presentation evokes neither (lococentric) relativism nor an all too easy identification. My ambition is that it will contribute to new potential understandings of what it may mean to be related, for all of us, through a particular ethnographic description. The same holds true from the other side, as it were. While the book is obviously not intended to be simply about life in Chandman’-Öndör District or Mongolia, it is nevertheless my hope that Mongolians – if they read this – might recognise parts of the picture I paint. My interlocutors and friends should know, though, that the main theme of this work, in many ways, also forms a daring contrast to the warmth with which my family and I were received by most people in Chandman’-Öndör over the years.

Note 1. Mongolia refers to the independent nation of that name throughout the book. Mongolia, however, is far from being home to all ethnic Mongols, who  – apart from Mongolia proper – live mainly in China (primarily in the Inner Mongolian Autonomous region) and Russia (Buryatia and Kalmykia).

Acknowledgements

This study could never have taken place without the many people in Chandman’-Öndör District, who let my family and me into their lives even though this brought along difficulties for some. In particular, I would like to thank Yura, Uragmal, Badamtsetseg, Shürentsetseg, Bat-Orshih, Otgonbayar, Davaahüü, Mönhbat, Norovsüren, Zolbayar, Naasanjargal, Siilegma, Tsedenbaljir, Shura, Enhtüvshen, Yanjmaa, Batbayar and Nordov. Also, I would like to thank all the kids who made it such a memorable year for my son, Peter. In Ulaanbaatar I would like to thank Batbuyan, ‘Miki’ and Professor Bazargür at the Institute of Geography, Mongolian Academy of Sciences, for kindly receiving me and helping me to make my fieldwork and the stay of my family possible. Also, I express my gratitude to Nyam-Ochir, Gambat, Dandar, Sasha and Tunga. A very special thanks to Bayarmaa Khalzaa, my invaluable friend and Mongolian teacher, assistant and advisor on all ­questions Mongolian. My Mongolian düü and fieldwork assistant throughout the years, ‘Jenya’ Boikov, and my very good friend Burmaa Nyama  – and their daughter Indra – gave me the feeling of having a genuine Mongolian family while in the field. The same applies to Victor, Pürvee and Dima. In the process of writing this book, I have come to know Otgonchimeg, her father Bürneebaatar and their family. I am deeply grateful for this extension of my network of close ‘relatives’, which has now come to include Hazar, Jenya and Ogii’s son. I thank Jenya for having shared his family with me and for having managed to combine the roles of fieldwork assistant, informant and ‘dry’ (huurai) brother for two and a half decades. Carrie Humphrey was my genuine mentor while preparing the initial version of this manuscript in the early 2000s. Discussions with her have been a continuing source of inspiration and have always left me with renewed enthusiasm. She has encouraged me to pursue my ideas and – later – publish the book while at the same time guiding my research with perceptive and incisive comments and suggestions. For her unfailing support, I am deeply obliged.

Acknowledgements • xi

I would like to thank Marilyn Strathern, Alan MacFarlaine and David Sneath for chairing presentations of parts of this manuscript at the Department of Social Anthropology (Cambridge) and at the Mongolia and Inner Asian Studies Unit (Cambridge). Their insights, as well as the perceptive reflections of participants and fellow students at these sessions, were highly appreciated. Also, I would like to extend my gratitude to: Uradyn E. Bulag, Stephen HughJones, Agata Bareja-Starzynska, Bjørn Bedsted, Jeanett Bjønnes, Christel Braae, Chuka Chuluunbat, Gregory Delaplace, Bumochir Dulam, Rebecca Empson, Jerome Game, Mönh-Erdene Gantulga, Bayarmandah Gaunt, Signe Gundersen, Michael Haslund-Christensen, Hanna Havnevik, Mette High, Leo Howe, Ole Høiris, Lhagvademchig Jadamba, José Kelly, Torsten Kolind, Gaëlle Lacaze, Magnus Marsden, Pie and Hans Meulenkamp, Tim Morris, Andrew Moutu, Dawn Nafus, Ida Nicolaisen, Kimi Hibri Pedersen, Kyle Rand, Alexander Regier, Joel Robbins, José Rodriguez, Jun Sato, Vera Skvirskaya, Carla Stang, Uranchimeg Ujeed, Torben Vestergaard and Piers Vitebsky. I would also like to thank Elaine Bolton for carefully proofreading an earlier version of the entire manuscript and Åse Ghasemi for designing the map, and then I would like to express my gratitude to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro for inspiring the title of this book with a subsection on ‘The AntiSocial Contract’ in the final chapter of From the Enemy’s Point of View (1992), even if the argument made here differs substantially from his. For countless stimulating dialogues on Mongolian ethnography and excellent company while preparing much of an earlier version of this manuscript, I would like to express my deep gratitude to Hürelbaatar Ujeed. I am thankful to Hildegaard Diemberger for taking time to discuss material on Tibetan Buddhism, to Martin Holbraad, Rane Willerslev and Michael Mahrt for thought-provoking discussions and advice, and to Alan Wheeler for numerous inspiring exchanges on Mongolian ethnography and history, and for great companionship on a horse trip to the remote upper reaches of the Üür river. Also, I am deeply grateful to Esther Fihl for her unfailing support after returning to Denmark, to Mikkel Bille and Miriam Koktvedgaard Zeitzen for carefully reading and commenting on an earlier version of most of this manuscript and to other colleagues at ToRS and the Centre for Comparative Culture Studies – Andreas Bandak, Thomas Brudholm, Mikkel Bunkenborg, Martin Demant Frederiksen, Birgitte Stampe Holst, Annika Hvithamar, Birgitte Schepelern Johansen, Benedikte Møller Kristensen, Regnar Albæk Kristensen, Anja Kublitz, Stine Simonsen Puri, Tine Roesen, Frank Sejersen, Kirsten Thisted, Michael Alexander Ulfstjerne and many others – for providing me with an intellectually highly stimulating, and extremely humorous and sociable, work environment over many years. Morten Pedersen has, if anyone, been my friend and companion on ‘the Mongolian venture’, and his support, ­inspiration and friendship has been invaluable throughout.

xii • Acknowledgements

This book has been long in the making, and even though I have done my best to stay faithful to the original manuscript as it was first conceived without letting my current trains of thought and way of writing interfere too much with the original style, structure and argument, I have struggled to find enough substantial chunks of time for revising the manuscript and revisiting my ethnographic material. I thank Berghahn, Tom Bonnington and Caroline Kuhtz (and previous editors) wholeheartedly for their patience, and I am deeply grateful to Katherine Swancutt and two anonymous reviewers for their thorough reading of the manuscript and for their criticism and many great suggestions. The much too long process of writing the book also means that some chunks of the manuscript have already been published in different versions. Parts of Chapter 1 and Chapter 3 have appeared in ‘The AntiSocial Contract: Enmity and Suspicion in Northern Mongolia’, Cambridge Anthropology 24 (2004): 41–63, where some of the key arguments of this book were first presented, and I thank Blackwell Publishing and Springer for permission to reuse parts of my article ‘Absent Powers: Magic and Loss in Northern Mongolia’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), in Chapter 6. For generously funding the research upon which this book is based I would like to express my gratitude to the Danish Research Council for the Humanities, the Danish Research Agency, King’s College (Cambridge), Cambridge European Trust, Knud Højgaards Fond, Sigurd Jacobsens Mindefond, the University of Cambridge and the Department of Social Anthropology (University of Cambridge). Also, I would like to thank Dronning Margrethe og Prins Henriks Fond, Kong Christian den Tiendes Fond and Ebbe Munchs Mindefond for financially supporting my initial interest in Mongolia. My brothers, Henrik and Michael Højer, and my extended family have been a great help and support throughout the years, and I thank them all. While not unworried about my life trajectory and many travels, my parents, Karen and Knud Højer, have always been behind me in whatever I have chosen to do. There is no way of expressing my gratitude to them. Johanne, Karl Emil, Peter and Mette have meant everything to me and given my life a sense of solidity amidst all the writing. Johanne and Karl Emil have managed with a dad who spends too much time working, and Peter has so fantastically coped with moving between – and growing up in – three very different countries, languages and climates. For making all this possible – and for being who she is (and, not least, for coping with me) – this book, however small a sign of gratitude, is dedicated to Mette.

Notes on Transliteration

Apart from widely used spellings of well-known historical names, such as Chinggis Khan, the following system has been used when transliterating from the Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet: А (a) Б (b) В (v) Г (g) Д (d) Е (ye) Ё (yo) Ж (j) З (z) И (i) Й (i) Л (l) М (m) Н (n) О (o) Ө (ö) П (p) Р (r) С (s) Т (t) У (u) Y (ü) Х (h) Ц (ts) Ч (ch) Ш (sh) Ъ (‘’) Ы (y) Ь (‘) Э (e) Ю (yu) Я (ya)

In quotes I have kept the author’s original transliteration but, if necessary, placed my own transliteration in square brackets so as to avoid confusion. I have followed Sneath (2000: viii) in adding a Roman ‘s’ to the end of Mongolian plural forms when they appear as an integrated part of an English sentence. Unless otherwise stated, I have followed Samuel (1993) for transliteration of Tibetan terms.

Introduction Creating Difference from Within

Y Most Mongol tribes think and speak of most other Mongols with a mixture of dislike, suspicion and sometimes envy. At the same time all who speak the Mongol tongue, they feel, are aha-dū, elder and younger brothers, and ought to stand together against all who are not Mongols …   It is, I think, inherent in the character of the nomad life that there should be this wavering between unity and dispersal. Nomadism cannot be uniform. ––O. Lattimore, Mongol Journeys

I had heard of her the previous day. She used to be a colleague of Ulaanhüü, a local teacher and the father of my Mongolian host family, but she had now gone to live in the capital, where she had settled as a diviner of some repute. She had become well known and wealthy, I was told, and her name had even appeared in the newspapers. Rumour had it that she was a hermaphrodite. Now that she was sitting in front of me, I could see why locals might think so. She was abrupt and heavier than most Mongolian women, acted like an assertive male authority and was bizarrely dressed. Wearing leather trousers and big golden rings, she did not look like the Buddhist lama she was said to be. Neither lamas nor Mongolian women – especially when alone – are supposed to drink, but this woman was greedily devouring meat and fat while relentlessly ordering the poor mother of the household to bring her more

2  •  The Anti-Social Contract

Mongolian milk-spirit (shimiin arhi). She was indeed terrifying and a living paradox at that: a drunk woman, a female Buddhist lama in a conspicuous outfit and – in gendered terms – a hermaphrodite, neither man nor woman. I was visiting a decaying socialist-style sanatorium in the remote Mongolian countryside with my Mongolian host family and fieldwork assistant when we were all invited to visit a family in their small log cabin on the other side of the river. We did not know that the family had another visitor, but we soon realised that the lama diviner was the reason we had been invited. The host family served us drinks and meat from a recently slaughtered sheep, while the lama was keen on telling us how lucky we were to be offered the head of a sheep. The hidden agenda behind the hospitality was difficult to miss because she soon asked us, in a rather impolite fashion, whether we had room in our car to give her a lift back to the main village of Chandman’-Öndör District, my fieldwork base. Ulaanhüü,1 my Mongolian host, replied that we would not be going straight back to the village, but he was obviously not telling the truth. Having tasted the offered milk-spirit, we then decided to leave after what – for my Mongolian friends – had been an unpleasant visit, but just as we were about to go, the lama asked my fieldwork assistant to stay behind for a moment, as she needed to talk to him face to face. Ulaanhüü seemed uncomfortable about this, so while the rest of us waited patiently outside, he went into the house on two occasions to ask them to hurry up. When my assistant finally appeared, he was not very informative. The lama had told him, or so he brusquely informed me, that we would have a pleasant trip back to the village. While walking back to the sanatorium, Ulaanhüü declared that he would never give a lift to a woman like her. She had been impolite and had shown no respect, he said, and civility was to be expected of a woman who had once been his younger colleague at the local school. My fieldwork assistant had feared the lama, and he later told me that she could not have been genuine. A lama would be calm, properly behaved and modest, he said. They all agreed that she had only invited us and made the family serve the sheep’s head in order to get a lift. The lama had arrived to perform a service, and now she could not get back to the village, it seemed. This was not a thoroughfare, not even by Mongolian standards, and only very few cars would pass by here. To the north, there was only taiga and then mountains. On one evening a few days later  – when back in the village centre of Chandman’-Öndör District – my assistant told me what had really happened in the log cabin. The lama diviner had informed him that my host family was a bad family and that they would try to get as much as possible out of me. We had to be careful, she had confided. While secretly attacking our host family, she also made sure that the information would stay concealed: there would be war (dain), she had cautioned my assistant, if this information was revealed

Introduction • 3

to anyone. The warning, and the lama’s whole appearance, had made him anxious, and he had not dared inform me straight away. I only saw the lama once more. She had been drinking and was riding a motorbike through the village. Later on, she went back to the capital, and six months later I heard that she had passed away. She was, however, somehow proved right in her prediction of conflict. There is no doubt that the lama’s transgressive and odd behaviour was distressing and immediately effective, simply because her presence alone begged one question: did she have the power of her frightening appearance? Just as her appearance drew attention, so did her words brand one’s memory, at least for a while. At the very same time, her improper and indecent behaviour was what made her unreliable: was she an impostor or simply mad? She could not be ignored, though, and once her words had been spoken, they had become a potential truth that affected our actions towards others. Concern was raised: might the host family indeed be bad? And what about the lama? Could she be believed, let alone relied on? Ulaanhüü had undermined her authority, but, according to the lama, he was not to be trusted anyway. As was often the case during my fieldwork, concern, disquiet and idioms of deceit were integral to the fabric of social life. Appearances deceive, I was often warned, and contained in the message provided by the lama was the necessity of secrecy, of working under the surface. The form of transmission (delivering information behind closed doors with a warning not to pass it on) and the content of the message (anticipation of conflict and bad, unreliable people) made this clear. The lama had disseminated a piece of information that, from the beginning, was not known to all (only the fieldwork assistant was told) and that could – by its very mode of transmission – not be made known to all: ‘If he told this to anyone, there would be war’ (the warning itself already instigating this war). As with the case of rural French witchcraft, where words always wage war and objectivity and neutrality is impossible, the nature of persons and relations only made sense from a position within the system (cf. Favret-Saada 1980 [1977]: 10).2 The account itself could not be made public; it was partial in nature and unverifiable. The only thing known for sure was that ‘someone’ was not to be trusted, because relationships were cast in an idiom of mistrust. This story may be deemed idiosyncratic and irrelevant if it was not for the fact that I repeatedly encountered similar expressions of mistrust and enmity during my fieldwork (see also Højer 2003, 2004). Additionally, suspicion and antagonism, even violence (Pedersen 2011), have since then been shown to be prevalent features of social relations in many other Mongolian districts (see e.g. Empson 2011: 268–315; Swancutt 2012; High 2017: 74–75), even to an extent where one could speak of a ‘community of mistrust’ and ‘living with an assumption of malice’ (Buyandelger 2013: 125–29). Indeed, Lattimore’s impression in the introductory quote is often repeated in local

4  •  The Anti-Social Contract

theory about local life, such as when a middle-age female interlocutor in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, once explained to me that  – having lived in Mongolia for years – I myself, for one, should be able to understand that in Mongolia everything is ‘just for one person’ (wrestling, horse racing etc.) and that ‘people like to do things on their own and haven’t worked together for ages’ (cf. Bruun 2006: 132). ‘We are nomads,’ she told me, ‘and if we work together, we have arguments’ (see also Bulag 1998: 65). Another interlocutor, a male flour vendor, similarly brought this out as an indigenous concern when he echoed Lattimore in bluntly stating that ‘no one can unite Mongolians, only Chinggis Khan could do so. Mongolians are separate and dispersed’ and ‘they only pretend to respect each other’. Such views are even echoed in analyses of Mongolian political life; for example, when D. Jargalsaihan (known as Jargal DeFacto) in his weekly televised DeFacto Review often laments the disorganised state of Mongolian politics and once even proclaimed with a knowing and maybe resigned smile on his face that ‘in Mongolia, nothing is institutional, it is always individual’.3 While I do obviously not want to take such local conceptualisations as face value explanations of inherent traits of nomadism or Mongolian culture, nor make them into the only – or key – operative principle of social relations in Mongolia (or accept the reference to an assumed pre-cultural ‘individual’), they do point to important aspects of anti-social relations that are often underexplored in Mongolian ethnography, at least as a significant trope in its own right, and equally undertheorized in general anthropology. In this book, I thus set out to explore mistrust, suspicion and enmity and the Mongolian concern with the dangers involved in communicating, even in relating. In doing so, I aim to take issue with the core of much anthropological theorising,4 where social life is taken to imply, much in line with Rousseau, that social man constantly lives ‘outside himself [and] knows only how to live in the opinion of others’ and that it is only from the judgement of others that ‘he derives the consciousness of his own existence’ (Rousseau 1967 [1762, 1755]: 245; see also Lévi-Strauss 1978a [1973]5). While this may be a reasonable assumption for any sociology or social anthropology, it is equally sensible to ask, I argue, what then happens when these others – through whom we live  – also exist as others and when we start knowing ourselves through the eyes of what is believed to be different and sometimes unreliable, unknown and feared others? What are the implications when the others through whom we are realised are, in effect, others and when this realisation leads to uncertainty, avoidance, precautions and danger, rather than to the certainty of playing a set role vis-à-vis other set roles in a fixed social system, ‘a society’ composed of ‘social relations’, where selves are as clearly defined and known as others? How do we approach a world of relations where the unknown other and danger in social relationships are important

Introduction • 5

features and where the avoidance of such ‘social relationships’ are – at least in part – constitutive of our coming into being? This is, essentially, what this book is trying to tackle.

Chandman’-Öndör District While I contend that mistrust and animosity are important and often overlooked aspects of life in Mongolia, this is obviously far from all there is to relatedness in rural or urban Mongolia – and it is certainly not instability, anxiety and concern that characterises Chandman’-Öndör District at first sight. Indeed, to most foreign visitors, the village centre of the district (sum) would appear to be a calm and quiet place to live, where social problems such as poverty, repeated bursts of violence and excessive drinking, while certainly not absent, are less prevalent features of everyday life than in many other Mongolian districts a decade or so after the collapse of socialist society (see e.g. Pedersen 2011). Life is unhurried, few people are to be seen and the sound of a jeep making its way along the rough dirt tracks of the village only rarely interferes with the prevailing silence or the few barking dogs (or, in the summer, mooing cows) of Mongolian rural life. Many young people move away, mainly to the Mongolian capital, for education and work, and the ones that remain or return usually take up a life of herding, teaching or small-scale business. The village is indeed located in the remote periphery of Mongolia, more than seven hundred kilometres – and at least twenty-four hours of non-stop driving  – from Ulaanbaatar, the capital city and centre of Mongolia. It is reached from the provincial centre, Mörön (see Figure 0.2), after a long and rough 137 kilometre ride on a bumpy and occasionally muddy track that is increasingly surrounded by forested slopes. Depending on the car, the weather and the driver, this journey rarely takes less than five hours and often much more. Located at a small stream, a tributary to the Arig river, and surrounded by hills covered in larch trees, the village is home to the district administration, a school, a clinic, a post office, a village hall and a number of small shops, and it is the only local hub for business, communication, entertainment and government. This is where herders send their children to live when attending school, and it is the place for shopping, attending larger festivities and exchanging the latest news. Apart from the occasional celebratory gathering at the local school or village hall, the central square – located just south of the dominant school area and surrounded by the district administration, village hall, a handful of shops and a low wooden fence to keep out horses and other livestock – is where most people are to be seen. Children are on the lookout for candy; teachers and suit-wearing officials are on their way to work; and a few herders, wearing the traditional

6  •  The Anti-Social Contract

Figure 0.1  Chandman’-Öndör District centre in summer, 2006. Photograph by the author.

Mongolian deel (a kaftan-like garment), are often sitting on the ground next their horses, exchanging cigarettes and information. If space tends to be perceived by reference to centres rather than borders in the vast ‘empty’ territories of the Mongolian countryside (cf. Pedersen 2003),6 the village, as it were, is Chandman’-Öndör District – and its absolute centre. Located in Mongolia’s northernmost Hövsgöl province, Chandman’Öndör District stretches out from the southeastern shores of Lake Hövsgöl (see Figure 0.2), a scenically located alpine lake just south of the southern Siberian Sayan Mountains. The district is home to approximately 3,000 villagers and pastoral nomads and almost 40,000 heads of livestock – horses, sheep, goats and cows/yak – and it covers an area of roughly 4,500 square kilometres. When entering Chandman’-Öndör territory from the south, one is struck by the increase in forest and rivers compared to the Mongolian steppe land. This is where the steppe vanishes in favour of the Siberian taiga; geographically it is the borderland between Inner Asia and Siberia. The northernmost part of Chandman’-Öndör District and the northern part of the large neighbouring Tsagaan-Üür District is one of the most uninhabited regions of Mongolia, a land of forests, mountains, highland, rocks and rivers. More than two thirds of the administrative district is covered by forest,

Introduction • 7

mainly larch, and the area is interspersed with river valleys of various sizes, the biggest of which is the Arig river valley in the southern part of the district (see Figure 0.2). The rainfall is considerable during summer – at least compared with most other parts of Mongolia – forcing most people to abandon their Mongolian ger (the circular nomadic dwelling, also known as yurt in English), which is suited to a drier climate, and move into wooden houses from late spring. In the village, most people live in wooden houses all year round, and it is probably one of only a few villages in Mongolia where no concrete buildings, visible signs of socialist modernity, are to be seen. Not much is known and documented about the pre-revolutionary history of the region east of Lake Hövsgöl, and it has never been studied by anthropologists conducting long-term fieldwork. In 1934, for example, Čeveng (1991 [1934]: 74) wrote that it was impossible to say anything about the area, as nobody had ventured into it to do research.7 The Darhad and Duha people west of Lake Hövsgöl have – in contrast – been the subject of much more work in Mongolian, English and French (see e.g. Badamxatan 1987; Wheeler 1999, 2000; Pedersen 2006, 2011; Kristensen 2007, 2015; Hangartner 2010). Yet, based on the available literature and information on the region, it is possible to establish that until the socialist revolution of 1921, the area east of Lake Hövsgöl had, due to its geographical location, been on the fringes of most previous empires. During the Manchu Qing domination of contemporary Mongolia from 1691 to 1911, the border went right through present-day Chandman’-Öndör territory (see Figure 0.2). Border watch-posts (haruul) were set up in 1727 (Banzragch 2001: 29), when a group of Halh Mongols, the majority group in contemporary Mongolia, was sent to the area as a result of the Khiagta treaty between the Russians and the Manchu Qing empire. The Halh Mongols arrived from present-day Arhangai and Övörhangai provinces in central Mongolia to settle at Höh Tolgoi, north of contemporary Chandman’-Öndör District centre, so as to protect the border and prevent relationships between Russians and Mongolians. Along with Höh Tolgoi, six other border watch-posts were set up east of the Hövsgöl lake. While TannuUrianhai (roughly present-day Tuva), like Outer Mongolia, was officially registered as an ‘outer dependency’ (wai-fan) and thus was included in the Qing empire, the belt of watch-posts were placed south of Tannu-Urianhai (see Figure 0.2) and Lake Hövsgöl, possibly because Tannu-Urianhai – and most likely also the Turkic-speaking people living around Lake Hövsgöl – ‘fell into the loosest category of “outer barbarians” (wai-i)’ (Ewing 1981: 188). Also, the terrain to the north was difficult, the control of the unknown TannuUrianhai was still not secure and senior Qing officials, apparently, did not visit the area (Ewing 1981: 189). This meant that the Turkic-speaking people, who were related to present-day eastern Tuvinians and whose descendants are

8  •  The Anti-Social Contract

Figure 0.2  Contemporary (top) and pre-revolutionary (bottom) Chandman’-Öndör District in Mongolia (bottom right). Maps created by the author and Åse Ghasemi. The pre-revolutionary map was inspired by Banzragch 2001: 244.

Introduction • 9

nowadays referred to by locals as Soyod Urianhai, lived in a land north of the border watch-posts (a part of which is now Chandman’-Öndör District) that was less strictly governed by the Qing empire (see Figure 0.2). Their origin is unknown, but in the neighbouring Tsagaan-Üür District, Ganbaatar, a local ‘Uighur’ (an often used ethnonym for the Tuvan-speaking people inhabiting the northernmost part of this particular district) could relate a legend about a group of poor hunters from Tuva led by Bogdyn Baatar, who had come to ask for – and was granted – land in the area east of the lake and north of the border in very old times. There seem to have been differences even back then, though, between the ‘Uighurs’ living around the Üür River in the neighbouring Tsagaan-Üür District and the Soyod Urianhai in present-day Chandman’-Öndör District. While the exact pre-revolutionary affiliations between such Tuvan-speaking groups are unclear, they all seem to have been organised into the Lake Hövsgöl Urianhai banner from the late eighteenth century up until a few years after the socialist revolution in 1921. On prerevolutionary maps at the museum in Mörön, the provincial capital, the area east of the lake and north of the border watch-posts simply appear as ‘all the Lake Hövsgöl Urianhai’ (Hövsgöl Nuuryn Urianhain Bügd), the seat of administrative leader(s) being at present-day Hanh District centre, at the northern end of the lake, and in other publications the area is also simply named (the region of ) ‘the Lake Hövsgöl Urianhai’ (Hövsgöl Nuuryn Urianhai) (Rinchen 1979: 16–17; Sanjdorj 1980: xviii–xix; Banzragch 2001: 56–58, 244; Atwood 2004: 9, 556). Prior to the revolution they were, according to Banzragch and others, divided into four districts (Banzragch 2001: 56), two of which were south of the border. It was the Northeast District (Ar züün sum), one of the two Urianhai districts north of the border, that was part of contemporary Chandman’-Öndör District.8 South of the border watch-posts, in the territory around the Arig river lived – and lives – the Mongol-speaking Arig Urianhai, the majority group in present-day Chandman’-Öndör District. According to Banzragch (2001: 59–60), the Arig Urianhai are descendants of an Urianhai tribe from the area around the Irtysh (Erchis) and Chüi river (Banzragch 2001: 59), who used to be subjects of the Zünghars, a branch of the Oirat or western Mongols, outside the Manchu dominion. Led by Horolmoi, this tribe secretly penetrated Halh territory to hunt but were caught by the Manchu-supported Hotgoid noble, Büüvei, around 1710. After submitting to the Manchus, settling at the Tes river, then fleeing and finally being recaptured, they were given land at the Arig river in present-day Chandman’-Öndör District. When they once more tried to flee, Horolmoi was executed, and his tribe finally settled down permanently at the Arig river. From the early eighteenth century and throughout the Manchu rule of Mongolia, the people living at the Arig river were satellite subjects (har’yaat) of the banner of prince Düüregch, centred in

10  •  The Anti-Social Contract

present-day Tsetserleg District in the western part of the Hövsgöl province. Possibly, it was Genden, a Hotgoid ruler, who decreed the area around the Arig river to be part of this banner (see Wheeler 2000: 24). As such, the Arig Urianhai people, or Övör Shirhten as they were called,9 were ruled by chiefs (zaisan) appointed by prince Düüregch. According to a local herdsman, whose ancestor had been chief of the Övör Shirhten, they were supposed to provide the banner centre with animals and fur to be sold to Russians and Chinese (also see Dorjgotov 1979: 6). The term Urianhai is thus somewhat misleading given that the Soyod Urianhai north of the border watch-post and the Arig Urianhai south of the border watch-post could be contrasted in more ways than their names would suggest. The northern Soyod Urianhai used to be shamanic, Turkicspeaking and outside the border watch-post area, whereas the Arig Urianhai are Mongol-speaking and used to be inside the border in pre-revolutionary times, and more influenced by Buddhism. Indeed, the Arig Urianhai are often referred to as the Halh Urianhai (i.e. Mongol Urianhai) and a few vague and controversial but not necessarily contradictory claims are made about their ‘genuine’ Mongol origin (see also Chapter 1).10 Nowadays, the differences between the various groups of people populating Chandman’-Öndör District are often said to be negligible, although dialectical differences do exist and a few people in the northern part of the district, apparently, still understand Tuvan language. Yet, much in line with socialist census tradition, a distinction between Arig Urianhai and Soyod Urianhai was not even made in a census from 1992. According to this census, there were 533 Halh, 2,231 Urianhai, 12 Darhad and 32 Buriats within the district territory. Yet, the area is mostly presented as being Arig or Halh Urianhai by the official administration, a bias that is occasionally lamented by local Soyod Urianhai because it neglects their presence in the district. Also, there is still a conception that it was not just in the past that the northern Soyod Urianhai were wild and ‘without masters’ (ezengüi), i.e. outside ‘control’ and political order. The two Buddhist lamaseries in the south (Arigiin Dood Hüree and Arigiin Deed Hüree) were built in 1744 and 1803/4, whereas the lamasery (Rashaany Hüree) in the north at the Bulnai spring – in what was Soyod Urianhai, and traditionally ‘shamanic’, territory – was not built until 1904.11 We might therefore very tendentiously speak of the prerevolutionary region of present-day Chandman’-Öndör District as expressing an Inner Asian paradigm of shamanism, hunting and non-state people in the north versus centralised and Buddhist pastoralists in the south (cf. Humphrey 1980; Pedersen 2001). Yet people in the south were also hunting and had shamans and, in contrast with the Darhad area to the west of the Hövsgöl Lake (see e.g. Pedersen 2011), Buddhism and shamanism were not strongly opposed in this region.12 This is attested to by the historical

Introduction • 11

prevalence of yellow shamans (‘Buddhist’ shamans) and red Buddhists (‘shamanic’ Buddhists) in the area (see also Chapter 4). The socialist revolution of 1921 came to stir up the region considerably. In the first years after the revolution, the administrative units still coincided with the distribution of ethnic groupings in the area, but administrative reforms throughout the 1920s finally led to the new law on the division and classification of Mongolian territory in 1931, when the presentday Chandman’-Öndör District came into being. The area then followed the familiar Mongolian (and to some extent Soviet) pattern of change. The Buddhist Church was destroyed between 1937 and 1939, when the four monasteries of the district were demolished and most lamas imprisoned or executed.13 An old man from the Arig river valley recalled how they had taken his lama father away in 1937, just as the grass had turned green in spring, and confiscated most of the family’s property, including most animals. An extraordinary harsh winter followed, and the remaining animals were lost, leaving the family highly impoverished. They now had to work for other, richer families until the collective farm (negdel), Leninii aldar (Lenin’s glory), parallel to the district in terms of administration and the territory covered, was formed at the end of the 1950s. The collectivisation of property that this entailed may explain why poor families that had fallen victim to the purges in the late 1930s often later turned out to be staunch believers in socialism. A primary school had already been established in 1940, and in 1971–72 a secondary school (a year eight school) was founded. The Bulnai sanatorium, renowned for its healthy hot springs, was established in 1968 as a state sanatorium in the northernmost part of the district, and a post office, a bank, a saw mill, a clinic, a power station and administration, plus other modern institutions, were set up in the district centre – located where the Arig Urianhai and the Halh border guard territory used to meet – alongside or before the establishment of the collective farm. The socialist period saw the creation of an official administration and a socio-economic organisation based on strong vertical structures and, as in Manchu times, weak horizontal links between districts (Bulag 1998: 49). Almost all property was collective, the economy was planned, redistributive and strongly centralised, at least in its official version, and nobody, not even leaders, could consider themselves outside an all-embracing hierarchy centred in Ulaanbaatar and ultimately in Moscow. In short, the socio-economic organisation of the state was laid out as a monstrous centralised and highly codified system (Humphrey 1998: 109). While socialism was still praised for order, stability and equality at the time of fieldwork, especially by elderly people, many locals mainly emphasised the strictness of hierarchy and planning in socialist times, and one herdsman related that ‘people had a terrible “milk plan” (süünii tölövlögöö) in the summer. They used to milk cows until

12  •  The Anti-Social Contract

late fall, and if they couldn’t fulfil the requirements, they would have to pay with their own money. Also, when they lost animals, they paid for it.’ Socialism was most certainly radical in its organisational, economic and ideological restructuring of society, but its time span was relatively short (50–60 years of official atheism and a little more than 30 years of planned economy), and it was not entirely successful in controlling less institutionalised, alternative and unrecognised domains outside official life – i.e. practices that did not take place in spaces visible to the gaze of the official state. Apart from the fact that the official economy was converted into a less official one where disposable property or manipulable resources – rather than accumulated capital (as in a capitalist economy)  – was converted into priceless rights over people through exchange (Humphrey 1998; see also Pedersen 2011: 97), these parallel spheres were, for example, gambling, illegal hunting, the secret practices of Buddhist lamas and the quiet celebration of the traditional New Year, especially in the countryside. One lama could even remember how he managed to buy a religious book from the local state shop.14 Economic entrepreneurs such as the panz (trader, speculator, spiv) also operated alongside the collective economy and, while they were often despised for not doing physical work and for ‘sucking’ other people’s labour, their activities were well known. There is nothing to suggest, though, that such illicit practices took place within the confines of large-scale secret institutional structures of opposition. Rather, they seem to have been private, implicit and largely unspoken and sometimes even practised by officials themselves. Some people, for example, sought out religious practitioners when biomedicine failed. Potential lamas became interested in religion through experiences of illness or a personal belief in the truth and value of religion, and officials who were supposed to reveal religious activities themselves had religious partners. One man who – when head of the province union – was asked by the authorities to find out if any young people kept ‘sutras, gods or idols’ told me that he himself had brought a monk to his home in order to cure his wife’s allergy. Different ‘ideological’ domains – i.e. domains not necessarily opposed to, or involved in, each other (cf. Yurchak 1997) – seem to have been present. On the one hand, there was a domain of public language that left no space for either hidden counterculture or fundamental critique to emerge from within. Many people did believe in socialism in rural Mongolia, and the literal message of socialist slogans – such as ‘the truth is our way’, written on a painting of Lenin and a little girl on the wall of the local village school – was not necessarily lost, as Yurchak claims was the case among urban Russians (1997: 168–69), but he seems right in observing that ‘the socialist slogan’ ‘became a signifier of immutability’ (Yurchak 1997: 168–69) where ‘the official system of representation was the only possible … in the system’s official sphere’ (Yurchak 1997:

Introduction • 13

164–66; see also Pedersen 2011: 48–52). The Lenin painting on the school wall is still there, more than ten years after the collapse of the socialist system, and even though a local antagonism surely exists between the old Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (headed by the principal of the school) and the new Democratic Party (headed by the local governor), there is a distinct socialist feel to most local public events, such as collective workdays (subbotnik) and village hall gatherings. The many medals and diplomas awarded at district-level celebrations, for example, is an enduring socialist practice (cf. Zimmermann 2011) that appears unquestionable to locals, and so are the memorable tunes played on the Hammond organ in the local village hall when distinctions are awarded. On the other hand, there was the domain of ambiguous discourse and small hidden acts of defiance towards disliked leaders, as well as private experiences kept for oneself and not reducible to official ideology. The strong ideas of the public, the official and the collective fed similarly strong notions of secrecy and privacy, such as when families secretly kept their own sacred books or objects at the bottom of their chest (see also Bruun 2006: 10). The considerable trade in religious objects following the collapse of the socialist system revealed that many such items must have been hidden in Mongolia during socialism, and Szynkiewicz even argues that while the institutional church was abolished in socialist times, some of the central values of Buddhism were retained. ‘This was perhaps due to the official regard for classical Marxist writings,’ he writes, ‘which in popular perception became just a gloss to the holy scriptures. The latter were neither quoted nor discredited, which contributed to their continued esteem’. ‘Moreover,’ he continues, ‘it enabled a Mongol intellectual tradition to survive in those strata of society which were beyond the reach of routine purges among the town intelligentsia’ (1993: 164). Nowadays, people still move with unease between the present and the socialist past, between official and less official versions. Some people are reluctant to talk about the past, at least in very specific terms, possibly because incidents from socialist times are bound up with the feelings and public morality of when they happened and maybe also because the past is too obviously irreconcilable with the present and what people do now. In the early 1990s, the Revolutionary Party lost its monopoly of power, and policies were implemented to transform Mongolia into a democratic country with multiparty elections, private property and a liberal marketbased economy. The present is often imagined in stark opposition to this socialist past (authority versus freedom, security versus insecurity, collective versus individual etc.), and such imaginings have a very concrete form in the (physical) dismantling of the local collective farm, the privatisation of domestic animals and machinery, the ‘revival’ of religion and tradition, and the instigation of democracy and market-based exchanges during the

14  •  The Anti-Social Contract

1990s. The socialist system thus left at least one legacy behind: it had produced a radical distinction between the collective state/socialism and the individual person/capitalism. Thus, when the state disappeared, it created a ‘sudden and conspicuous absence’ (Fernández-Giménez 2001: 49) and only its own opposition – ‘individualist capitalism’ – was left. ‘Communist ideologies had warned,’ Ghodsee writes with reference to communist Bulgaria, ‘that capitalism was an immoral system, and privatization seemed to provide empirical evidence that those who were the least scrupulous were the ones that benefited the most from the sudden dismantling of the socialist system’ (2011: 184). Privatisation had its costs and led to many arguments in Chandman’-Öndör also, where people in the right positions managed to gain the most, and concerns with – and evidence of – inequality, unscrupulous leaders, deprivation, rising prices and the growing importance of ‘money’ had become widespread at the time of my fieldwork, and such concerns were often contrasted with the stability, equality and collective morality of socialism. As such, it was not simply individual nature that re-emerged when the social contract of state socialism broke down. What emerged was rather – at least in part – the socialist state’s own alterity. While an important context for this study, then, is the apparent social disintegration that followed the collapse of state socialism in a remote rural district of villagers and nomadic pastoralists in the northernmost part of Mongolia, the book does not simply explore disintegration as a return to a Hobbesian natural state of chaos in the aftermath of societal failure. To be sure, people did face rising unemployment, a lack of basic necessities and the breakdown of most collective state institutions in the 1990s, and the neighbouring village was described as a place of wild drinking and uncontrolled fur business immediately following the ‘democratic revolution’. Such circumstances, however, did not appear in a cultural vacuum where the ugly face of nature simply reappeared as the stable exchange relations of planned economy broke down. Apart from socialist ‘tradition’ itself producing its own alterity – ‘ugly capitalist nature’ following a ‘socialist civilisation’ that had disappeared almost overnight – the uncertain relations usually associated with the anxieties of post-socialism (see e.g. Buyandelgeriyn 2007; Hangartner 2011), I argue, were as much internally cultivated in indigenous Inner Asian perceptions of social relatedness as they were externally confronted in post-socialist surroundings of unemployment, business and diminished social security.15 Uncertainty and societal breakdown did certainly ‘happen to’ people and was also confronted as an external ‘condition of post-socialism’, but disintegration and ‘war’, as we saw in the beginning, was also created through cultural and witchcraft-like idioms that stressed the perilous nature of communication and exchange and generated ‘otherness’, uncertainty and division from within. In other words, the book follows Sahlins’ laconic insight that ‘[i]t

Introduction • 15

takes a lot of culture to make a state of nature’ (2011: 27). This obviously needs elaboration, theoretically and ethnographically.

Society and Exchange? Throughout the history of modern social anthropology, the conception of social life has had a crucial bearing on the notions of exchange and reciprocity (see e.g. Malinowski 2010 [1922]; Mauss 1990 [1950, 1925]; LéviStrauss 1969 [1949]; Bohannan 1955; Sahlins 1972; Bourdieu 1979 [1972]; Gregory 2015 [1982]; Parry 1985; Appadurai 1986; Strathern 1988; Parry and Bloch 1989; Weiner 1992; Laidlaw 2000; Graeber 2001; Sykes 2005). Strathern writes that [t]he discovery of the gift … was the discovery of people exchanging things which they did not need, and unpacking that paradox has dominated anthropological theorising on exchange ever since. For here the challenge was to uncover the principles by which people “needed” to exchange at all – and the answer has invariably been that people need society, viz. to lead a socially integrated life and interact with those around them, the transactions expediting such integration. (1992b: 169)

This, at least, was the case in Mauss’ seminal work on the gift, where he made reciprocity the tangible communicative glue of Durkheim’s more abstract notion of society (Durkheim 1938). Mauss’ theory of the gift was, if anything, a theory of human solidarity and societal integration, and a gift that does ‘nothing to enhance solidarity’, Douglas has written with reference to Mauss, is simply ‘a contradiction’ (1990: vii). The question for this defining take on sociality and exchange, then, is how social agents come to be entangled with each other  – i.e. how bonds are created through reciprocal exchanges where human agents absorb each other’s different parts and thus become ‘one’ through exchanging gifts. So when Mauss asked rhetorically: ‘What … compels the gift that has been received to be obligatorily reciprocated? What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?’ (1990: 3, original emphasis removed), his answer was that ‘the thing received is not inactive’ but possesses something of its giver (1990: 11–12). The thing has a hold over the receiver because the giver has not left it, and the exchange thus produces a tie through things and between souls (1990: 12). Differences are integrated, and gift-giving, in the abstract, is what compels a response, or simply another way of conveying how responses prompt new responses because people are, or have become, part of each other. Interestingly, however, refusal and detachment are explicitly left out

16  •  The Anti-Social Contract

when the ties produced through gifts and obligations are so strongly emphasised (cf. Parry 1985). Mauss makes clear that ‘[t]o refuse to give, to fail to invite, just as to refuse to accept, is tantamount to declaring war; it is to reject the bond of alliance and commonality’ (Mauss 1990 [1950, 1925]: 13), and Sahlins, in his interpretation of Mauss, even goes further in noting that ‘… primitive society is at war with Warre [in the Hobbesian sense], and … all their dealings are treaties of peace. All the exchanges, that is to say, must bear in their material design some political burden of reconciliation’ (1972: 182). Active refusal, the making of dissociation and the apprehension of ­difference – when, for example, refusing to reciprocate the gift of a sheep’s head, when told to abstain from getting involved with your Mongolian host family or when trying to avoid communicating in a Mongolian village  – are conspicuously absent from such perspectives on sociality as integrity-­ enhancing exchange. This is not a feature of an early French sociological tradition only. Malinowski similarly accentuates aspects of a tribal society ‘permeated by a constant give and take’ (2010 [1922]: 167) and a ‘love of give and take for its own sake’ (2010 [1922]: 173), and Lévi-Strauss, in an altogether different structuralist vein, highlights how exchange in the form of ‘exogamy represents a continuous pull towards a greater cohesion, a more efficacious solidarity, and a more subtle articulation’. ‘Exchange,’ he writes, ‘and consequently the rule of exogamy which expresses it – has in itself a social value. It provides the means of binding men together’ (1969 [1949]: 480). In the chapter exclusively devoted to reciprocity in ‘The Elementary Structures of Kinship’, he even goes as far as to conclude that ‘a continuous transition exists from war to exchange, and from exchange to intermarriage, and the exchange of brides is merely the conclusion to an uninterrupted process of reciprocal gifts, which effects the transition from hostility to alliance, from anxiety to confidence, and from fear to friendship’ (1969 [1949]: 67–68). We find many instances of the deep-seated and ingrained nature of this perception in anthropological theorising and also in some of the most influential and more recent literature. Gregory carefully distinguishes between gifts and commodities, the former being prevalent in Melanesia. Gifts, according to him, are characterised by perpetual personal interdependence arising from the reciprocal exchange of inalienable things (Gregory 2015 [1982]: lxii, 6, 13). Likewise, Strathern, in The Gender of the Gift, sees ‘enchainment’ as ‘a condition of all relations based on the gift’ (Strathern 1988: 161), and according to Godelier, reciprocity is similarly about a lack of separation (Godelier 1999). ‘If the counter-gift does not erase the debt,’ Godelier writes, ‘it is because the “thing” given has not really been separated, completely detached from the giver. The thing has been given without really being “alienated” by the giver’ (1999: 42, emphasis in original).

Introduction • 17

When not associated with societal integration, Mauss’ argument about reciprocity is occasionally (mis)read through an economizing lens, assuming that ‘nobody does anything for nothing’ (Parry 1985: 454–55). In this case, exchange is coupled – although often in complex ways – with a universal notion of strategically calculating and competing individuals (see e.g. Malinowski 1926; Barth 1966; Firth 1967; Bourdieu 1976, 1979 [1972]) that leaves little room for attending to the cultural fashioning of distance and separation. Societies and cultures may integrate through the imposition of specific values (in the last instance, however, themselves often a product of individual actions), but disintegration is always associated with a selfevident separation of self-interested and self-contained individuals that are everywhere thought to be of a similar pre-cultural kind. While it is beyond the scope of this book to review the immense literature on exchange within anthropology, it is fair to say, I believe, that there is a tendency, then, towards understanding reciprocity in either one of two directions. Either it has been seen as an integrative aspect of (often non-commodified) social and cultural worlds, or it has been conceptualised as self-interested economising transactions, even if masqueraded as gift-giving (cf. Graeber 2001: 23–47). One view concerns the importance of reciprocity as a social and cultural force that integrates (‘substantivism’), even in markets and market-based societies (see e.g. Carrier 1995; Hart 2014), and the other proposes that exchanges happen between naturally separate individuals who are only serving their own interests (‘formalism’). The fact that this opposition is so ingrained in much theorising, however, has made us less inclined to shed light on culturally specific ways of producing separation. So if, for anthropologists, ‘“gift-reciprocity-Good/market-exchange-Bad” is a simple, easy-to-memorize formula’ (Gell 1992: 142), it seems fair to conclude that ‘gift-reciprocity-bad’ is not an equally catchy phrase when it comes to anthropological thinking. True, ‘keeping-while-giving’ has gained some interest (see e.g. Weiner 1992; Godelier 1999), but the same does not hold true of ‘avoiding reciprocity’ and the dangerous aspects of integration and communication in general. Mauss, in fact, was aware of the potential danger of the gift (Mauss 1990 [1950, 1925]: 59; see also Parry 1994; Laidlaw 2000) and does mention both the ‘the fatal gift’ and the fact that the word ‘gift’ has a double meaning in some Germanic languages, namely gift and poison (Mauss 1990 [1950]: 63), yet he never develops or explores the implications of this insight. All this is important not just for the sake of theoretical speculation but because Mongolian ethnography challenges some of these often-held assumptions about exchange and relatedness. In Mongolia, for example, the exchange of ‘active’ objects – whether in the form of words or things – is often avoided and thought to be dangerous. On one occasion during my fieldwork, a driver suddenly demanded to leave a newly established camp on a riverbank, simply

18  •  The Anti-Social Contract

because he had found an old knife on the ground. When rapidly driving away from the place, he anxiously explained that the knife could have had blood on it. While it is well known that sharp things (mes) may be particularly dangerous and protective, this applies to other things as well. Düütsetseg, a young female teacher that we will meet again later, explained to me that ‘people say that it can be dangerous to receive something from others. Maybe you have an object, an earring, received from someone else and this object causes misfortune. People have taken a thing with misfortune. Because of this animals die, people fall ill, and you must either throw the thing away or pass it on to someone else.’ Düütsetseg and the driver are, of course, only referring to ‘misfortunate objects’ (gaitai yum) here, and although other things such as gold are known to carry misfortune (see High 2017 for a discussion of the misfortune of gold (altny gai); see also Højer 2012), one could rightly argue that Mongolian life is ripe with exchanges and objects of a more mundane and unproblematic nature, such as the everyday exchange of goods in business or the exchange of animals, animals products, money and services between individuals and families. Yet, apart from the fact that such ordinary and everyday exchanges may be imbued with similar problems (see Chapter 1) and that even food may carry ‘dangerous things’ and ‘is the easiest medium for transporting pollution, attaching spirits, or simply having influence on a person’ (Buyandelger 2013: 128–129), it is a widespread assumption in Mongolia that the (bad) soul of a previous possessor (cf. Humphrey 2002c; Empson 2007: 114, 135 and 2011:109), or the (negative) feelings towards a future possessor, may stay in an object and, hence, that blending things – and thereby being influenced by other persons – may be inherently dangerous (see also Højer 2004, 2012). More troublesome than alliance-producing, this suggests that objects  – manufactured or utilised by other humans and belonging to other persons and agencies – may move dangerously between social units and cast misfortune on the receiver. Items are unsafe because they have been received from others, and it is the simultaneously alienable and inalienable character – the social, reciprocal or ‘abductive’ quality (Gell 1998), we might say  – of the ‘things’ exchanged that makes them dangerous.16 So, if ‘“hau” sets in motion the spirit of reciprocity and obligation’, because it ‘is a spiritual element hearkening from the object’s place of origin, to which it always seeks to return’ (Peebles 2015: 477), and because ‘the power to circulate is a social force, an expression of society itself ’ (Siegel 2006: 6), it may equally well be a dynamic that arrests communication, not only due to the importance of keepingwhile-giving but also because ‘hau’ or the spirit of the object is thought to be a contaminating disease. The association of different persons through detachable objects that can move between – including words – thus poses a threat not unlike ‘contagious magic’ (Frazer 1980 [1911]; see also Laidlaw 2000: 629–30).17 Troubles emerge if the items of (unknown) others, invested with

Introduction • 19

their (unknown) acts, are appropriated or simply appear outside the sphere of such others, and in Mongolia, external agencies are often thought to be polluting or dangerous (Bawden 1963a: 220, 234; Bulag 1998: 263; Empson 2011: 245–49). Objects, in other words, are troublesome because they are too social in the Maussian sense and can ‘move between’ and make dangerous connections. While this, as we shall see later, may often be associated with particular kinds of objects, the same thing may apply to all objects and, maybe more importantly, even to words and thoughts. Rather than absorbing each other’s different parts, or getting involved with others, as in giftgiving, one should often, the Mongolian implication is, abstain from such a dangerous blending of souls through exchange.18

The Anti-Social Contract While intimate and trust-based relations may prevail at the household level in Mongolia, this anti-social logic, characterised by a penchant for apprehension and suspicion when communicating and exchanging, may be generalised to much wider domains of Mongolian life. If looking at settlement patterns, for example, Mongolia is time and again described as a land without fences and rural life is depicted as friendly and

Figure 0.3  Chandman’-Öndör District centre in winter, 2001. Photograph by the author.

20  •  The Anti-Social Contract

peaceful by Mongolians and foreigners alike, non-academics as well as academics (see e.g. Jagchid and Hyer 1979: 132; Billé 2015: 54). In Mongolia ‘generalised hospitality without expectation of an immediate return (or any return) is … the norm’ (Humphrey 2012: S65). However, it almost goes without saying that this widespread (and not incorrect) stereotype about Mongolian hospitality19 is only a part of the picture. High fences protect the suburban compounds in Ulaanbaatar, the Mongolian capital, and securely locked metal doors often safeguard flats in apartment blocks from criminals. Understandable as this may be in a city with relatively high crime rates, theft and protection against human dangers are also a genuine concern in the Mongolian countryside. In Chandman’-Öndör District centre, as in many other villages, most people live in ‘compounds’ (hashaa) surrounded by high fences and protected by vicious dogs awaiting unwelcome intruders. These intruders may of course include drunks, but they are also thought to be thieves and other ill-intentioned people. In fact, as settlements condense – as one moves closer to the centre of the village – fences tend to grow higher. Physical proximity, in other words, engenders more protection and separation of individual compounds. And while it is true that there are almost no fences in the Mongolian countryside, nor are there – with the possible exception of closely related people – many immediate neighbours in the least densely populated sovereign state in the world. Rather than being an indication of hospitality, the lack of fencing might then be due to the fact that fencing is unnecessary or simply less visible.20 At least, it would be unwise when visiting a pastoral camp to step out of the vehicle before the fierce dogs of the host family  – their most trusted animals  – are brought under control. Visitors, especially unknown ones, are rarely met with an unconditional smile but rather with a reserved attitude. If invited into a home, it seems important not to mistake formal hospitality for straightforward cordiality, because people are often cautious and their hospitality is based on subscribing to a formal obligation of serving tea and some bread or dried curds (Højer 2003).21 As a matter of fact, beneath ‘the distancing set up by the performance of formal hospitality, there is unspoken piercing suspicion’ (Humphrey 2012: S71; see also Højer 2003), and the enactment of hospitality through a number of highly ritualised gestures may rightly be seen as adding up ‘to the craft of allaying suspicion; avoidance of giving the tiniest offence; self-control; and self-deprecation along with conscious respectfulness to the other; in sum to dampening or pausing whatever other intentions, suspicions, narratives, or emotions that might be present, and creating a (precariously) assembled sequence that conveys the affect of measured reassurance’ (Humphrey 2012: S67, my emphasis). This description of settlements and ritualised hospitality, of course, needs to be supplemented by other observations also, such as the way people talk

Introduction • 21

about and enact relationships and the anthropologist’s  – my  – ‘sense’ of people’s relationships while in the field (this last part is often downplayed in favour of an anthropological focus on  – and sometimes reading too much into  – indigenous vocabulary). When I talked to people in Chandman’Öndör District, it was not unusual for them to describe other people in the village as unreliable (naidvargüi), sly (zal’tai) or simply bad (muu). People’s appearances were considered deceptive, and it was frequently assumed that disingenuous motives were behind people’s actions and words. At the same time, there was a serious concern at being ‘damaged’ by other people’s talk and moods and, hence, a reluctance to engage with people in ways that would subject one to the injurious talk and thoughts of others (cf. Buyandelger 2013: 206). Less than a week after the incident with the lama diviner in Bulnai, I was interviewing another local lama, Harhüü, in his wooden house on the other side of the river, some distance from the village centre, when he warned that many people are cursed (haraal hiilgesen hün olon baidag). You should not become involved (orootsoldoh) with those people. Some people have been keeping strong curses for a long time. Those people have to use a lot of energy (enyergi). We are afraid of that great energy. People have to protect themselves. Most of those people don’t know that they are cursed.

In telling me that cursed people were everywhere to be found and yet invisible, Harhüü was implying that, potentially, any person and any relationship could have dangerous curse-like effects. Similar to ‘magical fences’, shamanic mirrors, protective ‘force fields’ and remedies that ‘block hostile forces from the home’ used in other Mongolian village environments where danger is seen to abound (see Empson 2011: 282; Swancutt 2012: 79–80, 131, 186–87, 196–205), Harhüü himself considered it critical to protect his family with a strong magic shield of mantras (tarni) – i.e. mystical formulae – w ­ orking within two hundred metres of his home, and he would pray in front of his altar every morning and ‘take measures’ to protect himself whenever l­eaving his home, he informed me. While I will develop this argument in more ethnographic detail in Chapter 2, the key claim for now is that inter-human relationships in Mongolia are often thought to be problematic, if not outright dangerous, and that we need to pay attention to cultural idioms that are not – as is often the implicit assumption in anthropological studies (also in Mongolia)  – ­ necessarily ­promoting fluidity and continuity between selves and others. The problem is that this self-other continuity is often built into the very edifice of the social and thus tends to be overstated and create blind spots with regard to anti-social relations. On the one hand, such an overemphasis on self-other

22  •  The Anti-Social Contract

Figure 0.4  A home in the district centre. Photograph by the author.

integration is, as we have already seen, engineered through concepts such as reciprocity or – in the vein of ‘neo-Maussian’ approaches (Graeber 2001: 35)  – ‘dividualism/animism/perspectivism’ (whether this is thought to be a metaphor for the social per se or a description of a specific societal form or ‘modality’ in Mongolia or elsewhere). If reciprocity stresses the integration of self and other, then perspectivism similarly assumes that ‘[b]eings can “become-other” … because in a crucial sense they already “are other”’ (Holbraad and Willerslev 2007: 330), and animism, also in the North Asian context, presupposes that [i]f people cannot perceive themselves as potentially being in the shoes of others, if people cannot imagine themselves as Others (whether human or non-human) and Others as themselves, then the very basis for animism is likely to break down because its ontological principle depends on an unbounded potential for identification … There are no radical discontinuities here, only continuous substitutions of Same becoming Other, and vice versa. (Pedersen 2001: 416)

This potential for becoming other is similarly highlighted in recent ethnographies on Mongolia. Pedersen’s book on shamanism as transition/postsocialism (and vice versa) (2011; see also Pedersen 2007, 2014) describes shamanism as a ‘potential state of perpetual metamorphosis’ (2011: 40) and ‘the spirit of [post-socialist] transition’ as a ‘ceaseless jumping from one body

Introduction • 23

to the next’ (2011: 79), and in Empson’s work on Mongolian fortune ‘people actively seek the perspective of someone else in order to constitute themselves as subjects’ (2011: 322).22 The aim of the present book is to complement such studies by paying more attention to the often downplayed flipside of ‘becoming other’ and integration, as it were, by focusing on practices and discourses in which such integration and otherness is avoided. On the other hand, the continuity of self and other may also be thought of in more classical hierarchical terms where social positions are integrated by virtue of their difference. In Mongolia, such differences would include, for example, men and women, elders and youngsters, Buddhist lamas and lay people and teachers and pupils, the assumption being that social positions are integrated – Dumont-style (Dumont 1972) – by virtue of their known difference in hierarchical, transcendent and systematic social ‘wholes’ that are organised by ‘paramount values’ (see e.g. Robbins 2004). Again, such relations do obviously exist, and I will attend to them in due course (see Chapter 3), but overlooking the prevalence of relations where the other is anticipated as not quite known – i.e. as a genuine and anxiety-provoking other; for example, not only known as an elder to a younger – would again mean ignoring a crucial element of anxiety in social relations in Chandman’-Öndör District and elsewhere in Mongolia. This prominence and pervasiveness of suspense in relationships with others can, I argue, be thought of as ‘generalised witchcraft’, a term that, of course, needs a few words of explanation. I use the witchcraft term to stress the affinities of anti-social Mongolian cultural idioms  – such as hel am, a key term in this book, meaning ‘dispute’, ‘troubles’ or ‘injurious talk’ (see Chapter 2) – with ‘occult’ notions elsewhere, such as ‘witchcraft’ and the ‘evil eye’, at least if we think of such phenomena as associated with ‘deceit’ (Ruel 1970) and ‘the mysterious powers of humans’ (Douglas 1970: xvi) to harm others. ‘Generalised’ witchcraft, however, refers, on the one hand, to an anticipated omnipresence of different and conflicting agencies, whether ordinary or extraordinary, and people’s reactions to such anticipations of threatening others. Yet, apart from pointing to this contemporary prevalence of hel am, attested to by a range of other ethnographic studies in Mongolia (see Chapter 2), the adjective ‘generalised’ is also used to downplay the exoticism often associated with the ‘witchcraft’ term and to stress the fact that Mongolian anti-social idioms are also non-occult, widespread and indeed very ‘ordinary’. As a matter of fact, Mongolian anti-social idioms are characterised by a peculiar inseparability of ‘the natural’ and ‘the supernatural’, ordinary quarrels and extra-ordinary powers, and while ‘witchcraft’ in Mongolia may be ordinary or ‘natural’, ordinary ‘troubles’ may easily turn extraordinary and come to involve ‘occult’ powers. Much like in the peculiar invocation of ‘war’ in the introductory story, everyday thoughts, words and conflicts easily slide back

24  •  The Anti-Social Contract

and forth between ordinary understandings and occult dimensions, even to the extent where it is this very ambiguity and inseparability that seems the defining characteristic of a term such as hel am. If generalised witchcraft concerns anticipations of, reactions to and the creation of anti-social relations, it implies a manner of relating where others are thought to be dangerous and where suspicion and anxiety prevails. On the one hand, then, it gives rise to a social anxiety that would appear to bear formal similarities to Taussig’s idea of regressive sorcery, where … sorcery invokes a mode of explanation that undermines its starting point, while the starting point ineluctably leads to its undermining. In posing this double-bind as to its own nature, sorcery de-realises reality as well. The formula “sorcery explains coincidence” prevents us from appreciating the extent to which coincidence and sorcery pose questions concerning one’s life environment, opening out the world as much as closing it in. (Taussig 1987: 465)

In the Mongolian case, we may translate this insight into the claim that generalised witchcraft similarly de-realises social reality and promotes otherness as a result. As in the case study from the beginning of this introduction, it reproduces a ‘double-bind’ in the social domain so that the third party, the one evoking representations of witchcraft, could herself be a witch; somehow it is the famous Liar paradox made operational in the social realm. You are made to question relations while you engage in them. Who was the lama to make such allegations? And what to make of my host family? On the other hand, and as a corollary to this understanding, it also entails that relating to other people through exchange of objects or other forms of communication entails the risk of being influenced by others and/or caught in their dangerous gaze. My host family was caught in and affected by the words of the lama diviner and had potentially become a bad family, and the diviner came into being through the claims made by Ulaanhüü. While this will be ethnographically substantiated in Chapter 2, we can conclude, then, that being social, in this sense, amounts to a dangerous coming into being through (the perspective of ) troublesome others. It amounts to being absorbed and affected by otherness – whether things or words – and being absorbed by otherness equals losing or becoming other to yourself through the perspective of others. As we shall see, withdrawal is a sensible reaction to this danger of a self becoming an other’s perspective. If becoming other to yourself seems to be celebrated in Melanesia, Amazonia and much anthropological theory (see, however, Macintyre 1995), then, this is not always so in Mongolia. In Mongolia, of course, ‘each party’ may be ‘affected by the other’ (Strathern 1988: 179), but when a certain qualitative distance, even opposition, is assumed between self and

Introduction • 25

other, one may also try to cancel precisely this interactive ‘affect’ through strategies of avoidance, formality and ignorance. People evade, one may say, getting in touch with the Other as truly other and to avoid becoming a ‘you’ to a compelling and dangerous Other other’s ‘I’ (cf. Viveiros de Castro 1998: 483). Some newer studies on otherness and enmity propose a perspective that is similar to the one presented here, yet they still tend to take an approach whereby otherness is considered mainly productive. In an intriguing book, Stasch, for example, shows how the social world of the Korowoi of West Papua, Indonesia, consists of strangers and heterogeneity. Otherness is thus an internal feature of local social relations (Stasch 2009). Yet, while the Korowoi, according to Stasch, poses otherness as a relation, this kind of relatedness is still rendered ‘a quality through and around which people are mutually close’ (Stasch 2009: 4, my emphasis) and a ‘belonging with strangers’ (Stasch 2009: 21, my emphasis). Likewise, for the Tupinamba in Amazonian Brazil, according to Viveiros de Castro, the enemy was the centre of a society in constant metamorphosis (Viveiros de Castro 1992: 301). Viveiros de Castro writes that their relationship to the enemy is anterior and superior to society’s relationship to itself, rescuing it from an indifferent and natural self-identity  – one where others would be mirrors and reflect back the image of a Subject posited in advance as telos. Every origin was an answer; every gesture, vengeance. Free and fierce, inconstant and indifferent, the Tupinamba were servants of warfare: this pushed them into the future. Inhabitants of a society without ­corporations – incorporal, so to speak – and cannibal (thus incorporating), its being was time. (Viveiros de Castro 1992: 301)

While the unknown enemy is certainly generated and can be imagined to be everywhere in Mongolia, the enemy is not, as in Viveiros de Castro’s case, the centre of society, and it should not be incorporated. Quite the contrary, the notion of the enemy – or the suspicious other – generates suspense and anxiety; the other is someone you should not get in touch with – i.e. begin exchanging perspectives with23  – and it is avoided and kept at a distance. Engaging with others – i.e. taking their perspective – means that you may become unknown to yourself  – i.e. to the one seeing in the first place. As such, the anti-social is a domain of avoidance and withdrawal – and, as we shall see, maybe even of physical dispersal.

Book Outline Before we establish this point in more ethnographic detail in Chapter 2, I will introduce the Northern Mongolian setting, even if many of the claims

26  •  The Anti-Social Contract

made in this book go beyond a specific village and district and concern modes of relatedness found all over Mongolia (and beyond). This will be the task of Chapter 1, where I will look at the forms that collectives and networks take in public rituals and everyday ordinary exchanges in the wake of the breakdown of the Mongolian socialist state and relate this to the organisation of actual movements in a district largely based on pastoral nomadism and an emerging market economy. On the one hand, the chapter identifies practices of unification and integration towards centres that are simultaneously based on indigenous understandings of collectives, a refurbishment of socialist forms and the effects of market economy while, on the other hand, it identifies ‘nomadic’ practices of movements and everyday exchanges that counter such spatially defined integration and the trouble-free creation of alliances. Delayed everyday exchanges, for example, are shown to imply mistrust and to fertilise a suspicious way of attending to others. The task of ethnographically exploring a local world where suspicion and mistrust are prominent features of life is continued in Chapter 2. More ­specifically, this chapter looks at gossip and an indigenous belief in the ­enactment – i.e. dangerously creative capability – of language-like representation through an extended case study. I show that the Mongolian notion of hel am (curse-like talk and disputes) is not just a consequence of pre-existing social orders but also elicits a suspicious attention to others. Cultural idioms like hel am, then, induce distance in social relationships and serve to disintegrate social orders as much as they reflect them. While the ‘social disintegration’ that is often thought to characterise post-socialist transition may be encountered in the surrounding landscape of unemployment and shortage of resources, the chapter concludes that it is also fashioned and engendered by cultural idioms, which point to the danger of ‘distributed personhood’ – i.e. of becoming victim to the social environment and the talk, thoughts and gaze of others. While Chapter 2 deals with dangerous communications, the safe relationships of established and well-defined ritual hierarchies are the concern of Chapter 3. The traditional Mongolian New Year (Tsagaan Sar) and the establishment of a new household at a Mongolian wedding provides the ethnographic lens for outlining social orders, where distance does not imply suspicion and dangerous others but is integrated into a transparent and conventionalised formal hierarchy of different yet safe and known social positions. While the gift exchanges and traditional rules pertaining to such social fields are embodied in individual persons’ habitual gestures, it is demonstrated how the slowness and stiffness of ritualised actions also enhances the sense that such formalised actions are also not one’s own. A bodily aesthetics of control, dignity and slowness, then, implies relational stability and a concern with upholding a transcendent socio-religious order.

Introduction • 27

The distinction between the dangerous and the safe, disintegration and order, is related more specifically to religious practices in Chapter 4. While the chapter presents a bewildering variety of sometimes contradictory practices and statements on religion and spirit powers by locals, it also shows how a distinction between the Yellow and the Red directions of Mongolian Buddhism is at play in the local world. After sketching the historical context for Buddhist practices in Northern Mongolia, the difference between these directions is illustrated ethnographically by attending to their divergent conceptions of knowledge, religious discipline and spirit powers in the landscape. It is argued that the two directions are concerned with morality and danger respectively, and if the production of compassion, commonality and centralisation can be associated with Yellow Buddhism, then suspicion, ­difference and enmity are prominent features of Red Buddhism. In the final chapter, Red Buddhist magical practices are shown to merge with the modernity of socialism and post-socialism to promote ‘relations in suspense’. Practices of divination and the making of powerful magical charms repeatedly allude to concealed, not quite known and anxiety-­ provoking ­agencies and as such generate social caution towards human and spirit agencies alike. Through specific ethnographic examples that relate religious practitioners to ordinary people and everyday life to extraordinary matters, the chapter thus highlights a present Mongolian disquiet with ­connection-making and a prominent concern with the upholding of distance, also to spirit powers. This generation of danger and caution in communication, it is argued, are brought about by a new constellation of transformed (post)socialist modernity and Red Buddhism.

Notes   1. Throughout this book, almost all personal names are pseudonyms.   2. Witchcraft is often associated with questions of deceit: ‘… to be other than one seems to be, to have in some way a “double” identity, always places one potentially in the position to deceive, and for Banyang [group of people living in Cameroon] the evil of witchcraft is above all the evil of deceit’ (Ruel 1970).   3. This happened in DeFacto Review on 27 August 2017. See http://jargaldefacto.com/ article/defacto-review-2sh17-sh8-27, accessed on 4 April 2018.   4. For much earlier versions of a similar argument, see Højer (2003 and 2004).   5. In celebrating Rousseau as the founder of ethnology, Lévi-Strauss stresses the human primacy of identification with others and compassion. He explains that, according to Rousseau, man’s essential faculty ‘is compassion, deriving from the identification with another who is not only a parent, a relative, a compatriot, but any man whatsoever, seeing that he is a man, and much more: any living being, seeing that it is living. Thus man begins by experiencing himself as identical to all his fellows’ (Lévi-Strauss 1978a [1973]: 38).

28  •  The Anti-Social Contract

  6. There is a sense in which an area, so to speak, is its centre (töv); when Mongolians say that they are travelling to a province (aimag), for example, they imply that they are going to its centre.   7. It seems that the only earlier non-Mongolian accounts from the region are travel accounts by the Danish explorers Krebs and Haslund-Christensen, who travelled in the region in the early 1920s (see Krebs 1937; Haslund-Christensen 1946). The only Mongolian study is Čeveng’s work from 1934 on the Darhad and Urianhai of Lake Hövsgöl, which has been translated into English (1991 [1934]) and which contains the most valuable, yet vague, information accessible to English readers on the people of the region east of Lake Hövsgöl. Recent works in English written about the Duha or Tsaatan of the western side of Lake Hövsgöl contain information specifically on the Turkic-speaking Urianhai west of the lake (see Farkas 1992; Wheeler 2000; Kristensen 2015), and Ewing, when writing about the Urianhai or Tuvan pre-revolutionary borderland in general, notes the lack of information on the Lake Hövsgöl Urianhai people (Ewing 1981: 175), although it is not clear whether he is referring to people living east of the lake also. In Mongolian, the most valuable information that I have come across is Dorjgotov’s distinctly socialist account of the development of Chandman’-Öndör District (1979) and Banzragch’s book on the history of the Hövsgöl province (2001). It has proved impossible to get hold of a book on changes in Mongolian administration by Sonomdagva (1998), but it does – judging from the references of other works – contain valuable information too.   8. The region east of Lake Hövsgöl and north of the Manchu border watch-post area has – for all we know – for centuries been homeland to people who were closely related to the Turkic-speaking inhabitants of the Eastern Sayan regions, such as Tofalars, Oka Soyots, reindeer-herding Tuvans of eastern Tuva and Duha (Wheeler 2000), the latter of which now live in Mongolian territory west of Lake Hövsgöl. The subsistence of those people was based on hunting, gathering and reindeer herding in the sparsely populated taiga regions of the eastern Sayan Mountains. It is not entirely clear, however, how exactly the Turkic-speaking hunters and herdsmen living on the eastern side of Lake Hövsgöl are affiliated to these people, nor to what extent they should be considered distinct from other eastern Sayan people. The present-day Turkic-speaking Duha from the western side of Lake Hövsgöl, for example, have been present at least in the Hanh District at the northern end of the lake in the middle of the twentieth century (Farkas 1992: 3) and have probably also lived on the eastern side of the lake at times, although this is not certain. Yet, most of the eastern Tuvan reindeer herders, and probably the ancestors of the present-day Duha, were part of the Toja banner in the Qing administration of Tannu-Urianhai (Farkas 1992: 6–7; see also Wheeler 2000: 36), and as it seems that the Urianhai on the eastern side of the lake belonged to – or indeed were – the Hasut banner (Čeveng 1991 [1934]: 73), it is indicated that they were at least relatively distinct from the Duha and eastern Tuvans (see, however, Potapov 1964: 252). When referring to population figures, Čeveng differentiates between the Hasut (banner) of the Urianhai of Lake Hövsgöl, ‘the Northern Sirkid’ (possibly the present-day Duha) and ‘the Southern Sirkid’ (Övör Shirhten or Arig Urianhai), and he writes that most of the Urianhai of Lake Hövsgöl live around the Üür river and others around the Hanh and the Arig river (1991 [1934]: 74). All this indicates that the Lake Hövsgöl Urianhai, the Üüriin Urianhai and possibly the Hasut banner were referring to Turkic-speaking people east of Lake Hövsgöl and that those people were considered a relatively distinct group of Urianhai people – the Lake Hövsgöl Urianhai – who even had a distinct dialect. Čeveng, referring to Sanžeev, writes about their language that ‘although it is identical with the language of the Uriyangqai [Urianhai] people of Tangnu Tüva [Tannu-Urianhai] and the Altai, they

Introduction • 29

say that they and the people of Tangnu Tüva do not understand each other’s language’ (Čeveng 1991 [1934]: 73). Recordings made by Alan Wheeler and myself during a field trip along the Üür river to the Üüriin Urianhai in 2002, and subsequently played to the Duha people by Wheeler, reveal, however, that contemporary Tuvan-speaking Duha easily understand the dialect of the Üüriin Urianhai, even if the Duha – thought-­ provokingly  – were not aware of the existence of this other Tuvan-speaking group in the Hövsgöl province. Further indicating their affiliation to the eastern Tuvans was the fact that the Üüriin Urianhai rather surprisingly used the word Duha when referring to themselves in Tuvan when we visited them in 2002. The dialect, however, does appear to be slightly different, and they do use more Mongolian words when speaking Tuvan than do the Duha (Wheeler, personal communication). While they may thus be considered closely affiliated with Tuva in terms of language and culture, the following rough historical survey of the prehistory of the region, based on the limited available literature, paints a more complex and uncertain picture in terms of administrative borders.   Only little is known about the early history of the people and the area in question (see Vainshtein 1980 for an introduction to the very early history of Tuva), but after the fall of the Yuan dynasty in 1368 the region of Tannu-Urianhai (Tuva) came under the rule of Oirats (Western Mongols) until the early seventeenth century (Ewing 1981: 177), although the area east of Lake Hövsgöl might just have escaped the Oirat field of power (see e.g. Rinchen 1979: 15). At the turn of the seventeenth century, military defeats and pressure from the Hotgoid people of northwest Mongolia led to a rapid decline in Oirat power (Ewing 1981: 177–78). The Oirats had to return to Jungaria in present-day northwest China, and the region was seized by the Hotgoids led by the so-called Altan Khans, the last of whom, Luvsan, managed to gain de facto independence in return for submitting to the Manchu Qing dynasty (Ewing 1981: 178). Yet once again, it is most likely that the Hotgoid rule in this region did not include the Tuvan-speaking Urianhai around Lake Hövsgöl. Potapov writes, for example, that the eastern boundary of the Hotgoids was the Delger Muren river, located to the south and west of Lake Hövsgol (1964: 383), and as such it did not include the lake region. Also, Russians made their presence felt in the area alongside the Hotgoids. In 1661, for example, Russians subjugated some Tuvans living at Lake Hövsgöl (Potapov 1964: 209; Forsyth 1992: 95), and in 1628 ‘the Turkicspeaking Hasut Tuvans (near Lake Kosogol [Hövsgöl])’(this seems to be the earliest mentioning of the Tuvans at Lake Hövsgöl) became part of a Russian administrative region centred at the Krasnoyarsk fort (Potapov 1964: 112, 350). Until the 1650s, relations between Hotgoid and Russians were supportive, but relations deteriorated when Luvsan began raiding Tomsk and Yeniseisk (Ewing 1981: 179) in southern Siberia.   Luvsan, the last Altan Khan, was  – after a series of disruptive interventions and a period of imprisonment  – eventually deprived of his right to rule the Hotgoids in 1686, when his first cousin, Genden, replaced him (Potapov 1964: 210; Ewing 1981: 180). Genden’s rule covered the territory from Lake Uvs in northwest Mongolia to the Selenge and Orhon rivers and significantly included the area around Lake Hövsgöl (Potapov 1964: 211). In 1688, Genden was forced to flee to the Selenge river region when the Oirat confederation ruled by Galdan invaded Mongolia, and this probably led to renewed Oirat rule over at least some of the Urianhai territory at the turn of the eighteenth century (Ewing 1981: 180). As a result of the Oirat invasion, the Halh Mongolian nobility turned to the Manchus, and they were incorporated into the Manchu Qing empire at the Convention at Dolonnor, Inner Mongolia, in 1691. This resulted in the incorporation of Mongolia into the Manchu Qing empire for more than two hundred years to come. Although much of Tannu-Urianhai and northwest Mongolia was still

30  •  The Anti-Social Contract

under Oirat control, the Hotgoids ruled from this time onwards the Urianhai around Lake Hövsgöl (Banzragch 2001: 56). Their status as subjects, however, is still unclear. On a map of the administration of the early Qing rule (1691–1724), the area east of Lake Hövsgöl is a separate area outside the larger provinces and simply marked as ‘all the Urianhai’ (Urianhai bügd) (Rinchen 1979: 16).   Genden, the Hotgoid ruler, died around the turn of the eighteenth century and was followed by Sünjeesenge, who died without issue and was succeeded by Büüvei, Genden’s second son (Ewing 1981: 180) and the first real subjugator of Tannu-Urianhai. Büüvei was close to the Oirats, and it was feared that he could not stand the pressure from them. Therefore another Hotgoid noble was allocated pastures on the Tes river alongside Büüvei to help him ward off the Oirats (Ewing 1981: 180–81). But renewed pressure from the Oirats led Büüvei to ask the Qing for a more aggressive strategy ‘… and [he] suggested that the Tannu-Urjankhai should be secured as a prop against the Oirats’ and ‘asked permission to “summon” the Urjankhai to submit; if they refused, he warned darkly, they would be subjugated by force’ (Ewing 1981: 181). Büüvei did manage to subjugate the Urianhai, who were finally secured in 1726, before Bandi succeeded him in 1730. In 1737, Bandi was followed by Chingunjav (Yanjmaa 2000: 6–7), who instigated the famous rebellion against the Qing in 1756 (for further details, see Bawden 1989; Kaplonski 1993). The Chingunjav-led rebellion failed, however, and Chingunjav was arrested and executed in 1757.   Just after Büüvei’s pacification of Tannu-Urianhai in 1726, a few districts (sum) were formed on the basis of the existing tribal-kinship unit, the otog. While the sources on the late eighteenth century are incomplete and the organisation of Tannu-Urianhai quite complex (Ewing 1981: 185), it appears that in the period from Chingunjav’s execution to 1805, the rule over Tannu-Urianhai was divided between a number of Halh princes and Tannu-Urianhai nobles (Banzragch 2001: 56), the latter of which seems to have governed the area around Lake Hövsgöl. By the early nineteenth century, the number of districts in Tannu-Urianhai, including the regions around Lake Hövsgöl, had reached 46 or 47 (Ewing 1981: 185). The ‘banner’ (hoshuu) administrative unit was not applied to Tannu-Urianhai from the beginning, but by 1818 more than half of those districts belonged to one of five banners (if excluding the banners and districts in Tannu-Urianhai ruled by Mongolian princes (see Potapov 1964: 252; Vainshtein 1980: 234; Ewing 1981: 187; Atwood claims, however, that all five banners were established in 1755)). One of these was the Lake Hövsgöl banner (Potanin 1883: 10–13; Ewing 1981: 186), the extent of which is unknown but to whom the Urianhai around Lake Hövsgöl belonged. At the head of each banner was an üherda (‘everyone’s chief ’ (Yanjmaa 2000: 7)), appointed by the Military Govenor of Uliastai, the head of the Qing administration in Mongolia. According to Ewing, the position of üherda was not hereditary in theory, although in practice it was, but according to Yanjmaa, the position was an appointed one between 1805 and 1886/1913 (the years in which one üherda succeeded another one is not clear from her work) and hereditary from 1886/1913 to 1923 (2000: 7). Below, the üherda was the zangi, the head of each district. The üherda was also the head of one of the banner districts. In 1786 (Potapov 1964: 243), the üherda of one of the five banners, Daš of the Oyunnar banner, was put in charge of the other five Tannu-Urianhai banners as governor (or amban-noyon), but around 1880 (sources are widely divergent on this issue and range from 1787 (Vainshtein 1980: 235) and 1805 (Yanjmaa 2000: 7; Banzragch 2001: 56) to 1878 (Potapov 1964: 243) and 1880s (Ewing 1981: 187)) the üherda of the Lake Hövsgöl banner appealed successfully to be a direct subordinate to the military governor of Uliastai and not to the amban-noyon (Ewing 1981: 187), and the Lake Hövsgöl

Introduction • 31

banner was renamed the Hasut banner (Potapov 1964: 243). What was behind this appeal is unknown, but at the end of the nineteenth century the üherda of another of the five banners did the same before the Qing.   The overall picture that emerges from all this is that the Qing administrative intervention in Tannu-Urianhai  – to which the Lake Hövsgöl Urianhai belonged  – was much looser than was the case in Mongolia, and it was mostly organised around already existing systems of organisation (Ewing 1981), such as the otog (a tribal-kinship unit). In fact, the Qing seemed rather indifferent to the administration of Tannu-Urianhai, and one can probably conclude in line with Ewing that Tannu-Urianhai, although part of the ‘outer dependency’ of the Qing, was never fully part of the Qing political system. The Lake Hövsgöl Urianhai outside the border watch-posts were in a kind of no man’s land, not allowed to cross the border to the south, and the various banner heads (üherda) of TannuUrianhai did not participate in the annual trips to Beijing to swear allegiance to the Qing emperor. Moreover, they received less generous stipends from the Qing than did other rulers (Ewing 1981: 190–91). However, new administrative units (banners) and systems of government (bureaucracy, various official positions etc.) were introduced – although later than in Mongolia – and participation in the imperial hunt in Jehol and the rendering of an annual sable tribute in Uliastai, the capital of Qing administration in Outer Mongolia, was demanded (Ewing 1981: 191).   The Qing administrative dispositions, though, were not the only way in which the Urianhai people east of Lake Hövsgöl were connected to the world at large. In TannuUrianhai, trading between Cossacks and Urianhai was taking place back in the eighteenth century, and in the nineteenth century this trade was intensified when the Qing empire was opened to foreign trade in 1860 (Ewing 1981: 192–96). Although it might not have affected the area east of Lake Hövsgöl, which was enclosed by the high Sayan mountains to the north, it is certain that the Halh people of the frontier posts in the south, meant to inhibit trade with Russians, were themselves engaged in trade with the Urianhai north of the border, buying ‘leather, hides and fur’ and selling Chinese goods such as ‘brick tea, tobacco and cloth’ (Sanjdorj 1980: 101–2; Yanjmaa 2000: 12; Banzragch 2001: 31). Also, according to one local, Chinese merchants were – as opposed to the Lake Hövsgöl Urianhai living north of the border – allowed to cross the border from the south. This crossing probably took place only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as the Manchus – prior to that – were successful in keeping Chinese traders out of Urianhai territory (Ewing 1981: 190; Bawden 1989: 82). Some trade was also taking place across the more porous northern border to Russia.   According to Banzragch (2001) and Yanjmaa (2000), the Lake Hövsgöl Urianhai was divided into four districts just prior to the revolution. These were the Ar züün (northeast) district, inhabited by native Uighurs or ‘Soyod Urianhai’ (Banzragch 2001: 56), the Ar baruun (northwest) district, also inhabited by native Uighurs or ‘Soyod Urianhai’ (Banzragch 2001: 56), the Övör züün (southeast) district (located south of the Övör Shirhten), inhabited by people from present-day Tuva who came to the area in 1772, and the Baruun züün (southwest) district (likewise located south of the Övör Shirhten), inhabited by people coming from present-day Tuva in 1773 (see Figure 0.2). The boundary between the two northern districts, and between the two southern districts, is not identified, and the groups might not have been clearly associated with a definite territory. Yet, part of the Ar züün District is identified by local historians as the Soyod Urianhai territory covering the northern part of present-day Chandman’-Öndör District. These divisions may have been a continuation of the four districts of the so-called Hasut banner, although Yanjmaa never mentions the term Hasut, and Banzragch only refers to it as a clan name (Banzragch 2001: 57).

32  •  The Anti-Social Contract

  After the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 until 1921 – the period of Mongolian independence under the political leadership of the Bogd Khan or the Javzandamba Hutagt, the reincarnated head of the Buddhist church in Mongolia – at least some of the districts of the Lake Hövsgöl Urianhai people became lay subjects (shav’) of the Javzandamba Hutagt (Čeveng 1991 [1934]: 74; Yanjmaa 2000: 8; Banzragch 2001: 56). During his reign, the tax obligations stayed at around an annual provision of three sable pelts per tax-paying family (Yanjmaa 2000: 8; Banzragch 2001: 56). This seems to be confirmed by Haslund-Christensen, a Danish explorer who travelled the area in the early 1920s and who mentions a valley called ‘Kiækt’ (transliterated into Danish), located somewhere in the northern part of present-day Tsagaan-Üür District (it has proved impossible to identify the exact location) that was administered by the Javzandamba Hutagt (1946: 141). However, in the 1920s the region east of lake Hövsgöl also seemed to ‘enjoy an unoccupied independence, and was a place where a certain “plasticity” reigned, as in many other areas during the days of the revolution’ (Krebs 1937: 106, cited in Braae 2017).   The presence of Turkic-speaking Soyod or Üüriin Urianhai in the area east of Lake Hövsgöl was documented well into the twentieth century. In the 1920s, HaslundChristensen travelled widely in the region, and he passed Soyod camps of small Mongolian felt tents of poor quality and noted that they spoke a non-Mongolian language reminding him of Kirghiz (Haslund-Christensen 1946: 197) but that some of them were able to communicate in Mongolian (1946: 136). The descriptions of Haslund-Christensen makes it clear that by the early 1920s some of the Lake Hövsgöl Urianhai lived in Mongolian felt tents in the winter and tepee-like tents made of branches and bark during the summer (1946: 197). Haslund-Christensen also describes them as gifted hunters and hospitable people but as ‘appearing dirty’ as compared to the Mongols (1946: 197), and he documents the continued activity of Soyod shamans in the area, in particular his meeting with a powerful young female shaman who performed a ceremony to save the life of a Soyod man (Haslund-Christensen 1946: 198–205). Haslund-Christensen’s account from the early 1920s also includes descriptions of Mongols having settled down as traders among ‘the Soyod Urianhai’ to exchange barley for pelts (1946: 197). There were Buryats, some Chinese merchants and a few Russian colonists in the area too. The Chinese merchants probably entered the area in 1902 when the military governor of Uliastai proposed that this was the only way in which to counter Russian economic dominance over Tannu-Urianhai (Ewing 1981: 209). The penetration of Tannu-Urianhai by Russian colonists and traders had increased strongly in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, and Haslund-Christensen writes about a Russian settlement as far southeast as presentday Erdenebulgan District in the early 1920s. But when Tannu-Urianhai finally became a Russian protectorate in 1914 – after some years of uncertainty (see Ewing 1981: 207–12) – it did not include the areas around Lake Hövsgöl (see Shirendev et al. 1976 [1969]: 805; Wheeler 2000: 38–44).   Nowadays the Turkic-speaking Urianhai traditionally inhabiting the Northern part of present-day Chandman’-Öndör District are believed – by local ‘experts’ – to be related to the Duha or Tsaatan (as they are often called by Mongolians) living in Tsagaannuur District in the regions west of Lake Hövsgöl, close to the Tuvan border. Locals prefer to use the term Soyod Urianhai about these people, who nowadays only speak Mongolian (although some Tuvan words are remembered by some), and Üüriin Urianhai, or just Urianhai or Uighur, about the Turkic and Mongolian-speaking people living around the Üür river in the northern part of the neighbouring Tsagaan-Üür District.

Introduction • 33

  9. Övör Shirhten is used to distinguish them from the Ar Shirhten (see Figure 0.2), another group of Urianhai who were also the satellite subjects of prince Düüregch’s banner (Pürev 1980: 18; see also Wheeler 1999). 10. The first of these claims concerns the fact that the famous female ancestor of the Mongols, Alungua, was, according to the Secret History of the Mongols (the oldest surviving account of Chinggis Khan and the early Mongol empire (see Cleaves 1982; Onon 1990)), born at the Arig Usun (‘clean river’) in the land of the Qori-Tümed (Onon 1990: 3). Her father, Qorilartai-mergen, moved with her to Burkhan Haldun, the holy mountain of Chinggis Khan and the Mongols. The Arig river in Chandman’Öndör is the only river thus named in contemporary Mongolia, and a link is established between the Arig river, Alungua, the Qori-Tümed and the Hentii mountains, where Burkhan Haldun is thought to have been located (Onon 1990: 1). This is probably why some locals nowadays mention the Qori-Tümed and refer to the Secret History of the Mongols when talking about the origin of the Arig Urianhai. The Arig Urianhai even at times suggest that they are direct descendants of Alungua (also see Pegg 2001: 25–26). It is unclear how this would relate to Banzragch’s historical outline of their western Mongolian origin, and making these claims even less likely is the fact that there could easily have been other Arig rivers back then, as duplication of place names is very common in Mongolia. The Buryats in Russia, for example, make similar claims about descending from Alungua.   A second claim concerns the role played by the Adangqan Urianhai of the Jarchi’ut, who supposedly originated from Mongol (and not Turkish) tribes (Gongor 1970: 48) in the foundation of the Mongol empire. According to the Secret History, those Urianhai were subjugated by the five sons of Alungua, one of whom was Bodonchar, the originator of the noble Borjigin clan who was to foster Chinggis Khan and his successors. Bodonchar seized a woman from the Adangqan Urianhai of the Jarchi’ut and she bore him two sons. Later on, Jelme and Sübe’etei, also both Urianhai, played a significant role in Chinggis Khan’s unification of the Mongol tribes, and during the Yuan dynasty (thirteenth century), the Urianhai people are said to have guarded Ikh Khorig of the Burkhan Khaldun mountain, where Chinggis Khan is thought to have been buried (Gongor 1970: 49; Ratchnevsky 1983: 128–29). After the fall of the Yuan dynasty, the Urianhai became one of the six ‘tümens’ (nominally a military unit of 10,000 men but should rather be seen as a khanate, the jurisdiction of a khan) of the eastern Mongols and later were subordinated to the Zasagt Khan province (Gongor 1970: 49). In short, the Arig Urianhai are thought to be a branch of the Adangqan Urianhai (Gongor 1970: 49). Further proof of this is thought to be found in the fact that the Arig Urianhai used to have – i.e. prior to the revolution – old Mongolian clan names such as Argamuud, Zelme (referring to Jelme from the Secret History), Shavarchuud, Onhod and Engi (or Yangi) (also see Nyambuu 1992: 74). Herdeg is often mentioned as a pre-revolutionary clan name from this area also (see e.g. Dorjgotov 1979: 6). 11. There was also a fourth lamasery in the Halh Höhöö area (Höhöögiin hüree) but it has not been possible to find out when it was built. 12. While Pedersen (and many others) does highlight ‘conflict and uneasy coexistence’ between Buddhism and shamanism in the Darhad area (2011: 138), he also indicates that cooperation was taking place (2011: 13) and paints a more complex picture of Darhad identity as an ‘unstable mixture’ of shamanism and Buddhism (2011: 147). 13. Some locals, however, stressed the atrocities of the yellow (Buddhist) counter-­ revolutionaries and their destruction of the first small collectives. In their narratives, the revolutionaries were liberators who spared the lives of innocent people.

34  •  The Anti-Social Contract

14. Hangartner even relates how shamanic practices among the Darhad Mongols were allowed to continue in socialist times (Hangartner 2011: 6–7). 15. Swancutt makes a similar point when she argues that increased religious activities and conflict, while certainly influenced by the difficulties of recent history, cannot be reduced to economic crisis (2012: 24–25). 16. When Sneath discusses the Mongolian notion of ed (things, belongings)  – one of the words used by Düütsetseg above when referring to the dangerous items – he stresses significantly that ed needs to be governed and apportioned within a social and moral order and that simply to take ed is illicit (2002: 202–3). In line with Düütsetseg’s ‘counterconnective’ claim, ed is not supposed to move freely between ‘orders’. 17. Albeit not working back on the person from whom the object is detached but rather working on the person appropriating the detached object from another person. 18. If Empson, in her work on Mongolian conceptions of fortune (hishig) and relatedness (Empson 2011), shows that it is important to hold on to ‘parts’, whether things, animals or people, that are ‘escaping’ or separated from households in order to harness fortune (Empson 2007), one may possibly see this avoidance of the dangerous interference of others as a logical corollary to this part of her argument. 19. A concept always used rather imprecisely to describe Mongolians as friendly and open. 20. Sneath writes: ‘… Mongolian culture has, for long periods of time, associated land with agencies, both spiritual and temporal, who have been considered the “owners” or “stewards” of it’ (1997: 8). And in a note he adds: ‘This is in contrast to the romantic notion of pastoral nomads who consider the unfenced land they move upon to belong to all’ (1997: 14). 21. We should, however, keep the following observation in mind: Still, a stranger who approaches a yurt on the steppe often gets the impression that a Mongol host is quite cool or reserved compared with people in other parts of the world. For example, as a stranger approaches, the head of the yurt does not make an effort to stand or to smile, but maintains his position, hears what the stranger’s business may be, and then with hardly a motion or gesture of cordiality, but a mere motion of the head with chin extended outward or upward, says ‘suu’ (‘sit’). Cordiality or hospitality develops very soon as the conversation begins, and the host spontaneously offers tea, other refreshments, or food and would never ask a guest to pay for the hospitality. (Jagchid and Hyer 1979: 131–32; see also Humphrey 2012).

22. Likewise, Willerslev describes the relational identity of the Yukaghir as one where there are ‘no fixed identities … only continuous transformations of one class of beings into another’ (2007: 6) and where ‘in-betweenness seems to have no ending’ (2207: 12). 23. Cf. the danger of becoming infected with non-human otherness among the Darhad people living west of Lake Hövsgöl (Pedersen 2001: 422–23).

Chapter 1

Centralisation and Dispersal A District in the Market Era

Y Pre 1990, the tightly knit socialist system that prevailed in Mongolia was secured through a political and administrative hierarchy centred on Ulaanbaatar and ultimately on Moscow. Localism and ‘nepotism’ were countered at all levels – whether in nationalist, provincial or village disguise (Bulag 1998: 47–48; see also Boldbaatar 1999)  – and allegiance to power centres was secured by assigning local leaders who were not of local origin (cf. Bulag 1998: 51–52) and creating production teams ‘free of kin allegiances’ at the local collective farms (Humphrey 1978: 152–53; Szynkiewicz 1993: 165; Bulag 1998: 125–28; Wheeler 2004: 221; Bruun 2006: 12–13).1 Chandman’-Öndör District was no exception to this pattern. According to Enhtüvshen, the local governor, only two out of twenty-four leaders in the district’s socialist period were locals. The politics of countering regionalism and nepotism by creating socialist entities loyal to the larger system, however, also had a flipside to it, in that it established the conditions for presentday district and village allegiance. While deeply embedded in larger structures, ‘communities’ at the lower level of the socialist hierarchy also came into being as territorially defined collective farms (negdel) that united people around a common estate, a number of state institutions (school, kindergarten, shops, clinics etc.) and different recreational activities, all centred on the main – and only – village of one particular district. The collective farm was relied on in most aspects of life in Chandman’-Öndör District; it provided wages, pensions, medical care, education, animal fodder, transport for migration, etc. People shared an overarching point of reference; they had to fulfil

36  •  The Anti-Social Contract

production plans – 32 tons of butter and 300 tons of meat in one year, for example – and were all oriented towards common goals and the same territorial centre. Pastoral families were specialised in herding different animals, and they would process milk during the summer at one of each subdistrict’s four or five dairy farms (ferm). Ox carts would bring the cream to the district centre, where milk products, such as butter and dried curds, were produced in a small factory with around ten employees, in accordance with production plans, just as a specified amount of meat/animals would be delivered from the district once a year. As an elderly herdsman, nostalgic about the collective spirit of socialist times, told me when sitting in the grass next to his horse in the Arig river valley: ‘The collective farm was a big family (negdel gej tom ail bailaa l daa) … When there was a natural disaster – bad weather, a lot of snow or a drought – we used to solve it together.’ Localities and attachment to local district territories were also strengthened by the fact that the socialist administrative hierarchy was organised around ‘total social institutions’ – districts (sum) based on collective farms – that were ‘pitted against one another in constant competitions’ (Humphrey and Sneath 1999: 78) and that related to the socialist state in a vertical fashion that involved little ‘horizontal’ communication between districts. Such communication mainly took place through higher provincial (aimag) levels. My fieldwork was centred on one such district, created via the law on the division and classification of Mongolian territory in 1931 and solidified over the next sixty years of socialist rule, and even though socialist structures crumbled in the years following the ‘democratic revolution’ in 1990, ‘the district’ had certainly not ceased to exist at the time of my fieldwork. To be sure, many things had changed with the emerging market economy and the ‘freedom’ of democracy, but, at the same time, previously existing socialist cultural and political forms had very much endured. By looking more closely at such new and old forms of social life and by giving the reader a general sense of the social geography of Chandman’-Öndör in the Mongolian ‘age of the market’ (zah zeeliin üye), this chapter shows how novel forms of centralisation and collectivity are emerging on the ruins or foundations of previously existing cooperatives. However, it also demonstrates – mainly in the second part of the chapter – how the fluctuating and highly uncertain social relations of the market era are also conducive to social ‘dispersal’ and mistrust.

Centralisation: Market Places and Collectives The emergence of the new market has had wide-ranging consequences for life in rural Mongolia, in part because market places tend to centralise all socioeconomic activity. While Chandman’-Öndör District centre was also the

Centralisation and Dispersal  •  37

Figure 1.1  Playing chess in a local shop. Photograph by the author.

administrative, economic and educational hub in socialist times, it used to be more spread out, I was told, and previously had more settlements on the other side of the small river meandering its way through the village. Now the village had contracted around the fenced off central square, where the administration (and just behind it, the school, kindergarten and post office) and many of the new shops were located. The village population counted only a maximum of one thousand inhabitants, most of whom had very limited buying power, yet opening a small shop seemed nevertheless a viable way to earn some extra cash for families who could afford the investment and had nothing else to do. The village was home to quite a few such enterprising people, maybe even more so than in most other Mongolian districts, and there were around twenty-five small shops or street kiosks (delgüür or tüts2) in the district centre. One of the shop owners, an enterprising young woman in her mid twenties named Baigal, opened a shop in 2001 after she, like many others, had lost her footing in the turmoil of post-socialism transition in the 1990s (Pedersen and Højer 2008; Højer and Pedersen 2019). She dropped out of school after 8th grade in 1991 and faced family problems along with the insecurities that followed the extensive privatisation and widespread economic hardship of the 1990s. The family was not able to pay for her higher education, but with the money she saved after having occupied a number of odd and temporary jobs in the 1990s and having sold her cattle and a compound when her

38  •  The Anti-Social Contract

mother died, she initiated the small-scale trade that would later lead to the shop in the village centre. However, most shop owners, such as Batmönh, who we will meet again in the final chapter, were drivers (mostly assisting their wives, who were considered more active (idevhtei) and also better, I was often told, at doing business and choosing the right goods to sell), simply because transport is one of the major ‘means of production’ in a country where distances are great and the infrastructure largely undeveloped. The distinction between mobile traders and settled shopkeepers (Gregory 1994: 933) is thus of little relevance to rural Mongolia, where mobility is a precondition for ‘settled’ business activity. As in socialist times, where the drivers were ‘the aristocracy of farm-workers’ (Humphrey 1998: 249), they are now often the most prominent business entrepreneurs and the jeep an exponent of ‘the age of the market’, industriousness, success and private property. The driver has managed to fill the space of a person who can easily transgress boundaries – and thereby move goods at profit – by virtue of knowing the area and the people. A person such as Batmönh would have an informal, direct and joking attitude and happily visit (almost) any family. A vehicle allowed him to buy up hides from the countryside, for example, while selling goods to the herdsmen. Hides could then be sold at a profit in the provincial capital, where new provisions were also bought for the village shop (clothes, sweets, rice, flour, sugar, salt, tea, canned goods, biscuits, school equipment, soap, soft drinks, beer, vodka, cigarettes, candles etc.). The expense of travelling between district and provincial centre was easily covered by paying passengers. Profit, in other words, was based on travelling between centres and between centres and peripheries, and centres  – whether at national, provincial or district level – worked as fields of gravity for a market based on the velocity of exchange; hence the importance of vehicles. When new goods would arrive from the provincial capital, thus replenishing shop shelves, village people would flock to the small central square to buy goods. Obviously, this trend towards settlement and centralisation took its beginning in socialist times with centralised schooling and administration and even earlier on with monastic settlements and trade (Campi 2006), but it has been boosted by the new economy of profit making, and even local celebrations and religious ceremonies held in the countryside are nowadays used for selling candy, soft drinks, food and so on. These are centralised events and, as such, also market events. Centralisation and markets, in other words, go hand in hand, and it is common knowledge that herders have moved ever closer to the centres in recent years (attracted by goods, schools, administration, ‘entertainment’ and ‘the market’, with the district centre usually the place where major meat companies buy up animals during summer), with a resulting degradation of pasture around settlement areas in Mongolia, a closer proximity of people and greater stability of people’s settlements (Humphrey and Sneath 1999).

Centralisation and Dispersal  •  39

Figure 1.2  Gathering at the ovoo ceremony. Photograph by the author.

Locals in Chandman’-Öndör District, however, are not only drawn towards markets but also identify with centres of a very different kind. In the countryside, among herders, people feel that they belong to a homeland (nutag), which is often defined with reference to valleys, water sources and ‘sacred’ centres that partly overlap with the district’s four subdistricts (bag). Apart from often knowing each other more intimately than people from other areas, people living in and around the same valley or in the same subdistrict identify themselves with a territorially defined administrative unit with elected subdistrict leaders, common activities, celebrations and events, and/or a common source of fertility, namely the local river (gol)3 around which people gather in summer months – and the water of which is sometimes believed to possess a particular quality (chanartai)4 – and a cairn of stones or branches (ovoo) to be worshipped in early summer.5 Such ovoos are usually located at the foot and/or on top of particular mountains or hills thought to be the dwelling place of the spirit masters (gazryn ezed) of the land and river.6 Ovoo ceremonies take place once a year in June and serve, at least for some people (others are more agnostic and may not even attend the ceremony, especially, it was my impression, if they lived in the district centre), to worship the local spirit masters and thereby to provide rain, nutritious pastures and plenty of milk products, as well as protection from misfortune. The ceremony thus elicits the collective of the district’s different homelands because people who attend will be the herding families belonging to this particular ovoo – i.e. to

40  •  The Anti-Social Contract

the area influenced by its power (this power, for example, being the local spirt owner of the river (golyn lus)). At the ceremony, locals will typically refresh or revive the ovoo by adding small, freshly cut larch trees to it and by attaching ceremonial scarves (hadag) to those trees, and they will bring offerings in the form of money donations (handiv), dairy products (tsagaan idee) and meat (shüüs), the households of the area – supervised by the local ovoo ‘head’ (daamal) – taking turns to provide the slaughtered and cooked sheep. Prior to the ceremony, the participating lamas7 always establish an altar with burning incense, oil lamps, bronze vessels filled with different substances, ceremonial scarves and offerings of candy, meat and dairy products (mainly cheese (byaslag)), right in front/south of the ovoo, and when they begin the actual chanting of religious books and prayers (often including the use of various Buddhist instruments; for example, cymbals), they will be seated next to the alter. Local participants are seated in a circle extending southwards from the altar and the lama(s). The collective that appears at such ceremonies is thus strictly hierarchical (cf. Hamayon 1994: 82–83), lamas and elders sitting closer to the ovoo and therefore ‘higher’ than other locals (see also Chapter 3). During the chanting, local men, women and children are mainly just sitting down (and they are not always very attentive or quiet), but they get directly involved when they partake in the occasional ‘hurai hurai’ calls (to summon good fortune) while holding a piece of cheese with both hands and gesturing in circular movements, and when they circumambulate the ovoo while ‘offering the best food’ (deej örgöh) of milk and Mongolian milk-spirit (shimiin arhi) towards the end of the ceremony. As this is a collective happening of the local homeland (nutag), all offerings are shared among participants at the end of the ceremony. The lama may receive a cup of shimiin arhi along with a ceremonial scarf, some money and the uuts (the cooked posterior part of the sheep’s back), and the money may be distributed to the winners of the following naadam (‘games’), where children compete in wrestling and horse racing, but all participants leave with shares of both meat and dairy products. There is thus a sense of a momentary gathering of people and offerings to ask the local spirit powers for ‘abundance’ (elbeg) – as Odhüü, a local friend of mine, phrased it – and of its subsequent dispersal, although always with individual shares of the collective (offerings).8 While attachment to particular valleys and water sources is important, people still feel attached to the district at large by virtue of their common orientation towards the district village centre, and the notion of homeland (nutag) is also used for the district as a whole. The breakdown of the socialist system did, of course, weaken the state and the local administration in the 1990s. The property of the collective farm (animals, vehicles etc.) was distributed among its members, and people were left to take care of their own newly gained private property. The social security previously provided by the

Centralisation and Dispersal  •  41

Figure 1.3  Cooked mutton prepared for the ovoo ceremony. Photograph by the author.

state, as well as extra-local law enforcement and control, was dramatically reduced. Yet, while much of the socio-material infrastructure of centralisation and territorial integration broke down, as evidenced, for example, by the few remaining traces of the previously existing sawmill in the city centre, a number of things and conceptions also remained in place. In line with socialist understandings of knowledge, progress and education, for example, the people of the village centre are still conceived of as more ‘cultured’ (soyoltoi) than local herdsmen. They are thought to be educated, eloquent and well dressed and  – according to a local teacher I knew  – are calm, have warm eyes and walk properly.9 Likewise, medals and diplomas, the quintessence of socialist recognition, are still awarded, highly valued and worn at official occasions organised by the district administration, and they often even replace the revered traditional religious objects placed on family altars. In addition to the enduring idea of a civilised centre associated with official recognition (see also Buyandelger 2013: 108), the village has remained the practical hub for Chandman’-Öndör District as a whole. The kindergarten is still working and so are the bank, healthcare service and district administration. In 1990, the local school became a year ten school and grew in size by incorporating children from neighbouring districts. Herding families settle in the village to look after their children while attending school.

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Likewise, school children from herding families or neighbouring districts live in the school dormitory or with relatives in a compound in the village. Along with school children and village inhabitants, herders may also come to visit one of the many new shops, or they may visit the village centre for medical care, to attend performances and meetings in the local village hall, to visit relatives or just to exchange the latest news. The continued importance of districts and district centres after 1990, then, has left some form of localism flourishing in the wake of the disintegration of collective farms (Humphrey 2002a: 82–83; Sneath 2010: 256, 261; also see Szynkiewicz 1993). People have become attached to a collective whose physical and organisational structures have remained in place from the socialist period. This may explain why Chandman’-Öndör District celebrated its 70-year jubilee with grandeur in 2001, attesting to the continued importance of the district-level allegiance, if now expressed in slightly different terms than it used to be. While the specific district ‘community’ was still made to appear through large-scale celebrations organised by the local administration, it was now centred on tradition and on being true Mongols; a national attachment to Mongolia had clearly superseded an internationalist socialist belonging.10 As such, one loss, the universal structure of socialism, was substituted by another imagined loss – a distant Mongolian past hosting vivid traditions of clans, craftsmanship and religion  – which, in turn, became a potential for the future and in need of revival (Humphrey 1992a: 377). The vacuum left by socialism and the immediate past had made ‘historical mimicry’ of an envisaged ‘deep past’, a creative point of departure for the present.

A Genuine Mongolian Locality: The Alungua Celebrations In post-socialist Mongolia, Chinggis Khan has played a prominent role in this return to the distant past (see e.g. Wallace 2015b). Pegg, for example, has pointed out that ‘Chinggis Khan and his “Golden Lineage” (Altan Urag) are being used as symbols of “Mongolness” in different performance media by a variety of ethnic groups’ (2001: 7; see also Kaplonski 2004: 81–86; Empson 2011: 263–64), and at the end of August 2002, Chandman’-Öndör District joined this chorus by arranging the first ‘Celebration of Mother Alungua’s Teaching’ (Alungua eejiin surgaaliin bayar) because Alungua, the legendary female ancestor of Chinggis Khan and the Mongols, is sometimes thought to have been born in Chandman’-Öndör District at the Arig river (see also note 10). This claim is mainly based on the fact that Alungua is said to have been born at the ‘Arig Usun’ (clean river) in the land of the Qori-Tümed (Onon 1990: 3) and that the Arig river in Chandman’-Öndör is the only river

Centralisation and Dispersal  •  43

thus named in contemporary Mongolia. Although the dubious nature of the claim is acknowledged by locals, the celebration has continued to perform the link between Alungua and Chandman’-Öndör since 2002, and at the local museum in the district centre, Alungua even appears in the section on the prehistory of the area. While one can hardly avoid being taken aback by locals’ ability to set up events such as concerts in the village hall or at the local school, not to speak of the nationwide Naadam celebrations in July, the scale of the Alungua celebrations in 2002 was quite impressive even by Mongolian standards. The celebrations centred on the significance of children, motherhood and women as child-raisers and bearers of wisdom, as well as on teaching unity to Mongolian children, and they took off with a small conference on ‘Mongolian mothers and women’s traditional pedagogy’ (Mongolyn ehchüüd, emegteichüüdiin ulamjlalt surgan hümüüjüüleh uhaan) in the village hall, where various locals and scholars made a presentation. After this event, people were invited to view the local museum, which presented the local history in a small exhibition made by the governor (zasag darga) himself. In the evening, a concert entitled ‘Let us pray to the national emblem’ (töriin süldend zalbir’’ya) was performed. The second day of the celebration took place in the countryside at the statue of Alungua, erected close to the banks of the Arig river in 1992, and included – apart from speeches, songs, music and a single dance performance – sports competitions (Mongolian wrestling, horse racing and traditional ‘ankle-bone shooting’ (shagai harvah)) and the awarding of medals to mothers who had given birth to many children, thus merging the pro-natal policies of the socialist period, where mothers of many children received rewards and awards (Buyandelger 2013: 179–81), with the celebration of ultimate national Chinggisid motherhood. On the last day, a documentary on Chandman’-Öndör District – made for the occasion – was shown in the village hall while the wrestling competition continued in the local sports arena. A substantial amount of money was spent on the celebrations, and the budget was, according to one local official, a heavy burden for an already troubled local economy. The momentum for arranging the celebrations thus significantly came from the local governor of the Democratic Party (Ardchilsan Nam), a party opposed to the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (Mongol Ardyn Huv’sgalt Nam) and the anti-traditionalism and antinationalism of the socialist period (see also Kaplonski 2004: 71, 81–86), and it was organised jointly by the district administration, the provincial administration and two non-local organisations, the Society for Mongolian Moon Mothers (Mongolyn Saran Eej Niigemleg)11 and the Chinggis Khan Association (Chingis Haan Holboo). As such, the recently (re)discovered national importance of Chinggis Khan joined forces not just with the traditional and

44  •  The Anti-Social Contract

Figure 1.4  At the Alungua statue. Photograph by the author.

socialist value of motherhood but also with an administrative organisation mainly rooted in socialist times. This merging of national values and socialist ideals and aesthetics appeared in other ways also. The music played when awarding medals – itself a socialist practice – was identical to the tunes played when awarding distinctions in socialist times, and the way in which speeches

Centralisation and Dispersal  •  45

were given during the celebrations was strongly reminiscent of the immutability, repetitiveness and authority of the socialist era, and it is worth remembering that the village hall and the local museum, both prominent locations during the celebrations, were places for ‘ideological working’ (Buyandelger 2013: 77) until very recently. Some socialist symbols were literally dressed up in a new national fashion: on the central square of the district centre, a stone monument that used to depict Lenin was repainted with white standards (tug or süld)12 and a few words from Chinggis Khan, beginning with ‘the welfare of the state is the happiness of the khan’ (haan hün jargahdaa töriinhöö saind jargayuu). As the standards symbolise the everlasting spiritual embodiment of the Mongols (Rinchen 1984: 26; Bulag 1998: 218), the immutability of socialism  – conveyed by socialist ritual form (Yurchak 1997) and the stone itself – had become, one might say, indistinguishable from the spiritual immutability of the Mongol nation and its people. The celebrations turned Chandman’-Öndor District, located on the margins of the Mongolian nation state, into the birthplace and homeland of Alungua, the archetypal Mongol woman. The importance of turning a geographical margin into a central part of Mongolia  – and an essential component of being Mongol  – was further testified to by the fact that many officials and academics from the capital and the provincial capital  – and neighbouring districts  – travelled to this northernmost part of Mongolia to attend the celebrations. Some people, especially intellectuals from the capital, were deeply touched when prostrating themselves (mörgöh) and offering ceremonial scarves (hadag) to the statue of Alungua. One speaker lamented the present conception of a Mongolian woman as ‘someone who is just good to kiss’ and so he lauded the fact that at this celebration it was their quality as reproducers of Mongolian bodies, old teachings and central Mongolian values that was stressed. This concern of Mongolian intellectuals with Mongolian women as bearers of the Mongolian nation has been noted by Bulag also: Mongolia has been encouraging woman to produce as many children as possible for the good of the nation. Women, as the “mothers” of the Mongol nation, then, shoulder a responsibility to perpetuate the Mongol nation, its culture, etc. Women would be blamed for their failure to fulfil these roles, especially should they be used to reproduce members of other nations or ethnicity, as the concern of the Mongol élites clearly demonstrates. (Bulag 1998: 149)

While such a concern with women as central to perpetuating the Mongolian nation may also be shared by the wider population of non-intellectuals, there was a sense of hierarchy surrounding the celebration of Mongol unity at the Alungua celebration. The statue and the ovoo next to it were fenced off, and

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when celebrations began at the statue on the second day, only officials and official guests were invited inside the fence. Outside, local people – some still seated on their horses – were watching and seemed less engaged and more eager to participate in the surrounding festivities. While Chandman’-Öndör was celebrated as a district  – a documentary about the district was even made and shown in the village hall – it was the Arig Urianhai, at the implicit expense of the northern part of the district, who came to prominence as the real Mongols of Chandman’-Öndör.13 As such, the celebration was not about exhibiting local difference as difference from the national whole but rather about showing how their difference – if different – was that they, being directly associated with Alungua, were almost more Mongol than other Mongols. They were, however, establishing this ‘direct route to Mongolness, not via Halh, but through historical links to Chinggis Khan’ and his predecessors (Bulag 1998: 70). Such claims to true Mongol rather than Turkic descent were prevalent among other Urianhai groups in western Mongolia in the 1990s also (Bulag 1998: 101; Pegg 2001: 24–25). Mongolian purity and unity, of which Alungua  – and Chandman’Öndör – are exemplars (Humphrey 1997; Højer and Bandak 2015), was recreated through a constantly emerging theme during the celebrations, namely the famous teaching of Alungua: ‘Mother’s teaching harmony and unity: “… You, the five sons of mine, have not you come out of the same womb? If you go one by one, you will easily be defeated by others, like a single arrow. If you are united harmoniously, you will be as safe as the sheaf of five arrows and will not easily be defeated by others” – From the teaching of mother Alungua’ (Text on a picture at the local museum. The teaching is from The Secret History of the Mongols (see Onon 1990: 5))

And significantly, the ovoo next to the statue, usually made of stones or branches, consisted  – apart from stones  – of five upright arrows pointing towards the sky and inwards towards the centre of the ovoo; different trajectories merged into the supremacy of being a proper and ideal Mongol, a moral and traditional integrity. If the ovoo may be seen as an ‘axis of time’, ‘a kind of timeless time, a perpetual harmony, a setting out of the ideologically permanently recurring structure of society  – for which the archetype was the Imperial lineage, recurrently primed in its vigilance and valour’ (Humphrey 1995: 148), then Chandman’-Öndör District was made a fractal of a Mongolian whole, a patterned part almost more identical to the whole than the whole was to itself.

Centralisation and Dispersal  •  47

Dispersal: Mobile Pastoralism and Troubled Exchanges While the market centralises activities and different collective and hierarchical ‘wholes’ are made to emerge momentarily through ovoo ceremonies and public celebrations, the prominence of everyday dynamics of mobility, fluidity and unsettledness should not be ignored in a region so strongly influenced by ‘mobile pastoralism’ (Humphrey and Sneath 1999), the cracks and ruptures of a post-socialist society (see e.g. Nazpary 2002; Pedersen and Højer 2008; Højer and Pedersen 2019) and, as we shall see in the coming chapter, cultural idioms for breeding fragmentation. As opposed to what was described in the preceding section, the mobility of ‘nomadic’ life counters any straightforward social integration into stable large-scale collectives and so does the increased reliance on self-subsistence and the uncertain exchanges of goods and services in a market era characterised by high levels of scarcity and a dependence on what is often believed to be unreliable others. A European ‘sedentary’ eye may be used to associate social life with settlements and territoriality (Malkki 1992) – whether in the form of neighbourhoods, villages, regions or nation states – and one might jump to conclusions about social life when faced with a physical description of human settlements in Chandman’-Öndör District: the quiet village centre is home to all major state institutions. The district administration, the bank, the clinic, the village hall and the school, all wooden brown buildings surrounded by railings and a few larch trees, are located next to the main village ‘square’. Around this central area lie private settlements of wooden houses and – in the winter – gers built within compounds that are mostly surrounded by a high compact wooden fence.14 Some of these settlements are enclaves separated from the central part of the village by a few hundred metres. Moving away from the village and into the countryside, the only small clusters of settlements, apart from Mongolian gers or wooden houses making up the camps of herding families, are three subdistrict (bag) centres in the countryside,15 Shivert, Yolgos and Höhöö, and the Bulnai resort in the northernmost part of the district. Now, the problem is not the physical description as such but to mistake these settlements for clear-cut social collectives. When looking at human interaction and the actual movements of people, a settlement-based view turns out to be deceptive. Groups are not easily identified with settlements, and settlements are not simply places where people live together. In fact, many, if not most, of the wooden houses are empty in the district centre during the summer and in the countryside during the autumn, winter and spring when herding families live in gers. Settlements, then, are better viewed as constructions for periodic occupation. Herding families in the countryside are usually required to move four times a year to find good seasonal pastures

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Figure 1.5  Making hay for the winter. Photograph by the author.

for their livestock (cattle, horses, sheep and goats in this particular area) and often camp with different constellations of households over the year, and many (male) activities, such as herding animals, hunting, preparing firewood and cutting hay, take place away from home.16 Apart from that, people spend much time going to and from the district centre. Even the district centre, however, is not ‘settled’ or easily defined as a settlement. During the summer months, many people move to the countryside and the centre turns into something reminiscent of a ghost town, only to dramatically increase its population at the beginning of September when school begins. Out of the more than 600 pupils at the local school, 150 children move into the school dormitory, and other families with school children move their ger into the compound of relatives, or alternatively send their children to live with relatives in the district centre. Yet other families own a house in the district centre, where one adult goes to live with the children while other grown-ups stay in the countryside to take care of their herds of animals. None of the neighbouring districts have a year ten school so the school of Chandman’-Öndör District receives pupils from other districts; one of them is Tsagaan-Üür District, about fifty kilometres away and another, Erdenebulgan District, is roughly ninety kilometres away. The border of the village is also hard to define, as clusters of settlements as well as single wooden houses are scattered around the valley where the district centre is located. Some of these are empty for most of the year because a number of

Centralisation and Dispersal  •  49

villagers own separate houses for summer and winter. The summer camps, although not located in the village, can usually be reached in a ten-minute walk. What is more, families may move from one house to another within the same compound,17 and at some point they may move their compound altogether because the place (gazar) is considered to have become bad or dirty after too many years of habitation. The wooden houses are built without using nails, and they can easily be dismantled and rebuilt at another site. Those one might expect to be the most stable inhabitants of the village centre, namely teachers and other state employees, are frequently away for seminars or meetings, and many people travel for educational, health and business purposes, too. When trying to track down people in the central village, one is often met with a hödöö yavsan (‘went to the countryside’) or a seminart yavsan (‘went for a seminar’), and when looking for people in the countryside one is, ironically, time and again met with a töv yavsan (‘went to the centre’). In general, unless you work in the school or in administration, you do not tend to run into the same people, apart from family members, throughout the year on a daily basis. Furthermore, distances are great, and the need to provide your domestic animals with good pastures means that settlements in the countryside tend to be widely dispersed. Apart from making it difficult to conduct classical village-community fieldwork, this mobility and dispersal, or the need for pastoral nomads to move in order to generate growth (Empson 2011), also makes ‘society’  – as a spatially defined, permanent and tightly knit political and social unit (one of the underlying and much criticised assumptions of classical anthropological fieldwork and much classical anthropological a­ nalysis) – deeply problematic. And it highlights the fact that the ‘whole’ district worshipped at the Alungua celebrations is only one possible rendering of local forms of relatedness. Alongside the mobility that characterises people’s lives, the disappearance of strong collective institutions – and the transition from plan to market – has certainly not diminished the fluctuating and – as we shall now see – also troubled nature of this social environment. In a sense, the spatial distance described above has a counterpart in a certain social ‘distance’ that may have become accentuated in post-socialist times. In decollectivised Chandman’-Öndör District, the household is the primary unit of production and consumption. It usually consists of a parental couple or a single mother, their/her unmarried children and possibly one grandparent or other elderly relative. While self-sufficiency is increasingly the norm as one moves away from the district centre and into the pastoral economy (cf. Buyandelger 2013: 109), it is also a key feature of households in the village. When I settled down in the compound of Ulaanhüü and Tsendee in August 2000, for example, I was literally surrounded by their own produce. In one corner of the compound, they had a vegetable patch where

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they grew potatoes and turnips (manjin). The vegetables were harvested in mid September and subsequently laid to dry in the sun every day in order for them not to rot or be damaged when temperatures dropped below zero later in the autumn and winter. Next to the fence, the family had two wooden ox carts that were dragged by their own yak-cow hybrid (hainag) bullocks and mainly used for transporting firewood  – i.e. branches and logs  – that we gathered and prepared in the surrounding forest. Piles of firewood were always stacked in the southern part of the compound, next to the axe and the wood chopping block (where I spent a lot of time throughout my fieldwork but especially when chopping firewood for the winter in October). In the northwestern corner of the square compound, next to the main wooden house, a haystack provided supplementary fodder for the family’s (and occasionally visitors’) horses, yaks and cows. The hay had been cut in late summer on Ulaanhüü’s hayfield north of the village in an area that was fenced off for haymaking. When Ulaanhüü, his teenage daughter, my fieldwork assistant and I transported the hay to the compound on the family’s ox carts only a few days after my arrival, we were told that some of the hay had been stolen from the field. This was the first ‘exchange’ outside the household that I was told of. The second house in the compound, placed just a few meters east of the main house, was my home for the first three to four months of fieldwork. I shared this house with the family’s teenage daughter, but otherwise it was mainly used for various tools and utensils and family belongings such as their packed-down ger (a small wooden shed at the eastern side of the compound

Figure 1.6  Herding at the district centre. Photograph by the author.

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was also used for similar things) as well as for processing milk and storing milk and meat products. The family had their own cows that were milked every morning and evening during summer in their cattle pen just west of the village, on the fringe of the larch forest covering the surrounding hills. During the day, the cows and calves would be grazing separately in and around the village, and we spent much time every day in late summer on finding and driving in cows and calves and on keeping them separate, just as a considerable amount of time was used for milking the cows, carrying the milk buckets to and from the pen and on producing dairy products such as clotted cream (öröm), butter (tos), spirit distilled from fermented milk (shimiin arhi), yogurt (tarag), dried curds (aaruul) etc. In general, daily tasks that would usually not involve people outside the household, such as fetching water (or, in the winter, blocks of ice) from the local river, would occupy much of our days. Like most other households, Ulaanhüü’s family was largely self-sustaining, and almost anything in the household economy would find use and reuse. Cow dung was used for insulating the northern walls of our wooden house, and greasy hands, I was told, should not be washed but used to soften leather ropes. Obviously, everything was not based on subsistence, mobility and unstable relations, and many households in the district centre were also embedded in wider social networks and larger state and market economies. Ulaanhüü and Tsendee were not shop owners, nor were they involved in any business

Figure 1.7  Fetching ice at the local river. Photograph by the author.

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activities, yet Ulaanhüü received salary for his work as a teacher at the local school and so did Tsendee for her job at the local nursery. Apart from the money I paid for eating and living with them, this was the only steady cash income they had in those years. The money had to pay for food (mainly flour but also salt, tea, candy, alcohol and occasionally meat and vegetables), clothing and other everyday necessities, and it also had to cover expenses for, for example, presents for the lunar New Year (Tsagaan Sar) and for university fees for their daughter in Ulaanbaatar. While most families were thus strongly self-reliant (see also Bruun 2006: viii), they were also dependent – to different degrees – on procuring cash; for example, by receiving salaries or pensions, carrying out business, hunting (illegally), or, mainly in the case of pastoral families, by selling animals or animal products from cattle, yaks,18 sheep, goats and horses. Live animals would be bought up in the village centre by non-local herders working for major meat companies during the summer or by local villagers when preparing winter supplies in November. Yet, villagers were usually also reliant on countryside families for the herding of their animals during winter, and then they were obviously drawing on networks of kin and acquaintances in other cases also. Apart from the partly ritualised exchanges at weddings and the traditional New Year (Tsagaan Sar) (see Chapter 3), there is thus a range of less ritualised types of exchange external to the household that are based on money (immediate exchanges of products and services for money), barter (delayed and immediate exchanges of products and services such as when looking after the cattle of another family) and obligation19 (services dictated by roles in kin relations or other mainly hierarchical relations such as those between elders and youngers, teachers and pupils etc.20) – or a mixture of all three. A person who has had his gun confiscated by a ranger for illegal hunting may, for example, ask a childhood teacher who knows the ranger in question to talk to him and reconsider his decision. So, while it is often recognised that socialism in itself was detrimental to the functioning of extra-family kin relations (Szynkiewicz 1993: 165), since it did not endorse non-state allegiances, it has become a widespread assumption that friendship and kinship networks, in particular, have replaced the redistributive socialist state as regards to such socio-economic exchanges between households in Mongolia (Sneath 1993; Humphrey and Sneath 1999; Park 2003; Kaplonski 2004: 32–35, 45). Sneath, for example, writes that diminished social control and the increased importance of private animals have promoted competition and suspicion and forced people to depend on reliable kin and friends (1993: 204). In a similar vein, Park explicitly argues that kinship relations, fictive or real, are fulfilling the functional void left by the disintegration of the socialist system and that such relations are an important means of creating security in times of economic difficulty (Park 2003). He

Centralisation and Dispersal  •  53

focuses on (quasi)-kinship connections characterised by reliability, satisfaction of needs and mutual assistance and contrasts them with the threat of unreliable non-kin (Park 2003: 159). Kin connections work through delayed exchanges based on trust and they ensure ‘solid relationships’ (Park 2003: 154). Such economic relations are often taken to involve ‘moral obligations, characterised by emotion, affect, and respect’ (Empson 2011: 129). While difficulties, competition and suspicion are acknowledged as part of the wider social environment in such studies, they thus also imply that such external problems can be reduced by relying on networks with trusted kin. This is obviously not untrue, and people from Chandman’-Öndör District may indeed rely on relatives such as when students receive meat and butter from relatives, for example, when they go back to the city. Yet, the concept of kinship networks tends to conceal the fact that such relations are not unproblematic or unambiguous and that the issue at hand is not simply ‘people to rely on and connect to’ versus ‘people not to rely on and not to connect to’. There are a number of obvious reasons why this dichotomy is far too simple and why unreliability and suspicion are integral to most relations. First of all, so-called ‘kinship networks’ are not quite as straightforward, predictable and systematic as one could be led to believe, and this precludes them from turning into large-scale collectives or tightly knit ‘networks’. Nowadays, there is confusion or a lack of knowledge – or indeed ignorance – of descent and how to trace it as compared with the way it is often imagined to have been in past clan systems (for a critique of the importance of clans based on kinship in pre-revolutionary Mongolia, see Sneath 2007).21 Only recently have people been provided with new identity cards on which their (self-chosen) clan (ovog) name figures, but even old people in Chandman’Öndör District had to ask around to find out which clan they belonged to.22 Clans are often guessed on the basis of a person’s place of birth, and some people realised after ordering their new ID cards that they had given the wrong name. But – as it was said – it was now too late to change it. The often preferred status of being a real Halh Mongol, both because the Halh had become central to Mongolian identity (Bulag 1998) and because being an Urianhai is often associated with negative stereotypes and low status, has probably also meant that many registered as Borjigin, the ‘golden lineage’ of the Mongols. In addition to the confusion surrounding clan names, there are many adoptions and divorces, complicating people’s ‘kinship networks’ further, and some children are born without a known father. Secondly, and more pertinently, although assumptions about the functioning of relationships and the genuine intimacy, trust and support of many family and friendship relations (see e.g. Empson 2011: 57–61) are clearly relevant (because people, for example, need each other to take care of complementary functions23), such relationships imply cultural idioms for understanding and anticipating

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relationships that cannot merely be reduced to their seemingly functional utility and that may not simply imply ‘closeness’ and ‘intimacy’. In other words, there is, as we shall see, a problem when we make a trouble-free move from the functional security and necessity of delayed exchanges to reliability, intimacy and clear-cut ‘integration’. The exchange of parts is not always a blending of souls and, when looking at Chandman’-Öndör District, the idea that delayed exchange creates trust and solidity in social relations actually seems to fly in the face of ethnographic reality. If we for a moment return to Baigal, the female shop owner from the beginning of this chapter, she stressed that her success was a result of independence and her own ‘confidence’. She had not obtained any loans and had not asked others for help when starting up her business. ‘I did it myself,’ she told me, ‘and did not need anyone’s advice or help’. ‘People don’t help each other,’ she continued, and while she spoke of a few good and trusted connections in the provincial capital, she stressed that in the district it was all about competition, about ‘wanting to have a bigger store than the others’. It was, she repeatedly stressed, ‘useless to have friends in the district’. Carrying out the immediate exchanges in the shop was not necessarily based on trust between the parties exchanging (cf. Humphrey 1985; Humphrey and HughJones 1992) but was based on a generalised trust in the idiom – money – of exchange and a knowledge of the right price, much like the herdsman and the trader both know how much hides, for example, are worth in the provincial capital and how much the trader should pay for them. Such exchanges have, in principle, no personal implications for the relation between the exchanging parties, because the exchange is, so to say, finished; there is no indispensable perpetual connection involved. Delayed exchanges, on the other hand, are – in line with Park (2003) – often imagined as integrative simply because there is ‘an account to be settled’. The assumption is that if there is no contractual and legal enforcement – no ‘abstract’ promise, such as a written contract or ‘money’, which substitutes and serves as trust – when exchanging with a time lag, this function is taken on by already established links of trust (see e.g. Humphrey 1985; Empson 2011: 5), such as kinship networks, which in turn are reinforced by the exchanges; ‘credit implies trust’ (Humphrey and Hugh-Jones 1992: 9). This is the case when credit, or different time frames for the objects exchanged, is involved, such as when a family in the village centre of Chandman’-Öndör District gives flour and some money (which can be used now) to a family in the countryside who, in turn, take care of their animals during winter (a service rendered over a longer period of time). In anthropological literature, this domain of credit and trust, exchanging flour for herding animals, is often associated with integration and the maintenance of alliances. In a seminal article, Sahlins writes, for example, that

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[t]he exchange that is symmetrical or unequivocally equal carries some disadvantage from the point of view of alliance: it cancels debts and thus opens the possibility of contracting out. If neither side is “owing” then the bond between them is comparatively fragile. But if accounts are not squared, then the relationship is maintained by virtue of “the shadow of indebtedness,” and there will have to be further occasions of association, perhaps as occasions of further payment. (Sahlins 1972: 222; my emphasis)

Yet, when moving from contract to trust-based delayed exchanges – and in rural Mongolia exchanges that are not simply highly ritualised, obligational or money-based and immediate hardly ever operate along lines of rigorous contracts  – we are also moving into a domain of ambiguity, volatility and suspense in which existing links of trust or kinship are not simply reinforced. When a village household in Chandman’-Öndör, for example, wanted to place their animals with close relatives for the winter, they had had a quarrel with the family in question and had to change their plans (cf. Swancutt 2012: 21–22; Pedersen 2017a: 83). They managed to find another family, once again relatives, and provided this new herding family with a two-yearold calf, some fodder and a monthly amount of money in return for herding their animals. However, in February, the herding family was no longer satisfied with the arrangement. A family member had fallen ill, they claimed not to have a proper cow shelter and, adding to their frustration, they were not satisfied with the payment. They wanted an additional pair of boots – and wished to return the animals. Prior to this, the household in the district centre had on several occasions vented their mistrust of the family taking care of their cattle. They were not herding them well, and wolves had eaten too many animals, they contended. An argument ensued and the animals ended up being removed. Some years ago, the same family had taken care of the village household’s sheep and goats and, according to the daughter of the village household, they had lost animals back then too. It was all a ‘bad omen’ (muu yor), she said. I asked her whether they would find some other relatives who could take care of their animals, and she responded with a proverb: ‘Better stay close to mountains and water, better stay far away from kin’ (uul usny oir n’ deer, urag törliin hol n’ deer). Subsistence and isolation were valued over the hardship of binding and always troubled relationships, it seemed, and ‘trust’ was more ambiguous than many anthropological studies would have us believe. Apart from contradicting Tylor and Sahlins’s dictum that ‘kindred goes with kindness’24 (Sahlins 1972: 196), it was precisely asymmetry and delayed exchanges that made communications problematic. Delayed exchanges and their built-in suspense and ambiguity paved the way for the possibility for mistrust and rather violent ruptures of human relationships just as much as they ensured continued attachment. The irony, though, was

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that, in the end, the village household had to place the animals with other relatives because no one else would take them. At a later date, a diviner in the district centre told the family that they were the victims of a curse (hel am), possibly related to the argument over their animals. Such relations are volatile not only because they are suspended between ‘settled’ relations of obligation towards kinsmen and negotiable  – i.e. ­‘unsettled’  – relations (how much flour, for example, should be received for taking care of four cows) but also because their set-up changes over time. Thus, the notion of the contract – as an abstraction unaffected by the unfolding of time (‘we have given you flour and you will take care of our animals’) – does not capture the progression of such arrangements well, because exchanges, so to speak, change; they are not (prior) rules that are detached from their execution over time (cf. Bourdieu 1979 [1972]). As such, the suspense and volatility of delayed exchanges is not only caused by the asymmetry of debt (accounts are never squared) but is also implied in the fact that circumstances (sudden attacks by wolves, someone falling ill, a change in weather, a person not turning up) are not really circumscribing a distinct exchange event but are intrinsic to delayed exchange sequences, which  – in consequence  – are never predictable. The herding economy, as well as rural life in general, is precarious (changeable weather, wolves and diseases appearing out of nowhere, theft or disappearance of animals, breakdown of vehicles, work schedules at the local school constantly changing etc.) and so is the post-socialist household economy for most people. Always uncertain and irregular, delayed exchanges based on trust thus often serve to generate ambiguity and conflict as much as they reinforce alliances. This reading of relations is shared by Mongolians themselves, who often stress the difficulty of relationships and any kind of economic reliance. A bank official, when giving a speech on the anniversary of the Mongolian Haan Bank in the local village hall, made this explicit. She told the audience to save money in the bank because they ‘would then have no trouble getting it back’. Arguably exaggerating the reliability of Mongolian banks, she did have a valid point about the often problematic nature of debt in Chandman’-Öndör District and Mongolia in general (see also Højer 2012; Sneath 2012; Pedersen 2017b; Waters 2018; Højer and Pedersen 2019). It should by now be clear that while delayed exchanges are a functional necessity, they are at the same time fragile and uncertain because the exchange sequences mostly move in unexpected directions and are also approached with precaution and suspicion from the very outset. Exchange may create ‘the bonds of society’ (Humphrey and Hugh-Jones 1992: 8) but the suspense involved in delayed exchanges in rural Mongolia equally serves to dissolve bonds and fertilise the ground for mistrust. The domain of social relationships is, apart from relations internal to the household (at least in most cases),

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characterised by a high degree of fluctuation. And, as we shall now see, this is not simply caused by an infrastructure of pastoralism, self-reliant economic household units and a transit economy of shortage and heightened competition for scarce resources but also has to do with indigenous cultural idioms through which relations are perceived and anticipated.

Notes   1. It should be borne in mind, though, that kinship networks may also have gained importance in the socialist period (see Humphrey 1998: 267–99).  2. TÜTS is an acronym for Türgen Üilchilgeenii Tseg (literately meaning ‘fast service spot’).  3. Gol also means centre, middle, core, main, etc.   4. People from the Uilgan river in neighbouring Tsagaan-Üür District, for example, are thought to be good wrestlers because of the quality of the water in the river. For the importance of homeland water, see Bulag (1998: 175).  5. See Sneath (2010) for a discussion of new collective identities and ‘homelands’ in Mongolia. For the notion of local valley communities, see e.g. Szynkiewicz (1982, 1993) and Bazargür et al. (1993).   6. They may also be located at road passes, in caves or at springs.   7. At one out of the six ceremonies that I attended during fieldwork, three ‘lamas’ were attending and, at another ceremony, two lamas were praying, but at the remaining four there would only be one lama present.   8. At least eleven such ovoos are worshipped throughout the district. For other descriptions and analyses of ovoo ceremonies (see e.g. Heissig 1980; Humphrey 1995; Humphrey with Onon 1996; Sneath 1991, 2000; Empson 2011; Lindskog 2016).   9. Such descriptions show how conceptions of being cultured and educated overlap significantly with the traditional domain of yos or right conduct (see Chapter 3). 10. Also the subbotnik (Rus.), voluntary unpaid labour days (Humphrey 1998: 194), a remnant from socialist times, have a widespread moral and collective appeal to people living in the village centre. Everybody seems to participate, and are expected to participate, when the village is cleaned on such days. 11. In Mongolian cosmology, women are symbolised by the moon (Park 2003: 149). 12. Jagchid and Hyer write the following about the standard: ‘When Chinggis took power as khan in 1206, in order to honor his protective deity, he created a new standard or flag, which was white and mounted on a decorated staff with nine tassels or tails. This flag became the standard of the Mongol Empire, but its exact nature or appearance is not known’ (Jagchid and Hyer 1979: 170). 13. As mentioned earlier, the Soyod Urianhais are implicitly stigmatised as backwards and do not always wish to present themselves as Soyod Urianhai. A woman who was Soyod Urianhai  – or so she had said  – appeared as Borjigin (the golden lineage of Halh Mongols) on her new ID card, and it was claimed that some Soyod Urianhai changed their dialect on purpose when speaking to outsiders because they were embarrassed about their ‘ethnic’ affiliation. 14. The Mongolian ger is almost only seen during winter, spring and autumn because the relatively humid summer is too hard on the tent material. 15. The district (sum) is actually divided into four subdistricts as the district centre is also the centre of a subdistrict.

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16. This applies to men in the village centre as well. 17. Humphrey notes that traditions of transhumance are strong even among Buryat Mongols for whom the reasons to migrate have ceased to exist: ‘Thus in the Selenga farm people who worked all year round in the kolkhoz centre built themselves small “summer houses” alongside their main winter houses, just a few yards away, in order to have somewhere to move to at the appropriate time of year’ (1998: 233). 18. As well as crossbreeds between cattle and yak (hainag, ortoom). 19. This term is borrowed from Sneath (Sneath 1993; Humphrey and Sneath 1999) and Gell (1992), who both apply it to transfers that are mutual but, strictly speaking, not ­reciprocal. 20. As an exception, relations with classmates involve obligational and largely egalitarian ‘exchanges’. Such relations can be called upon, for example, if you have a problem and someone from your childhood school class is now in a position to help you out. 21. For a discussion of the genealogical ambiguity in relation to ancestors and spirit worlds (see e.g. Buyandelger 2007, 2013; Swancutt 2008; Shimamura 2004). 22. It should be noted, however, that among the Buryats in Mongolia, family genealogies have been much better preserved throughout the socialist period, and knowledge of kinship, accordingly, is much more elaborate (see e.g. Empson 2011; Swancutt 2008, 2012). 23. In socialist times, kinship interests did indeed become oriented towards creating ‘a network of goods exchange between unequally supplied areas, the countryside and the town. Kin channels again became important, this time in provisioning instead of production, as had been the case during the pre-negdel [collective farm] period’ (Szynkiewicz 1993: 166, 171). Nowadays it is common for people in the countryside to provide people in the city with meat, butter and jam, for example, in return for which their children can live for free with relatives while attending university. 24. And Sahlins continues by quoting Tylor: ‘two words whose common derivation expresses in the happiest way one of the main principles of social life’ (1972: 196).

Chapter 2

Dangerous Communications Injurious Talk and the Perils of Standing Out

Y There is something peculiar about the way in which information in general, and news in particular, spreads in a village or district such as Chandman’Öndör. The telephone and telegram service at the local post office makes information from the wider world accessible, as do the few vehicles coming from the provincial capital with mail, newspapers and hearsay from the outside. Motor vehicles are the only regular means of long-distance transportation to and from the district centre, and everyone knows if and when a jeep is leaving for the provincial capital, or, more rarely, the capital. During winter, information and news also reach the village via television, which is broadcast for approximately three hours on evenings when electricity is running, provided that people have enough money to pay for the energy supply and that fuel for the local diesel generator is available. People are often deprived of the three hours of luxury and have to prepare themselves for the fact that electricity may be cut off five minutes before the end of an American movie or a Japanese serial. However, apart from the notice board of the central administration and some notes pinned to the wooden doorjambs of shops – bringing the intention of a jeep driver to the public or informing people that a hairdresser has arrived from Ulaanbaatar – the spread of most information and news inside Chandman’-Öndör District is based on talk. Through faceto-face interactions, even minute pieces of information tend to reach the most remote and marginalised crevices of human life. There is thus a sense in which informal talk is crucial to the spread of information. Talk, however, is not just useful and convenient. It also has its own life, and especially so when

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it comes to news  – i.e. particularly attention-demanding and conspicuous pieces of information, which increases the dispersive capabilities of verbal exchanges because people are curious and entertained by new information. It is well known that ‘Mongols are very concerned about news and rumours … and, after greeting, the first priority is to learn of the latest happenings and rumours’ (Jagchid and Hyer 1979: 134; see also Kaplonski 2004: 34–35, 77, 202; Pedersen 2011: 86; Swancutt 2012). Whether or not this curiosity is related to a nomadic pastoral way of life where people lived (and live) dispersed over large territories (Bulag 1998: 167), it is, as we shall see, the dispersive or ‘nomadic’ capacity of talk and gossip that makes it such a dangerous and sensitive domain of human relatedness in the Mongolian countryside. While the fact that a car is leaving for somewhere, or that a school holiday has been extended, is most unlikely to stir any intense sentiments, this is not the case with regard to less straightforward chunks of information that arouse emotions and involve the evaluation of individuals – such as when hearsay has it that a school child is considered unusually talented, or a person morally dubious or simply just ‘good’ (sain) or ‘bad’ (muu). Such chunks do spread easily, too, but in addition they feed into a domain of manipulation, caution and extraordinary powers in social relations. There is thus a sense in which gossip (hov jiv) – an umbrella category taken also to involve the Mongolian notions of news (sonin), rumours (tsuurhal) and talk (yaria) – and word-like representations in general, can be said to hold extraordinary sway over human reality in Chandman’-Öndör. In Mongolia, such performative word-like representations (cf. Austin 1975 [1955]; Tambiah 1985a, 1985b; Butler 1997) are often believed to effectuate certain real outcomes, partly because of their association with (hidden) intentions and moods. The specific Mongolian phenomenon of central concern here is ‘white’ (tsagaan) and ‘black’ (har) hel am,1 a term provisionally translated as ‘injurious talk’.2 Hel am is given specific attention for at least three reasons. First of all, it is addressed because it reveals something about the linguistic constitution of people vis-à-vis others. In a district where talk is so important, language ‘is not something simply added on to their [people’s] social relations to one another. It is one of the primary forms that this social relation takes’ (Butler 1997: 30). Thus, hel am – related to talk and gossip – is of immediate relevance to the reproduction of human relations and possibly the most important cultural idiom for destabilising them. Secondly, as discussed in the introduction, hel am occupies an interesting space that is simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary; a space that, so to speak, connects practices of everyday life with more extraordinary anxieties because hel am is, if anything, the ‘witchcraft’ of ordinary life, if not the ordinariness of ‘witchcraft’. This chapter, then, also serves as a point of connection between the worries of ordinary people and the concerns of religious practitioners, whose relatively

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elaborate knowledge can sometimes seem far removed from ordinary people’s common understandings of what is going on. Such practitioners will be the concern of Chapters 4 and 5. Thirdly, hel am is of interest because it points to some rather widespread principles  – such as the power of language and gossip – which are, nevertheless, of particular concern to Mongols and, thus, accentuated in a Mongolian context. Most contemporary ethnographies from rural Mongolia will thus contain often many references to this phenomenon (Højer 2003, 2004; Humphrey 2006: 171; Delaplace 2009: 525; Empson 2011: 7, 303–5; Hangartner 2011: 114–15; Pedersen 2011: 88–89, 72–73, 154; Swancutt 2012; Buyandelger 2013: 146–47; High 2017). In order to substantiate this ethnographically, I will now turn to a rather personal case story, which is presented at some length. The story is not recounted for methodological reasons (or to be self-absorbed), but because it specifically concerns the dangerous issue of standing out – i.e. of becoming a particular, attention-demanding and conspicuous person through other people’s discourse, and because it is hard for the anthropologist him/herself to avoid getting involved in events related to hel am, as ‘outside’ positions are almost impossible to entertain in cases of conflict and ‘witchcraft’ (FavretSaada 1980 [1977]: 10; Swancutt 2012: 36). Much like the cursing episode in Bayandun District in Eastern Mongolia described by Swancutt (2012), it may be considered a core piece of ethnography in this book. Yet, unlike in Swancutt’s fascinating and ‘cosmologically’ elaborate case, the following does not describe a single episode of ‘cursing’ or a full-blown ‘fight’ between factions of shamans or other practitioners. Instead, it should be seen as much in line with the way I experienced life in Chandman’-Öndör District, as a description of the more ‘mundane’ embeddedness of enmity/curse-like idioms.

Spells of Fieldwork From August 2000, and during most of my fieldwork, I lived with a Mongolian family inside their compound (hashaa). The family had two children living in the capital and a teenage daughter still attending the local school. The mother, Tsendee, was a teacher at the nursery school, and the father was one of the oldest teachers at the local school. Like many other families, it was a family that had its problems. Ulaanhüü, the father, was inclined to drinking, and they had the usual problems of getting by and raising enough money to help their children in the capital and to send the teenage daughter, Battsetseg, to university next year. When I came to live with them, the family may have thought of me as a prestigious addition to the family – i.e. the foreigner who chose to settle

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with this particular family. They almost certainly welcomed my financial support and also, in time, came to think of me as a son attached to and to be protected by the family. Not long after my arrival, Ulaanhüü gave me a Mongolian name that somehow paired with the name of their adopted son living in the capital. When my wife and child arrived in November, things were to change slightly. I used to share the second wooden house in the compound with Battsetseg, the teenage daughter, but we now came to live more as two families within the same compound; the Danish family in the ger and the Mongolian one in the wooden house next to it. Their involvement in our lives, however, soon became a worry (cf. Empson 2011: 7–8; 278–79). Tsendee, in particular, would interfere strongly in our social life. By that time, Ulaanhüü, the father, had eagerly arranged for my wife to be taught Mongolian by Düütsetseg, an unmarried young female Mongolian language teacher from the local school who was to become our very good friend also. When teaching was taking place at the small square table in our ger, the mother of our Mongolian host family would often come to our home, sit down on one of our iron-framed beds in the eastern ‘host’ side of the ger and stay throughout the teaching session. During her stay, she would hardly communicate with our visitor and, in general, appeared rather unfriendly. This was sometimes the case when we had other visitors too, and her demonstrative behaviour was noticed by them also. Gradually, we came to realise that our host family was keen on controlling our network of friends and acquaintances, also in less visible ways. These were just initial nuisances, though, and things  – unfortunately  – were to get worse. One night, Düütsetseg told us that Ulaanhüü had come to her classroom in the morning while she was teaching, and he had furiously told her to stay away from us in the future, the apparent reason being that she was not doing what she had been asked to do, namely teach, but the more plausible reason being that she had not only done what she had been asked to do. She had become too close to us, it seemed, and had as such interfered with the domestic domain of Ulaanhüü. Since having a social life is what fieldwork is all about, such an act, I thought, was problematic for both personal and professional reasons. The following day, I confronted our host family with the matter and the now tense mother went straight away to get Düütsetseg at the local school, where she was celebrating the Mongolian ‘soldiers’ day’, an occasion to party and for men to get drunk. The mother brought Düütsetseg back to our ger, where our now furious host family’s verbal (and almost physical) aggression towards her left us with no other choice than to leave. The weeks that followed were not easy. We seriously considered moving but had a lot of things to take into consideration. One of these was Düütsetseg

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who, we assumed, would want us to move away from our host family as soon as possible. This, it turned out, was not the case though. If I was determined to move if the Mongolian family would not admit their wrongdoings and change their behaviour, Düütsetseg was of the opinion that we could only move if they admitted their mistakes. We had to make them understand that they had been wrong, she said, and only then, eventually, could we move. Her line of argument was that Ulaanhüü had the reputation of being a hel amtai hün, a person ‘with’ hel am, so to speak, or a person with whom it was dangerous to fall out. If he bad-mouthed us, or indeed just had malevolent thoughts about us or her, we might fall ill or be struck by other misfortunes. Thus, before eventually moving, we had to make him understand that he had been wrong in order to calm his mind. In general, Düütsetseg tried to play down the conflict and to make us behave quietly because any escalation of the conflict would mean more talk, accumulation of anger and hence more danger (cf. Swancutt 2012: 140, 205). When faced with my doubts as to the existence of hel am, she simply stated that hel am was everywhere, even in Europe. There was nothing curious about it, she obviously (also) implied. After thorough consideration, we chose to stay, partly because we knew that Düütsetseg would be the one blamed by the family if we moved. Not only would it cause straightforward troubles for her but the father was an elder teacher at the school where she worked, and she would then certainly consider herself to be in danger of hel am. Our host family claimed that they had just been trying to protect us from bad people. Even after reconciling with the family, though, Düütsetseg was still reluctant to visit us, and I realised that she was not the only one. Visiting us would be exposing oneself to the dangers of hel am, I was once informed. While this was never elaborated, I presume that visits would mean getting involved with our host family, who, at least among some people, were feared for hel am. On the other hand, just knowing us – the foreigners – would catch other people’s attention and instigate gossip. And gossip always implied the danger of hel am. About a month later, we realised that our host family were clearly not willing to change their behaviour towards Düütsetseg, and we decided that it was time to move. After moving, our social networks were literally ‘without master’ and they expanded rapidly, possibly because we chose not to stay with a family but managed to rent a section of a wooden house that was not located in a fenced-in family compound. In the period surrounding the conflict, we suddenly found ourselves being struck by one misfortune after another, and I decided that it was time to visit Harhüü, the ‘red’ (see Chapter 4) Buddhist lama in the village. Obviously, we needed some confidence – a ritualised break with the sequence of ­accidents – but it was also an opportunity to obtain some information. It turned out that Harhüü already knew that we had had to move. ‘Things like that travel

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like a “telegram”’ (tsahilgaan, also meaning lightning or electricity), I was informed (cf. Empson 2011: 278). I told the lama that a friend of mine had advised me to have a ritual performed in which sacred texts would be recited (nom unshuulah) against hel am – i.e. against severe disputes of a dangerous kind. Harhüü responded that only one in ten people were good people and that only one in a thousand were really good. We had lived in a bad place but now everything was fine, he continued. He was happy to know that we had moved. He asked us in what year we were born according to the lunarsolar calendar and concluded that this was a bad year for my wife in terms of health, and she had indeed been ill. He then told us to come back the next morning with incense and vodka. The vodka had to be strong, he said, because we would have to deal with something severe. It is worth paying attention to four details of the ritual performed the following day. First, before initiating the ritual, he asked us to concentrate in order to make the hel am return or become indifferent while he did the chanting. Second, he clapped his hands at an object – in this case a glass of vodka – during the ritual. The lama uses this procedure when expelling and warding off danger. Third, midway through the ritual, he asked me to go outside and throw the vodka in the direction of the home of our ex-hosts. I had to do this to return the hel am, he explained. Fourth, after the ritual, we had to fumigate ourselves, our clothes and our home with incense. Fumigation is thought to purify and to cancel out the influence of other persons or agencies that might have infected objects, people or spaces. Rather than reconciliation, the ritual

Figure 2.1  Red Buddhist lamas performing a ritual. Photograph by the author.

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was about withdrawing from, or indeed cutting off, a relationship.3 Later on, he did the same ritual for Düütsetseg, at her request. After some time, we heard that Ulaanhüü had left for somewhere, and he stayed away from the village for a while, it turned out. Some rumours had it that he had gone to a spring – which was not unlikely, as it is common for people to visit springs, considered healthy and healing, for recreation during the summer – and others that he had gone hunting, but Düütsetseg was clearly worried about what he was up to. She was afraid that he – being a Darhad  – might have gone to Renchinlhumbe, a village far away in the Darhad area, known for its black shamans and ‘curses and the like’ (haraal maraal). At some point, we were told that he had been hunting and got lost but had now come back. A few weeks later, while attending the sports festival (naadam) of the national celebrations (ulsyn bayar) in July, I was surprised to realise that Harhüü, the ‘red’ lama and also a good friend of ours, suddenly seemed reluctant to talk to us. The celebrations took place in a steppe valley away from the village, and only rarely would so many locals be gathered in one place. Dressed in their finest garments, villagers and nomads had arrived by jeep or horse to watch the wrestling competition and the horse races. This was a place to see and be seen. Yet, Harhüü, apparently, looked right through me. When back in the village, I told Düütsetseg about the lama’s odd behaviour, and she immediately came up with an explanation. A few weeks earlier, it appeared, Harhüü had warned her against seeing me too much. He had made clear to Düütsetseg that undue meetings, not least in public, should be avoided. Slightly taken aback by this disconcerting piece of information – I was, after all, doing fieldwork and needed to see people – I asked her for an explanation. She hesitated but then replied quietly: ‘It will make people talk and nobody likes being talked about.’ For Harhüü, it was obviously dangerous to be seen too often with us in public. Furthermore, it explained why Düütsetseg had not been around so much over the last couple of weeks. We might not have been Darhad people like Ulaanhüü or ‘with’ hel am but we were conspicuous foreigners and a potential vehicle of curse-like injurious talk, and the fact that we had had to move had probably not made us less prone to being the talk of the town. The wrestling competition continued the following day at the small sports stadium in the village, but I left the stadium at around noon. A few hours later, Harhüü turned up at my home. He had been drinking heavily, but before falling asleep on my bed he managed to tell me that, in the morning, at the sports stadium, he had noticed that I had many enemies. And he then concluded solemnly that this was due to the fact that I had ‘been living in this area for a long time’. Apart from once again being slightly disconcerted, I could not help thinking that personally I would have expected the opposite,

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that staying in a place for a long time would mean increasing your number of friends. Mongols, including Harhüü, often consider foreigners such as me naive (genen) and tend to consider other Mongols sly (zal’tai).4 Just before leaving Chandman’-Öndör, we went to the old, renowned female diviner in the village. We wished to say goodbye to her, and I wanted to ask her about a long-lasting impairment of my right foot. Nothing that I knew of had happened to the foot. The diviner asked me whether it had happened before or after we had moved, and I told her that it had happened before. Actually it did happen before we moved as I told her but after our first grave conflict with the family. After divining with her rosary bead and old dice, she conveyed to me that I had broken a branch on a tree or moved a stone on a mountain south of here, thereby implying that I had upset the spirit master of either tree or mountain (cf. Bawden 1963b: 157). I felt sure that hel am would have been the answer had I mentioned the conflict we had had two months before we actually moved. And when we came to talk about the not-too-good health of my wife, the old diviner immediately said that people were talking a lot and that the health of my wife was related to tsagaan hel am, har hel am (‘white and black hel am’) as if she had just been waiting for an opportunity to relate our misfortunes to the conflict with our ex-hosts. Before we left, she spent much more time than usual murmuring tarni (‘mystical formulas’) to incense held in front of her mouth before she passed it on to me and asked us to fumigate ourselves well before leaving Chandman’-Öndör District for good the following day. My wife had to be fumigated particularly well. Then everything would be fine, she said. And so we left.

Dangerous Communications Interestingly, other anthropologist have found themselves in similarly awkward and conflict-ridden situations with host families when doing fieldwork in Mongolia (Empson 2011: 7–8, 278–79; High 2017: 74–75; see also Buyandelger 2013: 170), and maybe even more intriguing is the fact that such situations have often arisen in relation to the (forced) change of host family – i.e. when moving between household units – and that they have also involved concerns about malicious gossip (hel am). Thus, in order to grasp the full implications of the story, I will begin by taking a closer look at this notion (see also Højer 2004; Swancutt 2012: 131–38). Hel am is reminiscent of ideas about ‘the evil eye’ found elsewhere (see e.g. Spooner 1970; Dundes 1981; Appadurai 1990; Ghosh 2002). Literally speaking, hel means ‘tongue’, ‘language’ or ‘news/message’ (Bawden 1997: 487), whereas am refers to ‘mouth’, ‘words’ or ‘speech’ (Bawden 1997:

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15–16), and in a dictionary the compound hel am takes on a whole range of related meanings, such as dispute, talk, gossip, wrangle or argument (Hangin 1986; Bawden 1997). While apparently referring directly to spoken words, hel am does not, however, only concern verbal language in a narrow sense, and it is obvious from people’s usage that, apart from carrying connotations of dispute and bad-mouthing, the notion of hel am is taken to involve the injurious and extraordinary powers of words and emotions in general. When a diviner, for example, asks a client if ‘there is any hel am’ (as they often do), she/he is clearly referring to an argument but at the same time indicating that this argument is related to the hardships of the client. Hel am is said to exist wherever there are people and to happen every day, not just in Mongolia. While Düütsetseg, when once discussing the issue with me during a stay in Mörön, the provincial capital, stressed that hel am was everywhere to be found, she also acknowledged that hel am might be known better in Mongolia than in any other place. When explaining its workings, however, she illustrated it with a story supposedly written by a Kazakh author about a group of fishermen. The sons of the fishermen, she related, used to start fishing in a nearby lake when they reached the age of twelve. This first fishing trip was considered dangerous and certain customs had to be observed. When leaving the home, the boy’s mother would ask him to collect firewood in the forest. The forest is situated in the opposite direction to the lake, but both the mother and her son will know, Düütsetseg said, that he will walk in the direction of the forest for a while, only to later choose another path down to the lake to go fishing. So what is this trick and detour all about? According to Düütsetseg, this was done to avoid people saying that ‘now he is going to fish’, etc. If people would not talk about it, she explained, then lus horloj chadahgüi, ‘the spirit master would not be able to harm him’. The trick of pretending is to avoid ‘spreading the word’, and hence danger from the lus, the spirit master of the water. The Mongolian notion of spirit masters of the land (gazryn ezed) is based on the idea that certain landscape features have spirit masters, such as mountains, rivers, trees, plants, rocks etc. and that such spirit masters are active agents with regard to the well-being of human beings. Misfortune, then, is often attributed to the fact that someone has made a spirit master angry. The curious point in this story, however, is that the ancient notion of local spirit masters (see e.g. Bawden 1963b: 156; Heissig 1980: 102) is explicitly related to talk or gossip. Düütsetseg claimed that the power attributed to spirit masters and the power attributed to talk can be considered almost identical. As such, she confirmed that Mongols ‘regard anything said as having more consequence than we do’ (Humphrey 1997: 37) and that talk is an extraordinary power to be taken into account in Mongolia. Among the Darhad Mongols, the word hov (gossip) is sometimes explicitly associated with hovs (magic) (Pedersen 2011: 203), and when

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writing about rumours, news, and information exchange in Mongolia, Bulag observes that [t]he word medee (information) derives from the notion of medeh, to know. In Mongolian, to know something entails not just knowledge or cognition of it, but control or command of it. If I medeh somebody, this means he is under my control, or under the control of my information. People as objects or targets of information can thus be successfully turned into puppets under the “mouth” of the knower. The Mongols often say: biye biyeen medenee (they know one another, so they control each other). (1998: 168–69; see also Humphrey with Onon 1996: 324)

In other words, the (extra)ordinary link between power and control, on the one hand, and words or information, on the other, is significant,5 and an awareness of the distinction between what is said and what is not, attesting to the importance of manipulation through words, is important in the Mongolian context. This power of words is also related to, and accentuated by, some of the intrinsic features of informal talk and gossip in Mongolia (and elsewhere). First, as stated in the introduction to this chapter, when people are entertained by news or information that stands out, gossip gains power from its mere existence, by catching and demanding people’s attention. Like a hurricane – or indeed like the schismogenetic process outlined by Bateson (1935, 1958 [1936]), the ‘strange attractors’ or ‘spiralling effects’ described by Swancutt (2012) and the ‘escalations’ portrayed by myself and others (Højer 2013; Højer et al. 2018) – it feeds itself and grows and disperses by its mere existence. Second, gossip is characterised by its ability to circulate horizontally, incestuously crossing any kinship and household boundaries, and is therefore ‘public’ (i.e. accessible to everyone) without being staged (i.e. accessible to everyone at the same time). As we have seen, this circulation is a strong local concern too, and while I never came across any mentioning of ‘gossip spirits’ in Chandman’-Öndör District, it is interesting to note that like the hyper-fluid gossip spirits described by Pedersen among the Darhad Mongols, gossip is thought to be omnipresent and to move freely between affines, rivals and friends also in Chandman’-Öndör District. Lacking a clear spirit clan pedigree, gossip – like gossip spirits – thus belongs to nowhere; it spies, imitates ‘people’s bad things’ and break barriers (Pedersen 2011: 203– 4). Third, gossip as a communicative medium is characterised by its elusive agency. It may have a beginning, such as when someone spreads a rumour that only he or she knows about  – and some local people in Chandman’Öndör District are thought to be good media for the spread of gossip – but gossip as a knowledge form constitutes agency as elusive, moving utterances from the sphere of emanating from a subject (‘I say’) to the sphere of

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reported speech (‘it was said’ (gesen)), which is widely used in Mongolia. As such, it discards subjective agency and constitutes itself as a knowledge form of the ‘objectively possible’; almost no one can be held accountable for its truth-value or confirm it for sure. Yet, and this is important, the information is present as a possibility (often counter-balanced by no other information), as a definite possible, and this may even be more so in Mongolia, where people do not seem very concerned with censoring information passed on to them but rather eagerly appropriate it and pass it on. While such information may be ‘unreliable’, it nevertheless casts its own spell on reality by being the only possibility available, such as when I – in the introduction – was faced with the possibility that my host family was a ‘bad’ family. Gossip, in this sense, is the ‘sympathetic magic’ (Frazer 1980 [1911])6 of everyday life: ‘the copy, in magical practice, affecting the original to such a degree that the representation shares in or acquires the properties of the represented’ (Taussig 1993: 47–48; emphasis removed). And since persons exist in other people’s words too, those words tend to work as body parts do in ‘contagious magic’ (Frazer 1980 [1911]), the principle of thought that holds ‘that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed’ (Taussig citing Fraser, in Taussig 1993: 52–53). Just as detached nails can influence their original bodies, so words, in Mongolian gossip, are thought to influence what they refer to; they touch people. Following Taussig, Gell writes about the universe of intentionality and desire  – and not strict physical causality  – that this applies to: ‘To see (or to know) is to be sensuously filled with what is perceived, yielding to it, mirroring it – and hence imitating it bodily’ (1998: 103). Although not phrased in these terms, it was also a local concern that the participants in gossip were ‘sensuously filled’ with the knowledge conveyed through gossip. Sentiments, moods and desires were stirred by gossip, it was assumed. So when hostile and fabricated rumours were spread about Düütsetseg, her concern was more with their presence as existing words and what they would do to people than with their fabrication as false ones, because, as she said, ‘they were there for people to employ’. Truth was not really the question; rather, the question was the ­assertion of possible truths with real effects.7 In other words, apart from being caused by a dispute with a person such as Ulaanhüü, who is considered particularly dangerous – that is, a disputatious person or a person ‘with’ hel am (hel amtai hün), hel am can work its way ‘through gossip’ (hovoor) (cf. Stewart and Strathern 2004). The wider implication of this is, as we saw with Düütsetseg and Harhüü, the ‘red’ lama, in the case study above and with regard to the Kazakh fishermen, that hel am is ubiquitous (Swancutt 2012: 134) and always present as something to be wary of because all engagement with other humans could work its way into

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the extensive, limitless and authorless, yet also very effective and affective, networks of gossiping and, by implication, hel am. Hel am occurrences may thus not so much be ‘temporally bounded events as delayed, drawn-out possibilities of harm that can happen any time’ (High 2017: 82). On the one hand, hel am can thus be related to certain individuals who are thought to be particularly dangerous to fall out with (it can be specified) and, on the other, it serves as an attendant to engaging in relations with other people in general (it can be generalised). The specified version is strikingly similar to a classical sociological take on society as an order that constitutes itself by exclusive practices. People who are considered dangerous with regard to hel am are thus, in some way or another, considered marginal as well; being an outsider and being dangerous amounts to the same thing and involves ‘the denial of common bonds’ (Douglas 1970: xxv). Ulaanhüü was a person with whom one should not fall out (hel amtai hün), and he was indeed, in many ways, a dangerous outsider. He did not have close relatives in the area and then, of course, he was a Darhad, as one may recall from the story above. The Darhad people are from the area west of Lake Hövsgöl (see Figure 0.2), and they are often disliked and somewhat feared for their shamanic abilities. Another supposedly hel amtai hün in the village did not speak to or meet many people. ‘She is Darhad,’ someone told me. When asking whether this was important, I was – after some hesitation – quietly told that ‘we all think like that’. Darhads are often associated with wilderness, shamanic curses and cunning behaviour (Hangartner 2011; Pedersen 2011: 11, 115–47; Kristensen 2015) and are, as such, often considered the quintessence of dangerous outsiders in Mongolia.8 On the face of it, this would seem to tally with Gluckman’s take on gossip as a means of group unification and exclusion. Aligning gossip with an integrative notion of society, he argues that ‘gossip does not have isolated roles in community life, but is part of the very blood and tissue of that life … gossip, and even scandal, have important positive virtues. Clearly they maintain the unity, morals and values of social groups’ (1963: 308). ‘[T]his combination of functions of scandal,’ he later continues, ‘makes the hostility itself a mode through which the tribe remains united’ (Gluckman 1963: 312). People in Chandman’-Öndör District could thus, according to Gluckman, unite around their common disapproval of Darhads.9 In this kind of analysis, hostility becomes a function of – and serves – a primary societal unity, and the productive hostile aspects of cultural idioms such as hel am are sidestepped. They are reduced to a reflection – or an instrument – of a pre-given ‘social group’ and are not themselves generative of ways of relating. However, such ‘reflections’ or cultural vehicles, as I will argue further below, also have a life of their own, and relatedness is not just an effect of a pre-existing ‘society’ but is equally a result of the vehicles through which it is grasped. The

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same applies to cultural idioms such as ‘Darhadness’. Being a Darhad in Chandman’-Öndör’ District (and Mongolia as a whole) – like Ulaanhüü – may make one an outsider, but focusing on a person’s Darhadness, or indeed presenting them mainly as Darhad – like in Ulaanhüü’s case – would also give prominence to marginal attributes (‘with’ hel am, a practitioner of black shamanism etc.). ‘Darhadness’ thus creates social reality as much as it represents it, and Ulaanhüü, in this sense, came to be ‘with’ hel am because he was imagined to be Darhad/‘with’ hel am. It does not make much sense, then, to distinguish sociality (‘society’) from the way in which it is imagined (‘culture’), and imaginative anticipations are as generative of relatedness as established ‘social structures’. This has other implications also. According to Ulaanhüü himself, for example, it was other villagers who were spreading malicious rumours about him, and Favret-Saada has pointed out – albeit in a different context – that witches often consider themselves the victims of witchcraft (1980 [1977]: 175–93). Yet, the problem runs deeper than this because hel am is more diffuse and undecided than a focus on specific accusation and the identification of ‘witches’ would allow for. Indeed, hel am is, if anything, an integral part of relatedness in general. It concerns the always present possibility of conflict and the reproduction of subjects as separate and opposed agencies, partly unknown to each other. Hel am, then, not only creates social reality by representing it to itself, nor does it necessarily conform with or lead to (new) social structures in the form of (changing) rivalling factions of shamans and their allies (Swancutt 2012). It also, so to speak, tears social reality apart from the inside. Rather than being an arbitrary ‘unaccounted for’ force that simply serves as – and is reduced to – a means for social integration, it is a ‘cultural’ force that breeds disintegration by generating mistrust, distance and suspense from within. When taking this issue into consideration, it is more difficult to clearly conceptualise insiders and outsiders, as dangers are implied in communication in general, making (almost) anyone a potential outsider.10 Any person and dispute could, in principle, be ‘with’ hel am. And hel am is indeed often used in the general and ordinary sense of argument and dispute. As such, the matrix of hel am is not just an explanatory framework, retrospectively reading the unfolding of events (Evans-Pritchard 1950 [1937]; Tambiah 1985a: 51; Stewart and Strathern 2004: 12),11 nor is it a secondhand reflection of a decisive social structure as some studies of witchcraft assume (see for example Middleton and Winter 1963; Turner 1996 [1957]; Douglas 2002 [1966]: 127), or mainly a response to post-socialist or neoliberal predicaments (Buyandelgeriyn 2007; Empson 2011: 304; Hangartner 2011: 88–122), a take that is much in line with studies on the modernity of witchcraft (see e.g. Geschiere 1997; Comaroff and Comaroff 1999), where occult responses are always inseparable from and made to make sense only

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in relation to modern conditions of ‘power’, whether in the form of capitalism, neoliberalism, globalisation or colonialism (for a similar reading, see Englund 1996; Højer 2009: 579–80; Pedersen 2011: 29–34). Hel am is just as much a projection into the future that conceptualises (and undoes) relationships as it is being conceptualised by (and reinforcing) pre-existing social relationships (of ‘power’ for example); it is an active principle at work in people’s engagement with other people – almost all other people – that makes danger, suspense and manipulation12 inherently present in communications. It is, in Siegel’s words, a ‘negativity that … produces no community and yet has effects’ (Siegel 2006: 4). Rather than just indicating that ‘the enemy [is] one of us’ (Carey 2017: 99), enmity thus operates from within to make any pre-existing us-ness problematic from the outset. Witchcraft studies that tend to focus on explanations of past events, full-blown accusations or conflicts, and dispute settlements and trials (see e.g. Evans-Pritchard 1950 [1937]; Stewart and Strathern 2004: xi–xii), would, as such, overlook hel am as an anxious and cautious way of anticipating others and engaging with them in a district where full-blown accusations are rare (see also Empson 2011: 7; Swancutt 2012: 32, 37). Such a cautious engagement is made no less present when ever-impending dangers are believed to work their way through the ever-present phenomenon of gossip or informal talk. Düütsetseg explained that ‘there was white and black hel am in socialist times as well. Back then we thought and guessed (taaj medsen) like that too’. Yet, she was quick to add that ‘there is a difference between now and then, because hel am works through gossip (hovoor). If people talk badly about someone it will lead to black hel am and if people praise someone too much it will lead to white hel am. So hel am can originate from gossip’. ‘Back then in communist times,’ she continued in a slightly romanticising tone, ‘there was almost no gossip (hov jiv). People worked and didn’t have time to gossip. They did not like it. Back then people were considerate (evseg) and sociable (niitech). They worked together, danced with each other and held meetings’. Now, she explained, ‘gossip has become a lot (mash ih bolson, aimaar ih bolson). Gossip has become like work. Now life has become difficult and people like to talk, they like to talk about bad things. People sit at home and they see a person go to work. They envy (ataarhana) that person, they want to talk about him – they want to say bad things’. According to Düütsetseg, and not at odds with my own interpretation, gossip/hel am and ‘post-socialist conditions’ had come into a mutually enhancing interplay and created an increasingly challenging social environment. The case study involves both the first and the second versions, the specified and the generalised one, often in ways where one would easily slide into the other. While we were living with the Mongolian family, many people actually did decide to stay away from us, partly because they feared getting involved

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Figure 2.2  The village. Photograph by the author.

with our host family and partly because getting involved with us posed a certain danger, too. People seemed to fear our host family because they were easy to fall out with and because Ulaanhüü had the reputation of being ‘with’ hel am, someone whose anger would cause misfortune. But people also feared getting involved with us because we were the only foreigners in the village for most of the year and obviously highly visible (and richer than most), making anyone entering into a relationship with us visible to the public eye and possibly suspicious. Harhüü, the red lama, was very aware of that danger of standing out, and so was Düütsetseg. So, the ‘specified’ anxieties – the host family and the foreigners – also existed because such involvement posed the danger of leading to uncontrolled general talk and hence increased troubles once the problem and the talk diffused into the wider social environment.

The Logic of Spell-Like Expressions: Implication versus Causality I now wish to make the claim that the spell-like logic of hel am can be generalised to a much wider domain of Mongolian life and Mongolian ‘language ideology’ (Schieffelin et al. 1998). A Mongol may, for example, maintain that it is a kind of hel am (‘a bad spell’) to claim that a particular person is good, or to say – when going to the market in the provincial capital to seek out

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transportation for the capital – that you will definitely find someone who can take you. Such positive statements or thoughts will lead to their opposite, it is believed (according to one of my informants, we can call this small (jijig) white hel am). On the other hand, actions, statements and thoughts implying bad things, it is held, will set in train a sequence of events leading to an unfortunate happening (although hel am may not be used in this instance, the logic is closely related to the logic of black hel am). What is really at issue in such articulations is a knowledge form of ‘binary determination’ (good/ bad etc.) most clearly expressed through language. Such modes of expression should be avoided because they are too efficacious, not only in the sense of spreading the clear word (‘she is good’) and thereby making it a real and successful representation that is appropriated by people but also in the sense of placing it in a discourse of binary knowledge whereby the effect could just as well be the opposite of the statement because opposites are thought to be integral to each other; either/or may thus turn into both/and. When claiming with certainty that someone is good – thereby suspending suspense – you are simultaneously getting in touch with ‘bad’, which is implied and only momentarily concealed by its opposite (‘good’) and therefore brought in as a potential. The danger, then, is a judgemental representational knowledge form of either/or, because it always also involves both/and and, hence, also ‘bad things’. The result is that Mongolians often prefer not to pronounce – or even think (I reckon) in terms of – such clear-cut statements with regard to people they are fond of or things they want to happen or not to happen. When moving into this more vague and general domain of the use of hel am, a whole range of other spell-like phenomena comes to mind, such as the fact that drivers in the Mongolian capital  – around the turn of the ­millennium  – only very rarely fastened their seatbelts, since this seemed to imply a future accident. Informants in the capital confirmed the credibility of this interpretation, and as if to underscore its validity, one of them drew attention to a Mongol proverb: ‘A (good) omen from the mouth is an eternal(ly good) omen’ (amny belegees ashdyn beleg). Although it is significant once more to note the use of ‘mouth’ (am(ny)), the general implication was that what is done now will be an omen for the future. Putting on a seat belt is like speaking of accidents, something you are not supposed to do in Mongolia. Likewise, it is a bad omen (muu yor) to express regret, as you do in Mongolia, by making a number of quick ‘alveolar clicks’ (tagnaigaa tashih) while shaking your head if you only do so for fun when nothing bad has happened (as my son once did). Similarly, an Inner Mongolian friend once mentioned that he was worried about filling out some car insurance papers because this was like implying that an accident was going to happen. Whereas Danish people, for example, often try to tame the course of events with security-enhancing measures such as insurance, Mongols often seem

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to imply that such extraordinary measures will conjure up misfortunes.13 The measures are, so to speak, self-made omens14 – i.e. actions, thoughts or words casting a spell on the sequence of events by creating a reciprocal bond between events in the sense that no events that are sequentially related to other events (driving car – fastening seat belts – car accidents) will stand by themselves.15 As such, it is not the causal connections between events in a sequence of events that are at stake but the fact that all events in the sequence are necessarily implied in each other in a kind of teleological bundle so that ‘fastening seat belt – driving car – accident’ could just as well be ‘accident – seat belt – driving car’. The logic is that you would not wear a seat belt if there was not going to be an accident and, by implication, wearing a seat belt entails an accident. Put in even more abstract terms, by carrying out the act (fastening a seat belt), you are carrying out an implication of the future (accident) so that the future, so to speak, becomes past for the present. In the realm of spells and omens – of self-fulfilling prophesies – the present thus has implications as a future for the future. By doing this or that, in other words, you are committing yourself to one specific future. This would explain why ‘Mongols take great care to avoid remarks or words that carry a bad omen or connotation’ (Jagchid and Hyer 1979: 134). As the last quote indicates, all this does not only concern temporally separate events but also a more general relation between ‘representations’ – in the form of words, thoughts and conspicuous manifestations or displays of anything, really – and what they refer to and bring to mind. Humphrey writes that [a]ll Mongols avoid casual reference to the names of dead people, predatory animals and certain mountains, rivers and springs, which are considered to be inhabited by spirits, and which in the past have caused various natural catastrophes. It is thought that the casual pronunciation of these names would catch the attention of the spirits with possibly disastrous consequences to the speaker … Names are thought to represent something of the essence of the person, and the pronunciation of a name in a sense brings that person into being even if they are physically absent. (1993: 75–76)16

Likewise, Empson calls attention to the fact that ‘parents resist outward displays of attachment to their infants so as not to tempt competition from spirits who might coerce the child to return to the world from which they have come’ (2011: 114), and she also describes how people may be concerned with not making their new houses stand out too much in fear of jealousy (2011: 169, 282, 289, 314). In High’s account of artisanal miners in Mongolia, she similarly stresses how delicate matters were only communicated, if at all, ‘in a subdued whisper in order to prevent spirits from eavesdropping’ (High 2017: 17), and Pedersen notes how female shamans’ names are not mentioned ‘for

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fear of attracting her or her spirit’s attention’ (Pedersen 2011: 88). In more direct relation to this chapter’s theme, Swancutt notes that talk about hel am is ‘conveyed in whispers or hushed tones’ and also that, among Buryats in Inner Mongolia in China, the euphemism ‘bad speech’ (muu yaria) may be used for hel am in order not to attract it (Swancutt 2012: 140–43).17 (Loud) words then – like conspicuous actions, thoughts and physical m ­ anifestations – may make too much of something and thereby get in touch with dangerous ­agencies/acts by literally calling attention to them.18 Humphrey writes that ‘to speak the name aloud does not merely make the named-one look up, as it were, but actually focuses attention on the pronouncer of the name. It is to avoid such potentially dangerous focusing on oneself that each person takes care not to say the name’ (1993: 89). Yet this attention seems to be based on the fact that dangerous others/agencies are evoked or that a not necessarily dangerous other is evoked in a too intimate and/or dangerous – and not detached – manner that exposes one too closely to a dangerous (known and safe) Other’s (unknown and unsafe) other because it is possible to refer to such ‘persons’ and ‘forces’ by using respect and distance (i.e. to refer to them as known yet distant and safe Others). Euphemisms such as boohoi (‘wolf ’) instead of chon (‘wolf ’), or hairhan (‘merciful’ or ‘gracious’) instead of mogoi (‘snake’), uul (‘mountain’) or mountain passes with spirit owners are used in this way. The avoidance of such words and names ensures that distanced, hierarchical and safe relations are not challenged and ‘brought close’ by ­dangerously calling such others into being as ‘equal’, different and opposed agencies affecting (and jeopardising) oneself or one’s household. As mentioned earlier, it is partly the lack of obvious agency that makes gossip, as a medium, able to proliferate because, contrary to the quote above, the speaker is not at the centre of attention. The real attention-catching subjects are the ones being talked about. As we may once more recall, both Harhüü and Düütsetseg were afraid of what we might rephrase as ‘the attention-catching function of gossip’, of the power of talk to summon, maybe not exactly what is being talked about, but moods and intentions (anger, jealousy etc. towards a person). And one should be cautious about inciting sentiments in an environment where such sentiments and moods are thought to act and where people in general ‘are not inclined to reveal strong feelings or allow spontaneous laughter or anger [and where] common conversation is rather subdued, quiet, and orderly’ (Jagchid and Hyer 1979: 134–35, see also Empson 2011: 7) and where, as a Mongolian saying goes, ‘a bad person’s voice is loud’ (Humphrey 1987: 46; Billé 2015: 59–60). Now, apart from drawing attention to the dangers of representations, displays or articulations, or at least attention-catching articulations, in relation to hel am in general, people also distinguish between white and black hel am as different forms of articulations. Black hel am is concerned with misfortune

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caused by someone speaking maliciously, or indeed just having bad thoughts, about someone else, whereas the rare white hel am, usually considered more dangerous, transpires when people are praised too much (with a veiled envy) by other people. The black kind of hel am is straightforward in the sense that it has to do with ‘anger’ causing misfortune to the one at whom the anger is directed. While the anger may not be acknowledged by the angry person, there is a simple correspondence between what is wanted, what is said/thought/felt and what happens. With regard to white hel am, things get more complicated, since there is a discrepancy between the appearance of praise and the hidden mood of envy. What is openly said (expression) is simultaneously veiling envy and causing harm. Appearances are false and the dangers not apparent. Things may thus build up and eventually cause terrible things to occur; death seems to be a likely outcome of white hel am.19 A story, for example, was told about a little girl who was the youngest daughter of a teacher. When the girl was four she could read and write, and while most other children enter school when they are seven or eight, this girl entered year three in school when she was only six. One day, she and her mother were crossing a local mountain pass on horseback when a motorbike came from behind. The horse got scared and began to gallop; the little girl fell off and was dragged behind it. By the time she got to hospital, she was already dead. Before the accident, people had praised (magtaj baisan) the girl a great deal, and the lamas concluded that it was white hel am. People said that she was an unusually talented person (av’yastai hün) but they said it with (a veiled) envy (ataarhaj yar’dag). The danger of white hel am lies in this discrepancy between the openly stated and the hidden, between what people say and their moods and feelings, a discrepancy that can be summed up in the concept of envy; by its nature, a suppressed and ambiguous feeling of disliking what in reality is your own desire.20 The implicit and subdued nature of envy also allows it to build up over time. I was told, for example, that Bogd Khan, the head of state and church during Mongolian pre-revolutionary (semi-) independence, is said to have been worried about his own popularity and, to counter the dangers of white hel am, he made sure that unflattering rumours were spread about himself. Generally speaking, however, such moods and feelings, whether hidden or openly expressed, gain momentum from the spell-like domain of informal talk or gossip, which in turn is fed by news and the fact that someone sticks out from the rest of the crowd by being talented, foreign or, as if often also the case, conspicuously rich and successful (Empson 2011: 305–8, 2012; High 2017: 81–82). This leads us back into the sociological domain of what it may take to be conspicuous, to stick out and engage in non-given and unconventional relations in Chandman’-Öndör District.

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The Micro-Sociology of Hel am: Düütsetseg and Ulaanhüü A good starting point is to take a closer look at the relationship between Düütsetseg, a young unmarried female teacher, and Ulaanhüü, an elderly teacher and a marginalised and anxiety-provoking person. What is atypical about Ulaanhüü is that two ‘types’ of person, the elder authority of the teacher and the dangerous Darhad, are combined in one person. Yet, it is this double constitution of his public personality that makes this particular case so compelling. Adding a few details to the case study may clarify this. First of all, the teaching of my wife was arranged through Ulaanhüü because he wished to take care of – i.e. control, guard and supervise – our extra-domestic relations. We belonged to Ulaanhüü by living in his compound, behind his fence (hashaa), and approaching us without gaining permission from Ulaanhüü would mean interfering in Ulaanhüü’s domain of domesticity. Although a separate household, Ulaanhüü perhaps considered us foreigners who could not completely stand on our own feet, and I was also – at least to a certain extent – considered a son of the family and my wife, perhaps, a daughter-in-law that was meant to be overseen by Tsendee (see Chapter 3). At least, Tsendee was constantly supervising and interfering with my wife’s work, and my wife, like other daughters-in-law in Mongolia, had to ‘appear to be working all the time’ (Buyandelger 2013: 197). Ulaanhüü was indeed our household head (geriin ezen), a patron who had the double role

Figure 2.3  Home close to the district centre. Photograph by the author.

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of authority and responsibility towards us (Sneath 2000: 42). In view of this, the presence of Tsendee, when Düütsetseg was visiting our household, could be seen as a way of checking that Düütsetseg was doing what she had told Ulaanhüü she would do, namely teach. In time, Düütsetseg became a friend of ours, and this meant trespassing over a critical line. Düütsetseg only had a mandate from Ulaanhüü to teach, not to befriend us. Second, when Ulaanhüü brought Düütsetseg out of her classroom to tell her that she had to keep away from us, Düütsetseg did not say a word. It was an order given by an older teacher and, by passing on the information to us, she was (unknowingly) gambling because authority meant something quite different to us, namely something based on equality and agreed-upon legitimacy. We were people who would seriously question Ulaanhüü’s right to do what he had done, and this would damage Düütsetseg, who  – by ­definition  – was the outsider interfering in a given household. Düütsetseg found herself in a precarious position. On the one hand, she had been forced into an open conflict with a hel amtai Darhad by being involved with us, and she was deeply anxious. On the other hand, she was up against something that was ingrained in herself, namely the traditionally legitimised authority of the elder (see Chapter 3) and the social status associated with education and authority in socialism (cf. Humphrey 1998: 363–72). The local school, and a concomitant belief in education, authority and progress, has remained the apparent institutional stronghold of socialist ideology in Chandman’Öndör. The head teacher is the chairman of the local Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (Mongol Ardyn Huv’sgalt Nam) and, as already mentioned, the text on a huge painting of Lenin, covering the wall of one of the school buildings, still reads: ‘The truth is our way’ (Ünen bol bidnii zam). In this system, knowledge flows downwards and learning is literally copying the truth of the (older) teacher, whether you are a pupil or a younger colleague. Her fear of hel am from Ulaanhüü thus also became a fear of hel am from an established system; that is, hel am could be seen as a sanction, not as a cold punishment in a juridical manner but as a total feeling of insecurity and fear caused by challenging a system of which she herself was a part. By ‘condemning’ the system, she was herself in danger of being condemned by it, and her whole existence as a socially established person could be at stake. For Düütsetseg to avoid entering into this dangerous limbo of questioning the established, she retreated, tried to moderate tempers and strove to avoid potentially conflictual circumstances such as visiting our compound. She knew that to be part of a conflict was also to enter the all-encompassing information network, moving in all directions and reaching the most remote corners of the district, and thereby exposing oneself to further danger and hel am. She would become a conspicuous object of talk, someone who had offended the position of an elder teacher and become friends with the

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foreigners. She would lose control, become the puppet of other people’s mouths, and be made into a person who is not a ‘settled’ generalised person (elder, younger, wife, husband, teacher etc.) but a specific ‘moving’ and ‘movable’ person who has exposed oneself to attacks of ordinary and extraordinary kinds. Being a young unmarried woman – that is, someone who is not yet settled and is without a proper household  – certainly did not make one less prone to this kind of attack. Like among Buryats in Eastern Mongolia, certain accusations levelled at Düütsetseg implied that ‘[w]orry-free single women are seen as having unbridled sexuality – a potential source of danger and conflict’ (Buyandelger 2013: 187). As far as I know, Düütsetseg never considered herself to have actually become a victim of hel am, but the anticipation of hel am suffused all ­relations – and in the end she actually did move away from the village. She may have been afraid of hel am but she may equally well have had enough of contemporary life in the countryside – and, as matter of fact, it may be wrong to distinguish between the two in the first place.

The Danger of Distributed Personhood Let me recapitulate. Hel am may, as Düütsetseg claimed, be arrived at by guesswork – and is thus as much an anticipated possibility as a known certainty. Yet, hel am is believed to exist and so are people ‘with’ hel am; once it was even mentioned that one such person had a black tongue (cf. Swancutt 2012: 130). It does, of course, simply exist in the ordinary sense of conflict, bad-mouthing and dispute, yet it does also potentially have less ordinary dimensions as testified to by the spell-like effects of hel am, often drawn attention to by ordinary people and diviners/religious practitioners alike. Indeed, as stated in the introduction to this book, it is this inseparability of – or slipping back and forth between – the ordinary and the occult that may be the defining potential of hel am. This is also why it has been introduced as ‘generalised witchcraft’; it is widespread, ordinary and as such non-occult, yet it may also have extraordinary effects that require extraordinary measures. Hel am does, of course, imply specific accusations that are aligned with a fairly given outline of social order (households as primary units, social hierarchies, Darhad marginality). It is crucial, however, that hel am – as generalised witchcraft – creates disorder as much as reflects (problematic relations in) social orders, and while hel am is a potential of any relation challenging the established order (delayed/asymmetrical exchanges,21 friendship across households, achieved superiority, being a foreigner etc.), it is also a cultural idiom that, by itself, generates such non-given relations. Through anticipation, silence, avoidance and ritual activity, hel am promotes a cautionary

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attending to others (who are always outsiders, to some extent), an anticipated danger in the social realm, and thus implies suspense in ‘relations’. The caution promoted by hel am results from the fact that being objectified as sticking out (and sticking out simply by virtue of being objectified) implies an uncontrolled existence in a domain of gossip (and indeed talk and thought in general), an effective domain of affect, where representations actively perform, or enact, by virtue of touching people and by virtue of pertaining to their referent. Sticking out mobilises attention and, paradoxically, puts your life in the hands of others. Gell writes that [v]ulnerability stems from the bare possibility of representation, which cannot be avoided. Sorcery beliefs endure, and are highly explanatory, because vulnerability to sorcery is the unintended consequence of the diffusion of the person into the milieu, via a thousand causal influences and pathways, not all of which can be mirrored or controlled. (Gell 1998: 103)

This is written about ‘volt sorcery’ (inflicting harm on a person by inflicting harm on the image of that person) but could not have been a more apt conclusion to this chapter. If much anthropology has been concerned with exchange and, in more recent renderings, ‘distributed personhood’, where persons are generated only within relations and through exchange (Gell 1998: 96–154; cf. Wagner 1991; Strathern 1988), then hel am, indeed, draws attention to the danger of exchange and distributed personhood.

Notes   1. Often people just say hel am, but this tends to refer to black hel am.  2. Previously, I have used the notion of ‘spell’ to describe such representations, but I decided, on the advice of an anonymous reviewer, that this term may lead to inadvertent exoticisation of a Mongolian practice/idea that is sometimes more akin to the English ‘bad-mouthing’. Also, it is important to stress that hel am, in Mongolia, is different from a ‘curse’ (haraal), where a certain ritualised ‘magical’ act (e.g. the uttering of words) is carried out with a clear intention of causing immediate harm to someone, thus distinguishing it from the mostly unintentional and indirect workings of hel am (see e.g. Swancutt 2012: 128–38). However, it is important to note, as will also be shown in this chapter, that hel am indeed has curse-like effects. Among the Buryats in Eastern Mongolia studied by Swancutt, for example, people often do not even discriminate between hel am and curse (haraal) (Swancutt 2012: 127).   3. This is a counter-connective move at odds with much theorising within social anthropology. Lévi-Strauss, for example, writes about exchange as being about provoking countermoves (1969 [1949]: 54), and he further writes that ‘… any social contact entails an appeal, an appeal which is a hope for response … The relationship of indifference can never be restored once it has been ended … From now on the relationship can only be cordial or hostile’ (1969 [1949]: 59; my emphasis). In this case, however, the cancellation

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of counter-moves, provocations and influences, and the creation of indifference, seems to be at stake.   4. While resonating with famous Mongolian proverbs, such as ‘Mongols are bad to each other’ (Mongol mongoldoo muu) (Bulag 1998: 7; Billé 2015: 158) and ‘one Mongol is good, two Mongols will drink alcohol, three Mongols will fight’ (neg mongol ih sain, hoyor mongol arhi uuna, gurvan mongol zodoldono) (Billé 2015: 212), it is obviously not my wish to give the impression that this is the only idiom through which relationships in Mongolia are cast.   5. This implies that the distinction between power and knowledge/information made by Favret-Saada is not applicable here: ‘… witchcraft is spoken words; but these spoken words are power, and not knowledge or information’ (Favret-Saada 1980 [1977]: 9). Rather, it is the power of knowledge itself that is at issue in the above.   6. This is comparable to Tambiah’s idea of magic working by transferring qualities analogically (1985b).   7. The specific knowledge form of informal talk and gossip, and its efficacy as such (i.e. the efficacy contained within the medium as medium), is not taken into account when simply analysing gossip as being about self-interest, ‘information management’ or purposive behaviour. Paine represents this latter stance (1967).  8. This needs some qualification. In the wider context of Mongolia, people from the Hövsgöl province as a whole may be feared due to their association with marginality, wilderness and powerful black shamanism, yet within the Hövsgöl province itself this is mainly associated with the Darhad and even more so with the Tuvan-speaking and reindeer-herding Duha (see Kristensen 2015). One may therefore tendentiously say that what Hövsgöl is to Mongolia, the Darhads are to Hövsgöl, and the Duha are to the Darhad – or that, for many Mongolians, perceptions of the Darhad/the Duha and the Hövsgöl region as a whole have merged into one.   9. Kapstein represents an opposite functional take when he analyses the ritual exorcism of ‘malicious gossip’ in Tibet. He implies that gossip is simply a threat to an existing community: ‘It is not difficult to imagine that the amplification through gossip of what were at first relatively innocent innuendos might soon endanger the social fabric of the community. The exorcism of gossip therefore addressed an important and psychological need’ (1997: 528). 10. Lacaze has similarly noted the current commonality of maledictions, conflicts and revenge among the Darhad Mongols (Lacaze 1996). 11. Tambiah writes: ‘But when fate does withhold the regularity of events … they resort to a retrospective system of evil magic (bulubwalata) with which to reorder their experience and come to terms with failure. As with all classic types of witchcraft, the Trobriand system deals with misfortune ex post, not in terms of ‘laws of nature’ but in terms of deviation from an ideal order of social relations’ (1985a: 51). It is such explanations that Siegel describes as ‘cheerful understanding[s] of the witch’ that avoid thinking about ‘both the violence of witchcraft and the fear it inspires’ (2006: 9). 12. Indeed, an informant told me that Mongols were the best actors (jüjigchin) of all. When another informant mentioned her seven favourite proverbs, they included: ‘Not everyone laughing is a friend, not everyone angry is an enemy’ (ineesen bühen nöhör bish, uurlasan bühen daisan bish), and ‘a man is “motley” (malicious etc.) inside, a snake is motley outside’ (hünii ereen dotroo, mogoin ereen gadnaa). 13. While this does point to a prominent feature of Mongolian life (and also was a perception confirmed by an insurance agent when I once interviewed him in Ulaanbaatar), it is not meant to imply that Mongols never ‘insure’ themselves against misfortunes. First, it

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would be difficult to sharply distinguish insurance from non-insurance. It is, for example, a kind of insurance simply to prepare hay for the winter in August. Yet – although a difficult line to draw – what I refer to is mainly the misfortunes that one would not ordinarily expect (a car accident), and not the hardships of ordinary life (such as a cold winter). Secondly, Mongols do entrust themselves to superior powers, such as spirit masters, for protection or insurance (daatgal). However, there may be a tendency for rural Mongols to view this as protection and/or obtaining fortune rather than as insurance, at least if the latter is taken to imply that you can cancel misfortunes once – or before – they have taken place. Danish car insurance, for example, is not really a protection against accidents but is rather an attempt to neutralise its effects. 14. This is very similar to my use of ‘spell’. When I use self-made omen, it is in the sense of signs coming from the activity of humans themselves and not, as ‘omen’ is generally used, as a sign giving itself to humans from the outside, but I also use it to draw attention to the logical affinities between spells and omens. The coming-from-the-outside omens, as they are indigenously defined, are the kind of omens analysed in an article by Caroline Humphrey (1976). Humphrey shows – from the analytical perspective of an outsider – how the recognition of such omen-signs are also bound up with human concerns – i.e. human intentionality – but the natives still do not consider them a human creation like the ones dealt with above. Rather, they are thought to present themselves to humans. Admittedly, though, this is a precarious distinction because something apparently done by an agent may not be done by him- or herself as it were (it may have been accidental – i.e. something not wanted, or a spirit acting through a person). 15. The notion of self-made omens is useful because it also captures the space in which previous happenings or connections cast their spell on present and future actions. An informant, for example, told me about the tragic death of her mother when she was a child. She had received the news about her mother when she was laughing and having fun with other children. Since then she has been careful about being too happy. 16. This resonates strongly with Freud, who writes that some people: … regard a name as an essential part of a man’s personality and as an important possession: they treat words in every sense as things … They are never ready to accept a similarity between two words as having no meaning; they consistently assume that if two things are called by similar-sounding names this must imply the existence of some deep-lying point of agreement between them. (1950 [1913]: 63)

17. One might also speculate that this is one of the reasons why there has never been a public response to the political repression during socialism. Buyandelger attributes this to the survival of a state-socialist-style of forgetting (2013: 95), and Kaplonski explains it with references to a particular emphasis on singular personal memory in Mongolia (2008b). I would suggest, however, that it also has to do with a general reluctance to speak about misfortune (as it is believed to attract more misfortune) and, hence, that this might also partly explain the strong reactions to the Mongolian documentary about mass burials described by Buyandelger (2013: 92–95). 18. Humphrey further writes that name taboos are not only attached to names per se but also to ‘words which have the function of names in the crucial respect of having the capacity to attract the attention of the person named’ (Humphrey 1993: 78) – that is, they have the ability to ‘sensually’ attract attention (of e.g. spirits) by using sounds similar to the person or spirit’s name. This is further testified by the fact that while homophones are taboo, synonyms are not; the danger is not at the level of meaning but concerns sound. The sound, by its mere resemblance to the sound of a taboo word, draws attention to

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a reference – a person or a spirit – that is dangerously loaded with power and ambiguity and therefore inherently attention-drawing. Such references could be dead people, elderly in-laws, spirits of mountains and – really – any other existing agency. Sounds are empowered with this evocative ability by virtue of being phonetically related to the taboo word proper and thereby to its immanent reference. 19. While Swancutt in her study of Buryats in Eastern Mongolia writes that white hel am is more difficult to contain because people are circulating praise and do not realise that they are propagating something harmful, she also concludes, contrary to what I was told, that white hel am is more ‘lightweight’ (Swancutt 2012: 135). 20. That Mongols consider envy to be prominent in Mongolia is conveyed by popular Mongolian anecdotes such as the following: in America two families, one rich and one poor, lived next door to each other. One day, an old magician came by and offered to fulfil one wish for the poor family. The poor family wished to become as rich as the other family. In Mongolia the same thing happened, but this time the poor family wished for the rich family to become just as poor as they themselves were. For a widespread anecdote with a similar point, see Bulag (1998: 65). 21. Ghosh notes in relation to the evil eye in a village in Egypt that envy is necessarily predicated on asymmetry and imbalance (2002: 109).

Chapter 3

Safe Communications Formality and Hierarchy

Y Anyone who has spent time in the Mongolian countryside will have noticed the highly formalised aspects of human life. When entering a Mongolian ger – whether in the arid Gobi desert in the south or the more lush taiga regions of the north  – one will know what to expect. The circular space of the ger is everywhere organised in a similar way (cf. Humphrey 1974, 1987; Sneath 2000: 216–21). Things and people are given their rightful places: hosts and often women are assigned to the eastern side, elders and respected guests to the north, other guests to the west, and children will usually stay near the door in the south. All will face the oven or the ‘hearth’ (gal golomt, literally ‘fire hearth’) in the centre, the fire requiring respect – both in more ritualised action and in everyday injunctions; for example, not to throw garbage in the fire  – and embodying the well-being, continuity and integrity of the family (Jagchid and Hyer 1979: 150; Empson 2011: 285–86), although obviously to different degrees and more or less explicitly for different Mongolians. Whereas a European home may be associated with individuality and privacy, the structure of the Mongolian ger is invested with regularity and commonality and may be considered the most ‘public’ and conventionalised of all spaces.1 As a public space, it also circumscribes and figures as the primordial layout for the conventionalised and conventionalising exchanges that are so prominent all over Mongolia. During my fieldwork in Chandman’-Öndör District, such conventions were not only pronounced at ritual celebrations and when visiting households, they were also given expression through the endless number of rules for right

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behaviour that I was persistently confronted with and gradually learned to embody.2 So if the previous chapters were mainly concerned with inherently ambiguous and non-given exchange, I will now turn my attention to the propagation of conventional, formal and hierarchical exchanges of things, words and gestures in the Mongolian countryside. Such formal and hierarchical exchanges, I will show, are concerned not with ‘making difference from within’ but rather with ‘making similarity from without’ in a drive towards stability, closure and predictability. The major bulk of ethnographic material will concern the celebration of the traditional Mongolian new year in Chandman’-Öndör District because this event activates, in an almost exemplary way, the hierarchically ordered and transparent human relations that life in a rural Mongolian district is also about.

Tsagaan Sar Tsagaan Sar (literally ‘white month’) is the traditional Mongolian celebration of the new year according to the Mongolian lunar-solar calendar and usually takes place in late January or early February.3 The celebration is ancient (Jagchid and Hyer 1979: 117; Atwood 2004: 584–86) but was not appreciated by the socialist government and was – like other ‘old-fashioned feudal traditions’  – accordingly abandoned as a large-scale celebration in socialist times. While the celebration was quietly continued to some extent in the countryside, people had to work during Tsagaan Sar, and the celebration in the district centre was reduced, I was told, to a swift greeting to your colleagues when arriving at work on the first morning of the month. With socialism also came the introduction of the Gregorian calendar and New Year (shine jil), and nowadays both New Year and Tsagaan Sar are celebrated in Chandman’Öndör District and Mongolia at large. This, however, happens in almost diametrically opposed ways. New Year is celebrated with entertainment, speeches and dances in public spaces such as the school and the village hall (lit. ‘cultural centre’ (soyolyn töv)) and is attended by many people. Tsagaan Sar, on the other hand, involves no centralised celebrations but only visits to the private homes of mainly kin but also friends and other acquaintances. During Tsagaan Sar, the village centre is quiet and all celebration takes place within the confines of the household. Whereas the Gregorian New Year, then, is concerned with the reproduction of the (administrative) whole or collectivity, and may thus in some sense be aligned with the Alunguo celebrations, Tsagaan Sar is about the reproduction of (kinship) networks (cf. Humphrey 1998: 379–80). When we prepared for Tsagaan Sar in mid February in my host family, our preparations included the time-consuming making of spirit distilled

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from fermented milk (shimiin arhi), pastries (heviin boov and yeeven) and 1200–1300 steamed dumplings (buuz), the only food served during Tsagaan Sar. In addition to this, we had, as had all other families, to buy substantial quantities of vodka, sweets and presents and clean our home thoroughly. Carpets were hung out and swept with snow, mattresses were cleaned and all furniture dusted. Not until the first morning of Tsagaan Sar do families take their newly cleaned carpets back into their houses. Often, people in rural Mongolia may be content with washing their hands and face but, for Tsagaan Sar, people queued to shower in the public bath, next to the school. The local river – the only water source for the district centre – can only be accessed through holes in the ice in winter, but due to the appearance of shoals of small fish, the water is dirty at this time of year, and people spend much time making clean water for Tsagaan Sar by melting ice blocks cut out at the river banks. One of the final preparations that took place in my host family on ‘the last evening of the year’ (bitüünii oroi) after the first star has appeared in the sky, and after we had placed three ice cubes over our household entrances (for a god to drink, according to Ulaanhüü), was to arrange a huge bowl of dried curds (aaruul) on top of which are placed layers of pastries decorated with sugar cubes, sweets, lumps of viviparous snake-weed mixed with butter (meheeriin tos), cheese (byaslag) and clotted cream (öröm). This arrangement will vary from family to family, but there will always be an uneven number of layers of pastries, each layer alternately symbolising happiness (jargal) and suffering (zovlon), the top and the bottom always representing happiness.

Figure 3.1 Preparing meheeriin tos for Tsagaan Sar. Photograph by the author.

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The ‘white food’ (tsagaan idee) or milk products, so prominent in this arrangement and elsewhere in Mongolian life, are considered pure, and ‘white’, indeed, is key to understanding Tsagaan Sar. Although the celebration is not – in the main – experienced as explicitly religious in Chandman’Öndor District, as was the case among the Buryats in the socialist period (Humphrey 1998: 378), the concern with purity and regeneration contains many parallels with Yellow Sect Buddhism (see Chapter 4). Humphrey makes this parallel explicit when she writes that ‘[i]n Lamaism, the tsagaalgan [Tsagaan Sar] festival is associated with the defeat of “heretical teachings” and the triumph of the “true belief ”. In the monasteries on New Year’s Eve, the lamas used to burn rubbish, symbolising people’s sins of the past year, and then conduct a service (khural) dedicated to the protector of the faith, Lhama … It is this complex of ideas, which integrates a deeply felt moment of the productive cycle with the upholding of the faith, the rejection of heresies, the absolution from sin, and above all, the responsibility of everyone in their world for the well-being of the souls of their dead relatives …’ (1998: 379). Apart from this concern with morality (and more or less implicit Buddhist teachings), the point to be emphasised is that, at Tsagaan Sar, everything is meant to be purified and cleaned and the seamless passing of time discontinued in a two-fold sense. First, time is separated into disparate units: Tsagaan Sar is the time when the tugal (calf in the first year) turns byaruu (calf in the second year) and humans become one year older (Jagchid and Hyer 1979: 74; Humphrey 1998: 429);4 it is the occasion for ordered renewal – i.e. for structuring time and new beginnings. And, secondly, time is discontinued – or more precisely, negated – by the idealised celebration of what exists all the time, namely – apart from the way in which time itself is ordered – a systematised hierarchy transcending time in a myth-like fashion (cf. Lévi-Strauss 1978b). If the following description, then, appears slightly detached from specific persons, actual incidents and the concrete flow of events, this is also due to the nature of what I am trying to describe.

Tsagaan Sar Visits On the New Year’s Eve (bitüünii oroi) of Tsagaan Sar, people hold a small celebration with their closest relatives, where they eat and drink well, enjoy each other’s company and maybe, as we did, watch some television. The next morning is the first day of the new year or the first morning of Tsagaan Sar, and it is commenced with taking the first steps of the new year outside the home in a specific direction depending on one’s age (this caused some confusion in my host family, as they were not sure about the right directions and had not had the time to ask the diviner living next door or any other

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knowledgeable person due to the time-consuming preparations for the celebrations). In the morning, each family also makes a libation of milk tea, often with a special spoon for ritual sprinkling (tsatsal), and the first thing that children do is greet (zolgoh) their parents. This is followed by a succession of visits to and from relatives and acquaintances over the following days. Ideally, people begin by visiting the closest and most respected relatives, but these may live in the countryside or far away, and people often have to compromise on the ideal sequence of visits. The schedule is tight, and visits often have to be carefully planned. Younger people always start out by visiting elders, after which the elders repay the visit, unless they are very old or live too far away for a return visit to take place. As the days pass, people visit increasingly more distant relatives until all the necessary visits have been carried out. After the first five days of Tsagaan Sar, the celebration decreases in intensity, symbolised by the bowl of pastries being reduced to half its size and, on the tenth day, the bowl is taken away. By then, the visits and return visits have virtually been completed and everyday life has been completely resumed. But Tsagaan Sar never really ends. If you meet a close relative for the first time in the new year at a much later date, you have to do the greeting again. The age hierarchy expressed through the ordered sequence of visits is prominent in greetings too. When visiting a family, each visitor starts out by greeting each person who is older than him or herself, unless the elder individual has already been greeted by this person at a different place during Tsagaan Sar. If there is an old man or woman present, the visitor begins by greeting him or her and then works his/her way down the hierarchy, beginning with the father of the household. The greeting is performed by holding out one’s forearms and hands, palms facing upwards, and placing them underneath the forearms of the hierarchical superior while saying: ‘How are you?’ (Amar baina uu?, literally ‘Are you peaceful?’). The superior will place his forearms, palms facing downwards, on top of the greeter’s forearms while answering: ‘Greetings! How are you?’ (Mend ee, Amar baina uu?, literally ‘Greetings! Are you peaceful?’). If the relationship is intimate and the age difference substantial, the old person may gently hold the head of the younger one and ‘sniff’ him or her on each cheek.5 A ceremonial scarf (hadag) can be presented to the one greeted as a sign of respect, and this will always be done when greeting elderly relatives. After greeting people, you take your place in the home of the host family, and the younger ones present – possibly the children of the host – will then come to greet you. Men will always put on their hat when being greeted. Hats are symbols of power and dignity (Jagchid and Hyer 1979: 53) and are treated with respect and care in Mongolia. When the initial greetings have taken place, snuff bottles are exchanged as are a range of further greetings, beginning with: Are you having a nice celebration of the New Year? ((Sar shinedee) saihan shinelj baina uu?). The subsequent greetings

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Figure 3.2  Making libations. Photograph by the author.

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often include: Have the livestock turned fat? (Mal süreg targan orson uu (orov uu)?). What age have you reached? (Nas süüder hed hürch baina?). Have you been successful in your work and ‘duties/position’? (Ajil alba öndör orov uu?). When the initial formalities have been completed, the mother, or children, of the host family offers presents to the guests. If visiting people in the countryside, the guests may also bring presents, as a return visit is unlikely to take place. The presents offered have not been prepared for, and nor are they aimed at, specific individuals and unique relations between individuals. They are rather meant to suit a category of people (elders, men, women, children etc.) and as such express a type of relation. Presents are usually shirts, money (preferably new notes6), fabrics, cigarettes, match boxes (fire being symbolically significant), sweets for children and ceremonial scarves (hadag) for highly respected people, and the adults’ presents are always given with a cup of shimiin arhi (spirit distilled from fermented milk). Once again, older people receive their presents before younger ones. Steamed dumplings (buuz), more shimiin arhi and often vodka are also served, and before leaving, all guests should take a ‘snack’ from the bowl of pastries, as one would often also do after an ordinary household visit. Most men are under the (strong) influence of alcohol for most of Tsagaan Sar whereas women only drink moderately, if at all. Drunkenness, though, does not bring about any obvious loosening of formalities; even a very drunk person will always remember to put on his hat when being greeted or offered a present. People dress up in their finest clothing for Tsagaan Sar, and they will often have a new traditional Mongolian deel (a calf-length tunic or kaftan) made for the occasion. To be presentable and to adhere to strict conventions are critical features of much interaction. Exchanges of greeting questions, for example, are so well defined that answers almost take place before the question is posed. Thus, on many occasions in Chandman’-Öndör District – and especially during Tsagaan Sar, when most actions are overtly ritualised or formalised – people have to dress, walk, greet, sit, receive, give and so forth in certain specified ways (cf. Humphrey 1987, 2012).

Transcendent Acts When I use the notion of formality to describe such behaviour, it is because Tsagaan Sar practices themselves are rule-like. Tsagaan Sar (and many other) rules, accordingly, are not just established as such by the anthropologist, post factum, but are part and parcel of what these acts are all about; the ‘objectivating perception of the social world’ (Bourdieu 1976: 118) is, so to speak, native. As such, formal practices are and should be embodied, of course, but not to an extent whereby their rule-based nature dissolves into the carelessly

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habitual and they cease to draw attention to themselves as rules. By being overtly formalised and automatised, the practices  – through the ‘stiff’ and solemn aesthetics of the act itself – involve a meta-reference to the fact that they are form or rule, much like when Richard Schechner and Gregory Bateson proposes that ‘[t]he story of “how this performance is being made” replaced the story the play would ordinarily have told. This self-referencing, reflexive mode of performing is an example of what Gregory Bateson called “metacommunication” – signals whose “subject of discourse is the relationship between the speakers”’ (Schechner 1994: 623). In other words, it is not ‘the story’ or the contents of the individual rule alone that is communicated but also the notion of system and rule as such. The curious thing about this metacommunicative aspect of Mongolian life, coming to the fore during Tsagaan Sar (but also on many other occasions), is that one gets the feeling that the use of the body is scripted in detail. In Mongolia, there are an almost endless number of rules for right behaviour (Humphrey 1987, 2012; see also Højer 2003; High 2017: 61–62), and Humphrey, when reflecting on ‘marked actions’ among the Mongols, writes that ‘the minutiae of daily life are greatly formalised, usually by categorisation into named types of acts’ (1993: 73). It is indeed as if everything – in particular bodily dispositions and certain speech acts – is and should be mediated by rules. Phenomenologically inspired anthropology is  – in its critique of representational epistemology – fond of using examples that evoke an image of actions that are not concerned with executing rules but rather with flow and engagement, such as when the musician begins to truly play and the distance between player, instrument and acoustic environment collapses (Ingold 1993: 460). What is favoured in the Mongolian engagement in formality, however, is not ‘getting lost’ in ‘doing’ but rather ‘being aware’ of the representational nature of the act.7 When practising cello, Ingold writes, and ‘something goes wrong in the performance, one becomes painfully aware both of oneself and of the instrument, and of the distance that separates them’ (1993: 460; see also Willerslev 2004: 404–5). In the Mongolian case, however, something has to ‘go wrong’, so to speak, in the sense that the rigid separation between performer and what is performed has to be upheld in order to convey that the rules are also not one’s own (cf. Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994: 5). The body as subject and the body as object for rules should simultaneously be kept separate (the rules transcend the individual) and c­ onflated (the rules are embodied). In Mongolia, such formalised actions are well defined and believed to have (had) reasons. Although the specific reasons are often not known by any one individual (see also High 2017: 62; Empson 2011: 99), it is thought that ‘someone’ will – or at least did – know the rationale behind the rule at some point in time, and such rules, of which there are literally hundreds, are

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indeed to be found in numerous books on Mongolian tradition and customs (see e.g. Tserennadmid 1999; see also Humphrey 1987). The domain of rules is often referred to as yos, meaning rule, custom, habit or etiquette, but it may be better translated as the proper (in this case, Mongolian) way of doing things (cf. Toren 1995: 531; Empson 2011: 95–99). When the explanation for a rule is unknown, yos is simply evoked as the reason.8 Alternatively, people say that to do this or that is ‘bad’ (muu) or that you ‘may not do so’ (bolohgüi). Yos is deeply ingrained in the ‘shape’ of Mongolian actions, as well as in notions of purity and (mis)fortune. When I once spoke to Düütsetseg about this, she explained that some people were ‘pedantic’ (yosorhog) and that she herself would only follow the yos she ‘liked’ (taalagdah), such as the customary prohibition against throwing milk or blood in a river. She stated three reasons as to why she particularly liked this custom. Firstly, the water would become dirty (bohir). Secondly, she did not like to see it or even think about it (evgüi sanagddag). Thirdly, she thought that there might be a water spirit (lus) who would get angry with her and eventually punish her, and misfortune is indeed often evoked as the result of breaking a customary rule or prohibition.9 Yet, when I asked Düütsetseg why so many rules without any obvious rationale were followed, she simply said hevshil (habits, routine or custom).10 According to her, the thoughts or minds of people in the countryside had not yet ‘broken’ (zan evdreegüi); countryside people, she claimed, were calm (taivan), sincere (ünench), good-hearted (tsailgan)11 and credulous (genen). Also, they knew each other well, and hence could not do bad things but had to think about their reputation or ‘name’ (biye biyee sain tanina, buruu yum hiij bolohgüi, neree bodoh heregtei). While this is, after all, only a partial and strongly idealised picture of life in the Mongolian countryside, it does draw attention to the transparency, consistency and permanence ideally characterising the sphere of yos – and, with the preceding chapter in mind, it also foregrounds the importance of not having a bad name. To literally move your body slowly is part of Mongolian formality. The stretching of formal actions points to an ‘aesthetics of inertia’ that makes the actions appear more scripted and ‘stiff’, and it also indicates that one should allow time and respect for such actions because they transcend the vicissitudes of time (Højer 2003: 107–8).12 I, for example, was sometimes scolded for doing things too fast when serving food or beverages to guests, and while my wife was often praised for her upright body posture, this was not the case with me. In general, it is believed that westerners move their bodies much faster and with less care, control and dignity than Mongols, for whom being calm (taivan) is highly valued (see also Michelet 2013: 88–117). In line with this, Lacaze has written that, in Mongolia, ‘“[c]orporeal looseness, corporeal vacancy” (biye sul) denotes a sickly, puny state of health’ (Lacaze 2000: 46), and Humphrey notes that among the Buryat Mongols

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Figure 3.3  Tsagaan Sar. Photograph by the author.

‘[t]he word khüdelmeri, “labour”, has its root in khüdel, “movement”, “shifting about”, which in Buryat culture is considered undignified. Elders and respected people such as high lamas remain still, and if they move do so in a slow and dignified way’ (Humphrey 1998: 308; see also Pedersen 2011: 105). If anything, the domain of yos, idealised during Tsagaan Sar, is about holding onto replicable conventions and established hierarchies, whether in education (the older teacher), religion (the lama) or domestic life (the household head). In this world of convention and hierarchical distance, people are entangled in relations that favour recognition and predictability and thereby secure continuity between past and present. The self is defined in a nonnegotiable and safe system whereby little is at stake and true particularity – or genuine otherness – has receded into the background. The principle of interaction inheres not in particular individuals but rather enables – in this domain of formality – ‘society’ to represent itself (Godelier 1999: 40) and transcends individuals, some of whom are ‘closer’, as it were, to the transcendence than others.13 Old people are embodiments of yos, and it is expected of elders that they ‘have yos’ (yostoi) and, hence, ‘are polite, decent, and know how to behave’ (Sneath 2000: 217). The pictures of deceased family members are often placed on the north-eastern wall of a home and, in front of these pictures, small offerings are to be found. The deceased are thus conspicuously ‘behind’ even the most respected people, and the deceased

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will often receive a small cup of vodka before anyone else (see also Sneath 2000: 224; Empson 2011: 118, 125). In short, it is a system of ascribed status in which the secured repetition has to do with differences in position vis-à-vis other people, mainly according to a principle of age (and ultimately death) but also including notions of gender – authority and strength places men above women – and knowledge (teachers and lamas are esteemed).14 In Mongolian, there is no distinct term for sibling, only for younger brother/ sister (düü), older sister (egch) and older brother (ah).15 At Tsagaan Sar, such a hierarchy is involved in the sequence of visits, the order of greeting, the way greetings are given, the kind of presents given, the seating of guests and so forth. Specific individuals are placed in fixed relation to specific others in a hierarchical structure that associates by making people unequal (cf. Dumont 1972). During Tsagaan Sar visits, this association mainly takes place through exchange: greetings are exchanges of words and gestures, presents are given and reciprocated at a later point, and visits are met with return visits. Moreover, only people with whom you already stand in a relationship are visited – i.e. people with whom you have had previous exchanges. Essential to these Tsagaan Sar exchanges, however, is the simultaneous connection (exchange) and disconnection (always exchange based on hierarchical difference) of the parts involved. On the one hand, then, most exchanges establish the parts as non-equals because exchange partners are bound together by virtue of their inferiority/superiority; the inferiors respecting (hündleh) the superiors and the rules (yos) transcending any specific interaction. Social agents are created and connected by virtue of their difference. Husband and wife, for example, do not exchange greetings on the first morning of Tsagaan Sar because they are considered ‘one’ and therefore incapable of exchanging. On the other hand, the exchanges take place between individuals and households as part of the same hierarchical system that associates by keeping separate, albeit only insofar as the individuals and households are ‘singularised’ (Strathern 1988, 1992a) – i.e. depluralised or homogenised – as generalised parts of a system in which difference is subsumed within the whole. Difference, in other words, is encompassed (Viveiros de Castro 2001: 27; Stasch 2009: 13) and a ‘closed’ and ‘final’ kind of relatedness accentuated, where set roles are played out in a fixed system of well-known and generalised Selves and Others. When addressing hierarchical superiors, their (unique) names are substituted with – or followed by – (generalised) honorifics such as ah (older brother), egch (older sister), guai (polite form of address used after name) or lam (lama). In other words, as people grow older and become at one with the hierarchy ‘the individuating function of names seems to fall away, to be replaced by categorization into a social type’ (Humphrey 2006: 170).

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Transcendence and Daily Relations Now, persons are – as should be clear from the preceding chapters and the overall argument of this book – not exclusively defined by this hierarchical structure. A young male teacher from the school, for example, would come to visit his elder colleague during Tsagaan Sar, even if the young teacher at other times expressed disapproval of the older colleague. This partiality of the hierarchical relation is further illuminated by the fact that the gifts given are neither personal nor must they necessarily be kept. Unlike the precarious exchanges described earlier, they can in principle move on to another person without bearing a (sometimes dangerous) ‘personal’ trace of their previous relation, and no inherent (i.e. total) connection between person and gift, or person and person, is established. Rather, the inherent connection is between gifts and (people as) relations in a system. To be sure, reciprocal ‘bond-generating’ gift exchange is taking place in the sense that people are exchanging what, in principle, may be identical objects and which therefore have no immediate use value, and also in the sense that people are forced into a relationship of debt through the obligation to receive and give back. Nevertheless, this system of reciprocity is more reminiscent of Bourdieu’s rendering of what he took to be Mauss’s structural and slightly timeless notion of exchange than of Bourdieu’s strategic exchanges in which aspects of timing and instrumentality take a prominent place (Bourdieu 1979 [1972]; Mauss 1990 [1950]). The Tsagaan Sar exchanges – although taking place in time – indeed appear as suspended in time and somehow torn out of it. The debt and the reciprocal circle are finished off at the return visit. It is kept aloof and not necessarily involved with everyday exchange. Talking about the difficulty of uniting Mongols, even relatives, an interlocutor in Ulaanbaatar once phrased it in the following way to me: ‘Tsagaan Sar is an interesting holiday … Relatives gather and get to know about each other. They know that “this person is my relative and I need to respect him”. But this is just about respect, it’s only form.’ While this may be only one idiosyncratic take on Tsagaan Sar, it does reveal a certain way of ‘thinking through Tsagaan Sar’ because the Tsagaan Sar form of exchange is extraordinary and will only be taken up again the following year, when the hierarchies are established anew while remaining aloof. In this sense, the ‘debt’ is not total; it is only total within a separate and partial system of formal obligations. This slightly formalised description of an indigenous formal structure, however, needs to be qualified with some reservations. The Tsagaan Sar exchanges themselves are indeed finished but hierarchical obligations  – brought to the fore and idealised during Tsagaan Sar  – take place all the time as a confined but very significant aspect of everyday life also. You are,

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for example, expected to pay respect and listen to elders and to do what they ask you to do. Hierarchical exchanges or obligations, then, are also about a particular ordering of everyday relationships. These can indeed be, and most often are, of a pragmatic nature, such as when a teacher takes two pupils out of school to help him cut his own firewood. Also, the exchanges taking place during Tsagaan Sar do express some of the often-used networks in everyday life – i.e. networks of kin and acquaintances – and as such they reinvigorate these. In this sense, the hierarchical mode of relatedness is often intertwined with (kinship) obligations to give and request goods and services throughout the year (Sneath 1993; Humphrey and Sneath 1999; cf. Gell 1992) and therefore inseparable from pragmatic and everyday economic concerns. While it is certainly the case, then, that such relations are not confined to a separate ritual sphere and suffuse most relationships, the danger of mixing the sphere of kinship (as idealised hierarchical manners) with more pragmatic concerns was alluded to in Chapter 1 as also being a native concern. We have previously seen how this predictable vision of the social world may be challenged when people are involved in conspicuous activities such as getting caught up in conflicts, accumulating riches, exposing extraordinary talent and being involved with ‘foreigners’. Apart from such ‘external’ problems, however, the worldly reproduction of the idealised patriarchal hierarchy has its own ‘internal’ problems of division and continuity too. Mongolian weddings exemplify how such internal divisions – here the bride being detached from her natal family  – is countered by ritualisation and institutionalisation.

The Wedding Contemporary Mongolian weddings (hurim) usually occur on auspicious days  – i.e. days when the deities Dashnyam and Baljinnyam have favourable meetings according to the lunar-solar calendar,16 and they usually take place at the camp of the groom’s family in the brand-new ger of the coupleto-be. Most weddings take place in September, when the domestic animals have fattened well and life in the countryside is considered most enjoyable. Weddings have certain formal similarities to Tsagaan Sar: they are highly ritualised; hierarchy, formality and exchange are prominent features; a new beginning is marked; a transition is taking place; and then the celebration continues until all kin members, friends and acquaintances have visited the new household. In September, I attended one of the weddings taking place in the valley west of the district centre with my host family.17 The couple-to-be were relatives of my host family, so Tsendee and Battsetseg had attended the

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camp several days ahead of the marriage to help out, and on the wedding day I crossed the Hövön Davaa, ‘the cotton pass’, on horseback only with Ulaanhüü. The wooden saddles of our horses were newly painted, and our horses’ manes had been trimmed for the occasion. Like all other guests (and as on all formal occasions in Mongolia), we arrived in our finest clothes, which – in the case of adults – would always be the traditional Mongolian deel for occasions like this. The ger of the bride and the bridegroom had been built next to – and east of (or to the junior side of ) – the camp’s two other gers. The new ger, almost all of its contents and a number of domestic animals, had been bestowed upon the new household by the parents of the bridegroom. The parents of the bride usually only have to present a bed and a chest (avdar) but they may also present animals. Depending on circumstances, the share of property (höröngö)18 given to the new family by the respective parties varies, but the heavy economic and preparatory burden of a wedding is generally placed on the shoulders of the groom’s family. Greetings were incessantly exchanged among the many guests present on the wedding day, and the elderly men were eager to exchange snuff bottles while waiting in the sun for the truck to arrive from the bride’s camp. The bridegroom and two of his relatives were to bring the bride and her family. This entailed some ritual exchanges at the bride’s camp, but the bride was not ‘stolen’ (hulgai hiij avchrah) as in the old days. Some elderly informants told me that they had (ritually) ‘stolen’ their wives when they got married in the 1950s. The truck was – as somehow expected – late. Upon arrival, it circulated the camp sunwards before stopping next to a ‘runner’ made of felt pieces covering the ground from the truck to the entrance of the new ger. The many people sitting on the truck were all singing. Bride and bridegroom were now welcomed with formal greetings from the ‘leader’ (darga) of the wedding, Tsedenbaljir, who was the husband of the older sister of the bridegroom’s mother.19 He was a man skilled in organising weddings. The newcomers were not allowed to walk on the ground but had to walk on the ‘felt runner’ to the entrance of the new ger, where the bride and the bridegroom were met by the mother and an elderly female relative of the bridegroom. They offered each of them a blue ceremonial scarf and a cup of pure white milk, and also sniffed them before they entered their new home. The milk is considered good (sain) and is only drunk by the new couple. Everybody then entered the new ger. Most people sat down on the carpetcovered ground – the guests of the bride in the western ‘guest’ side, and the guests of the bridegroom in the eastern ‘host’ side20 – but the most respected people were seated on a bed in the hoimor, the honorific ‘upper’ (northern) part of the tent (Humphrey 1974: 273). There were around sixty adults and a large number of children present, but everybody almost miraculously managed to fit into the relatively small ger. Room had also been found for a table

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Figure 3.4  Receiving the new daughter-in-law. Photograph by the author.

with ritually displayed foods placed between the oven in the middle and the northern wall. It was extremely hot in the tent and there was no room for physical manoeuvre. The bride and bridegroom were placed on two chairs at the north-east wall of the ger – i.e. on the bridegroom’s side and facing the centre of the ger like everybody else. The bridegroom was sitting on the northernmost chair of the two and thus closer to the hoimor. For much of the wedding, though, the couple was not really the focus of attention. People on the floor were exchanging snuff bottles and greetings, and tea and soup were served. At some point, the mother of the bridegroom, standing in the northern part of the ger, started to slice the uuts (the cooked posterior part of a sheep’s back) placed on the table and served on ritual occasions. Had the bridegroom’s father still been alive, he would have been the one to slice the meat. The uuts had to be shared by all guests, and the pieces of meat and fat were accordingly sent around on a small plate. Later on, the symbolically significant red rope (chagtaga) – of which one end is fixed to the circular framework of the ceiling (toono) of the ger – was led to one of the bridegroom’s relatives. He was standing on the northern side of one of the two pillars (bagana) supporting the roof-ring in the middle of the tent. Connected to this ‘symbol’ of ‘good luck/fortune’ (süld hiimor’) – to which money was later attached to increase the household’s fortune – he was now able to ‘say the ritual felicitation/blessings’ (yerööl heleh) while also holding a ceremonial scarf and a cup of shimiin arhi (spirit distilled from

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fermented milk). After speaking the blessing, he passed the end of the rope on to a man from the bride’s side of the ger, who was also holding a ceremonial scarf and a cup of shimiin arhi, and who was to stand on the northern side of the other pillar, the one in the western guest side of the tent’s central circle. This representative of the bride’s side chose to sing a traditional Mongolian ‘long song’ (urtyn duu). Other highly ritualised acts included lighting the fire of the hearth (i.e. the oven) for the first time and making the first tea (shine tsai, literally ‘new tea’). The bride and groom had to light the fire together, and the tea had to be tasted by all the guests. Shimiin arhi and a present were also offered to each guest by both the bride’s and the groom’s side. Again, the elderly and more respected individuals received the biggest presents, and the oldest and most respected ones received ceremonial scarves. Later on, all the guests queued in front of the newly married couple to ‘sniff’ them and present them with gifts. As the wedding progressed, formalities loosened and people started to sing with increasing enthusiasm while getting intoxicated  – women21 as well as men and anthropologist. With the amount of alcohol served, it was almost impossible not to. Singing, in Mongolia, is thought to ‘create a “positive” social space’ and to ‘ensure a good future life for the bride and groom’ (Plueckhahn 2014: 124). Yet, before the bride’s party left the celebration in the early evening, just before sunset, the frivolity had turned into a fight between two men, and one of them was now lying motionless, bleeding and dead drunk in front of the ger. A number of people had had too much to drink by now, and a few, it seemed, had lost their tempers. This is not unusual, though, and did not cause any drama, and people managed to calm them down and literally ‘load’ them onto the truck of the bride’s party. As a Mongolian saying has it: ‘no wedding without a fight’ (zodoldoongüi nair baihgüi). The truck with the bride’s party then – under much cheerful h ­ owling – drove sunwards around the camp before it disappeared to the south. The cows had to be milked now, but the drinking, singing and celebration did not end then, and later on a number of women arrived from another wedding nearby. At some point, the celebration in the ger of the newly married couple came to an end and the celebration had to continue in other gers.

The Making of a New Household Whereas Tsagaan Sar is coping with the seamless continuity of time, the wedding, one might say, is coping with the continuity of ‘social’ space in the sense that it is concerned with making the ‘extraordinary’ transfer of a member of one family or ‘patrilineage’22 to another possible. Through ‘a rite of passage’ (Van Gennep 1960 [1909]), the transfer of the bride is made to

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happen outside the flow of ordinary time. In the old days, for example, the bride could not simply ‘come along’ or be ‘taken’ but had to be ‘stolen’, and the exchange during the wedding thus had to be initiated by a ritualised nonexchange. But even nowadays, the inherently problematic flow of persons between ‘patrilineal exogamous groups’ (that can only reproduce themselves with the help of others) is ritually cancelled out – or ritually made possible – by the wedding ritual. The bride cannot touch the ground of the new place before she has established herself anew as part of a new household (the lighting of the ‘original’ fire, the making of new tea, etc.) which is part of an old camp and ‘patrilineage’. In order to transcend the ordinary and re-establish the world of relationships in a new setting, it is necessary to transcend the actions of the ordinary; hence a ritualised wedding where actions move from the ordinary (the girl with her parents) to the extraordinary (the ritualised transfer of the bride and the momentary gathering of two patrilineages at the wedding) and back to the ordinary (dilution of formality during the wedding, the return of the bride’s relatives and the new household establishing relations with new family members and guests during the coming months). During the wedding, the separate kin groups are joined – but never ­conflated – by acts of sharing meat, exchanging presents and connecting to and blessing the same rope; a rope leading to the roof ’s circular encapsulation of the household’s ‘singularity’. The new household is based upon a primary division between the side of the bride and of the bridegroom respectively – a division that is not forgotten during the formal and momentary union at the wedding, where they occupy separate spaces in the ger. During this leap into the ‘transcendent’ union at the wedding, the ordinary has changed for the people involved: a new household has emerged,23 and the woman finds herself in a new place. She came with her relatives and they left without her, and from then on her mother-in-law and father-in-law are simply referred to as ‘mother’ (eej) and ‘father’ (aav) – i.e. as if she were a child of this family. The ritualised space of the wedding creates unity from division and vice versa by ritually undoing the relocation of the woman and thus by pretending that it never really happened. Yet, the wedding ritual may also be seen as a way of making such transfers safe and unproblematic, as it is well known that daughters-in-law have traditionally been outsiders to their family-in-law in Mongolia (and elsewhere) and, as such, ambiguous people to incorporate into the agnatic kin group (see Jagchid and Hyer 1979: 82–83; Geschiere 1992: 164; Humphrey 1993, 1998: 405; Empson 2002: 18, 175–77; Buyandelger 2013: 162; Plueckhahn 2014: 130–133; High 2017: 34–40, 68–69). Social structures, such as the Mongolian, that tend to be vertically organised into agnatic units (Pedersen 2001; see also e.g. Humphrey 1995), at least in principle, are challenged by affinal alliances, a fact that may be seen as the kinship corollary to this book’s

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major claim about the problem with exchange in Mongolia. Daughtersin-law may, for example, be ‘polluting to the “bone”’– i.e. the patrilineage (Bulag 1998: 263) – and contain potentially conflictual emotions about their new life with in-laws, and the wedding ritual does not bring their attachment to their parents and kin to an end. A young woman that I knew from the Shivert subdistrict in the south, for example, had married a man in the northern Höhöö subdistrict. Even if she felt close to her in-laws, she started to sing – after a long night of drinking – about being a daughter-in-law, staying far away from home and missing her mother.24 One of her songs sounded like this: Instead of serving you tasteful tea I’m giving you my song filled with melody My song filled with melody My kind mother Pour the song into your bowl and drink The kindness of caring and giving birth Having no time to pay for it Me, the foolish child My heavenly mother, forgive, forgive My only mother in the world Forgive your singing child My heavenly mother, forgive, forgive I see your face in my eyes The mind restrains the body My old mother, Oh, I miss you a lot The tears of hazel eyes Are filling up the bowl Oh, I miss you a lot.

The often structurally and emotionally split position of daughters-in-law places them in a potentially tricky liminal space; they are, at least partly, ‘out of place’ (Douglas 2002 [1966]; Leach 1964) and forever ‘betwixt and between’ (Turner 1967). This danger of ‘moving between’, apparently, has caused similar concerns with regard to men when travelling too far away: ‘Wives were considered dangerous in that they brought with them the alien spirits of their natal group. This danger was counteracted by “purification” through fire. But this was paralleled by men who if they went on a long journey also had to cross a fire when they returned home in order to rid themselves of alien spirits’ (Humphrey 1992b: 190). We may thus also extrapolate that the fire, central to the establishment of a new household at weddings, safeguards the family

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and the lineage and serves to protect family members from some of the problematic outside influences. Ritualised formality and purification (as we also saw in the previous chapter), then, are two strategies for making communications safe, and in some instances formalised action is even rationalised by locals in terms of precaution. When you receive something, the sleeves of your deel should be rolled down, it is often said, to show that you do not hide a knife, and soaking the tip of the ring finger in vodka and ‘flicking’ it before drinking, I was once told, was originally done to make sure that the vodka was not poisoned.

Lived Formality In actual practice, the patrilinearity and virilocality of the above description is not always subscribed to. The fact that the daughter-in-law has to use ‘father’ and ‘mother’ for her new parents-in-law also applies to the son-in-law towards his parents-in-law, although the practical implications of having to do so every day and all the time are most often with the daughter-in-law. It is also not inconceivable for the newly married couple to settle down with the family of the wife if need be, but this is the exception rather than the rule. Moreover, current settlement patterns, even in the countryside, are not in exact accordance with the principles of residence traditionally embedded (or perceived to have been embedded) in mobile pastoralism. Some families, for example, are settled in the central village for most, if not all, of the year while their parents take care of the animals in the countryside. Thus, it all works less as an all-encompassing system that controls practice in all detail than as an ideal, yet influential, configuration for the differentiation of ‘social’ units that is still highly marked by formalised principles of custom (yos) and ­hierarchy (e.g. age and patrilinearity). The formal and hierarchical system, however, should not be seen as simply a symbolic representation covering up ‘real persons’, ‘real emotions’ and more genuine forms of relatedness. If it appears from the above description that people are not ‘emotionally’ invested in formal and hierarchical relationships, and that affect has no place in such formal engagement with others, this would be a wrong interpretation in a double sense. While it is the case that relationships so reproduced are not predicated upon one part really being emotionally attached to the other but rather on prescribed obligation and respect, this does certainly not by implication exclude a bond of affection. After one of my many Tsagaan Sar visits, a young girl, for example, shed many tears because she had just left an elderly relative whom she had not seen for two years, and the relationship between parents and children is almost always based on strong intimacy and affection as well as respect (as

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if these were opposed in the first place). Indeed, one may even argue, in the Mongolian context, that by avoiding the use of unique personal names and using honorifics only when addressing seniors one is ‘indicating both respect and a warm and close relationship’ (Humphrey 2006: 159, 170). Secondly, establishing a distinction between what people ‘really feel’ and what they ‘openly and symbolically express’ would presume a problematic distinction between ‘outer’ relational actions and the psychological interior of total(ly integrated) persons. If we instead see affect as inhering in relations and actions, then the production of emotions of respect through the specific act of formality does not preclude the presence of different relationships of affect between the same individuals (simultaneously or at different points in time), nor does it preclude the existence of a ‘slippery zone’ between the fake and the real (Humphrey 2012: S64).25 Now, there are of course instances when formality fails, but in Chandman’Öndör District these tend to be exceptions that prove the rule. On one occasion during Tsagaan Sar, many people were assembled at the house of a family in the district centre, and one of the most respected guests, sitting in the hoimor,26 had become dead drunk. He could not speak and could hardly even stay on his stool. He was an (almost) elder who had lost control of his body, and people were openly offended (cf. Plueckhahn 2014: 134). Elderly people epitomise idealised formal hierarchy and should, as mentioned earlier, be the foremost bearers of control, dignity and custom (yos), and the space they occupy – the hoimor – is where this formal hierarchy is most purely present (see also Pedersen 2011: 145). The man in question was contradicting all that, and people’s reactions were confirming a moral universe of proper behaviour. On another occasion during Tsagaan Sar, a young man, Nergüi, was visiting his former female classmate, Bayarmaa, the oldest daughter of my host family who had returned from Ulaanbaatar for the celebrations. Nergüi was excessively drunk on arrival and known to be a problem – i.e. turn agsan (a state of uncontrolled rage) when drunk. This time was no exception, and he was only forced to leave my host family’s house after having wreaked havoc and attacked Ulaanhüü and Bayarmaa, his former classmate. The following day he arrived  – sober and much ashamed  – with an elder female relative and presented a ceremonial scarf to Ulaanhüü. Tsendee, the mother of my host family, was understandably very upset, but Ulaanhüü forgave the young man and said that he himself had been like that when he was young. Nergüi had not only failed to observe the etiquette of formality but had violated it by hitting an elder, and his acts could only be cancelled by an act of utmost formality, the presentation of ceremonial scarves.27 Bayarmaa, the daughter, was not presented with one but I – who he had threatened to kill the day before – was.

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The fact that formal relations may be neglected, then, does not mean that the system as such is abandoned. Formal relations do circumscribe these – from the perspective of formality – exceptional events. Likewise, the system as such is more predictable than the actual people occupying its positions in a world of sometimes very changeable and negotiable social relations. Odhüü, one of my friends and a distant relative to my host family, was adopted but knew his biological mother. To illustrate the weakness of the relationship, however, he told me that he did not even visit her for Tsagaan Sar. He did not feel obliged to pay her respect, because the relation between them was not characterised by a tangible attachment to – and respect for – a person who had actually brought him up, yet he never challenged the conventional and expected relation between mother and child. Another family chose not to visit some close relatives because they had had a conflict, but this was such a serious matter that people found reason to gossip about it.

Making Differences from Without My aim with all this has not been to show that structure and practice are in dialectical interplay but rather to avoid the assumption that there is a simple and predictable one-to-one relationship between the system of formalised hierarchy and daily social relations. The system of formality exists as a relatively autonomous (to use an anachronistic expression from structural Marxist vocabulary) and systematised reality, which constitutes itself – through an aesthetics of slowness and stiffness – as being rule-based. While rules are embodied, then, it is crucial that the rules, the system and the hierarchy are also not one’s own. In other words, the formal structure looks curiously similar to the reified – and much criticised – version of society as outlined by Durkheim and others. If practice theorists focus on the fact that rules only exist in and through practice (see e.g. Bourdieu 1979 [1972]), and phenomenologically inspired anthropologists claim that we can only speak of things in themselves (Jackson 1996), the Mongolians, at times, seem to prefer a degree of detachment from their actions. They alone are not the authors of what they do, and ‘things as they are’ (Jackson 1996), in Mongolia, are also meant to be outside themselves. This ‘detached’ mode of relatedness operates through an aesthetics of formality and the mutually embedded principles of custom (yos) and hierarchy. It is fundamentally hierarchical in the sense that one can have more or less yos and age and, nevertheless, is always connected to others in fixed relations of inferiority/superiority through an ultimate principle of transcendence that is explicitly present in the style of formal acts (‘meta-reference to rules’). Every person will come to occupy known positions – like elder and

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younger – throughout their life. Although not embedded in a ‘social organisation of clans’ any more, if indeed they ever were (see Sneath 2007), the principles for constituting social unities in terms of hierarchy and distance are still present. Such principles circumscribe a domain of transparency and conventionalising ‘vertical’ exchanges whereby similar differences, such as the ones between elder and younger, are made to appear. This system of set and predictable roles, where selves and other may be different yet are always well known, can be contrasted with the non-given, uncertain and dangerous ‘horizontal’ relations  – as outlined in the previous chapters  – which reinstate persons as particular agents that may expose themselves because they are involved in conspicuous activities such as accumulating riches, exposing extraordinary talent and being involved with ‘foreigners’.

Notes  1. I do not claim, however, that the ger and the objects on display in the ger do not differ between different Mongolian groups (see e.g. Empson 2011: 200) and individual families, and the ger, of course, is individualised and private too. People exhibit private pictures, for example, and do behave ‘as if at home’. Yet, apart from the fact that different people appear on them, the pictures in the photographic montage that is usually on display on the household chest in the northern part of the ger are almost interchangeable from home to home. They are usually from the central square of the capital, from when the husband or son was doing his military service etc. Still, it is essential to uphold a distinction between behaviour towards ‘intimates’, such as family members, and behaviour towards (non-intimate) guests, because ‘convention’ almost always applies much more strictly to dealings with the latter category (see also Empson 2011: 106–44).   2. Humphrey writes: ‘… the household is the locus of the rules [for correct action (yos)] because the family-based household is the basic unit of interaction’ (Humphrey 1987: 43). When outside the household, or rather ‘away from inhabited places’ (heer), people – and their bodies  – tend to act differently and be less concerned with formally correct action. Interestingly, this lack of concern with upholding the rules and the formality associated with the Mongolian household is also found among the artisanal miners studied by High (2017: 49, 115). Strictly formalised rule-based behaviour in Mongolia, then, appears to be associated with certain spaces, notably the home.   3. Although Tsagaan Sar is a pan-Mongolian celebration, not all aspects of the following description are applicable to Tsagaan Sar celebrations everywhere.  4. Present-day Mongols often seem unaware of this way of counting human age, and confusion about old people’s precise age is common. Most people only recognised the ‘Mongolian’ way of counting age after being told about it by me. Nevertheless, one of the ritualised ‘greeting questions’ used during Tsagaan Sar does actually point to the custom of becoming one year older at Tsagaan Sar: ‘What age have you reached (Nas süüder hed hürch baina)’?   5. It is common for old people to ‘sniff’ other people, and children are usually ‘sniffed’ by grown-ups. You only ‘sniff’ people with whom you are closely related.

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 6. As has often been noted, the value of money, in Mongolia, may be dependent on its physical state (see e.g. High 1917: 89), and newer notes are always used in ritual exchanges.   7. Toren reminds us that: ‘People may rationalize their behaviour by reference to rules; they may say that they do a thing in a certain way because it must be done in that way because it is the proper way of doing it. But this appeal to the rule as justifying behaviour does not mean that the behaviour can be objectively explained as rule-governed’ (Toren 1995: 527; emphasis in original). It is thus not argued here that phenomenological theories are necessarily wrong but that the aesthetics of this kind of native behaviour has more affinity with a ‘representational aesthetics’ than with a ‘phenomenological’ one.   8. Sneath notes that, for Mongols in Inner Mongolia, it seems more important to practise a custom than to explain it (Sneath 2000: 222). This is applicable to Chandman’-Öndör District, too.   9. These reasons seem to confirm Humphrey’s claim about yos: Accepted rules such as “You must not wash in rivers” contain some idea of polluting flowing water, but even here the way that Mongols talk about this shows that the action can be considered as much dangerous as wrong. If you pollute the water, the river spirit will take revenge and punish you, so it is better not to do it. (Humphrey 1997: 28, my emphasis)

10. This is a different sense of yos than the one outlined by Humphrey: ‘Yos, in this way of thinking, are not simply there to be followed unconditionally, but have to be learned, together with their reasons’ (Humphrey 1997: 30). 11. Also meaning honest or straightforward (Bawden 1997: 502). 12. Referring to Moore and Myerhoff, Tambiah remarks that even new rituals are constructed such that their internal repetitions make them tradition-like (1985c: 132). 13. There is a correspondence with this in Mongolian political life. Based on a study of Inner Mongolia, Sneath writes the following: … it is an older and indigenous Mongolian notion of political order. As long ago as the thirteenth century those with superior rank were spoken of as “higher” (deed). The term “central place” (töb gajar) also means “headquarters”, and the word for centre (töb) also means orthodox and righteous. In the face of complaints about a policy he is describing or implementing, a local official will often say deerh jaabar – “directives from above”, implying that they are beyond his control and must be obeyed. (Sneath 2000: 144)

14. A lama, for example, may be treated as an elder although not really being an elder in terms of age, and likewise it appears to be improper to greet the wife in a household before having greeted her husband, the latter being the ‘head of the household’ (geriin ezen), even if the wife is older than her husband. One female informant stated with contempt that even her younger brothers (düü) would be seated in the respected northern part of the ger. 15. I am not implying that language terms and social hierarchies are coterminous by ­necessity – which they are often not (see e.g. Irvine 1998) – but use the example because it is sustained by a general experience of life in rural Mongolia. 16. This explains why many weddings take place on the same day. The wedding described below, for example, was only one of three weddings on the same day in this particular valley. 17. For other accounts of Mongolian weddings, see Humphrey, who has looked at Buryat weddings during the socialist period (1998: 382–401), Sneath who has provided a

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18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

detailed account of a contemporary Inner Mongolian wedding (2000: 226–35), Atwood who has written about Mongolian weddings in general (2004: 581–83), and Plueckhahn who has analysed an Altai Urianhai wedding in relation to singing and the creation of a ‘beautiful’ wedding space (Plueckhahn 2014). Bruun also has a section on marriage that contains information on Mongolian weddings (2006: 115–118). Yeast, seed, property, fund and resources, all possible translations of hörongö, may convey a sense of ‘resources for growth’. While this was never explained to me in this way, it is interesting to note that Plueckhahn writes that ‘no blood relative of the bride or groom can be chief of a wedding’ (2014: 129). When entering a ger, west will be on the left side and east on the right side as the entrance of the ger always faces south. Nevertheless, the words for west and right are identical as is the word for east and left, because the speaker, like the ger, is always thought to be facing south. It should be said, though, that most women tend to drink much less than men, and it is often frowned upon when women, especially younger ones, drink and smoke in rural Mongolia. This is referring to an idea of ‘the patrilineage’ reproduced in wedding practices rather than to actual existing and well-defined patrilineages. Clan names were not really operative in the area of fieldwork, and although most people acknowledged that Mongolian descent was traditionally traced through the eternal ‘bone’ of the father’s lineage, as opposed to the perishable blood of the mother, other people claimed that descent should or could just as well be traced through women. Yet other people were just confused when faced with the question of descent. Note that the verb gerleh, to marry, derives from ger, the noun referring to the traditional Mongolian tent (i.e. household) but is also more generally used just to mean home. Emotions are often expressed in relation to singing in Mongolia. Compare this with Appadurai’s discussion of the pragmatics of the portrayal of emotions in Indian poetics and drama: The key assumption is that the actor evokes certain feelings in the viewer by exteriorizing his or her own emotions in a particular formulaic, publicly understood, and impersonal way. The object is to create a chain of communications in feeling, not by unmediated empathy between the emotional “interiors” of specific individuals but by recourse to a shared, and relatively fixed set, of public gestures. The creation of shared emotions is thus unyoked from the emotional authenticity of any particular person’s feelings. (Appadurai 1990: 106–7)

26. In the traditional south-facing tent, this is always to the north, but this was a wooden house with an eastern entrance, and therefore the hoimor was the westernmost part, furthest away from the entrance. 27. This contradicts Pedersen’s claim that people refrain from moralising about drunken rage (2011: 220).

Chapter 4

Morality and Danger Religious Practices and Buddhist Directions

Y In Chandman’-Öndör District, most people will be vague about their religious affiliations if questioned in religious terms. The majority of people are not particularly concerned with subscribing to a systematised and objectified belief system, i.e. to ‘a religion’, nor do they  – contrary to what has been described elsewhere in Mongolia, particularly among the Buryats (Empson 2011; Swancutt 2012; Buyandelger 2013) – have a very elaborate knowledge of religious systems as such. Such expertise is confined to a few religious practitioners, but even they often complain about not being learned. Ordinary people’s concern with religion can thus be summed up as more ‘pragmatic’ than elaborate and ‘systematised’, not so much because their concern is necessarily with gaining access to material assets but more because they turn to various ‘religious’ practitioners when possible and when needed, and needs can be many and made to appear in different ways. This apparently pragmatic and ad hoc attitude, however, does not prevent ordinary and extraordinary concerns of everyday life from being tied up with more established and longstanding religious orientations. In the course of this chapter, I shall reflect on the presence of a bewildering variety of sometimes contradictory practices and statements on religion and spirit powers. However, apart from contributing to the as yet few studies of ‘grassroot Buddhist practices’ in contemporary Mongolia (Ujeed 2015: 280; see, however, e.g. Bruun 2006: 121–142; Abrahms-Kavunenko 2013, 2018; High 2013a, 2013b, 2016, 2017; Humphrey and Ujeed 2013), I shall also move on to outline two modes or ideal types of Buddhism, inspired by

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Samuel’s distinction between clerical and shamanic Buddhism (1993) and Humphrey’s distinction between shamans and chiefs/elders (1994b, 1995; Humphrey with Onon 1996). These orientations roughly correspond to local versions of the yellow and the red direction of a Mongolian rendering of Tibetan Buddhism,1 and they relate to a distinction permeating everyday life, between morality and compassion, on the one hand, and enmity, conflict and suspicion, on the other. While one is concerned with relations of commonality and connectedness, the other is concerned with relations of danger. The distinction between two such orientations, then, conforms to a distinction between ways of reproducing a universal kind of connectedness and practices of generating distance and difference.

Religion and Daily Life While Chandman’-Öndör District is home to many ovoo ceremonies in June and everyday life is permeated by countless customary practices and rules (yos) that are often related to religious prohibitions and spirit powers, it would be wrong to say that ‘religion’ and ‘religious’ ceremonies, in the household or elsewhere, play a prominent role in the district, at least among most of the families that I was acquainted with. Ulaanhüü, for example, claimed – much in line with his support for the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (associated with the socialist regime)  – that in my host family, they were all non-believers. They did follow the tradition (worshipping ovoos etc.), he once pronounced, but they did not believe in anything. To illustrate his lack of belief, he told me that he had once been drunk and had had an argument with a lama. The lama had warned Ulaanhüü that something bad might happen to him, upon which Ulaanhüü had answered that ‘if you are that powerful, why don’t you just kill me here and now?’ He had then spat at the lama and left. On other occasions, however, Ulaanhüü would pay an old diviner, living in the compound behind ours, a visit. When some of his animals had once disappeared, for example, he asked her about his lost horse and explained the circumstances to her (that he had used a strong tether and that it might have been cut by someone). The diviner, an old woman who was rumoured to have once been a shaman (udgan), used her rosary and dice and then told him that the horse had been stolen but was not far away and would soon be found. He also asked the diviner about his missing bullock, and she disclosed that it would be grazing further up the valley. This was indeed where he found it the following day. The horse, though, was not recovered until some days later. When this happened, Ulaanhüü declared that the diviner had been right in everything she had said. When asked about why she had those abilities, he stated that the gods had given them to her. Earlier on,

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Battsetseg had similarly told me that she did not like religion (shashin) and – later – that she venerated or worshipped (shüteh) the old diviner. Other locals had similar reservations about ‘believing’ in ‘a religion’ while they still subscribed to specific practices associated with Buddhism, spirit powers and special abilities. When I was talking to Düütsetseg about belief (itgel), for example, she would, like Ulaanhüü, claim to be a non-believer. She had faith in neither Buddhism (sharyn shashin) nor shamanism (böögiin shashin) but added that she did believe when things were not working out for her. Then she would pray or light an oil lamp (zul). When we later touched upon the Buddhist notion of ‘merit’ (buyan), she mentioned that old people recite prayers (maan’ unshih), count rosary beads (erh tatah) and make offerings (deej örgöh). ‘When people approach death, they start considering what merit they have gained and what sins they have committed (Bi odoo yamar buyan hiilee?, yamar buruu nügel hiilee?),’ she told me. ‘The young people do not believe in this and do not think about it,’ she continued. I asked her whether she would be doing it when she got old and she answered: ‘Yes, those thoughts come when you get old.’ On yet another occasion, Düutsetseg explained that people in the countryside have a close and direct relationship with nature (baigal’) and that this is why they believe in lus and savdag (spirit masters of rivers and mountains). ‘But people who live in the central areas (töv gazar – i.e. big cities like Ulaanbaatar),’ she continued, ‘do not think about nature and it will have no

Figure 4.1 An ovoo ceremony at Lake Hövsgöl. Photograph by the author.

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effect on them. They don’t believe in lus so for them there is no lus inside their heads.’ ‘So it is necessary to believe (itgeh)?’ I asked, and she confirmed. ‘What do you think?’ she continued. ‘Why does it always rain after an ovoo ceremony?’2 I asked her whether it always rained after an ovoo ceremony, and once again she confirmed matter-of-factly. I challenged her and said that it did not always rain after an ovoo ceremony, and she answered that mostly it did. ‘There are spirit masters,’ she stated, and then laughed because I was expressively quiet. Apparently now ignoring the necessity of believing for spirit powers to exist, she repeated: ‘They are there.’ The notion of spirit powers, of course, is often met in Mongolia and Chandman’-Öndör District and not only in relation to the power of mountains and rivers. During an interview with Enhtuya, an old female bonesetter (bariach)3, who also made use of herbal medicine and lived on the outskirts of the village with her middle-aged son, she talked about a certain plant called Altan gagnuur (Roseroot). ‘It’s a root, it’s like a human and it’s dangerous,’ she said. ‘In order to hide the fact that you are collecting it, you have to cover it with a pot when you take it so that the sky (tenger) will not see it,’ her son added. The year before, the son had gone to Lake Hövsgöl to collect it and had been hit by hailstones: ‘If you take it, revenge is immediate,’ he explained. I asked them what was so special about the plant, and they replied that it was strong and had a spirit owner (savdag). Yet, the vacillating, undecided and mixed set of attitudes exemplified by Düütsetseg and Ulaanhüü was also the case with the old bone-setter. She dealt mostly with fatigue (yadargaa), blood circulation and bones (the head in particular) and stressed the importance of having capable (düitei) and soft (zöölön) hands and of being of a lineage (udam) of bone-setters. When asked whether she had any shamanic spirit ‘representations’ (ongod) or other objects of worship (shüteh yum), she replied: ‘Such things are becoming useless, ongods and the like, because now we have these books [referring to some pamphlets distributed by Christian missionaries].’ I had already noticed the books but, before leaving, the bone-setter and her son showed us their seter, an animal (picture), consecrated to a Buddhist deity or other (shamanic) power (see Chapter 5). Questions concerning religion and extraordinary powers are thus surrounded by ambiguity, ad hocness, incoherency and a jumbling of different traditions, and a statement such as ‘the Mongols believe’  – in the sense of ‘not questioning’ something – does not do justice to the uncertainty characterising most people’s approach to most extraordinary powers. Assertions about the existence of such invisible domains, for example, are frequently followed by a ‘maybe’ (baih aa). It is safe to say, then, that a certain doubt pertains to such powers and that many people often claim to be non-believers when asked about the extraordinary – i.e. when the issue is explicitly phrased

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through language and generalised beliefs. Yet, people’s ‘religious’ sensibilities should not only be attended to in the direct answers to questions posed by the anthropologist, as they do not often subscribe to what is immediately recognisable as generalised, objectified and coherent belief systems (cf. Willerslev 2004; Empson 2011: 94). If, when attending religious rituals during the socialist period, Buryat Mongols ‘believers’ had ‘no complex of ideas, no defined system of rituals and sacrifices, but only fragmented, vague images, illusions, and thoughts, haphazardly called into being by events’ (Mikhailov, cited in Humphrey 1998: 410), and if only one third of the Buryats attending a particular ritual were active believers, then Humphrey, commenting on Mikhailov’s conclusion, suggests that this was due to most people’s lack of willingness to declare themselves publicly as believers. The question of belief may then not be answered unambiguously as a question of belief versus nonbelief and, more significantly, one would miss the point about extraordinary powers in Chandman’-Öndör District if only understanding the approach to them through such once and for all declarations. People may declare a disbelief in spirit owners in one situation yet act as if they exist in another. While I do not wish to simply subsume spirit owners, hel am and merit within the same category of ‘religion’ or ‘the extraordinary’, they do nevertheless share the feature of being, to most locals, ‘possibilities’ rather than physical objects, as it were. They are phenomena that can be questioned and whose appearance, visibility and effects, even if their existence is taken for granted, are surrounded by uncertainty. It is always up for discussion whether some misfortune is caused by hel am, whether a person has gained merit or committed sins, or whether something is caused by the action of a spirit owner. We may thus think of these phenomena not as certain and unquestioned visible phenomena, nor as simply undisputed beliefs, but as existing possibilities that present themselves to people and elicit actions due to their possible existence. The domain of the extraordinary, then, is materialised and operationalised through people’s interpretations and anticipations of possibilities that are present in their world rather than necessarily ‘believed in’ or spelled out in statements. People, in other words, act upon and relate to the ‘possibility of a truth’, some possibilities being more likely than others, and thereby reproduce its possible existence and efficaciousness. Nobody seemed to question the existence of hel am, for example, yet pinpointing who had fallen victim to it, what its consequences might be and who was particularly dangerous in this regard was arrived at by guesswork (and also some agreement). Hel am was a domain of uncertainty but also a ‘definite possibility’ that carried weight in people’s lives. In line with this, we may also think of extraordinary powers as being that which is inherent in acts and their form, whether made known or not to the actors themselves, because even people, such as Ulaanhüü, who claim

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to be ‘non-believers’ elicit assumptions or ‘beliefs’ that are ingrained in their actions. Some rules (yos), for example, are not necessarily rationalised by Mongols themselves as expressing a non-questioned belief (in the proposition, for example, that a calf will die if you stand up eating) but are rather passing on the content inherent in the form of actions themselves. Certain actions imply hierarchical, aesthetic and moral assumptions about the purity and supremacy of milk (you are not allowed to step on spilt milk), other actions imply that fire is to be respected (you are not allowed to throw litter into the oven), and the structure of actions at ovoo ceremonies points towards a specific transcendence of the kind outlined in the previous chapter; people are organised in a circular fashion with lamas and elders placed closest to the ovoo, which almost takes on the quality of a hoimor, the honorific northern part of a Mongolian ger (see Chapter 1). Nevertheless, people may at the same time  – and indeed often will  – express a lack of belief in the spirit owners being worshipped; in other words, they act out beliefs and yet do not ‘believe’ in any straightforward or unambiguous sense. This is in essence the same point made earlier about a generalised and secularised form of witchcraft. Put bluntly, people do not have to call each other witches to attend to each other through idioms of hel am. With these general reflections in mind, I shall now  – notwithstanding the many complexities involved in this field of extraordinary powers – show how it is possible to delineate two domains of ‘definite possibilities’, whether

Figure 4.2  Buddhist readings at an ovoo ceremony. Photograph by the author.

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verbalised or not. One of them refers to the subscription to a morality and systematised doctrine and the other to the anticipation of the specific and uncertain powers, some of them human, with which humans engage. The latter is associated with immediately powerful objects and agencies and mainly concerns this-worldly issues, whereas the former concerns the right conduct with respect to principles transcending the concerns of any particular life. While this distinction will structure the following outline, it is important to note that these are ideal types (Weber 2012 [1904]: 125, 127), relevant ‘accentuations’ that are trying to be faithful to the ethnography, and that one can never simply assume a clear-cut real-life distinction, nor a simple correlation between ‘religious complexes’ and individual ‘religious elements’ (a la Herskovitz’s cattle complex in East Africa (1926)). The bonesetter, for example, illustrated how elements from a doctrinal universe can be integrated into the latter domain of suspense and immediacy by placing the Christian pamphlets in a universe of powerful objects, rather than subscribing to the doctrine conveyed by their content (the Christian doctrine); the pamphlets, instead of spreading ‘the word’, had replaced the ongon (shamanic spirit ‘representation’) as a powerful agency. At the risk of oversimplifying, the two modes correspond to a sociological distribution between youngsters, concerned with the ad hoc immediacies of this life, and elders, concerned with merit, sin and rebirth, as exemplified by Düütsetseg’s reflections. This, in turn, roughly corresponds to the distinction made by Humphrey between shamans losing strength as they age and elders gaining wisdom by growing old (Humphrey with Onon 1996: 4–35). Whereas shamans deal with powerful entities, elders are more concerned with correct knowledge and collective morality, i.e. the domain of yos. I will, however, move these insights in a different direction by linking them not only with institutions such as Buddhism and shamanism (following Samuel 1993) – or shamans and elders – but also by showing how this divide is reproduced within Buddhism itself and by relating one of the religious modes to everyday anti-social relations that divide from within.

Religious Practitioners in Chandman’-Öndör It will be recalled that the purges of the 1930s left the territory of Chandman’Öndör District without any temples. After the collapse of the socialist system, however, some elderly lamas established a ger temple on the ruins of an old temple site in the Arig river valley. The ger temple ran for a few years only because the lamas were old and eventually passed away, and the single surviving lama believed that he was not learned enough to continue on his own. When I began my fieldwork, a few young lamas from the capital, Ulaanbaatar, were

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in Chandman’-Öndör to reopen the area to Buddhism and possibly to revive the temple once more. They came back two years later, when I carried out additional fieldwork, and the plans to open a temple were now (and possibly back then also) being promoted by a woman newly arrived from Ulaanbaatar, who was born in this area and had married a high-ranking official, and a rich herdsman4 who had likewise just returned to his homeland (nutag) after thirty years of absence. The discussions were now concerned with the location of the temple. The local governor (zasag darga) wanted the temple to be established in the village centre yet could not find the money to do so this year (2002); the initiators could not wait, however, and decided to try and establish an initial temple in the countryside, close to the site of the old temple. Apart from this pending issue (to which I will return below), the contemporary state of ‘institutionalised religion’ was characterised by the presence of a small number of individual practitioners, such as diviners, a few more or less self-taught Buddhist lamas and a couple of bone-setters. Yet it was significant that these people – with the possible exception of ‘real’ lamas – were perceived as being able to do different things rather than being categorised as members of a particular group of practitioners, such as bone-setters (bariach) or diviners (mergech) (cf. Humphrey with Onon 1996: 183; Pedersen 2011: 102–4). They were people with specific abilities (but drawing on different traditions), and they were only vaguely entitled ‘bone-setters’ or ‘diviners’; they were rather described by what they could do (divine, cure a headache, do readings of religious books, cure bad sight). While ‘lama’, in contrast, was a title that would often be used to denote a person who was learned within the Buddhist tradition – i.e. ‘knows books’ (nom medeh) – it was not necessarily an officially bestowed title (cf. Bareja-Starzynska and Havnevik 2006; see also Bruun 2006: 123; High 2017: 96–97),5 mostly because the area was devoid of highly learned lamas and religious institutions. As a matter of fact, the term was only used consistently when referring to three local people, one of whom had left the area. As one local told me, only one of the remaining two lamas, the ‘yellow’ lama, was actually a proper lama. To understand this ambiguity with regard to the lama status of one of them, the ‘red’ lama, it is necessary to first outline two different religious perspectives that are associated respectively with the ordinary yellow lama and the less ordinary red lama – less ordinary because the idea of a genuine lama is mainly associated with the virtues of the Yellow Religion.

The Yellow Religion Although Buddhism had come to play a significant role for the ruling class of the Yüan dynasty in the thirteenth century and never completely died

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out, especially among the Western Mongols, it was not until Altan Khan, during the military campaigns of the 1570s, established contacts with Tibetan Buddhism that Buddhism was reintroduced, popularised and institutionalised in Mongolia.6 Altan Khan’s conversion to the Gelugpa order (Yellow Sect) of Tibetan Buddhism around 1578–79 furthered the spread of Buddhism and marked the beginning of a crucial change in Mongolian politico-religious history by forming ‘the two pillars of modern Mongolian quasi-feudalism’ (Jagchid 1988c: 133),7 namely the ecclesiastical and the lay nobility. Altan Khan conferred the title of Third Dalai Lama upon the master of the Tibetan Gelugpa order, and the master of this order in return proclaimed Altan Khan to be a reincarnation of Khubilai Khan, the great Mongol emperor of the Yüan dynasty. This mutual support eventually led the Gelugpa to take power in Tibet, and Altan Khan, having gained religious blessings, came into possession of a legitimising and unifying force. The alliance between religion and state was further strengthened when the Third Dalai Lama died in Inner Mongolia in 1588, five years after the death of Altan Khan, and was reincarnated as the Fourth Dalai Lama in the family of Altan Khan. In the period to follow, the centralisation of lay hierarchies weakened, and a power vacuum made it possible to consolidate a strong and independent religious structure. As such, it was the religious establishment that benefited most from the alliance  – and it managed to convert most Mongols to the ‘Yellow Religion’ (sharyn shashin)  – while the lay feudal structure continued to dominate only in a fragmented form. Another critical step in the establishment of institutionalised Buddhism in Mongolia was the unanimous decision of the Halh Mongol leaders in 1639 to make the son of Tushetu Khan Gombodorji, a descendant of Chinggis Khan, the head of Buddhism in Halh Mongolia. This institution of the Living Buddha of the Halh Mongols, known as the Javzandamba Hutagt, was hereditary by reincarnation. This obviously entailed the possibility of finding the reincarnation among the lay nobility, thereby strengthening the ties between the lay and the ecclesiastical spheres. Having legitimised its head as both a descendant of Chinggis Khan and a descendant of one of the companions of Buddha (Bawden 1989: 58), the religious structure was reinforced. ‘Yellow Sect’ (Gelugpa) Tibetan Buddhism was thus from its introduction to Mongolia bound up with worldly power, and the religious hierarchy was gradually to supplement the fragmented lay feudal structure and appear as the only ­possible centralised Mongolian institution.8 Initially, the conversion of the Mongols was not exclusively carried out by the Gelugpa order. Heissig writes that: ‘The Sa skya pa whose doctrinal structure stood close to that of the ‘Red’, unreformed rNying ma pa, took a major part in the spiritual and religious life of the Mongols until the decisive advocacy of the Yellow Sect … after 1634. Indeed, in many regions the yellow,

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reformed sect prevailed only slowly and with difficulty’ (Heissig 1980: 28). The advancement of the Gelugpa order, however, went hand in hand with the disappearance and suppression of non-Gelugpa orders and less dogmatic and institutionalised ‘shamanic’ practices. Notions of causality, reincarnation and compassion substituted the ritualised killing of horses, and shamanic spirits were incorporated into the pantheon of Buddhism. Many accounts testify to a serious antagonism involving repressive measures such as the prohibition of shamanic practices, the burning of ongods (‘representations of shamanic spirits’), the confiscation of animals from shaman-worshippers and even violence against shamans themselves. The effectiveness of this repression was possible due to the alliance between Buddhism and the powerful political system at the end of the sixteenth century, and it doomed shamanism (and non-Gelugpa orders) to a future existence as an ‘underground religion’ (Jagchid 1988e: 323). Yet it is difficult to see this only as an antagonism. Having evolved through its struggle against the Tibetan Bon religion, Tibetan Buddhism could be regarded as having been highly influenced by ‘shamanism’ from the outset and involved many elements that could easily substitute already existing ‘shamanic’ elements (Heissig 1980: 39–45). The very complex process was thus characterised by struggle, mutual influence and transformation on both sides, yet also had some very specific implications that are of relevance to contemporary Mongolia. Moses describes how shamanic ‘sites of transcendent religious significance’ became places where Buddhist monasteries were built (Moses 1977: 114). Lamas assumed control, often by performing deeds superior to those of shamans, and transformed sacred shamanic sites into Buddhist centres (Moses 1977: 114). Humphrey similarly writes that ‘[l]amas saw shamanic “rulerspirit” sites as power points, to be controlled, obliterated, or converted … Conversion meant the turning of chiefly and shamanic cult sites into oboos [ovoos], the introduction of a new ritual, usually in Tibetan, and the imposition of the “punctual” view of the landscape’ (1995: 157). Buddhism became stronger in the seventeenth century, as did the Manchu control of Halh Mongolian territory. After the Manchu conquest of Halh Mongolia at the end of the seventeenth century, the ‘punctual’ making of centres materialised in the very concrete organisation of society: As the Mongols began to settle into newly established political districts after the Manchu conquest, these monastic centres acquired a new importance. They became places to which the people came for protection from the elements and from bandits; they sought protection there in time of war; they came to buy and sell from the Chinese and Russian traders who gradually moved in; and finally, some became a part of the monastery as a noble grant, or at their own request. Eventually the sparsely inhabited Mongolian territory

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was covered with a network of monasteries of varying sizes, the nuclei for later urban settlements. (Moses 1977: 114–15)

During the Manchu rule of Mongolia, the Buddhist religion required its own separate administrative system and gained additional wealth and power to an extent where it developed into ‘a state within the state’ (Bawden 1989: 33). The Manchu Qing dynasty gradually lost power during the nineteenth century, and by the time the dynasty had been overthrown and Mongolian independence – i.e. ‘autonomy within the boundaries of Chinese suzerainity’9 (Moses 1977: 146) – had been attained in 1911, the Buddhist religion had become the most powerful organisation in Mongolia. Mongolia was established as a theocracy with the eighth incarnation of the Javzandamba Hutagt at the apex of religion and state, and he acquired the status of Bogd Khan (‘holy emperor’). The Bogd Khan, though, only had ‘nominal authority over those outside his territorial possessions’, and the Buddhist ‘church’ was not a tightly knit organisation but consisted of largely independent major monasteries (Moses 1977: 125–27, 132–33). Even though the theocratic state never became a de facto reality, however, each major monastery nevertheless sustained a complex and elaborate administrative system. It should be clear, then, that while this was the first amalgamation of religion and state power, Buddhism – in the form of Yellow order (Gelugpa) Tibetan Buddhism from the sixteenth century onwards  – was, from its inception in Mongolia, inseparable from centralised and centralising secular power, at least until the socialist revolution of 1921 and the later purges of the 1930s. Although this view of power and Buddhism may seem far removed from and not immediately recognisable in present-day Chandman’-Öndör District, it is worth considering the implications of two sets of information. The first one has to do with the resurgence of institutionalised (Yellow order) Buddhism in the area. While one will have to await further developments in the intended revival (sergeeh) of the old temple, we can already note the following: the momentum for its establishment came from outside the district. The woman and the rich herdsman mentioned earlier had returned to their homeland, the lamas came from the capital, and support for establishing the temple was gained from the head of a religious school in Ulaanbaatar and, ultimately, from the Dalai Lama himself.10 When I once talked to her in a small log cabin in the Arig river valley, Chimed, the woman who wanted to establish the temple, explained that ‘Tsedev is the director of a religious school in Ulaanbaatar. At his school, they learn different languages and things related to religion. He wanted to renew the temple in his homeland [Chandman’-Öndör District], and when the Dalai Lama came to Mongolia in 1997, I think, Tsedev asked him to help him develop his

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far-away homeland.’ ‘The Dalai Lama,’ Chimed continued, ‘responded that he would help him develop religion in this area.’ One of the problems of developing religion, however, is the shortage of lamas in the Mongolian countryside. It is a demographic fact that the lamas who had survived the purges of the 1930s were very old by 1990, and many passed away in the years following the collapse of socialism. A new generation had to take over, but since new possibilities for religious education are almost non-existent in the countryside, potential lamas tend to be from – or go to – Ulaanbaatar or abroad. This has the effect that any religious revival seems to arrive from outside the district and to be based on non-local doctrinal and centralised learning. Some of the monks that Tsedev, the head of the religious school in Ulaanbaatar, had sent to Chandman’-Öndör, for example, were not just from the capital but had even received religious training in Korea or Tibet. Moreover, whereas the discussion as to where to build the temple could be considered an issue of secular versus ecclesiastical power (the local governor versus the religious people behind the initiative), the temple will – wherever it is built – constitute the establishment of a centre. Indeed, as Chimed told me, the temple should be located next to the main road and, in the long term, become a centre for learning religion and language, and it should serve to educate the people of the region. Institutionalisation, education (as generalised knowledge), centralisation and extra-local forces all seem to be implicit concomitants of the temple establishment. The local governor’s insistence on building the temple in the village centre should be seen in this light also and so should the explicit link made between Buddhism and Alungua, the historical figure that now serves to unify the district as a whole (see Chapter 1). At the local museum, Alungua is explicitly named in an incense offering prayer to Arig Usan – i.e. the ‘Clean River’ – where Alungua is said to have been born according to the Secret History of the Mongols. This prayer contains very distinct yellow Buddhist elements towards the end: May my homeland be purified May places that do pure actions be purified Through the power of offerings and sacrifices, may … our sicknesses, troubles and demons be calmed down; may wealth flourish throughout the year, and good merit be made, day and night …

Purification and merit is thus explicitly associated with unifying and centralising forces such as the homeland, Alungua and the local museum in the village centre, the latter representing the village to itself.11 The second set of information has to do with the perspective of the yellow lamas in the area. An elderly lama (the only survivor from the first revival of the temple), an old man who ‘knew some religious books’, and the local lama who had left the area are included in this ‘yellow’ category, but they were not

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really sectarian in the sense of explicitly belonging to one sect as opposed to another. Rather they were just ordinary lamas (or in one case ‘just knew some books’) who would – when asked – use the concept of Yellow Religion (sharyn shashin) with regard to their own conviction. Ochirbat was one of them. He was an old lama who lived in the deep countryside, and he was part of the first revival of the old temple and personified the Yellow Religion perspective associated with the new temple. Ochirbat had chosen to become a lama in socialist times and believed that, having existed for so many years, there had to be some truth in religion and the sacred books. He also thought that it might be useful to know these things in the future, as the troubles of the present (socialism) would not last forever. Buddhism had previously disappeared and re-emerged in Mongolian history, and Ochirbat was confident that one day religion would come back. ‘Religion has a reason (uchirtai),’ he said, ‘and it is not possible for it to disappear.’ He thus stressed the substance of long-lasting knowledge in the form of scriptures and interpreted history through an idea of pre-destination. In line with the domain of formality and hierarchy outlined in the previous chapter, his main concern was knowledge (as rules and repetition) and age (and hierarchy). In his outline of recent Mongolian history, Ochirbat described religion in pre-revolutionary times as powerful and the people back then as strong believers in ‘merit’ (buyan). They would abstain from sin (nügel), he said, and it was a peaceful time without serious crimes because people believed in reincarnation and the fact that criminal acts would influence their merit and future rebirth negatively. Also, the authorities back then were good, and they had had tradition, he contended. The communists, who repudiated religion as old-fashioned and feudal, destroyed this tradition and indoctrinated young people to believe that merit (buyan), sin (nügel) and ‘cause and effect’ (üiliin ür) did not exist. Religion would never come back in the same way again, Ochirbat lamented. People believed differently now, and they would just come to have a sutra (Buddhist scripture) recited for their own family, their own welfare, their own animals or their own luck in general.12 They had become sly and ‘like thieves’ in recent times, and because young people do not believe properly, Ochirbat explained, they ‘drink vodka, fight and kill each other with knives’. He concluded that people’s destiny would turn bad for generations to come but that everything would be fine if people just believed in the importance of good deeds for our destiny.

The Red Direction In academic writing, the use of ‘red’ in the Mongolian Buddhist context is slightly confusing. The term ‘Red Hats’ is sometimes employed to refer to

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the Nyingmapa order of Tibetan Buddhism (see e.g. Waddell 1972: 68, 73; Heissig 1980: 8, 28; Jagchid 1988a: 88; Hürelbaatar 2002: 113; Buyandelger 2013: 248; Swancutt 2012: 33), and Jagchid, an Inner Mongolian scholar, writes that ‘[s]trictly speaking, the “Red Sect” is identified only with the Nyingma-pa sect, though a general view, somewhat misleading, is that the so-called “Red Sect” includes all sects except the Gelugpa, the Yellow Sect’ (1988b: 138). The prevalence of various ‘misleading views’ may be due to the fact that the terms were most likely borrowed from Chinese sources (Charleux 2002: 206). While there is no doubt that among Mongols the Yellow Tradition refers to the Gelugpa order, the term ‘Red Religion’ (ulaany shashin) seems at best to refer to non-Gelugpa traditions (Humphrey and Ujeed 2013: 44)  – and more specifically to the Karma Kagyüdpa (Baabar 1999: 73), Jonangpa and the Nyingmapa orders and sometimes to the Sakyapa tradition (Sneath 2000: 7) – and at worst is an unclear and diffuse term. Adding to the confusion is the fact that much of contemporary – and past13  – Mongolian Buddhism is a jumble of different traditions in which dogmatic sectarian differences seem of lesser concern. Knowledge of lineages and teachings was largely exterminated in the purges of the 1930s, and Buddhism is now in a state of revival, sometimes on the basis of barely understood religious texts (Bareja-Starzynska and Havnevik 2006: 212; see also Abrahms-Kavunenko 2013). Academic discussions aside, the term ‘red’, rather than referring to particular sects of the Tibetan tradition, is often used by Mongolians as a reference to religious practices more ‘basic’ – in historical as well as ontological terms – than Yellow order Buddhism. It refers to what is perceived to be ancient Mongolian practices that deal with the immanent and sometimes ‘black’ powers and desires of this world (as opposed to other-worldly concerns). In line with this ‘basic nature’ of the red direction, a Mongolian acquaintance, who had studied Buddhism academically, once told me that even the Yellow order contains red aspects. ‘The hat of a lama,’ he explained, ‘is always red inside.’ The yellow, it seems, can never do away with the red but only hope to contain it. Much in line with this understanding, the red direction does not refer to centralised and dogmatic practices but deal with aspects that are deeply embedded in the everyday life of an often local world (Swancutt 2012: 18 implicitly draws attention to a similar distinction). Further testifying to this is the fact that lamas in (red) Mongolian Buddhism, again according to my acquaintance, are known to live far apart, follow specific teachers and the teachings they want to, and attend to the needs of specific localities. The fact that the red direction is less institutionalised – and also transferred by word of mouth (amyn jüd (Tib. Damngag Dzöd)) – is likely to have made it less visible and less vulnerable to the socialist purges of the 1930s (see also Hangartner 2011: 6–7). The institutional enemy was simply not clear – or

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very threatening – when dealing with a variety of non-specialised ‘red’ lamas who could take care of all the requirements of ordinary life (religious ceremonies of all kinds, worship of powers in the (local) landscape, divination, medicine etc.) at the periphery of centralised powers in the Northern and Western parts of contemporary Mongolia in particular. Chandman’-Öndör District is part of this Northern periphery (see the introduction) but, rather than a strong opposition between the Yellow Religion and the black shamans, as has been documented in the Darhad area further to the west (see Pozdneyev 1971: 343–44; for a more complex picture, see however Pedersen 2011: 115–47), the area east of Lake Hövsgöl was traditionally characterised less by an opposition between shamanism and Buddhism than by mutual influence between the two orientations. In pre-revolutionary times, the shamans in the area were considered ‘yellow’, and many lamas, I was told, were ‘red’ and thus closely related to shamanism. Harhüü, the current red lama in Chandman’-Öndör District, for example, claimed that the temple at the famous cult cave site, Dayan Deerh,14 was a Red Religion temple, and it is widely held that shamans attended the Buddhist temple at Dayan Deerh and that lamas were present at the shamanic ceremonies inside the cave itself. Red is therefore to be considered between yellow (Gelugpa Buddhism) and black (shamanism) in Mongolian religious colour terminology.15 Be that as it may, such symbiotic trends of mutuality were not exactly reproduced by Harhüü, the contemporary local red lama in Chandman’Öndör District. As opposed to the ordinary (i.e. yellow) lamas from the area, he firmly stressed sectarian differences, or what should more appropriately be referred to as differences of direction (tal). He was not part of an organised ‘sectarian’ movement and could not be identified with any well-known Tibetan sect, even though his practices – as we will see – bore many similarities with the unreformed (i.e. ‘red’) sects of Tibetan Buddhism. He usually operated with a distinction between a yellow, a red and a black direction, the latter two being similar to each other and opposed to the yellow direction. He claimed to follow the red direction, or sometimes even the black (shamanic) part of the red direction, and when asked about the name of his religion he would – rather descriptively and for lack of a better designation, it seemed – simply say Lovon Badam Junain shashin, ‘the religion of Lovon Badam Junai (Padmasambhava)’ (the only central deity of his direction).16 Making it into ‘a religion’ was not a major concern for him. Harhüü had been taught secretly in socialist times. During his childhood, he became seriously ill for a month, and doctors were unable to diagnose or treat him. One night, his mother brought a lama who performed a gürem (ritual to repel misfortune or sickness), and three days later he had dramatically improved. From then on, he was interested in magic power (id shid) and eager to learn it. At first he was taught the Tibetan alphabet by a yellow

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Figure 4.3  Red Buddhist lama. Photograph by the author.

lama, Davaa gavj (a clerical degree), considered the highest-ranking lama in the district, and then a ‘pure’ (tsever) red lama17 – to whom he was referred to by the yellow lama – reluctantly accepted him as a pupil (shav’) at a time when it was illegal to practise any kind of religion. The latter, who was head

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of the cultural centre at the remote Bulnai sanatorium in the northernmost part of the district, initially taught him five religious books and then some incense-offerings (san), and, finally – after five or six years – he was taught a number of secret mantras (tarni),18 the most secret of which was only ‘orally transmitted’ (amyn jüd). In the red direction, he claimed, there are thirty-six secret Lovon Badam Junai mantras, all for doing pure magic (tsever id shidiin tarni). Along the way, he realised that he had been taught shamanic ‘things’, and his teacher told him that he was to follow the red direction. The ‘shamanic sickness’, a concern for magic, secrecy and the orally transmitted, as well as the explicit association with shamanism, all point in a direction quite different from the one of Yellow Religion practitioners, and so does a number of other features. Whereas the Yellow direction is concerned with transcendence and ‘how people should behave’, the Red direction is concerned with immanence and ‘how people do behave’. Harhüü would never elaborate on notions of sin or conceptions of morality or ‘the right conduct’ in a general sense but would stress a different mode of relatedness when it came to the activities of the red direction. ‘The red direction does not study peace,’ he once told me. ‘The Yellow Religion is quiet and peaceful, but fate has left the red direction with the strong powers, such as mantras and curses, working in an immediate and very direct way,’ he further explained. While Harhüü, the red lama, and Ochirbat, the yellow lama, might agree that people are ‘like thieves’ in contemporary Mongolia, they think so for different reasons. Ochirbat associated mistrust with a change in time and mentality, whereas it was implied in the worldview of Harhüü that one should be careful about other people at all times. This was just the way the world was, he implied, and without stretching the point too far, his worldview could be described as suspicious, even ‘paranoid’, and war-like; indeed, the colour red (or black) is often associated with aggression and confrontation in Mongolia (High 2017: 98; see also Buyandelger 2013: 159, 248). Claiming that very few people could be trusted, he had a magic shield around his house and a mantra and a saw over the door to his home (which is common in Mongolia), all of which were to protect him and his family from imminent danger. The powers he dealt with were mainly the unseen powers of this world – the heaven, spirits of living people, spirits of dead people and spirit masters in the land  – and the powers he evoked through the use of mantras would be strong and direct, the metaphors used often relating to war and confrontation. He had only fought against curses on a few occasions in his life, he told me, simply because that meant engaging in a dangerous and energy-consuming fight that could eventually lead to his death. Harhüu was asserting his own powers through his practice (and in his communication with me, where he sometimes liked to boast about his abilities), whereas the yellow lamas downplayed their own immediate agency in favour of a more

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transcendent one (and in their communication with me always stressed their lack of knowledge). Harhüü often divined whereas the yellow lamas did not, or did so only rarely.

Enmity and Compassion The concordance between the red direction and enmity – and, more generally, anti-social relations – does not require a great leap of imagination, nor does the divergence between the Yellow Religion and enmity or between the yellow and the red directions. As is to be expected, though, the opposition between the red and the yellow direction was only overtly expressed as a ‘sectarian’ antagonism by Harhüü, who often stressed the war-like nature of the relationship between the two directions. They are like ‘fire and water’, he claimed, and he was cautious that the secrets of the red direction must not be revealed to the yellow direction and even once asked me to delete a mini-disc recording of an interview with him (cf. Swancutt 2012: 205). The yellow direction, on the other hand, was not explicitly sectarian, and in the present context it mainly refers to ordinary lamas, who often do not see red practices as being in opposition to the Yellow Religion. A yellow Buddhist lama from a different Mongolian province once explained to me that ‘if people start [practising Red Religion], they can’t leave it. But it is not widespread, because the yellow direction does things with pity and compassion. We do things in soft ways and make things softer. Body, heart and tongue. We calm people’s hearts and purify their tongues and bodies. People do good things when they are purified from the inside’. ‘The Red Religion’ on the other hand, he further explained, carries out tough exorcisms. If there is a bad spell, they do tough things [spells]. They grit their teeth, drink vodka and offer vodka to the gods. Let us say, for example, that there is one powerful person who has a bad heart and learned religious things. He is jealous of a big lama, because that lama does good things to people, has a good reputation among people, and is respected. The person wants to curse this lama and kill him. In that case, the Red Religion should protect that lama by doing hard things. They should remove the curse from the lama. They should do this for all six living creatures, but they should do it the hard way. That is why the Buddhist religion needs the Red Religion. The Red Religion has Lovon [Badam Junai]. The Dalai Lama is from the Yellow Religion and he is Gelugpa. Lovon is next to this. We need to worship Lovon too. It is not good if we don’t.

While the red direction may thus tend to fight the yellow direction, the yellow direction seems to contain red and black aspects of life but also to make use of red powers when faced with severe (black) curses. As such, the

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perspective of each orientation is reflected in their respective creation of difference. From the Yellow Religion perspective, it is important not to think about oneself, as all life forms are thought to be related, and to subscribe to a transcendent morality concerned with right conduct and not sinning. The red direction, on the other hand, engages in relations between specific powers of importance to the immediacies of everyday life (such as anti-social relations (where curses and hel am are involved) and spirit owners (lus savdag)).19 From the red perspective, one might say that the notion of morality is replaced by a notion of danger in the sense that you abstain from doing something not because it is wrong but because it is dangerous (Humphrey 1997: 28–29). Likewise, in the Yellow Religion, one is purified from self-inflicted sins, whereas in the red direction one is purified from the dangerous influence of others (see Chapter 2).20 Such oppositions between the two directions are reproduced on a number of different levels. While Mongolian monks, for example, are not known for their strict discipline with regard to celibacy, drinking etc. (see for example Kollmar-Paulenz 2003: 22–23), the yellow lamas in Chandman’-Öndör District live an ascetic, even poor, life, sometimes in celibacy and relatively withdrawn from ordinary life. Both Yellow Religion practitioners were quiet and modest, and they brought some distinctive moral considerations to the fore. They stressed that all life was similar and interconnected and underlined the importance of being pure and clean, having no bad thoughts, not thinking about oneself and being helpful and not greedy. Much in line with the Yellow direction, all such behaviour is tied to the idea that past right and wrong actions influence the future and future rebirths. In short, they were concerned with a higher and more generalised morality revolving around Buddhist notions of sinning, merit and reincarnation. In Geoffrey Samuel’s words, the yellow lamas in the area stressed ‘the karma orientation’ (Samuel 1993), placing more importance on ethical principles of right conduct than on ‘enlightenment’  – i.e. salvation outside of ordinary life – and pragmatic aspects of life such as health and prosperity (Samuel 1993).21 Whereas enlightenment might simply have been thought of as out of reach, the latter pragmatic orientation was straightforwardly devalued, much in line with ‘the greater Gelugpa emphasis on celibacy and monastic discipline (which pertains to the conventional level), and the generally clerical nature of the Gelugpa tradition in comparison with the others, which have always had a greater investment in nonmonastic practice’ (Samuel 1993: 511). In contrast, Harhüü, the red lama, lives, and stressed the possibility of living, a life oriented towards this world and, as opposed to the yellow lamas, was allowed to marry and have children, kill animals if hungry, and drink and smoke. Although only supposed to do so in moderation, he does all of this to a great extent, apart from killing animals. Drinking

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makes him courageous when reciting strong mantras and facing dangerous powers – in his own words, it makes him look like a lion rather than a cat – and smoking attracts evil spirits, making it easier for him to destroy them at close range. This distinction between transcendence and engagement can also be traced in the two directions’ different conceptions of religious knowledge and technique. The quantity of sutras (written teachings handed down) used by the Yellow Religion is immense, and the lamas spend long periods of time learning the doctrines. The red direction, in contrast, uses very little written material but keeps repeating the same powerful and secret mantras (tarni). Conflating the red direction and shamanism, Harhüü explained that ‘shamanism only has a small number of spells and influences other people directly by using a few uvdis [magic touches, magic, secret virtue]’. ‘Uvdis,’ he continued, ‘means one’s own energy (enyergi), it means that the energy that radiates (tsatsarch baigaa) from people can influence (nölöölöh) other people directly. Shamans from the red direction influence people by using spells (tarni). The Yellow Religion influences people by using very big sutras.’ When being performed by the lama, the mantras invoke direct and immediately working powers – for example, a curse transformed into a running fox that immediately reaches people – and when talking about magic in general, Harhüü would mention, for example, its possible use for getting rich, killing someone and winning when playing cards. Faced with the question of why he was so focused on material and worldly issues, he responded that these were the real concerns of ordinary people. Whereas the Yellow Religion emphasises literacy (doctrine), the red direction emphasises performance of the spoken language and its immediate effects (magic and hel am); indeed shamans, with whom Harhüü strongly identified, used to say that ‘Buddhist books and paintings were not real, just paper and paint’ (Humphrey 1995: 157; see also Pedersen 2011: 121–22). According to Harhüü, the Yellow Religion does not assert its powers in the same direct and immediate manner through magic (hovs, id shid). Rather, they affect all living beings and work through, for example, a number of different animals before they reach what they wish to influence (cf. High 2017: 99). In the same vein, the secrecy and magic of the red direction mean that a red lama can have only one pupil, whereas the doctrine of the Yellow Religion, in principle, is open to anyone who wishes to learn. This mode of transmission also gives the red direction a sense of idiosyncrasy and a lack of doctrinal conventions, as the power of secrecy, by implication, involves a secrecy of power; the workings of the red direction thus ‘fail to receive the … public attention necessary for transforming them into accepted conventions’ (Swancutt 2012: xix) that can be repeated again and again by anyone who wishes to do so.

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Similar opposition can be identified in relation to the Mongolian landscape. It is well documented that the Yellow Religion in Mongolia went hand in hand with a taming and standardisation of the powers of the land: mountain spirits were assimilated into the Buddhist pantheon, spirits were ‘calmed’, and mountain rituals were conventionalised (Heissig 1980; Humphrey 1995; Humphrey and Ujeed 2013: 49; Charleux 2002: 200; Pedersen 2011: 131, 136), and such practices would often take place in close cooperation with  – and involve authorisation from  – central, secular state powers (Wallace 2015c). Akin to the reiteration of descriptive place names all over central parts of Mongolia, denying places their uniqueness (Humphrey 1995: 144), the powers of the land were universalised by the Yellow Religion. In principle, the powers of a mountain in Eastern Mongolia could be identical to the powers of a mountain in Northern Mongolia and should accordingly be dealt with in the same manner. A contemporary example of this pattern of taming the landscape with yellow Buddhist teaching is provided by a lama that I once met in Telmen District in the Zavhan province. ‘There was nothing at this place [where a stupa had now been raised], just land …,’ he explained to me. When I first came here, a lot of people used to die; there were many arguments, and people were drinking. Also, there was a lot of theft. Many owls were howling. We believe that this bird heralds death. People don’t like this bird. If it howls, something bad will happen, we believe. People used to think that someone would die. I thought about it, did some research and talked to my lama friends about it and then decided to build the stupa. This stupa is for enlightenment and called Janchivchogdon. When people raised their voice at this place, they used to get sick … People were saying that kids playing there in the evening got sick, had convulsions and fell down. It happened to adults, too. People used to say that this place was haunted (güideltei gazar). Then we built the stupa. It connects the sky and the land. After building the stupa, everything was all right. The stupa protects people from bad things, makes bad things leave, spreads good things and makes people’s hearts happy. A stupa is a big thing. People used to say that at the time when the Indian people gave Dharamsala to Dalai Lama, there were many earthquakes there, but the Dalai Lama built many stupas and protected the area. Since then, they haven’t experienced any severe earthquakes, and no one has been killed … All stupas make people’s bad actions go away. It is good merit [buyan] … All the local spirit owners of the land and water that stay in the vicinity of the stupa will be happy. The spirit owners are happy and protected. People who see stupas are blessed. If there isn’t a stupa at a particular place, people run over that place, drink there and say bad words, but if there is a stupa, people don’t do those bad things. When people see a stupa, prayers and teachings come to their mind. That is why it softens people’s hearts and makes bad things positive … We dig the ground, throw garbage into the rivers, burn smelly things, drink vodka,

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fight and say bad things to each other without considering whether the spirit owners have come down to those places [spirit owners of mountains, rivers, springs etc. are said to come down to their locality only at certain times]. Because of that, the spirit owners get upset. People’s bad actions make the spirit owners return the harm. Stupas protect people from the harm of spirit owners. Stupas are teachers of spirit owners. Spirit owners are controlled by stupas. Stupas are the god [burhan] of the spirit owners and stay above them, they forgive people and make them calm and less angry … Stupas are god’s body and heart … God can’t exist in a regular place, only when people make a place for god by building stupas. In places where god is, bad things happen less.

In contrast to taming the landscape with reference to unified teachings and transcendent gods – and opposed to Yellow Religion lamas, who were said to conduct ovoo rituals all over Mongolia in the same way as they conducted them in Ulaanbaatar – Harhüü often stressed the fact that red lamas worship particular powers in different ways, thus attending to them in their specificity.22 According to him, every place, as well as the sky above it, is different and demands the invocation of different powers and masters. The master (ezen) of one mountain would, for example, be a Raven; the master of another, a Deer; and the master of the Dayan Deerh cave a hero (baatar), an altogether different kind of being. At the Dayan Deerh cave, he would, for example, play a flute during the ritual because Dayan Deerh enjoyed the sound of this particular instrument. Spirit powers, then, are distinct, and each powerful place protects or insures (daatgah) different localities. The recent disasters (zud, övchin) in Mongolia were caused by the anger of powers of the land (lus, savdag), Harhüü once explained, and by the fact that the Yellow Religion did not know how to deal with such specific powers. Knowing how to get in touch with them and calm them down was the domain of shamanism and the red direction, and he pointed out that the area east of Lake Hövsgöl, a red direction stronghold, had not had any such disasters for many years. In this connection, it may be worthwhile considering the geographical distribution of ovoo rituals in Chandman’-Öndör District because there is a tendency towards the distribution of religion and people in pre-revolutionary times along a north-south axis corresponding to the distribution of ovoo worship in the area. In the south, the mountains worshipped are generally high and physically prominent (Büreg mountain, next to the district centre, being the prototype), whereas the rituals are less related to high mountains in the north. Furthermore, while it was often said that women were not allowed to climb several ovoo mountains in the south (at least traditionally), this was never said about ovoos in the north. As briefly discussed in the introduction, the north was traditionally identified with the Soyod Urianhai and shamanism and the south with Arig Urianhai and Buddhism, and this is reflected

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Figure 4.4  The Dayan Deerh cave. Photograph by the author.

in the fact that all southern ovoos are Yellow Religion ovoos, while Hilengiin ovoo and Bulnai ovoo in the north are red direction and shamanic respectively, according to Harhüü. He would always be the one to carry out the rituals at Bulnai ovoo and Hilengiin ovoo but could also conduct ceremonies at some

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of the more southern ovoos, although he did not consider these as important, and when carrying out a yellow ovoo ceremony in the company of his pupil and a yellow lama, the two red lamas sat on one side (west) of the ovoo and the yellow lama on the other (east).

Buddhism and Relatedness While the orientations outlined above are largely concordant with Humphrey’s distinction between chiefs or elders (including Buddhism) and shamans (1995; Humphrey with Onon 1996) in the Mongolian context, and Samuel’s distinction (1993) between clerical and shamanic Buddhism in Tibet, I believe that the workings of such directions in a new post-socialist context requires that their arguments be extended in a number of new directions. Firstly, Samuel’s argument is only made with regard to Tibet, and his use of shamanic is largely metaphorical. In the current Mongolian context, this association of non-clerical Buddhism with actual shamanism is made explicit. Secondly, the emerging religious practices of post-socialist times show the ramifications of the orientations within Mongolian Buddhism itself (red direction versus Yellow Religion), and as we have seen, even the red direction consists of yellow and black directions. Indeed, divisive practices seem to gain momentum from a red tradition that works by way of dividing from within, as it were, and by producing difference between (spirit) powers and Buddhist directions alike. We might even expect the red lama to have become ‘more red’ after the arrival of Yellow Religion lamas and that such schismogenetic processes (cf. Bateson 1935, 1958 [1936]) – as interactive processes leading to further differentiation  – will continue in the future. While it is true, then, that all traditions are worked ‘on’ as well as ‘in’ (Humphrey and Hürelbaatar 2013: 4) and are characterised by innovation (Swancutt 2012: xix), we may also say that some traditions, such as Red direction Buddhism, where publicly shared doctrinal teaching plays a less prominent role, are predicated more on idiosyncrasy and innovation than other traditions. Thirdly, the red direction should be directly related to post-socialist conditions and anti-social relations and seen as an actually practised relational ontology whereby suspicion and ‘war’ are generated in relations between human – and non-human – agents. On a final note, we may also relate the conclusions reached in this chapter to the findings outlined in previous chapters. There can be no doubt that some of the qualities of the yellow direction easily translate into official socialism and the formal hierarchies outlined in relation to Tsagaan Sar. Clothing in state institutions is generally formal (suits, school uniforms etc.),

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Figure 4.5  Medals, school uniforms, suits and ceremonial scarfs at the local school. Photograph by the author.

and public ‘socialist’ ceremonies, for example, have a distinct ‘traditional’ hierarchical socio-spatial layout. The stage of both the village hall and the school performance hall is at the respected ‘upper’ northern end of the room, and superiors are always seated to the north at public gatherings. The patron

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of one ovoo ceremony also held a strong position within the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party, and it was claimed by some (and strongly contested by others) that the major ovoo next to the district centre was the ovoo of the Democratic Party. In other words, ‘traditional’, religious, socialist and political hierarchies bear formal – and hence also substantial – similarities (cf. Dulam 2009; Pedersen 2011: 139–40), confer qualities on each other and are not always easily distinguishable. Socialist diplomas are placed on the household altar, next to (or replacing) Buddhist deities, and socialist medals often appear with ceremonial scarves on official occasions. The formal hierarchy described in Chapter 3 was also, as already seen, explicitly associated with yellow Buddhism and so are new local political identities based on the imagined prehistory of the Mongolian nation. In short, they are all centralised and hierarchical forms and emphasise knowledge and education as a cumulative progression towards transcendence, whether in the form of enlightenment, morality and Buddhahood; progress, communism and socialist women/men; or pure clan unification, formality and elders.23 The red modality, on the other hand, aligns with relations of enmity and suspicion as outlined mainly in the first chapters. One modality, then, is based on the essential identity and commonality of life forms; the other is concerned with different and irreducible life forms or agencies (and not abstract difference as in the idea of the universal nature of individuals) between whom relations are essentially problematic and uncertain. The point, however, is that the latter kind of relations is not what is left when the yellow modality fails but that distance, enmity and suspicion are actively produced in the specific cultural idioms – such as hel am and red Buddhism – of casting ­relationships and agency.

Notes   1. Some scholars talk about a distinct yet heterogenous ‘Mongolian Buddhism’ (Wallace 2015a: xvi), and others warn against the use of the term ‘Tibetan Buddhism’ because it may ‘obscure’ ‘historical realities’ (Elverskog 2006: 38–39). While I have retained the term, I thus use it with some reservations.   2. It is commonly held that ovoo ceremonies are followed by rain.   3. She was not so concerned, though, about what she was but accepted the term bariach. ‘Some people call me bariach,’ she would say.   4. Rich herdsmen were traditionally supportive of monasteries economically, thereby gaining religious merit (Hürelbaatar 1997).   5. Whereas a lama in the Tibetan context is a religious teacher, the term is used here for the Buddhist clergy in Mongolia, although many present-day lamas are not technically proper monks in the sense of having been ordained according to the canonical Buddhist monastic rules (Bareja-Starzynska and Havnevik 2006). Accordingly, the term is often used in a vague sense.

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  6. This historical section is mainly based on Bareja-Starzynska and Havnevik 2006, Bawden 1989, Charleux 2002, Heissig 1980, Jagchid and Hyer 1979, Jagchid 1988b, 1988c, 1988e and Moses 1977.   7. The two pillars, or the alliance and mutual support of religion and state, was a written tradition from the time of Khubilai Khan (thirteenth century), and the tradition seems to have been intentionally revived by Altan Khan (Bawden 1989: 29–30). Buddhism had, however, since its earliest known appearance in Mongolia in the fourth century assumed a direct political role in the state structure (Moses 1977: 13). As such, the dual principle of religion and state seems as old as Buddhism itself in the region. The dual principle implied that there are two spheres which influence the affairs of man: the sacred and the secular. It further says that each is inherently separate but equal with control of the sacred relegated to the priesthood, while the secular is the strict domain of the emperor, or his designated state officials. But the significance of the dual principle is that among the Mongols, at least, the emperor was considered to have special prerogatives which in effect made him and him alone the superior of both realms. (Moses 1977: 14–15)

  8. To counter the dangerous association of the religious and the secular sphere, the Manchu Qing Emperor made sure – after the death of the Second Javzandamba Hutagt – that future reincarnations were to be found in Tibet and not among the Mongolian nobility (Jagchid 1988d: 145).   9. Mongolia never achieved international recognition of her independence but was only recognised as a separate entity by China and Russia (Bawden 1989: 187–88). 10. Wallace notes that due to ‘the lack of centralized authority and unity among Mongolian Buddhists’, Tibetan lamas are often involved in the contemporary revitalisation of Buddhism in Mongolia (2015a: xxi). 11. Like most other phenomena that try to gain legitimacy in relation to Mongolian identity, Buddhism itself is also associated with Chinggis Khan in contemporary Mongolia (Wallace 2015b). 12. High writes about a contemporary Mongolian Buddhist lama who has similar worries about people’s individualistic and greedy concern with this-worldly prosperity and success rather than with caring for others and compassion (2017: 71–72, 99–101). 13. There are many historical examples of the influence of non-Gelugpa orders in the development of Mongolian Buddhism, and it is often difficult to separate this influence from the Gelugpa order itself. For example, although from the Jonangpa sect, Taranata came to figure as the reincarnate predecessor of Javzandamba Hutagt, the reincarnate head of Yellow Sect Buddhism in Mongolia, when the genealogy of the Javzandamba Hutagt was formed (Waddell 1972: 70–71; Bawden 1989: 58). 14. The cave is located in a remote place but is considered the site of a very strong spirit power, Dayan Deerh, who is one of the most important spirit powers even among shamans in Ulaanbaatar (Merli 2006: 261). This power is worshipped at an ovoo located inside the main cave (also see Galdanova et al. 1984; Even 1984, 1988–89; Birtalan 2011). 15. While the distinction between yellow, red and black ‘directions’ does seem ubiquitous in Mongolia, the line between them can be drawn differently. Swancutt, for example, writes that among Buryats in Bayandun in Easter Mongolia, the Red Sect lamas disapprove of and dissociate themselves from shamanism. Yet they do so in a context where yellow lamas seem to be absent and they – like Harhüü and unlike yellow lamas – still seem to stress rivalry (Swancutt 2012: 51–53). Pedersen also discusses the difference between black shamanism and yellow Buddhism, and while he sees it as a key distinction in the

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16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

life of the Darhad Mongols in the Hövsgöl region, he also argues that the distinction does not (only) divide individuals or groups from each other but is also an internal differentiation within each Darhad person (Pedersen 2011: 116–17). Lovon Badam Junai roughly means the teacher, master or instructor (lovon) who originated (junai) from a lotus (badam) (Hildegard Diemberger, personal communication). In some contexts (Inner Mongolia) it may indicate lay persons who have turned to religion (Caroline Humphrey, personal communication). Indeed, Padmasambhava is especially associated with red Buddhism (Humphrey and Ujeed 2013: 44) and rituals of folk religion in Mongolia and has always been a central figure in Mongolian Buddhism (Charleux 2002: 202–6). While one Mongolian specialist on Buddhism guessed that the lama may have come out of the Mongolian version of the Jonangpa tradition, it is common for contemporary Mongolian nuns and monks not to know with certainty to which order they belong (Kollmar-Paulenz 2003: 23). This lama had been the pupil of Yonzon Hamba, a very high-ranking and supposedly Red lama, close to the Bogd Khan (see Atwood 2004: 105; Kaplonski 2008a: 321–23, 2014). Tarni comes from dharani (a term deriving from a Sanskrit root), properly referring to ‘a short mnemonic string of words, holding the meaning succinctly of an intention which in normal speech would need to be much more prolix’ (Snellgrove 1987: 122). The meaning of dharani is very close to the meaning of mantra, a more general term for magical formulae (Snellgrove 1987: 122, 141), and the Mongolian word tarni is usually just taken to mean mantra. In general, the Yellow Religion is not involved in cursing (haraal) or hel am (A. Hürelbaatar, personal communication). Swancutt draws attention to a similar distinction between rivalry and Buddhist virtue in her village study of a group of Buryats in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (2012: 29–30). Samuel distinguishes between the Bodhi Orientation, the Karma Orientation and the Pragmatic Orientation in Buddhism (1993). This distinction may partly be aligned with the distinction between national Buddhism and modernising transnational Buddhism (Elverskog 2006). Such transcendence could be exemplified by the Mongol tradition (now widely practised again) of laying the body of deceased persons, especially high-ranking individuals, on the ground (il tavih) on high mountains, close to the sky. Mountains and high-ranking people seem to be the incarnation of supreme transcendence.

Chapter 5

Concealed Agencies Divination, Loss and Magical Objects

Y On the surface of it, the unknown, or simply the lack of knowledge, is a problem in present-day Chandman’-Öndör District. As we have seen, Tibetan Buddhism was popularised and institutionalised in Mongolian areas in the sixteenth century and emerged as the strongest institution in Mongolian society at the beginning of the twentieth century when the Manchu Qing dynasty collapsed, but all this came to an abrupt end during socialism. While some people secretly continued to carry out rituals at home and kept religious objects in the bottom of their household chests, away from public view, and even though knowledge of religious persons and texts was sometimes retained in ambiguous semi-public discourses (Humphrey 1994a), it is hard not to conceive of this as an historical rupture and detachment with the past. Most religious practitioners were forced to abandon their religious practices or executed, and all monasteries and most religious objects in Chandman’-Öndör District were destroyed during the Stalin-inspired purges of the 1930s. Combined with the socialist state’s ‘technologies of forgetting’ (Buyandelger 2013: 67–97) and a general ideological campaign against ‘superstition’ during socialism, such destruction has led to a major loss of canonical magico-religious knowledge. Ochirbat, the Yellow Religion lama, explained to me that socialism had changed the minds of the younger generation, who learned, as he expressed it, to destroy old religious objects with ease. Certainly, the transmission of religious knowledge was risky in socialist times, and now (people say) the old, wise Buddhist lamas have all died. If any potential students of magico-religious traditions were present during

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socialism, the teachers were  – quite understandably  – reluctant to accept them, and religious practices in the post-socialist era are often constrained by the shortage of lamas. People are therefore acutely aware of a ‘loss’ and consider this particular loss of knowledge as a hindrance to the contemporary practice of religion, often – as we have already seen – claiming not to be strong believers in anything. People also imagine the past as a time when this loss was absent; back then, they would say, people knew all those things. So a common concern among people in Chandman’-Öndör District – and Mongolia in general – seems to be: how should one practise religion in the face of this loss, when one does not know how to do it or what kind of powers one is dealing with? By turning this concern on its head, I shall argue in this chapter that such loss has a productive side to it and that it is partly from – and in – this loss that magical technologies and powers emerge. The concern with loss and absence as productive categories necessitates a reconsideration of the widespread native Mongolian assumption that the amount of magico-religious knowledge and the magnitude and extent of religious practice correlates with people’s strength of belief, as in the often-heard conflation of lost knowledge with lost religion. This quantitative conflation implies that the more you worship and know, the more you are thought to believe, and the more you believe, the more you are thought to worship and know. A further implication is that people will cease to believe if they lose the knowledge of how to worship (see also Swancutt 2012: 6). Obviously, this indigenous suggestion is not easily dismissed. Some people do reject religion, at least on certain occasions, and people in rural areas often avoid relating to spiritually charged places and objects precisely because they do not know how to relate to them (see also Delaplace 2013: 54). Many people in the area, for instance, will not worship Dayan Deerh, the famous cave cult site in the neighbouring TsagaanÜür District, because they are unacquainted with the correct procedures. Similarly, it is not uncommon for people to hand over religious items to a temple (cf. Bareja-Starzynska and Havnevik 2006: 212) simply because they do not know how to treat the items properly and, as a result, consider them dangerous (which, it should be noted, gives a novel and thought-provoking perspective on the trade in religious objects in post-socialist Mongolia1). Yet it is immediately clear that it is not because they do not ‘believe’ in spirit powers that people avoid such places and items, but rather they avoid them, and avoid relating to them, because they do ascribe the possibility of agency to them.2 Hence, the issue is that avoidance arises from an uneasy relation to the power of such agencies, a power that has come to be seen as erratic and uncontrolled because such locations and items have come to be imagined as lost objects and places  – lost to present-day people, lost to the present (in that they belong to the past) and lost to the past (in that they survived into

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the present), yet very present as lost. They are what one might call a present absence because they point to an absence by virtue of their presence3 and, hence, they are also absent presences in that they are shadowy, enigmatic and incomplete manifestations (cf. Højer 2006/2007, 2009; Delaplace and Empson 2007: 209; Holbraad and Willerslev 2007: 331, 337; Bille et al. 2010; Buyandelger 2013; Delaplace 2013; Kristensen 2015).

Socialism and the Labour of the Negative Before proceeding along these lines, it is useful first to explore the context of Mongolian socialism in relation to religion. During the socialist period (roughly 1921–1990), the Mongolian cities became associated with industrialisation and development, and the sparsely populated countryside, home to villagers and nomadic pastoralists, came to be considered as a space to be civilised and urbanised (Humphrey and Sneath 1999: 301; Sneath 2006: 147), at least in public ideology. The implication was that ‘city versus countryside’ was socialism versus a backward, feudal and traditional way of life and that history was to be written as ‘the progressive nature of the socialist regime’ (Kaplonski 1997: 57). In this way, the spatial distinction was simultaneously a temporal evolutionary distinction between pre-socialism and socialism. It was essential to the identity of socialism – and to the realisation of this identity – to depart from the past and the periphery, and moving to a new historical condition was to revolt against the past and ‘remote territories’. Things had to be destroyed, and an often specified number of enemies had to be killed (Žižek 1999: 40; Humphrey 2002b: 29; Shimamura 2004: 208); the summoning of enemies, real or imagined, was a precondition for revolution and progress. In the words of one Mongolian: ‘They showed my father a paper saying he was an enemy of the people, and was to be arrested … It wasn’t necessary [to explain]. He was an enemy’ (Kaplonski 1999: 97). The socialist regime thus envisioned that the past – i.e. the enemy – was not the present and the present was not the past and, hence, that the past was, and had to be, lacking in and lost to the present in a profound sense. The purges of the 1930s were the most violent eruption of socialist modernity and its strategy of opposition, revolution and historical rupture. More than 20,000 people were killed during the purges (Kaplonski 1999: 95, 2014: 207), most of them Buddhist lamas, and 760 out of 771 Buddhist temples and monasteries were demolished (Baabar 1999: 370). This strategy of radical critique, however, had the unintended consequence of also bringing into being what it was trying to destroy. ‘The labour of the negative’, a phrase coined by Hegel and more recently appropriated by Taussig (1999;

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see also Højbjerg 2002), is a notion that captures the dynamics of these unintended consequences; it is also a notion which, eventually, will lead us back to the range of ethnographic phenomena mentioned above where lack of knowledge as knowledge of lack was related to magical potency. The labour of the negative points to the dialectic logic that socialism’s attack on its (imagined) enemy backfired because not only did socialism’s imagination of superstition serve to eradicate such superstition, it also – while eradicating it – brought it into existence as superstition, i.e. as something that was important and powerful enough to necessitate destruction. In other words, the force of destruction and the sheer amount of energy expended on superstition had a tendency to mystify ‘mystification’. It fashioned an entity and gave it potential life. In this sense, the labour of the negative may be compared with the logic of hel am, as hel am concerns the fact that extreme and definite statements (‘she is good/bad/beautiful’ etc.) are dangerous because they, in stating things too clearly, evoke opposites/enemies and affect. A great deal of ‘superstition’ was lost during socialism, clearly, but simultaneously an imagined space of absence was created. People were made to know that certain things existed of which they should not know; strong attention was brought to the fallacies of religious beliefs and to the things and powers subject to annihilation. We just need to remind ourselves that many stories are circulating in Mongolia about how the socialist destruction of shamanic paraphernalia backfired and led to the violent and mystical death of the communists destroying it. An old woman in Tsagaannuur District in the northernmost part of Mongolia once told me of a man who drowned after burning a shamanic costume. Likewise, a revolutionary in the neighbouring Tsagaan-Üür District is said to have caused his own death and the death of all his descendants after burning a shamanic tree at Dayan Deerh in 1930 (Yanjmaa 2000: 30). While nobody dared to touch the sacred stone cairn at the Dayan Deerh cave cult site, one man, I was told, tried to shoot down a piece of silver from the wooden pole of a destroyed Buddhist temple nearby, and he died soon after, along with his wife and five or six children. Similar stories are heard from other parts of Mongolia (see e.g. Bruun 2006: 131). Previously suppressed – and hence, angry – spirits are (re)emerging among the Buryat Mongols in Eastern Mongolia to take their revenge for being neglected in socialist times (Buyandelgeriyn 2007; Buyandelger 2013). Some of them – the souls of the victims of political violence that did not received a proper burial (the so-called uheer) – ‘were made into outcasts of the socialist state’, and their tormented souls are now returning to make trouble (Buyandelgeriyn 2007: 135; Buyandelger 2013; compare with the wild and nameless shurkul and barkan spirits of the Daur Mongols (Humphrey with Onon 1996: 190)). The destruction, so to speak, recharged the batteries of the shamanic paraphernalia, sacred trees and ‘supernatural’ powers destroyed.

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Figure 5.1  Remains of a monastery at the Üür river. Photograph by the author.

Now that socialism has been abandoned, people are left with this awareness of absence. What was considered to be a feudal past full of superstition in socialist times is today a potent space for religious innovation and magical agency. ‘People,’ Swancutt writes, ‘are likely to produce new knowledge when they are not working with a repertoire that has been intact for generations’ (2012: 3), and Buyandelgeriyn (2007; Buyandelger 2013) presents a substantial amount of thought-provoking ethnography that supports this claim (see also Abrahms-Kavunenko 2013). She – like me and Swancutt – points to the productiveness of the lost Mongolian past when writing that ‘the more the Buryats [Mongols] believe in the loss of that tradition during socialism, the more shamanic rituals they generate’ (2007: 128; see also Buyandelger 2013: 37). Buyandelgeriyn, however, attends less to the constitutive indeterminate nature and generative capabilities of perceived absence within magical workings. Her understanding of emerging shamanic practices and spirit powers is mainly based on the Buryat Mongols’ attempt to come to terms with historical loss, tragic past events and existing post-socialist uncertainties, and she relies mainly  – like many others (see e.g. Hangartner 2011: 88–122) – on implicit ‘emotional–functional’ explanations such as the Buryat Mongols’ need to find meaning, construct identity and history,4 or alleviate suffering. Shamanic practices are means for dealing with ‘anxieties and uncertainties’ (2007: 127; see also Buyandelger 2013: 7), for making ‘misfortunes

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meaningful’ (2007: 127, 128, 142), for offering explanations (2007: 130), for making ‘their sufferings bearable’ (2007: 142) and for controlling ‘the flow of misfortunes’ (2007: 132), and ‘capitalism’ (Buyandelger 2013: 11) or ‘economic anxiety’, she explains, ‘has pushed the Buryats to seek help from shamans’ (2007: 128). While this is one important way of framing absence, I am – for now – less interested in actually existing historical loss (although this obviously enters our equation) and the real traumas of past and present, or in what people psychologically, emotionally and economically need to do, so to speak, than in what certain magical and modernist technologies do to people by working with and creating conspicuous and productive gaps that constantly defer any clear understanding of the powers dealt with. While everyone acknowledges that things – and revolutions – certainly did happen in the past (and also brought about deeply traumatic events), the historical gaps, then, take on particularly strong significance when merging with magical domains constituted in a strong presence of absence – such as the domains of anti-social relations or concealed magical agencies. Harhüü, the red direction lama, for example, was much more inclined than others to evoke and engage with historical gaps and past mysteries, and the agencies he dealt with were, as I will soon show in more detail, always largely concealed. Following from this, absence cannot simply be seen as a by-product of socialist modernity but is also intrinsic to the magical technologies – and the implied anti-social relations – that will be explored ethnographically in the following sections; like modernity, divination and magical objects can create imagined spaces of productive absence. Hence, the following ethnography will show how magical technologies join the modern (post)socialist space by making absence and suspense present and how magical practices are fuelled by absence and cultivate it.

Divination Divination has been defined as ‘culturally sanctioned methods of arriving at a judgement of the unknown through a consideration of incomplete evidence’ (Willis 1996). A similar conception of divination as ‘a judgement of the unknown’ or as providing a culturally conditioned transformation from uncertainty to certainty is manifest in many writings on divination (for example Evans-Pritchard 1950 [1937]; Park 1963; Tambiah 1985c: 128; Peek 1991a, 1991b; Parkin 1991). Indeed, while criticising previous reductionist approaches to divination, Holbraad has recently argued that divinatory pronouncements ‘must be true’ and that truth in divination has ‘the peculiar characteristic of being beyond doubt’ (2010: 269, emphasis in original). Whereas this discussion about the ontological alterity of divination

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itself does raise thought-provoking questions about truth in divination as it presents itself to practitioners who ‘believe the verdicts’ (Holbraad 2012: 69), it also leaves out the fact that the closure, or the determination, explanation or identification provided by the act of divination, even if motile, can be accompanied by an equally important production of suspense and insecurity, at least among my interlocutors in post-socialist Mongolia. In line with this, I shall propose that, instead of looking at divination, as it often takes place in Chandman’-Öndör District, as a process only of closing down possibilities – i.e. finding causes (Evans-Pritchard 1950 [1937]), legitimising decisions (Park 1963), maintaining social structure (Turner 1975: 236) or relieving anxiety (Jahoda 1971) – we should rather – or simultaneously – look at it as a displacement of anxiety and sometimes even as a producer of concern. In so doing, divination in Northern Mongolia may be seen as a process in which post-socialist religious innovation, and the evocation of relatively new spiritual powers, implies unease or apprehension as much as it confronts or removes it. While it is not my purpose to make a full survey of divination in Chandman’-Öndör District, a few comments on the local context of divination are nevertheless appropriate. The most prominent diviners that I know of in the area include Harhüü, the male red direction lama, an old woman (sometimes referred to as an udgan, a female shaman) in the district centre, a teenage girl from the local school and an old female Darhad shaman, whose summer camp is located in the Arig River valley on the way to the administrative centre of neighbouring Tsagaan-Üür District. Harhüü, divines by dice and coins; the old woman in the district centre uses a rosary and a single old dice; the young girl divines by using cards or forty-one small stones; and the old female shaman likewise divines by using forty-one stones. While a great deal could obviously be said about such techniques (see Bawden 1963a; Swancutt 2006, 2012: 154–84; Hangartner 2011: 114), my concern here is more with the effect of divination on the people who use it (who are mostly ignorant of such techniques) and the way in which outcomes are reached between diviner and client  – i.e. with the creation of particular forms of knowledge in divination sessions. The effect of such sessions was based on the intervention in people’s lives by the diviner through what could only vaguely  – and only when questioned directly about it  – be referred to as a gift, talent or ability to see what other people cannot (cf. Favret-Saada 1980 [1977]: 21; Swancutt 2012: 38–39). The diviners, then, were diviners by ability rather than by gender, age or other social status. Harhüü, who features prominently in the accounts below, claimed that his abilities had to do with the fact that he could connect to certain waves (dolgio) and that he could say things only by virtue of being located between the magnetic fields of earth (gazar) and

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heaven (tenger). At some point, he also asserted that he drew his (divining) energy (enyergi) from vodka and that his abilities were strongly improved after an almost fatal car accident in Buryatia, Russia, a few years ago.5 The young girl had seen one of her relatives divine when she was only a little child. The relative had then taught her how to do it and she had proven to be unusually able. Her great-grandmother was believed to have been a gifted diviner, and it was assumed by some that the girl had inherited the ability from her. At first, she did not like to divine, but her parents did not want to lose the opportunity to bring a much-needed income into the family. Diviners are paid, but the amount of money – or ceremonial scarves (hadag), cigarettes and other presents  – is decided by the client and presented as a gift. The old female shaman from the neighbouring district obviously had abilities from being a shaman, and the same holds true for the old woman in Chandman’-Öndör District centre, who almost became a shaman (or possibly did become one) when she was young and had also been taught by a relative, a high-ranking lama. The repute and credibility assigned to the different diviners varies, and they all work on their own. They are simply known by their individual ability – sometimes in general (‘a good diviner’), sometimes in specific matters (‘good at finding lost animals’, ‘good at curing frightened children’ etc.). People often consult a diviner because they have a problem or a worry that needs to be addressed and sometimes simply because the diviner is in the vicinity. A diviner can be sought if domestic animals are lost or in case of more serious problems, but when the diviner visits a family it seems that everyone present  – and sometimes even neighbouring families  – feel like inquiring about something. Worries, even quite serious ones, seem to be everywhere, at least when facing a diviner. A functionalist explanation of a need-matches-demand kind would thus seem inadequate because the ‘need’ also arises from the diviner’s sheer presence, and because the need does not have to be pragmatic but is also about an inability to resist the temptation of knowing in the vicinity of a diviner. A lama, who can both divine and do household ceremonies, will therefore bring out demands and worries as much as he will necessarily meet them. This would particularly be the case with Harhüü, who often travelled around the area. The queries of clients only rarely have to do with predicting future events but are mostly about investigating present misfortunes or worries, some of the most common being lost or stolen domestic animals, economic problems (more loss (garz) than income), lack of success in ‘work’ (ajil), human and animal diseases or accidents and hel am. When an explanation is sought for misfortune, the diviner will often attribute it to the wrath of various spirit agencies (such as animals consecrated to a deity or spirit power (seter) and spirit owners of mountains, rivers and springs (lus savdag)), malign occult

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powers related to disputes or jealousy (hel am) or having consumed substances in other households or being in possession of other people’s items (e.g. old knives, which are often related to misfortune in Mongolia). The divination sessions are usually over within a few minutes, and I have only once seen other people asked to leave because the matter at hand was too personal. Yet clients do sometimes tend to consult the diviner privately when nobody is listening.

Divination as Elicitation Divination sessions work by eliciting knowledge, and while this knowledge is predicated on the diviner’s intervention, it can only  – as we shall see below – be produced through a convergence of this intervention with the client’s prior knowledge. All the following three sessions took place in a ger in the countryside with Harhüü, the red lama, yet the female client in the first example is not a member of the host household: Lama: What was your name? Woman: Erdenezaya [lama shakes the small box with dice and looks at the result] Lama: Is there a spring (bulag)? Woman: Here? Lama: Yes. Woman: There is no spring. Lama: [repeats] There is no spring (?). Another woman: What about the spring at the winter camp at Bor Tolgoi [name of hill]? Lama: Did you dig the spring (using wood or stone)? And did you then drink from it (Uusan tal baina uu)? Woman: Maybe kids … Lama: Making the hole of the spring bigger … [they keep talking about the spring – the lama says that he can see that she did drink from a spring and the woman does not know which spring he is referring to] Lama: There is a little bit of lusyn gem (misdeed/harm of lus).6 Did you drink water from a spring? Woman: There is one at the summer camp. Lama: You drank. How are your dreams (züüd) and presentiments (zön)? Woman: In the back of my head there is something and it hurts … it really hurts … for three years … Lama: In your family, on the old man’s side [probably her husband], there is something related to a seter.7 On your side, a liquid/thin (shingen) thing came into the lus bulag.8 That is the problem of your side. Because of that

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your dreams and premonitions have become uncomfortable (evgüi). You have chaotic dreams about death or dead things. Maybe you dream that you are falling down and die. That kind of dream. [woman confirms while he talks] Woman: Yes, I am having strange dreams, for example I am hit or beaten by someone. I have them a lot. Lama: You have those dreams because of something that has to do with the spirit owner (lusyn yum). Woman: I believe that only you can help me. Lama: Now we have ice and snow outside and the lus has not taken off its cover. When it gets warmer, a way out has to be found as regards the lus. Woman: Is it at the summer camp or the winter camp [referring to the lus]? Lama: Let’s see. [he throws a single dice several times] Woman [while the lama is throwing the dice]: At the summer camp there is spring water (har us). Lama: Yes, there is a big har us. That’s the one, at the summer camp. Woman: So the one at the summer camp is the one. My son got married in  the autumn. During the wedding they were using a lot of water from that spring. They used ladles and the children did it in a careless (hamaagüi) way. Lama: Maybe the ladles had milk on them. That is why it might be a little bit angry. There is nothing else. Everything else is fine.

A question is never followed by a straightforward answer from the diviner. The lama starts out by asking a question, and only after having made sure that a spring exists9 does he move in a more specific direction: harm was done to the spirit owner of the spring or the spring itself. Often he uses phrases that are neither ‘statements’ nor ‘questions’ (‘there is no spring (?)’) and that only appear as one or the other after the client’s reply, or when the session has finished, or indeed never appear as one or the other. She drank from the spring, he states/asks, but by the end of the session, they seem to have forgotten that drinking may have been an issue.10 After talking about the woman’s dreams and presentiments – and after mentioning that her husband’s family have a problem with a seter – the lama ascertains that the problems have to do with lus (the spirit owner of the spring) and, more specifically, with the spring at the summer camp. She realises that some children may have used unclean ladles when fetching water for her son’s wedding (milk and pure water should never be mixed). This is likely, as the same ladle is often used for water, milk, blood, tea and food, and they agree on the conclusion. The relationship with the lus has been invoked as damaged. The indeterminacy is kept present, and an open space is left for interpretation and counter-interpretation because the end point, one may say, is a collaborative product. Consider now the second example with the same diviner and client:

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Woman: I would like to ask about Boldoo, my son, who has just married. Lately, he started drinking a lot. Lama: What year is he?11 Woman: He is ‘chicken’?12 [lama shakes box with dice] Lama: The food at a wedding was [or ‘made him’] impure? A ‘reading’ (unshlaga) against impurity has to be made for him. Woman: Has it been there for a long time? Lama: It seems to me that it has been there for a long time. Did he start drinking vodka the year before last? Woman: Yes. The year before getting married he started drinking … Lama: Here it says that he started drinking vodka two years ago. He drank vodka at a family (ail) and that vodka was impure.13 Now he has become addicted to vodka (arhind dontoi boloh). Woman: He has become completely addicted (büüür [the long pronunciation of the vowel serves to emphasise] dontoi) Lama: He really likes it (sonirholtoi) … Woman: It’s VERY true … Lama: The only thing he needs is vodka … Woman: Yes … Lama: We need to make the impurity go away. Woman: Could you please do it? Lama: No, we are in a hurry. Woman: It is exactly true that it is two years ago.

From this session, it is even more obvious how the probing takes place. ‘Did he start drinking the year before last’ is followed by the client’s confirmation, and the lama only then states that ‘here it says that he started drinking vodka two years ago’. But consider also how such a circle of confirmation develops in the last part of the dialogue. At first, the lama simply states that the son in question has become addicted to vodka. The woman then validates his interpretation by saying that he has become completely addicted. The lama is encouraged and exclaims that ‘he likes it’, and the woman further encourages him by saying that it is very true. The lama is now in no doubt and concludes that ‘the only thing he needs is vodka’. In the final example, the client is the wife of the household in which these divination sessions were taking place: Woman: I always have a dream about a person who is dead. Lama: What’s your name? What year are you? Woman: Monkey. I always meet and talk to a dead person. [lama shakes the box with dice] Lama: This seter [which he apparently sees in the dice], is it following (dagax) you(r line).

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Woman: … [unclear] … Lama: Whose seter is it? Woman: It is Baatar’s seter [her husband’s]. Lama: Was there a lama in your family in old times? Woman: They say there was. Lama: Who was he? Woman: Maybe my dad or some close relative to him. Lama: Where did he put his religious objects (shüteen)? On a mountain? Woman: I don’t know, I really don’t know. I was told that there was such a person. Lama: Here [in the dice] it says that the man in question put his ancestral religious objects on the top of a high mountain. Those gods and religious objects (burhan shüteen) – and different kinds of things – sometimes think that they want to see you.14 Woman: I was adopted. Why do those things follow me? Lama: They are following you, and sometimes they want some offerings from you. Woman: It is impossible to find those things. Lama: We cannot find them, but we should respond (hariulaa hiih) and make offerings to it once a year. Woman: So we have to make offerings (deej).15 Lama: You have to make offerings. Woman: To my place of birth? Lama: To your mother and father’s land. And pray inside yourself for those gods and religious objects. And ask them to stay where they are. You have to remain calm. Offer deej, make libations [offering of milk] and serjim [offering of vodka]. Everything else is fine. It is good to dream about dead persons. Woman: I meet them/him. Lama: Don’t be scared of them and don’t suspect (sejigleh) them.

Again, a similar structure of dialogue emerges. ‘Where did he put his religious objects?’ is followed by ‘I don’t know’, and only then does the lama reveal what can be read from the dice. The issue is not the extent to which the lama is simply making it all up but that even to him the divination is not necessarily definite or providing unambiguous answers. The dialogue is integral to the divination session, and this is, at least implicitly, recognised by both diviner and client. Swancutt describes how she, when learning to divine during her fieldwork among Buryats in eastern Mongolia, became an ‘apprentice’ of her inquirers, who guided her to interpret her own cards. Much like she thus realised how Buryat inquirers have ‘a substantial influence on any given divinatory pronouncement’ (2012: 46) and that divinatory findings ‘are reached through cross-referencing’ (2012: 163–72), the divination sessions that I experienced were sites where the client and the diviner

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drew on the input of each other to elicit something that neither of them could have said on their own. The diviner would obviously have difficulties divining when there was no point of departure in a relatively known context, and often – at least so it seemed – he or she would have to draw on prior knowledge of the area and the persons involved. When the lama divined for me, for example, he only came up with some very general statements about my future prosperity (how was he supposed to know about the prospects of being an anthropologist) and ownership of a ‘Mercedes Benz’! Nevertheless – and this is essential – for the relation to work productively as divination, an extraordinary ability to connect with what is beyond the ordinary has to be assumed. The diviner is thought to have this ability to reveal and to bring the dialogue seriously to bear on this revelation and, for that reason, the diviner’s questions hold a propositional or suggestive value – legitimised by his ability – which makes them work as ‘indirect persuasion’. Zeitlyn writes that [t]he questions [at divination sessions] imply a line of interpretation. The client assents to the overall interpretation by assenting to individual questions. The examples Werbner gives [Zeitlyn is discussing and referring to Werbner 1989] could serve as a model for anthropologists of how not to ask questions. These questions do not just demand information, they convey the assumptions and intentions of the questioner. They therefore serve as indirect persuasion. By agreeing to answer a question, by recognising it as plausible and relevant, the client assents not just to the question itself, but also to the overall drift of the diviner’s interpretation. (Zeitlyn 2001: 234–35; emphasis in original)

This is what distinguishes divination sessions from ordinary conversation (but also what sometimes makes ordinary conversation divination-like). While I have now established that divination is a collaborative effort of elicitation or indirect persuasion, this has not moved me any closer to answering the main question of this chapter: persuasion or elicitation of what?

Batmönh: Driver and Businessman In order to answer this question and before attending to the above sessions in more detail, I will now turn my attention to a more thorough case study of a local driver named Batmönh. Batmönh was married and had two children, and when I first met him, he lived in a ger next to his impressive – but yet unfinished  – wooden house inside his compound in the village centre of Chandman’-Öndör District. He was around forty years old, grew up in socialist times and had never been particularly occupied with religious

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aspects of life. In the last couple of years, he had been trying to conduct business and had, with his wife, opened a shop in the village centre. The account begins with a short divination session between Harhüü and Batmönh, who was our driver on a trip to the Dayan Deerh cave, just prior to a ceremony at the ovoo in the cave: Lama: Well, Batmönh … [the lama shakes his box with dice, then organises them and looks at them] Lama: Good … ganzagalaa16 is bad … profit (olz) has become bad … the entrance of profit (olzyn am) has closed … the door for loss (garz) is a little bit open (neegdeh) … the things you find are not really working/profitable (olson molson yum, yum bolohgüi baina)… [while pointing at some of the dice in an explanatory fashion, like ‘you see’] the two ganzagalaa are empty … if some [profit] comes into this ganzagalaa, it always comes out again … health and everything else is fine Batmönh: … [unclear murmuring] … Lama: They are all fine [probably talking about other aspects of life on which the divination has something to say] [Lama packs down the box with dice and asks for the ceremony to begin] [some time passes] Batmönh: Now what shall I/we do? (odoo yaah ve?) Lama: Pray well.

Batmönh’s family is short of income, and his outgoings are a problem too. Money cannot be accumulated, or even kept, because there is nothing to contain it, nothing to keep it inside – and Batmönh is worried yet only told to pray well. Later that evening, having seen the few remains of the old Dayan Deerh monastery (including a place covered with human bones where a treasure, according to Harhüü, had been buried by lamas) and visited some more families on our way, we came to a ger around midnight. Harhüü knew the family, it turned out, and he went straight to wake them up, which is not unusual in Mongolia. The lama and his friend, the head of the family, had not seen each other for a while, and soon vodka was served and drinking began. After sharing a fair amount of vodka, Batmönh once more brought up his worries. Harhüü told Batmönh that he basically had a money problem and was in need of finances to finish his house. A long time ago, the lama continued, he himself had warned Batmönh about building a house at that particular place. Batmönh had ignored the warning and that was why he now had money problems. Batmönh revealed that, actually, other people had warned him too, and the lama replied that either the house had to be moved or a ceremony held. A week later, Batmönh himself told me the full story of the lama’s warning. He himself, it turned out, had previously asked Harhüü whether he

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should build the house on this particular spot, and the lama had not even bothered to divine but had concluded straight away that he should not. The lama later specified that Batmönh had built the house on the veins of a ‘spirit owner of a spring’ (bulag lus savdag). Batmönh remembered that two cracks then appeared in the ground of his compound, one next to his ger (where they currently lived) and one next to his new house (which was not yet finished). From the ground of the family compound just behind them, a spring suddenly emerged. This family had had to move and, in the autumn, the husband died. The spring water, however, had already started running through the cracks on the ground of Batmönh’s compound. This had obviously not been a good sign, and the lama had offered to conduct a ceremony if he wanted to continue building the house. Batmönh concluded that we probably cannot live without religion and then stated that he had previously not cared much about it but that now he was careful. He definitely wanted to invite the lama to carry out the ceremony. When I came back more than a year later, I was present at yet another divination session with Batmönh. In the meantime, the building of the house had finished, and this time Batmönh asked a female shaman in the neighbouring district for advice. The following is a transcription of the dialogue at that divination session: Batmönh: The stability of my home (ger)? Shaman: Your home’s stability? Batmönh: Yes, my home’s stability, and then some dispute/cursing (hel am) has come about from this spring onwards … Shaman: … if it is there or not? Batmönh: Yes, and then we have a shop, too, and it does not run that well. I was wondering what the problem is? [while smoking a cigarette she starts divining by making nine small piles from forty-one stones) Shaman: What year are you? Batmönh: I am dragon. My wife is also dragon, we are four, we have two children. [she is divining with the stones for quite a while and then looks at the result] Shaman: You are a driver? Batmönh: Yes. Shaman: Does your wife have a job? Batmönh: She does not have any job (ajil), but she works privately in our shop.17 Shaman: There might be a small obstacle (bartsad), but I don’t know where or what it is. It seems that there is no hel am but maybe you have an obstacle. Batmönh: What kind of obstacle might that be? [she starts collecting the stones again]

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Shaman: Maybe a hii yumny [‘spirit’, lit. ‘air thing’18] obstacle. How many children do you have? Batmönh: Two, a son and a daughter. [having gathered the stones, she slowly mixes them with one hand and makes nine new piles on the table in front of her] Shaman: Why did this come out [looking at the stones], this obstacle? Batmönh: What kind of obstacle – for my wife and me, or for the kids? Shaman: I think that you haven’t done anything wrong, but there is some obstacle. When you go on trips you should pray, my son. There is probably some obstacle. Batmönh: Is the stability of the home okay? Shaman: The stability is okay, but maybe there is some black hel am. How old are your kids? Batmönh: The big one is in seventh grade; the small one is entering fifth grade. Shaman: Why is it like this? [the shaman is referring to the layout of the stones] Batmönh: Can you do some healing? [she gathers and mixes the stones and slowly makes nine new piles while the conversation continues] Shaman: There is probably an obstacle. [She is looking at the stones]. Why did it come out like this? Batmönh: Did something appear that should not have appeared? Shaman: Something wrong is still coming out. Batmönh: What is it? Shaman: Yes, what is it? Have some relatives of your parents died? Batmönh: No, but in the spring two guys died and they are kind of related to my father, but they are not our relatives. Shaman: In the two previous divinations there were obstacles, and I’ve asked how serious they are. And it is not close to life and death (am’ nasnaas hol). Batmönh: How do we fix it? Shaman: You should take more care of your kids. Maybe they are in trouble. Probably someone is going to die. When there are four here, it is bad [while pointing to the stones]. Probably someone will die. Batmönh: Should a lama be visited? Shaman: There is some obstacle in your work. Batmönh: Can you fix it here? Can you do some offerings (deej)? [she gathers the stones] Shaman: Do you have any burhan or tenger yum [i.e. things related to deities or heaven]? Do you have a seter or something like that? Batmönh: My in-laws have got a seter. It is a painting of a goat. Shaman: The seter of Damdin (a Buddhist deity)19, a red seter. Is it a picture? Batmönh: It is a picture. On my side there is no seter or anything like that. On my wife’s side – her mother has got one. Shaman: Her mother’s seter. The seter was not hurt or impure, but you have an obstacle.

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Batmönh: Is it mine or my wife’s? My wife travels a lot … to the city or for work. [she makes nine new piles of stones] Shaman: If it is a goat, it is for Damdin. Batmönh: I haven’t really looked at it, but it was a picture of a goat. Shaman: Are things offered to that seter? Batmönh: I don’t know, but they might be. Shaman: Probably they do offerings. Batmönh: Is it important for us? Shaman: It is fine for you to offer things for that seter – to burn incense (san tavih) and give offerings (deej örgöh). Shaman: They don’t really do offerings for that thing. It is fine for you. It seems that they have forgotten about their seter. It is good to offer. Batmönh: Who? Me or my wife? Shaman: Your wife’s side should offer things. Some things can be offered to that seter by a shaman. Batmönh: By a shaman? Shaman: Yes, to Damdin seter. Some time has passed without offerings. Batmönh: My mother in-law herself takes care of the seter. Shaman: [repeating] They take care. Batmönh: Yes. It shouldn’t be related to us. [Batmönh says to the other people in the room that he is not that lucky] Shaman: How old is your mother-in-law? Batmönh: More than sixty. Shaman: It is not you and it is not your wife who has some misfortune (gai). It seems to be someone who has high blood pressure. Batmönh: On my wife’s side there are people who have high blood pressure, my wife’s older sister. Should we be careful about that person? Shaman: There is some harm (gem) related to high blood pressure, an obstacle. It will be suitable to offer things for the seter and burhan tenger (deities and heaven).20

Apart from once more accounting for divination as an exercise of elicitation, the case study of Batmönh exposes a few features worth paying attention to. First of all, his worries are initially and primarily directed at his own household. The household is the point of reference and the ‘container’ of wealth; it is the store into which profit enters and from where wealth is lost. One year later, the worries are once more directed at his household; the problems are the stability of his nuclear family, cursing and lack of increment. Batmönh is also quite persistent when he insists that the seter of his wife’s mother cannot have anything to do with his own household; according to Batmönh and most other informants, the seter stands in a relationship only to the individual household. And, at the end of the last divination, the problem was in fact related to the household who had the seter, and the

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problem of Batmönh had now become how to pass this piece of information on to his in-laws. Secondly, we can observe that a transformation is taking place with regard to his anxieties. It is clear from the outset that Batmönh uses the opportunity to express general worries, some of which are not uncommon in the Mongolian countryside. The shaman keeps mentioning an obstacle in the first part of the dialogue, and Batmönh is worried and concerned about this unidentified difficulty. At one point, the shaman mentions that someone is going to die (after saying that ‘it is not close to life and death’) and things are then related to the seter of the mother-in-law and, as such, removed from Batmönh’s nuclear family. The problem has been fundamentally transformed in the process (from worries about family, disputes and business to the fact that ‘someone in the extended family is going to die’) and is now narrowed down to be concerned with a seter. Immediately following the session, a small mitigating ritual was performed by the shaman, and Batmönh now knew that he should inform his family-in-law about the seter. He later declared that the shaman was an amazing diviner and wondered how she could know that the seter animal was a goat. While my recordings reveal that he himself told her, the point is that engaging with a diviner means entering a specific line of interpretation that you have to engage with and therefore (partly) believe in because it is enunciated and presents itself as a revealed possibility. The divination made known through the session becomes a necessary possibility21 in being an outcome of Batmönh’s anticipation itself: the client wants to know what the diviner knows that she/he does not know, and what the diviner knows, by implication, becomes – potentially – what she/he did not know. It becomes, necessarily, a revelation of the hidden.

Human-Spirit Relations of Suspense The most important conclusion to be drawn from all this, however, is that the divinatory elicitation cannot simply and only be considered a closure where knowledge is revealed and made visible, at least if it is not specified what is meant by ‘closure’, what specific relationships misfortunes are ‘narrowed down’ to, and how what appears to be a reduction in scale is dealt with. The problem is that specification or reduction does not necessarily lead to a general and total ambience of safety. New relations are evoked, but for them to constitute a closure, they would have to be fixed as unambiguous and not predicated on instability and uncertainty. Yet, rather than removing anxiety, divination, it seems, is just as much a site for the production of fear and relations of suspense. A man from the neighbouring village, located more than fifty kilometres away, travelled to Chandman’-Öndör District

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centre by horse because a divination made by Harhüü had shown that this man  – a friend of the lama  – had problems with a curse (haraal), and a ‘reading’ (unshlaga) had to be performed. The shaman-diviner in the above session also constantly raised concerns about a variety of vaguely defined obstacles, and Batmönh kept asking if something had appeared in the stones that should not have appeared. Suddenly, he was placed in a relationship to a seter that was not even his own. As part of that, his relations with his in-laws were made to be if not dangerous then at least problematic. The answer was not altogether clear, and he did not leave as a less anxious and more clarified person (cf. Buyandelgeriyn 2007: 138, 142; Højer 2009; Buyandelger 2013: 8, 122; Delaplace 2014). He did not know what to do, and on the night after the session with the shaman, Batmönh said that his wife’s mother also had some other religious objects. They had better give those objects to a temple, he concluded, as it was too dangerous to keep religious items that you did not know how to handle properly. Another person present at the divination sessions with Batmönh asked the shaman about his problems with a group of criminals in the capital, Ulaanbaatar, and he came out of the session with the (un)certainty that these criminals ‘have something in mind and are quite dangerous’. ‘Somehow they are problematic,’ he concluded. The criminals are intriguingly similar to the spirit powers evoked above; they are obscure and unpredictable. A conception of divination as a culturally conditioned transformation from uncertainty to certainty thus hardly explains what is so disturbing about criminals in Ulaanbaatar and spirit powers in the Mongolian countryside. Let me now once more return to the woman who had dreams about a dead person. For this woman, like for Mongolians in general, the open practice of religion has only become possible since the demise of socialism, but people – while probing into this magico-religious possibility – believe that their knowledge of such phenomena is vague at best. This obviously make them prone to listening to the interpretations provided by knowledgeable people such as lamas, but it also means that when people are presented with explanations such explanations do not necessarily fit into already crystallised cosmological schemes of cause and effect, and they do not always involve familiar agencies. For example, the phrase burhan shüteen, used by the diviner in this particular dialogue, and roughly meaning ‘gods and religious objects’, is imprecise and can only be expected to conjure up a general image of Buddhist objects and gods (of some kind), and the lama from past times is only dimly remembered by the woman. They are both vague and unfamiliar agencies that she would not expect to interfere in her life – i.e. to be a part of the relational field of which she herself is a part. In fact, she would hardly expect them to be agencies at all. In this sense, the diviner does not simply tell the client that she fell ill because she upset a definite and already known

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spirit power and that she should simply make offerings to this spirit power, a well-known and straightforward agency, for everything to be fine. The diviner’s answer does not confirm or fit into a well-established cosmological universe, involving well-known, clear-cut and transparent spirit powers, and the agencies dealt with are not part of an already established and tightly knit relational field of spirit-human interactions laid out in a cosmology.22 Even more important, however  – and reinforcing this  – is the fact that the causes evoked are themselves distinguished by not being well-known agencies. It is not only that people have forgotten – i.e. are self-proclaimed ignorant – and seek to be enlightened in answers and in the lama’s evocation of new relations but that this ‘ignorance’ is at the very centre of the kind of agencies dealt with. If the ontological premise for divinatory truth may thus be that it is beyond doubt (Holbraad 2008, 2010), it has to be qualified, at least in the present case, that the divinatory knowledge form works by dealing with agencies whose power and quintessence is their vagueness and unmistakable lack of complete intelligibility. What is beyond doubt, so to speak, is ‘doubt’. Hence, if we are dealing with anything like a cosmology, we are dealing with a cosmology of the unknown (and, in consequence, with an essentially unknown cosmology) and not with an encompassing spider’s web of dense meaning (à la Geertz 1973). In line with this understanding  – and with the one outlined earlier  – socialism has not simply, or only, served to suppress a pre-existing Mongolian religious culture that has then been revived or ‘set free’ in post-socialist times. In addition to an at times extreme repression, socialism has inadvertently been conducive to creating a powerful ‘landscape of empty places’. Among other things, this landscape is composed of religious objects whose significance is relatively unknown due to the loss of knowledgeable people (causing families to give away such dangerous objects to temples) and places where monasteries and spirit powers were once located  – i.e. places or ‘points’ loaded with the energy of destruction and past existence and brought into existence as semi-existent and not quite known agencies by virtue of being destroyed. People know that a monastery was once located at a certain place, and they know that certain objects are supposed to be powerful, but often they do not know what to do with these powers, nor how they work. Yet, this makes them no less powerful, and it certainly makes them more disturbing. And even more disturbing, maybe, is the fact that they do not often even know which powers exist and what kind of agencies they may be confronted with in the future, as a lot of powers have been severed from their individual and collective memory altogether. The radical ‘dialectical’ effects of socialism have thus fertilised the ground for a particular divinatory knowledge form, as exemplified in the above dialogue. This form of knowledge implies that causes or powers cannot be well

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known and familiar and that the knowledge produced in divination implies suspense and is inherently incomplete. In line with this, divination is not providing meaning where there is none, order where there is disorder, or simply substituting anxiety with confidence. Rather than re-balancing the world and removing anxiety, the session with the woman works with anxiety; it even creates it and guides it in new directions. The woman constantly stresses her insecurity and uncertainties: ‘They say there was’, ‘Maybe my dad or …’, ‘I don’t know, I really don’t know’, ‘I was adopted. Why do those things follow me?’ And when she states that ‘it is impossible to find those things’, the lama responds that ‘we cannot find them, but we should respond’. Of course, the fact that ‘we cannot find them’ appears to be meant in a purely physical sense: where are the objects? The physicality of the objects, however, is not insignificant, because their physical being is tied up with their agency. The lama does, after all, talk about responding, and he refers to objects conflated with the gods – implied by the phrase bürhan shüteen. The question, then, is also: where is the agency? The agency materialises as a vague mixture of a lama from the past and gods and religious objects that cannot be found. Their disappearance should thus be understood in a broadened sense as a conflation of lost in present space, lost in time and, as part of that, and most importantly, an agency evoked as – and gaining its particular strength from being  – partly lost or concealed: ‘Ask them to stay where they are,’ the lama concludes and thus moulds the relation to this agency as one defined by distance, suspense and, hence, potency at its centre (cf. Siegel 2006: 25). Who is this lama? Where are the things? What do they want? Why me? In this way, the gods and religious objects act on the woman by questioning her and, in responding to them in the form of an offering, she makes them stay where they are, at a distance, and simultaneously keeps the answers at arm’s-length. If ‘a sense of absence’, among some Buryats, involves a work to ‘maintain’ relations (Empson 2008), then this case would suggest that such a craving for ‘maintenance’ may also be ambiguous at best. Yet, what initially appears as avoidance and safety – i.e. making them stay at a distance by responding in the form of an offering – is simultaneously what empowers the gods and objects and what generates danger; why otherwise ‘make them stay where they are’? The distance maintained by the act of reciprocity, of offering, is what brings them into being as distant and absent and as disguised and not quite known. The power of such a nature of disguise is that it feeds thought, it captures and provokes attention: what is behind? This suspense, I argue, is a prevalent feature of the divination ­sessions – i.e. the creation of remote ‘black holes’ that we are (unwillingly) tied up to but also (need to) keep a distance from23 and that, accordingly, provoke an ­anxious reflective work.

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While people are drawn into relationships through divination, then, this does not simply happen in the manner of extending their networks of mutual bonding as in a Durkheimian ‘one plus one equals three’ logic, where society is more than the sum of its individual parts. These are seriously dangerous and worrying relationships in which one plus one rather ‘equals a half ’ in the sense that relationships are as much undermined as they are constructed; the connections are predicated on suspense – i.e. on facing different and not quite known other agencies. They place obligations on people – the upholding of which can be problematic  – and they would sometimes better be avoided (the religious objects of Batmönh’s mother-in-law should be given away). Such fears and avoidances are directed at various spirit agencies, but – as we have previously seen – they are also concerned with other humans in a post-socialist period where relations are exceedingly tense. People are wary of inducing anger in others, of not living up to the required formality and orderliness of exchanges and thereby of offending. Objects received or taken from other people can cause misfortune and so can other people’s jealousy and anger. The human others, however, are often not specified in divination sessions and could, in principle, be anyone (‘there is some ‘hel am’,’ the diviner might say). Hence, the often-noticed public allocation of blame with regard to divination and witchcraft is largely absent in rural Mongolia. Instead, we are left with a more generalised mistrust of human others and a widespread caution when dealing with human-human and human-spirit relationships in general.

Dealing with the Danger of Relationships The dangers alluded to in divination sessions are handled by different means. Deliberate action may be taken on the part of people themselves or it can involve the activity of religious practitioners. While people may manage on their own; for example, by making an offering – usually by burning incense empowered with mantras (tarni) – a specialist is often needed to carry out a ceremony or to (re)make powerful protective devices. I shall now attend to two such devices. The first one, the seter, because it is (becoming) widespread in the area of fieldwork and is an example of ‘religious’ innovation (Swancutt 2012) or revival24  – and the second one, a protective and more idiosyncratic written charm, because it will provide us with an aesthetics of the efficacy of magic in a double sense. On the one hand, the charm in question illuminates how magic presents itself – how its ‘material’ set-up works – and, on the other, it shows how magic is embedded in wider relationships. In this sense, the charm both presents and represents the nature of social relationships.

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The Seter In the area of fieldwork, a number of families have a seter (see Figure 5.2). Customarily, the Mongolian term seter refers to a bundle of coloured ribbons attached to a live animal, thereby indicating that this particular animal is consecrated to a deity or some other spirit power. As such, the animal with the seter (setertei mal) is a live offering or a mount for the deity/power to which it is consecrated.25 This consecrated animal will never be killed or sold, although this will have no implications for its offspring (cf. Jagchid and Hyer 1979: 153; Wallace 2014). The custom, is ancient and appears as far back as the thirteenth century in the ballad of Chinggis Khan’s two grey stallions, where Chinggis Khan is ‘plaiting (Mong. seterle) brightly-coloured pieces of silk cloth and silk strips into the manes of the victor’s horses, dedicated to the gods, at horse-races’ (Heissig 1980: 68). Although this picture partly holds true for the area of fieldwork, it has to be modified in at least two respects. First of all, one does not often come across live seter animals nowadays. Most seter animals are consecrated paintings of domestic animals – or, occasionally, figures of domestic animals carved from wood  – with a bundle of coloured ribbons either attached to the figure/ picture or painted as attached to the animal image. Secondly, whereas seter animals are often, at least in other Mongolian regions, considered offerings or

Figure 5.2  Ataany seter. Photograph by the author.

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mounts for deities or other powers, and the seter is attributed no agency of its own (A. Hürelbaatar, personal communication; see, however, also Wallace 2014: 177), in Chandman’-Öndör District, the seter itself can be spoken of as being ‘angry’ or ‘protective’,26 and offerings should occasionally be given to the seter, thus conferring agency upon the seter itself as much as on the power to which it is consecrated. Hence, a conflation of the seter as an object of worship, on the one hand, and the power to which it is consecrated, on the other, has taken place much in the same way as the shamanic ongon object is often imagined as neither the spirit itself nor simply a representation of that spirit (see e.g. Humphrey 1971; Pedersen 2011: 158). Indeed, an old Darhad shaman in the neighbouring district told me that there was not much difference between an ongon and a seter.27 Perhaps these two clarifications should not be considered distinct. One lama stated that, in the old days, all seter animals were live animals, and only when the domestic animals were collectivised – i.e. given away – did people have to draw pictures of their seter animals. Such drawings were simply made by people who were good at drawing. We can only speculate on the reasons for this. Obviously, people were not allowed to have seter animals in socialist times, but they could be kept secret by not attaching the coloured ribbons to the seter animal and then keeping the animal as part of one’s private herd,28 or – it seems – it could be secured by drawing the seter animal and thereby transferring the power into an object that could be kept secretly. One would not have to expose the animal then, or risk losing one’s control over it. In this sense, the collectivisation – and the exclusive acceptance of what was publicly allowed  – had to be accompanied by a strong sense of privacy and secrecy. Furthermore, drawing a seter animal, consecrating the drawing (preferably at the home of the family who is having the seter made) and then placing it on the most respected northern wall of the home must have had the effect of reifying it as an object of worship. While obviously hidden in socialist times, offerings can nowadays be placed on an ‘altar’ beneath the exhibited object, and, indeed, one never has to choose a new animal when the old one dies because the seter has become a consecrated picture of an animal with ribbons. In the picture, the seter animal is usually seen in front of a traditional table with offerings and surrounded by mountains, clouds, plants, sun and moon (see Figure 5.2). The seter animal has to be treated well, and such surroundings are considered unambiguously positive in Mongolia. The painting also has to be consecrated, put in a nice frame and placed on the northern wall of the household, with offerings presented to it occasionally. As such, this relative stabilisation of the seter may have had the effect of turning the seter into an object of worship in itself, thereby conferring a sense of agency upon the very object itself.29 This, however, is not all there is to be said about seters in this region, as there are also different kinds of seter associated with different deities or

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powers, such as Damdin’s seter, Ataa’s seter, Halhan Hairhan’s seter, Dayan Deerh’s seter etc. Some of them are specific to this particular region, and Harhüü, for example, would only recognise the seters of this area and some neighbouring ones.30 He was not able to identify all seters in other parts of Mongolia, also because different kinds of seters would often look very similar. A reddish-yellow goat, for example, could either be Damdin’s seter, Halhan Hairhan’s seter, Üüriin Hairhan’s seter or Jamsrai’s seter, and you would have to ask the family in question to know for sure. The various kinds of seter could be recognised by the kind of animal pictured31 and by the colours used but also by looking at the ribbons tied to the animal and by the mantra for consecration written on the reverse side of the picture. The seters all have ­different ‘religious books’ (nom) associated with them. While families could, on rare occasions, have more than one seter, any seter animal – or picture or figure of a seter animal – would only belong to, and be effective for, one family.32 Apart from being associated with only the individual household at any given time, however, the seter was also – at least potentially so  – considered essential for the reproduction of the family line and therefore inherited by one of the children. Whether attached to one family or one lineage, the seter, once brought into existence, is thus concerned with the reproduction of an ideally confined unity through time (cf. Empson 2002: 132–58), much in line with the often noted dominance of agnatic and vertical relations (and virilocality) over affinal relations in Mongolia (Pedersen 2001; High 2017: 34–42; see also Chapter 3). Some seters were indeed inherited, even though many of them were only produced recently – i.e. after the fall of socialism – by Harhüü. He would, for example, divine at a family home and conclude that their misfortunes were related to a seter that used to belong to this family, and the family would then have to re-make the seter. Harhüü was a skilled painter, a fact not unrelated to his religiosity,33 since a fine drawing of a seter animal was essential for it to enter/descend (buuh) or to come alive (am’drah) when consecrated. While the significance of seters in this region could therefore be partly ascribed to him, the interpretations that are brought to bear on the seter by locals obviously reach beyond him. According to Harhüü, no seters are alike and, just like human beings, they all have different qualities (ontslog) and  – like the ongon (Humphrey 1971: 272) – serve different purposes (see also Wallace 2014: 176–81). There would also be a difference between the strength of different seters, apparently depending on the success of an individual consecration. When qualifying such characteristics, however, they all have to do with an increase in the assets (animals, income) of the household itself (see also Empson 2011: 78; Swancutt 2012: 30, 138, 222) or with protection from others, whether enemies, thieves or other misfortunes (see also Wallace 2014: 176); the seter

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has first and foremost to protect (hamgaalah)34 and secure the continuity of a family. The successful reproduction of the household unit is thus secured through a separation with others, and a need for protection, security and wealth is brought about in the relation between Harhüü, the red direction lama, and ordinary people. However, when Ochirbat, the Yellow Religion lama, was asked about the seter, he claimed that it looked after families and generated religious merit (buyan hiih), and only when asked directly did he agree to use the word ‘protection’. Much in line with the conclusions reached in Chapter 4, Ochirbat mainly considered it a means of universal perfection (in a moral sense), while Harhüü saw the seter as a means of protection from danger (and sometimes also, as we shall see in a moment, as a danger in itself ). If Harhüü was an enthusiastic manufacturer and consecrator of new seters, Ochirbat would only purify (ariutgah) already existing ones. Among ordinary people, it seems, the contemporary seter is mainly considered a power for protection and increment.35 Yet, as made clear by Batmönh’s case, the protective relation established between the household and the seter is also a relation of obligation, and if the obligation of bringing offerings is not upheld, the seter can itself turn into the dangerous aggressor against whom it is supposed to protect. Relations with religious objects of this kind are thus not idly sought because, once established, apart from being protective, they place on people perpetual and weighty obligations that may be fraught with danger. Other anthropologists have made similar observations. Hürelbaatar explains how people in Inner Mongolia sometimes avoid making offerings to new sites because, once initiated, the relation turns obligatory and cannot be broken (2002: 85). Likewise, Buyandelgeriyn describes how propitiation rituals for newly discovered origin spirits among the Buryats in Mongolia imply that the family members commit to worshipping the spirit in perpetuity. Once a spirit is accepted into a family’s pantheon of origin spirits, it cannot be “dropped” or made to “depart,” as, without propitiation, it will harm the descendants. Although families hope that propitiating additional spirits will alleviate the causes of their misfortunes, they are also aware that each new spirit is an economic burden and an emotional disturbance and that it can potentially demand a family member be initiated as a shaman. (2007: 131)

‘For many’, she later continues, ‘the search for truth became almost a way of life and a spiritual and economic trap. Instead of expected material enrichment, people collected more spirits to propitiate, more questions to answer, and more rituals to stage. Dolgor’s and many other people’s existing economic anxieties and uncertainties increased and became entangled with s­piritual anxieties’ (2007: 141; see also Buyandelger 2013: 40, 89).36

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A Written Buddhist Charm Let me now turn to a different protective device with similar implications for the understanding of relationships. Harhüü had a protective written charm placed over the door to his home, and, once, he made a second copy for a client who was in trouble. While Harhüü lived in the remote periphery of Mongolia (on the outskirts of Chandman’-Öndör District centre), the client was a young man from the very centre of Mongolia, the capital Ulaanbaatar. The latter needed the charm to protect family members. For him, the lama personified a marginal space and a deep pre-socialist past because he practised a particular ‘red’ Buddhist tradition with ancient roots in Mongolian ‘shamanic’ tradition, far away from the centre of the country. The lama would ‘do something’ although the young man – in his own words – ‘did not know what it was’. This included a ritual for consecrating (aravnailah) or enlivening the device, and the young man then took it to his home in the capital city. The lama had created a rare charm, an almost one-off creation; the only other instance of it – as observed by the young man (and myself ) – was over the door of the lama’s own home. In the young man’s words, he wanted the charm because ‘he hadn’t seen similar things in other places’ and because the lama ‘did it on his own, made it himself ’ (singularity being the ontological premise for shamanic activity (Humphrey with Onon 1996)). A further reason, the young man added, was that ‘it did not seem to be completely Buddhist’. In this sense, the lama was an extension of the unknown; he embodied a lost past in the distant countryside and an esoteric semi-shamanic tradition whose secrecy – one might argue – was even boosted during socialism, when it was destroyed or forced to become clandestine and avoid the use of tangible written material, and/or when it was even discursively made into a backward, yet also pure, wild and powerful Mongolian tradition at the edge of the state (Hangartner 2011). The secrecy  – revealing things as concealed  – summoned by the lama when referring to his own abilities and religious education, and when he, at other times, told people of hidden treasures and mysterious happenings, is also manifest in the charm’s material form. The charm is written on a long

Figure 5.3  The protective charm (names in Cyrillic have been blurred). Photograph by the author.

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piece of paper and can be divided into four sections (see Figure 5.3). In the first section, the main text – a mantra – is written in black ink in Tibetan, a written language almost solely understood and read by lamas but nevertheless recognisable as Tibetan scripture by most people in Mongolia. In the second, the names to be protected by the charm form a section between the initial and the final part of Tibetan text. They are written in blue ink in Cyrillic, the script most commonly used in Mongolia and therefore easily read and understood by almost any adult person in the country. In the third section, a whole range of destructive or enchaining tools and frightening weapons have been drawn below the main text on the front. The fourth section, on the reverse of the paper, contains a mantra written in Sanskrit, used for the consecration of the device. The written charm was designed to be placed over the entrance to a Mongolian home, making the distinction between host and visitor crucial. It is well known that the threshold of the home is significant in Mongolia and is associated with a number of omens (Humphrey 1987: 44). From the description above, we would expect both host and visitor to perceive the device as a display of weaponry, inducing a sense of fear, protection and physical power, associated with an enumeration of familiar names related to the household and surrounded by unintelligible  – but recognisable  – religious text. It is this incomprehensible but recognisable Tibetan text that empowers the ‘familiar’ device by providing a level beyond complete understanding and thus makes it transcendent and powerfully ‘captivating’ (Gell 1998: 68–72).37 In addition, the importance of the incomprehensible – i.e. the incomprehensibility of power and the power of incomprehensibility – is emphasised by Harhüü himself, who stresses the secrecy of the charm and warns the client against copying it. He also claims that the charm and the mantra will not be understood by Buddhist lamas from other directions. On the reverse of the paper, the Sanskrit mantra (tarni) for the consecration of the device is written in Tibetan letters. This mantra consists of incomprehensible syllables, which Harhüü knows by heart but which he cannot and certainly should not translate, because their power derives from their mystical form as words without lexical meaning. As such, they are powerful rather than meaningful – they gain power from being beyond ordinary meaning and communicative ­understanding. They do not communicate power; they are power.38 Now, the charm’s materialisation of indecipherable ‘magical’ knowledge, which is, however, decipherable as a knowledge of the unknown,39 is associated with well-known names (such as members of the household) written in a conspicuous blue colour and symbols of aggression (axe, gun, etc.) and forced pacification (hobble and handcuffs). These symbols are easily accessible – i.e. their workings are made apparent to the victim of their aggression

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and can therefore only be perceived as the household’s explicit anticipation of intrusive and dangerous powers coming from outside the threshold of the home. There is no perceptual ‘ensnarement’, as with certain Indian threshold designs, where patterns serve to trap the attention of evil forces and make them into agents of their own capture (Gell 1998: 84–86). The charm in question does not cunningly cause the enemy to neutralise itself but rather implies opposing forces and killing, physical entrapment or cutting. Enemies are thus supposed to be destroyed or ‘singularised’ – i.e. dangerous aspects of them will be held back, cut out or destroyed. The saw, occasionally hung over the door of Mongolian homes, is likewise said to literally saw bad things into pieces if people enter with malign intentions, and ‘the magical innovations which block hostile forces from the home’ in other parts of Mongolia (Swancutt 2008: 844) are often also focused on the household threshold as a decisive and divisive line. In other words, when entering a ger, these ‘magical techniques’ imply that the connection to irreducible otherness is literally cut, both in the sense of cutting up the visitors to make them singular, unambiguous and safe, and in the sense, one might speculate, of making the home a container and instantiation of a generalised space for rule-based interaction. The specific ‘being’ of a household is protected by making it into a general domain of hierarchical formality and safe communications (see Chapter 3). A need for protection against, and segregation from, the unknown (aspect of ) others – for suspending suspense  – is thus brought forth through these protective objects as is a strong discrepancy between inner and outer, agnatic and affinal, because there is always more than meets the eye in relations with outsiders.

Magic, Suspense and (Post)Socialism Socialism and its aftermath have created a perceived (and also very real) loss and an ambiguous quest to recover lost knowledge. In this chapter, I have argued that this has opened up a space for magical innovation and that while socialism has obviously suppressed ‘religion’, it has also advertently boosted magical practices by suppressing powers that gain momentum from being concealed. Socialism and post-socialism have thus produced a strong ‘presence of absence’, and incomplete spirit powers are now (re)emerging, for example, through divination sessions and the manufacturing of protective devices. Seters are constantly revealed, and certain magical objects such as the written ‘Buddhist’ charm are gaining power from being rare ­survivals  – or spectres from the past – at the hidden periphery of state socialism. While divination sessions elicit new knowledge, this knowledge is often only revealed

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as enigmatic, and it produces concern as much as it clarifies worries. Whether dealing with divination or protective magical devices, such concerns are mainly directed at the household, which needs to be protected from the ubiquitously present dangers of human and spirit agencies alike. As the seter shows, however, even protective devices may themselves turn into dangerous aggressors (often emerging from the past) that have to be protected against and may have to be avoided. The enigmatic and incomplete aspects of other powers, human or nonhuman, and the implied relations of suspense have largely been inferred from the words and practices surrounding Harhüü, the red direction lama, in this chapter. At times, Harhüü even talked about a secret layer of information – accessed through meditation and divination, as well as when sending and fighting spells – whereby the energy of other people, who should otherwise never be contacted directly, could be assessed. Relationships of suspense are predicated upon this idea that powers are different and that agents should not turn into other agents – i.e. ‘the secret layer’ where others are assessed directly is extraordinary. Agents either have to confront or avoid other agents (the domain of the red direction and certain powerful objects) or establish a secure relation with them (the domain of formal hierarchy); in this sense, the red modality and formal hierarchy may be seen as two sides of the same Mongolian coin.

Notes   1. Bruun, for example, describes how the selling of a family’s old religious objects led to misfortune (2006: 130–131). In this case, the agency was discovered only after the objects were ‘lost’ to – or alienated from – the family.   2. In this sense, loss is not opposed to ‘belief ’ but is rather its precondition. It is obviously not implied, however, that people keeping religious objects are non-believers; rather, in this case, the loss or absence has taken enough shape for it to be dealt with safely.   3. It has been suggested to me that I use Derrida’s notion of ‘spectre’ (1994) rather than the dialectical expression ‘present absence’, which points to the iconoclastic power of what ‘always remains’ or the failure of iconoclasm ‘if any fragment escapes destruction’ (Pietz 2002: 65; I thank Victor Buchli for this reference). I have, however, chosen to retain the latter expression, since a dialectical expression, I believe, much better conveys the importance of difference or a split as a potentiality – whether in (post)socialist history, (post) socialist historical narratives, magico-religious summoning of concealed powers (present and absent at the same time) or magico-religious images (where meaning is deferred). While the notion of spectre – as something that simultaneously is present and not present, inaugurate and reveal, and repeat and initiate (Derrida 1994: 10, 98) – might convey all that, it runs the danger, like so many other single hybrid terms, of moving attention away from their split and paradoxical nature. Even spectrality, it seems, can only be

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described through the use of oppositions (present/not present, inaugurate/reveal, repeat/ initiate).   4. While also stressing the importance of historical rupture, the socio-psychological aspect is even more pronounced in an article by Shimamura (2004), whose focus is almost solely on the role played by shamanism in reconstructing the ethnic identity of the Aga-Buryat Mongols.   5. The significance of such liminal positions and states has been widely noticed with regard to divination in general (Peek 1991b).   6. Lus is the spirit master/owner of rivers and springs. While the expression ‘lusyn gem’ probably refers to hurting from both sides (from human to lus and vice versa), the two sides should not really be separated, because only if a human made a mistake will the lus punish him/her.   7. The seter is a coloured bundle of ribbons attached to a live animal, a figure of an animal or an animal on a painting (at least in the area of fieldwork). This animal is consecrated to a deity or a spirit power (see also later).   8. By phrasing it lus bulag, he does not really make a distinction between the ‘spirit master/ owner of the water’ (lus) and the spring (bulag) as such.   9. There are many springs in this area, and some are believed to have healing powers, which is why people also visit them for recreation during the summer. Obviously, they are all important water sources. 10. Zeitlyn writes the following about such leftover issues: In ordinary discussions over food or drink, and around seminar tables, in legal arguments in the court, and in other sorts of talk, many loose ends are left. The talk moves on, a topic is unresolved, but no matter, it is simply abandoned, not resolved. It may matter to the anthropologist puzzling through the transcripts afterwards. So in Tswapong [Botswana] wisdom divination, the diviner guides the direction of travel and can jettison, ignore, or neglect alternative interpretations. (Zeitlyn 2001: 235)

11. Mostly, the diviner wishes to know in which animal year the client was born according to the Mongolian zodiac. This zodiac follows a twelve-year cycle whereby each year is associated with a particular animal: rat (roughly 1984, 1996, 2008 etc.), ox (1997), tiger (1998), rabbit (1999), dragon (2000), snake (2001), horse (2002), sheep (2003), monkey (2004), chicken (2005), dog (2006) and pig (2007). 12. By asking about the client’s year and often name, he seems to be concerned with the specificity of this person (in a cosmological framework of astrology) and not with the persons as embedded in a social network of kin and ancestors. 13. The mention of a family in relation to the impure vodka seems to be significant. Bawden  – much in line with the argument of the introduction  – observes in a study of the ‘supernatural element in sickness and death according to Mongol tradition’ that: ‘Even when impure food has been eaten, the impurity generally has arisen not from physical decay, but from the origin of the meat, or the nature of the person or place from which the patient got it’ (Bawden 1963a: 234). 14. This could mean that the soul of the person to whom the objects used to belong wants her to take them back. 15. The word deej has a very general meaning of ‘offering’ but can more precisely be defined as ‘the choicest part(s) of something, especially of food or drink offered to a deity or guest of honor’ (Hangin 1986: 198). 16. Literally meaning ‘bags for horses’ but could loosely be translated as yield or success. This word might originally have referred to filling up your horse bags when hunting, but one

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should also note the use of ganzagyn naimaa, a term used for easy and simple business especially during the first years of the market economy. 17. In Mongolia you do not ‘work’ (ajil) if you have a small business on your own. The Buryat word azhal, ‘task’ or ‘job’ (Mong. ajil), originally meant ‘outside work’ (Humphrey 1998: 308), and Sneath implicitly makes the same point when he argues that the Mongolian economic sphere always used to be tied up with authority and a larger political order (2002). 18. In the Darhad dialect yum means ongod (‘shamanic spirits’), and her dialect is clearly Darhad. Yet for any Mongol, hii yum would be understood as something spiritual, and Batmönh was certainly aware of this reference to the spirit world. 19. Damdin is very popular among the Mongols and can be considered a kind of red deity (A. Hürelbaatar, personal communication; also see Charleux 2002: 203). In Buryatia, for example, shamans will worship this particular deity but not most other Buddhist deities. 20. For the Mongolian notion of heaven (tenger), or heavenly powers, see e.g. Heissig (1980). 21. This can be compared with gossip as a mode of communication (see Chapter 2). Gossip also makes claims in terms of necessary possibilities and, like divination, no one can be held accountable for the claims put forward (cf. Park 1963: 197). 22. For a different take on doubt in relation to Mongolian cosmologies and mining, see High (2013). 23. This may be analogous to Mongolians’ relation to ghosts that are ‘dangerous yet craving for sociality’ (Delaplace 2012: S142). 24. Inventiveness is not to be confused with ‘invented tradition’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) but rather implies a renewed engagement with already semi-known religious phenomena. 25. The Tibetan phenomenon of tshe dar or tshe thar (Nebesky-Wojkovitz 1975: 507) – or tsay-tar (Asboe 1936)  – is most likely related to the Mongolian seter. Harhüü even insisted on the Mongolian spelling being ‘setar’ – closer to the Tibetan one – rather than the Mongolian dictionary form ‘seter’. In Tibet though, the consecrated animal seemed to perform a not altogether similar function, namely that of a scapegoat set free in order to save a person from illness (Nebesky-Wojkovitz 1975: 507). Yet, Hildegard Diemberger has informed me that the present-day Tibetan tshe dar does indeed perform functions very similar to the Mongolian one (personal communication). In Tibetan, tshe means ‘life’ and dar means ‘the act of freeing or liberating’, and it is quite obvious that the tshe dar is a Buddhist substitute for the problematic killing of animals in animal sacrifice (Hildegard Diemberger, personal communication; see also Wallace 2014: 176). In Mongolian areas, seters have previously been dedicated to temples or sacred mountains as live offerings (Jagchid and Hyer 1979: 153; Wallace 2015c: 225). 26. That a seter is attributed with such agency seems odd to an Inner Mongol (A. Hürelbaatar, personal communication). 27. However, one could point to some differences between the seter and the ongon. Whereas the seter is exhibited in the respected part of the ger, the (few) ongons in the area of fieldwork are often hidden away (see also Pedersen 2011: 156), and among the Buryats, the various locations of the ongons reflected the spirit they were supposed to embody (Caroline Humphrey, personal communication). Also, the seter is not – like the ongon – a spirit speaking through the shaman. One might say that if the ongon as object is a ‘vessel/ receptacle’, the seter is sometimes considered a ‘vehicle’ in the sense of a means (for transportation) for spirit powers. Yet, notwithstanding all these apparent differences, Pürev –

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writing on Mongolian shamanism and particularly the Darhads – explains that the seter is indeed a simplified version of an ongon (Pürev 1999: 303–9). This is not confirmed, nor completely contradicted, by Pedersen, who briefly refers to the seter among the Darhads as a ‘protective amulet’ for a particular household that is to be left with an ongon (2011: 154). 28. I have only come across one family who claimed to have kept a live seter during communist times, but logically this animal would have had to be a private one over which they had full control. Yet, not attaching the seter (i.e. the coloured ribbons), it seems, would be a contradiction in terms, since the animal was only distinguished as extraordinary by the seter. 29. A less historically contextualising explanation came from Harhüü, who claimed that the live seter was a different kind of seter used for different purposes. For example, the ‘live seter’ could be made to save a very sick or almost dying person. 30. He claimed to recognise the seters of the following districts, all located in the western, central and north-eastern parts of the Hövsgöl province: Chandman’-Öndör, Tsagaan Üür, Erdenebulgan, Tarialan, Hanh, Hatgal, Bürentogtog, Tsetserleg and Tsagaan Uul. 31. Pürev notes – in line with the present fieldwork material – that only horses, sheep and goats can be made seter animals (Pürev 1999: 303–9). 32. The shaman from above, however, made this a difficult line to draw. Batmönh could – to his surprise  – indeed make offerings to the seter of his mother-in-law, the shaman claimed. 33. Actually, he once stated that the old lamas had been keen on bringing a talented painter into their sphere because ‘icons’ are of such importance to Buddhist activity. 34. The seter of a family can even be dangerous to outsiders: a guest who has just been to a funeral, I was told, will be seen as ‘bleeding’ by the seter and will be in danger. 35. Studies by Chabros, Empson and Charlier shortly mention the seter, and they associate it with (the accumulation of ) animal fortune (hishig) (Chabros 1992: 56–57; Empson 2011: 77–78; Charlier 2015: 36). 36. The obligatory nature of such a relation among the Buryats is also conveyed by Humphrey: ‘When the offended spirit has been revealed, the shaman commonly orders the client to go out to the mountain (tree, etc.) residence of the spirit and perform the ritual called alban, which means duty, service or tribute’ (Humphrey 2002a: 216; my emphasis). 37. The principle is comparable to Gell’s notion of ‘captivation’ (Gell 1998: 68–72), although Gell introduces this term with regard to the effects of artistic virtuosity: Artistic agency … is socially efficacious because it establishes an inequality between the agency responsible for the production of the work of art, and the spectators … Captivation or fascination – the demoralisation produced by the spectacle of unimaginable virtuosity  – ensues from the spectator becoming trapped within the index because the index embodies agency which is essentially indecipherable. (Gell 1998: 71)

38. Although Tambiah emphasises the inherent logic and design of Sinhalese spells, his observations are largely concordant with the present perspective: The “demon language” [mantras are referred to as the ‘language of the demons’] is consciously constructed to connote power, and though largely unintelligible is nevertheless based on the theory of language that the demons can understand. Thus, far from being nonsensical and indiscriminately concocted, the spells show a sophisticated logic. The logic of construction must of course be separated from the problem of whether the exorcist actually understands all the words contained in the spell. From this, as well as

170  •  The Anti-Social Contract the audience’s point of view, the spells have power by virtue of their secrecy and their capacity to communicate with demons and thereby influence their actions. (Tambiah 1985a: 20–21; see also Elverskog 2006: 37)

39. This can be compared to Houseman’s notion of ‘avowed secrecy’ (1993), where the excluded party is aware of the existence of a secret and of his/her exclusion from it.

Conclusion

Y

Suppose there are two people called Bat and Bold. Bat curses Bold. His brain and body create a very strong magnetic energy of hatred. The other person receives this with his mind and his magnetic energy and his health turns bad. Magnetic energy can turn into anything. It can be seen as a bear and it can appear as a wolf. Maybe it is not seen. Maybe it cannot be seen. —Harhüü, 2000

It would be unreasonable to claim that all Mongols feel surrounded by curses in wolves’ clothing. Yet it would be equally mistaken to maintain that this statement is a far cry from life as it is played out, at least partly, in contemporary Mongolia. Indeed, if one removes the more idiosyncratic elements – wolves, bears and magnetism – the statement seems not only to describe how life is often conceived, retrospectively that is, but also to suggest how it is frequently approached proactively by people. ‘Invisible energy’ and ‘magnetic curse-like influence’, then, are apt ways of alluding to the prevalence of a certain relational sensibility in contemporary Chandman’-Öndör District. This relational sensibility, I have argued, questions some of the key idioms of anthropological discourse by pointing to the danger of exchange and ‘alliance’, the avoidance of social relations, and the production of difference from within social life itself. Apart from the specific withdrawal from

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less formalised relations, and the avoidance of coming to exist too much in the gaze of other villagers (or spirit agents), this specific mode of relatedness creates social distance, apprehension and even physical dispersal. Düütsetseg, for example, ended up withdrawing from our host family and moving to the provincial capital to teach, only to later settle in the capital where she joined a Korean religious movement and only rarely entertained relations even with relatives from Chandman’-Öndör District. Her ‘exile’, if that is the right way of phrasing it, illustrates the exile that also occurs within the district itself; an exile from being caught up in circuits of talk, from exchange relations, from engagement with precarious others, from the influence-sphere of unknown spirit powers, and even from the spaces that other people inhabit. Fences are built, dogs are kept and people live apart and may even, like Düütsetseg and others, move away. Some years later, after moving to the capital, Düütsetseg tellingly explained to me, when sitting in a café next to the main Sühbaatar Square, that everything in Chandman’-Öndör District was ‘completely dark’ and full of ‘bad things like hel am’. But now that she had entered the religious movement and left the countryside (and perhaps a particular Mongolian world in its entirety), she continued, her heart had become calm, and she felt good, free and peaceful (see also Højer 2018). I never got to know the exact reason, but Batmönh, the driver and businessman from Chapter 5, also ended up leaving the village in favour of the provincial capital. While Rousseau, Mauss, Lévi-Strauss and many others have maintained that to be in debt to others is to be human and to be exiled from debt circuits, hence, equals being non-human and asocial (Peebles 2012), one could paradoxically claim that this Mongolian mode of relatedness is ‘social’ by way of escaping the circuits of sociality itself. Exile is its constitutive mode of being and not a condition external to relatedness. And if the social, as is usually assumed, involves responsiveness to others, the kind of relatedness highlighted here concerns the danger of being drawn into an economy of responding. It involves a quest to avoid the compelling actions of others. While such claims about the importance (but obviously not ubiquity) of anti-social relations are intimately related to discussions internal to anthropological discourse and may be generalised to many other ethnographic sites, they are also born of particular cultural forms of social engagement in a postsocialist rural district in Northern Mongolia. The specific cultural idioms through which inter-human attention is fashioned here – such as ‘injurious talk’ (hel am), red Buddhism and everyday sensibilities (for lack of a better word) – make it evident that separation and distance, and the reproduction of relations of suspense, have not just been brought about by the collapse of state socialism but are actively propagated as a form of attention in itself, alongside specific hierarchical forms of integration based on socialism, Yellow Religion and traditional etiquette. The disintegration of the socialist state,

Conclusion • 173

then, has not simply left rural Mongolia in a state of natural disintegration, the basis of which is considered to be universally similar, survival-minded individuals; nor has it simply led to a new kind of integration based on networks of friends and kin. The former perspective assumes that disintegration (and, by implication, integration) is the same everywhere – i.e. simply grounded in human individual nature, whereas the latter stance too easily conflates the practical-functional and often necessary exchange of goods and services in ‘networks’ with aesthetic and ontological issues of how self-other relations are conceived through cultural idioms. My aim has rather been to show how the fragile environment of post-socialism, characterised by highly indeterminate social relations, merges with cultural understandings of an unreliable social universe peopled with anxiety-provoking agencies. The discontinuities, or indeed revolutions, of both modernist (post)socialist history and social relations in the post-socialist period, I have held, are inseparable from the ‘discontinuities’ implied in particular ‘cultural’ perceptions of relational life. Cultural idioms such as hel am and particular red renderings of the world, then, do not mould an independently existing ‘post-socialist reality’ but come to be fundamentally implied in this reality as it transpires.

The Social and the Anti-Social The account of this book has been structured around an opposition between the given and the non-given, between suspicion and certainty, and the reader might think that these can only be considered in opposition to each other – i.e. as internally related terms. This is both true and untrue. It is true because red direction Buddhism and formal hierarchy are indeed two sides of the same coin and because Mongolian rural post-socialist life, as analysed in this book, is suspended between the purity and transcendence of hierarchy (epitomised by the colours of white and yellow) and a zone of suspense and the non-given (epitomised by the colours of black and red). Roughly speaking, the former is the domain of centre-focused integrative practices (weddings, district celebrations, ovoo ceremonies), ‘traditional’ formal hierarchy, Yellow Religion and, arguably, socialism, whereas the latter is the domain of red Buddhism, hel am and partly concealed (spirit) agencies. I am not hereby implying that all hierarchical domains are identical or that one of them dominates the others. Socialism is, of course, not traditional etiquette and Yellow Religion is, of course, not socialism. There are important differences between (and within) such cultural traditions but also formal similarities in the sense that they all lay claim to a transcendent domain of morality and ‘vertical’ integration that may often – by Mongols themselves – be acknowledged to stand in opposition to societal disintegration and hel am.

174  •  The Anti-Social Contract

One of my Ulaanbaatar friends, for example, used a Mongolian proverb to claim that ‘if the leaders can’t find their seat, the people below can’t find their way’ (deedes n’ suudalaa olohgüi bol doodos n’ güidlee olohgüi), and she used the current ‘leadership instability’ to explain the contemporary prevalence of hel am. From this perspective, red Buddhism, concealed agencies, protective devices and the danger of hel am do concern the contemporary failure of integration, much as Hobbes would have it. Yet, apart from integration and disintegration opposing each other in this complementary fashion – the more of one, the less of the other – they can also be seen as internally related  – i.e. as once again two sides of the same coin, in the sense that they are actually different perspectives on the same thing. If disintegration keeps unities apart by anticipating danger ‘inbetween’ (this ‘in-between-ness’, for example, being gossip, ‘alliances’ or non-ritualised everyday exchanges), then it is immediately clear that it simultaneously implies an internal integration of the unities protected and kept separate (whether individuals or households). By keeping unities separate from other unities (disintegration), they are at the same time constituted as unities through their separation (cf. Harrison 1993). Likewise, integration at ovoo ceremonies, district celebrations, weddings or Tsagaan Sar, for example, implies that something is left out (other unities, other aspects of people), on the background of which integration takes place, at least if we assume that the rituals momentarily manage to gather people around, for example, common values and ‘identities’. By holding unities together and making them similar (integration), they are at the same time kept separate from other unities (disintegration)  – i.e. other values, districts or kin networks. As such, disintegration is the side effect of integration, and integration and disintegration, once more, may be seen as two sides of the same coin, albeit in a different and more structural way than the more quantitative Hobbesian understanding, where integration and disintegration are mutually exclusive. It is also untrue, however, that formal social hierarchy (integration) and anti-social relations are only complementary or mutually implied aspects of the same thing, and a key argument of this book is indeed that anti-social relations are more than simply the counterpart to integration; it is also a disintegrative force in its own right that might, in principle, dissolve and threaten the stability of any conceivable whole, whether communities, families or individuals. We might initially note that the ritual carried out against hel am by the red direction lama (see Chapter 2) was not about reconciliation or revenge but about producing indifference, which in Simmel’s terms is ‘pure negativity’ and neither ‘sociation’ nor ‘conflict’ (1955 [1908]: 14); the lama wanted us to stop being compelled by the hostile exchange of perspectives with our former host family. The ‘social’ relation had to be cancelled and indifference produced; we had to actively unmake the relation. And we

Conclusion • 175

could continue by noting the reproduction of a generalised suspicion, an anticipation of the other as truly other, as it was mainly outlined with regard to everyday life conflicts, hel am, red direction Buddhism, and the evocation of concealed agencies in divination and magic. One may, of course, claim that this domain simply reflects ‘post-socialist’ social configurations (or is determined by it) – that social configurations are prior to their reflection in ‘religious’ or ‘magical’ idioms – but this would ignore one of the key claims made here; namely, that suspense over-determines existing social configurations and has a ‘wild’ (i.e. unpredictable with regard to an established social configuration) life of its own because it actively unmakes relations. This unmaking, in turn, may also produce further suspense and unmaking in a way reminiscent of the schismogenesis outlined by Bateson1 (1935, 1958 [1936]). In a sense, then, anti-social relations undo social configurations just as much as they reflect them and thus have an irreducible aspect to them. Difference, as only produced by unification, or Others, as only contained within selves or relations, do not account for these productive capabilities of the anti-social contract itself. In anti-social relations, the Other is assumed truly other and is not just a projection of the Self (alter ego) or someone to engage with  – or indeed transform into  – in trouble-free communication. There is an implicit assumption in much anthropological writing that the other is only the Other of a Self (because everything is ‘inside’ sociality), conveyed for example by notions such as projection (of a Self ), stigmatisation (of a Self ’s Other), reflection (of a Self ) and, ultimately, relation (where self and other is mutually implicated). Yet the fact that the other is made to be taken seriously as other in Mongolia – i.e. as not only the Other to a Self, nor as a conflation of self and other – generates a prominent aspect of being whereby relationality, if not sticking to safe and formalized relations, poses the threat that you may only come to exist through the dangerous gaze of unknown others.

Note 1. Schismogenesis is ‘a process of differentiation in the norms of individual behaviour resulting from cumulative interaction between individuals’ (Bateson 1958 [1936]: 175; original emphasis removed), although – in our case – it is not necessarily based on concrete ‘interaction’. Bateson gives an example that might remind us of the paranoia and suspicion outlined in this book: … in many cases the growth of the symptoms of the paranoid individual are attributable to schismogenetic relationships with those nearest to him. I understand that it is usual to find that those paranoids who build their delusions around a belief in the unfaithfulness of their wives, almost invariably have wives whose utter faithfulness is obvious to every outsider. Here we may suspect that the schismogenesis takes the form

176  •  The Anti-Social Contract of continual expression of anxiety and suspicion on the husband’s side, and continual response to this on the side of the wife, so that she, either continually humouring him or contradicting him, is promoting his maladjustment, and he, in turn, becoming more maladjust, demands more and more exaggerated responses from her. (Bateson 1958 [1936]: 180)

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Index

Page numbers followed by letter f refer to figures. absence: as by-product of socialist modernity, 140–41, 142; present, 139, 165, 166n3; as productive category, 138. See also loss Adangqan Urianhai, 33n10 affection: bonds of, 102, 103; display of, 75, 103 age hierarchy, 89, 90, 94–95, 97, 104, 105–6; and attitude toward religion, 111; in Tsagaan Sar ceremony, 89, 90 agsan (drunken rage), 104 alcohol. See drinking Altan Khans, 29n8, 117, 135n7 Alungua (legendary female ancestor), 33n10, 42; Chandman’-Öndör District celebrations of, 43–46; prayer to, 120; statue of, 43, 44f; teaching of, 46 Amazonian Brazil, Tupinamba in, 25 anger: drinking and (agsan), 104; and hel am, 77 animal(s): consecrated, 159, 168n25, 169n28, 169n31; depicted on seter, 112, 153, 159, 159f, 160 animism, 22 anti-social relations, 4, 19–25; formal social hierarchy and, 174; generalised witchcraft and, 24; Red Sect Buddhism and, 126, 132, 134; and social configurations, 175 anxiety, divination and production of, 143, 154–58 Appadurai, 108n25 Arig river, 33n10; Alungua associated with, 33n10, 42–43, 120

Arig river valley, 7; ger temple in, 115 Arig Urianhai, 9–10, 130; Alungua celebration and, 46; in Chandman’Öndör District, 10; origin of, 33n10 Ar Shirhten, 33n9 attention: avoiding, 65, 73, 76; danger in, 61, 65, 73, 77; and hel am, 75–76, 81 avoidance: of conspicuousness, 65, 73, 76; divination and, 157, 158; loss of religious knowledge and, 138; of social relationships, 5, 21, 24, 25, 171, 172 bad omen (muu yor), 74–75 Baigal (shop owner), 37–38, 54 Bandi (Hotgoid ruler), 30n8 Banyang people, Cameroon, 27n2 Banzragch, C., 9, 28n7, 31n8, 33n10 barter, exchange based on, 52 Bateson, G., 68, 92, 175, 175n1 Batmönh (shop owner/driver), 38, 149–50; divination session with, 150–54, 155; move away from village, 172 Battsetseg (daughter of host family), 61, 62, 111 Bawden, C.R., 167n13 belief: vs. acting out religion, 114; knowledge and, 138; loss and, 166n2; in merit (buyan), 121; in socialism, 12; in spirit masters (gazryn ezed), 111, 112, 114 black direction of Buddhism, 123, 135n15 black (har) hel am, 60, 72, 74, 76–77, 81n1 Bodonchar (noble), 33n10

192 • Index

body: of deceased, laying on mountains, 136n23; movement of, rules for, 92, 93–94 Bogd Khan, 32n8, 77, 119, 136n17 Bogdyn Baatar, 9 bone-setters (bariach), 112, 115, 116 Borjigin, ‘golden lineage’ of, 53, 57n13 Bourdieu, P., 96 Brazil, Tupinamba in, 25 bride, ritualised transfer of, 98, 99f, 100–101 Bruun, O., 166n1 Buchli, Victor, 166n3 Buddhism: abrupt end during socialism, 11, 115, 137; black direction of, 123, 135n15; centralising secular power and, 119, 129; clerical vs. shamanic, 110, 132; and divisive practices in Mongolia, 132; in post-socialist era, 13; purges of 1930s and, 11, 115, 120, 122, 139; revival in contemporary Mongolia, 115–16, 122, 135n10; roots in Mongolia, 116–17, 119, 135n7; secret practices during socialism, 12, 13; shamanism and, 10–11, 33n12, 118, 123, 125, 128, 132; two modes of, 109–10. See also Red Sect Buddhism; Yellow Sect Buddhism Bulag, U.E., 45, 68 Bulnai sanatorium, 11, 47, 125 Büreg mountain, 130 Burkhan Haldun, 33n10 Buryats: attitude toward religion, 109, 113; in Chandman’-Öndör District, 10, 32n8; divination among, 148; family genealogies among, 58n22; hel am among, 81n2, 84n19; historical loss and, 141–42; ongod among, 168n27; origin spirits among, 162; red lamas among, 135n15; rivalry vs. Buddhist virtue among, 136n20; single women among, views on, 80; stillness valued by, 94; suppressed spirits among, reemergence of, 140; transhumance among, 58n17 Büüvei (Hotgoid ruler), 9, 30n8 Buyandelgeriyn, M., 141–42, 162 calm (taivan), cultural value of, 93–94 Cameroon, Banyang people of, 27n2

centralisation: markets and, 38, 47; ovoo ceremonies and, 40; in post-socialist era, 38, 41; socialist system and, 35, 38; Yellow Sect Buddhism and, 119, 129, 132 ceremonial scarves (hadag): at ovoo ceremonies, 40; as payment to diviners, 144; presentation after breaking custom (yos), 104; socialist medals and, 133f, 134; at Tsagaan Sar, 90, 91; at wedding ceremonies, 99, 100 Čeveng, Z., 7, 28nn7–8 chagtaga (rope), at wedding ceremony, 99–100 Chandman’-Öndör District: 70-year jubilee of, 42; Alungua associated with, 42–43, 45; Alungua celebrations of 2002 in, 43–46, 44f; Buddhist temples in, 115–16, 119, 120; fenced compounds (hashaa) in, vii, 20; fieldwork in, vii–ix, 66; geography of, 6–7; location of, 5, 6, 8f; in market era, 36–37; north-south distinctions in, 10; population of, 6, 7–10, 32n8; prerevolutionary history of, 7–10; religious practitioners in, 66, 110–11, 115–16, 143–44; shops/kiosks in, 37–38, 37f; in socialist period, 11–13, 35–36; spread of information in, 59–60; subdistricts (bag) in, 39, 47; village centre of, 5–6, 6f, 11, 19f, 41–42, 47, 48, 73f; wooden houses in, 7, 47, 78f charm, Buddhist, 163–65, 163f China: ethnic Mongols in, ixn1; merchants from, in Chandman’-Öndör District, 32n8; and recognition of Mongolian independence, 135n9. See also Manchu Qing dynasty Chinggis Khan, 4; ballad of, 159; Buddhism associated with, 135n11; descendants of, 117; importance in post-socialist Mongolia, 42; legendary female ancestor of, 33n10, 42; oldest surviving account of, 33n10; standard of, 45, 57n12 Chingunjav (Hotgoid ruler), 30n8 Christian pamphlets, in bone-setter’s home, 112, 115 clans: confusion regarding, 53, 106; listing on ID cards, 53, 57n13

Index • 193

classmates, relations with, 58n20, 104 clothing: at state functions, 132–33, 133f; traditional (deel), 6, 91, 98, 103; at Tsagaan Sar celebrations, 91; at weddings, 98 collective farm (negdel), 11, 35–36; dismantlement in 1990s, 40; nostalgia regarding, 35 collective workdays (subbotniks), 13, 57n10 compound(s) (hashaa): of host family, vii, 49–51; in Mongolian villages, viii, 20 conflict: diviner’s prediction of, 2–3, 24; and hel am, 63, 66, 67, 69, 71; with host family, 62–63, 66; as preliminary topic of research, viii control: hel am and loss of, 80, 81; host family’s attempts at, 62, 78–79; information and, 68; old people and, 94, 104 countryside, Mongolian: absence of fences in, 20; concept of homeland (nutag) in, 39; dispersal of settlements in, 6, 47, 49; exchanges with village centre, 52, 54–56, 58n23; fieldwork in, vii, 2; formalised aspects of life in, 85–86; movement between village centre and, 48–49; shortage of Buddhist lamas in, 120, 137–38; during socialism, 139. See also Chandman’-Öndör District curse (haraal): divination about, 155; vs. hel am (injurious talk), 81n2; red lama on, 21, 127, 128, 171; yellow lama on, 125 Dalai Lama, 119–20, 126, 129 Damdin (deity), 152, 153, 161, 168n19 danger(s): divination sessions on, 158; in objects, 17–19, 138, 162; seter and, 162, 169n34; in social relationships, 4–5, 21; in standing out, 61; unknown and, 138 Darhad people, 7; Buddhism and shamanism among, 10, 33n12, 34n14, 135–36n15; in Chandman’-Öndör District, 10; conflicts and revenge among, 82n10; as dangerous outsiders in Mongolia, 70, 71; gossip (hov) and magic

(hovs) among, 67; gossip spirits among, 68; perceptions of, 34n23, 82n8; seter among, 169n27 daughters-in-law: arrival in new household, 98, 99f, 100–101; conflictual emotions of, 102; expectations regarding, 78; and new parents-in-law, 101, 103; status of, 101 Daur Mongols, wild spirits among, 140 Dayan Deerh cave, 123, 130, 131f, 135n14, 138, 140 death: approaching, and religious belief, 111; destruction of shamanic paraphernalia and, 140; fighting against curses and risk of, 125; white hel am and, 77 deceased family members: laying on mountains, 136n23; respect for, 94–95 deel (tunic, kaftan), 6, 91, 98, 103 democracy, transition to, 13–14 Democratic Party, 13, 43 Derrida, J., 166n3 Diemberger, Hildegard, 136n16, 168n25 diplomas, enduring importance of, 13, 41 distributed personhood, 81 divination, 142–58; and avoidance, 157, 158; and cosmology of unknown, 156; definition of, 142; as displacement of anxiety, 143; gossip compared to, 168n21; and indirect persuasion, 149; and knowledge, 143, 144, 165–66; as necessary possibility, 154; and production of fear/concern, 143, 154–58; sessions in, 145–49, 151–54; suspense in, 154, 157; truth in, 142–43 diviner(s): in Chandman’-Öndör District, 66, 110–11, 116, 143–44; explanation for misfortune, 144–45; female, 1–3, 66, 143, 144; payment to, 144; visits to, 110–11, 144 dogs, in pastoral camps, 20, 172 Dorjgotov, D., 28n7 Douglas, M., 15 drinking: religious practitioners and, 1–2, 3, 65, 126, 127–28, 144, 150; at Tsagaan Sar celebrations, 91, 104; at weddings, 100; women and, 2, 108n21. See also milk-spirit (shimiin arhi); vodka

194 • Index

drivers: as business entrepreneurs, 38; fastening of seatbelts by, as bad omen, 74, 75 Duha people, 7, 28n8; perceptions of, 82n8; Üüriin Urianhai and, 29n8, 32n8 Durkheim, E., 15, 105, 158 Düüregch (prince), 9, 10 Düütsetseg (teacher): concern about gossip, 69, 76; conflict with host family, 62–63, 65, 79; on gifts, danger associated with, 18, 34n16; on hel am, 63, 67, 72, 79–80; on merit (buyan), 111; move away from village, 80, 172; relationship with Ulaanhüü, 78, 79; on religion, 111–12; on yos (rule, custom), 93 Egypt, ‘evil eye’ in, 84n21 electricity, in Chandman’-Öndör District, 59 emotions: avoiding outward display of, 75, 76; of daughters-in-law, 102; formality and, 103–4; gossip and, 69; and hel am, 77; portrayal in Indian poetics and drama, 108n25; singing and expression of, 108n24. See also affection; anger Empson, R., 34n18, 75 Enhtüvshen (local governor), 35 Enhtuya (bone-setter), 112 enmity: among Mongols, 1, 3, 5; as precondition for revolution, 139; Red Sect Buddhism and, 126, 132, 134; research focus on, 4 envy: hidden, and white hel am, 77; prominence in Mongolia, 1, 84n20 euphemisms, use of, 76 ‘evil eye’: in Egypt, 84n21; hel am compared to, 66 Ewing, T.E., 30n8, 31n8 exchange(s): between countryside and village centre, 52, 54–56, 55, 58n23; delayed, ambiguity and conflict associated with, 55–56; and hel am (injurious talk), danger of, 81; kinship connections and, 53, 54–55; Lévi-Strauss on, 81n3; in shops, 54; social value of, anthropological literature on, 15–17; social value of, Mongolian ethnography challenging,

17–19; at Tsagaan Sar ceremonies, 91, 95, 96, 97; types of, 52; at weddings, 97, 98, 100 Favred-Saada, J., 71, 82n5 fear: divination and production of, 143, 154–58; of hel am, 63, 73, 79–80 fences, in Mongolia, vii, 19, 20, 172 fieldwork: location of, vii–ix; objective of, vii, ix; partial nature of, viii fights: suppression of religion and, 121; at weddings, 100 fire: lighting at wedding ceremony, 100, 102–3; purification by, 102. See also hearth food: impure, 167n13; at ovoo ceremonies, 40, 41f; at Tsagaan Sar celebrations, 87–88, 89, 91, 94f; at weddings, 98, 99. See also milk/milk products foreigners: conspicuousness of, avoiding, 65, 73; perceived as naive (genen), 66 formalism, 17 formality: aesthetics of, 105. See also hierarchy; rules/conventions Frazer, J., 18, 69 Freud, S., 83n16 Galdan (Hotgoid ruler), 29n8 Gell, A., 69, 81, 169n37 Gelugpa order of Tibetan Buddhism, 117–18, 122. See also Yellow Sect Buddhism Genden (Hotgoid ruler), 10, 29n8, 30n8 gender hierarchy, 95, 107n14. See also women generalised witchcraft, 23–24; hel am (injurious talk) as, 23, 24, 60, 80, 114 ger (yurt): decoration of, 106n1; hoimor of, 98, 104, 114; for newlyweds, 97, 98; seasonal use of, 7, 47; spatial organisation of, 85, 98, 104, 108n20, 114; wedding celebration in, 98–100. See also hearth; hoimor Ghodsee, K., 14 Ghosh, A., 84n21 gift(s): double meaning in Germanic languages, 17; potential danger of, 17,

Index • 195

18–19; theories of, 15–16; at Tsagaan Sar ceremonies, 91, 95, 96; at weddings, 98, 100 Gluckman, M., 70 Godelier, M., 16 gossip: association with magic (hovs), 67; attention-catching function of, fear of, 76; category of, 60; and danger of hel am, 63; dispersive/nomadic capacity of, 60; divination compared to, 168n21; elusive agency of, 68–69, 76; exorcism of, in Tibet, 82n9; and group unification/ exclusion, 70; and hel am (injurious talk), 69, 72; in post-socialist era, 72; power of, 60, 61, 68; sentiments and desires stirred by, 69 gossip spirits, 68 greetings: age hierarchy in, 89, 95; sniffing in, 98, 100, 106n5; during Tsagaan Sar, 89–91, 95, 106n4; at weddings, 98, 99 Gregory, C.A., 16 Halh Mongols: in Chandman’-Öndör District, 7, 10; Living Buddha of, 117; and Manchu Qing rule over Mongolia, 29n8; preferred status of, 53 Halh Urianhai, 10. See also Arig Urianhai Hangartner, J., 34n14 Harhüü (lama), 123–26, 127–28, 130, 142; avoidance of conspicuousness by, 65, 73, 76; consultation with, 63–64; on curses/ cursed people, 21, 171; divination by, 143–44, 145–49, 150, 155; and ovoo ceremonies, 131–32; protective measures taken by, 21; protective written charm of, 163–64, 163f; ritual against hel am, 64–65; on secret layer of information, 166; on seter, 161–62, 169n29 hashaa. See compound(s) Haslund-Christensen, H., 28n7, 32n8 hats: symbolism of, 89; at Tsagaan Sar celebrations, 89, 91 haymaking, 48f, 50 hearth, 85; during wedding ceremony, 100, 102–3 Hegel, G.W.F., 139

Heissig, W., 117 hel am (injurious talk), 66–67; as anticipated possibility, 80–81, 113; attentioncatching articulations and, 75–76, 81; black (har), 60, 72, 74, 76–77; conflict and, 63, 66, 67, 69, 71; vs. curse (haraal), 81n2; and distributed personhood, 81; from established system, 79; ‘evil eye’ compared to, 66; fear of, 63, 73, 79–80; generalised logic of, 73–74; as generalised witchcraft, 23, 24, 60, 80, 114; gossip and, 69, 72; as integral part of relatedness, 60, 71, 72; labor of the negative compared to, 140; and loss of control, 80, 81; and mistrust, 71; people ‘with,’ 63, 69, 70, 71, 73; post-socialist conditions and, 72; red direction of Buddhism and, 127, 128; ritual against, 64–65, 174; in socialist times, 72; spell-like effects of, 80; ubiquity of, 63, 67, 69–70, 174; use of term, 81n1; white (tsagaan), 60, 72, 74, 77 herders: in Chandman’-Öndör village centre, 5–6, 41–42, 50f, 51; exchanges with district-centre residents, 52, 54–56, 58n23; move closer to centres, 38; precarious position of, 56; seasonal moves of, 47–48; in socialist times, 11–12 hierarchy: age, 89, 90, 94–95, 97, 104, 105–6; in Alungua celebration, 45–46; and anti-social relations, 174; in everyday life, 96–97, 105–6; gender, 95, 107n14; and honorifics, use of, 95; at ovoo ceremonies, 40; Red Sect Buddhism and, 166, 173; and self-other continuity, 23; in socialist times, 11; at Tsagaan Sar ceremonies, 89, 90, 96; at weddings, 97; Yellow Sect Buddhism and, 134 High, M.M., 75, 135n12 Hobbes, T., 14, 174 hoimor (upper/northern part of yurt), 98; hierarchy expressed through, 104; ovoo compared to, 114; during Tsagaan Sar celebration, 104; during wedding, 98, 99; in wooden house, 108n26 Holbraad, M., 142

196 • Index

home(s), Mongolian, 22f; formalised rulebased behaviour associated with, 106n2; protective written charm for, 163–64, 163f; saw hung over door of, 165; seasonal, 47–49, 57n14, 58n17; spatial organisation of, 85, 98, 104, 114. See also ger; house(s), wooden homeland (nutag), 39; and ovoo ceremonies, 40 honorifics, use of, 95, 104 Horolmoi (tribe leader), 9 hospitality, in Mongolia, 20, 34n21 host family, 61–62; attitude toward religion, 110–11; compound (hashaa) of, vii, 49–51; conflict with, 62–63, 66, 79; controlling behaviour of, 62, 78–79; diviner’s warning regarding, 2–3, 24; feared for hel am, 63, 73; income of, 51–52; self-sufficiency of, 49–51 Hotgoids, 29n8, 30n8 house(s), wooden, 7, 49; in Chandman’Öndör District village centre, 7, 47, 78f; hoimor in, 108n26; insulation for, 51 household(s): focus on, in divination sessions, 153, 166; new, making of, 100–101; self-sufficiency in post-socialist era, 49–53; and seter, protective relation between, 161–62; and yos (rules/customs), 106n2 Hövsgöl, Lake, 6; area east of, 7, 8f, 28n8, 31n8, 32n8, 123, 130; area west of, 7, 8f, 10, 70; ovoo ceremony at, 111f; prerevolutionary districts in area of, 31n8 Humphrey, C.: on Buryat culture, 58n17, 93–94, 113, 168n27; on Lovon Badam Junai, 136n16; on name taboos, 75, 76, 83n18; on omens, 83n14; on rules for right behaviour, 92, 106n2, 107n9; on shamans and lamas, 118; on shamans vs. elders, 110, 115, 132; on Tsagaan Sar, 88 Hürelbaatar, A., 162, 168n26 ice blocks: fetching from river, 51, 51f; melting, for Tsagaan Sar, 87 ID cards, clan affiliation on, 53, 57n13

incense, fumigation with: in Buddhist ritual, 64; before departure from Chandman’Öndör District, 66 Indian poetics and drama, emotions in, 108n25 individualism, of Mongolians, 4, 54; Buddhist lamas on, 121, 135n12; collapse of socialism and, 14 Indonesia, Korowoi in, 25 inertia, aesthetics of, 93 information: and power/control, 68; talk and spread of, 59–60, 69. See also knowledge Ingold, T., 92 isolation: in Mongolian countryside, 6, 47, 49; valued over kinship networks, 55, 56 Jargalsaihan, D. (Jargal DeFacto), 4 Javzandamba Hutagt, 117; Mongolian independence under, 32n8, 119; reincarnations of, 119, 135n8 Kaplonski, C., 83n17 Kapstein, M., 82n9 Khubilai Khan, 117 kinship networks: confusion/ignorance about descent and, 53–54; and delayed exchanges, 53, 54–55; mistrust/arguments in, 55–56; in post-socialist era, 52–53; self-sufficiency valued over, 55, 56; in socialist era, 58n23; Tsagaan Sar and reproduction of, 86, 97 knowledge: and belief, 138; divination sessions and, 143, 144, 165–66; lack of, and magical potency, 140–41, 142; loss of, during socialism, 137–38, 165; power of, 68, 82n5. See also information; unknown Korowoi, in West Papua, Indonesia, 25 Krebs, C., 28n7 labour of the negative, 139–41 Lacaze, G., 82n10, 93 lama(s), Buddhist: in Chandman’-Öndör District, 115, 116, 120–21, 123; on individualism and greed, 121, 135n12; at ovoo ceremonies, 40; purges of 1930s and,

Index • 197

11, 120, 139; red, 63–64, 64f, 116, 122–26, 124f, 127–28, 130; self-taught, 116; shamans and, 118; shortage in Mongolian countryside, 120, 137–38; status of, 95, 107n14; transgressive behaviour of, 1–2, 3, 65, 126, 127–28; from Ulaanbaatar, arrival in Chandman’Öndör District, 115–16, 120; use of term, 116, 134n5; yellow, 116, 120–21, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129–30 language: binary expressions in, avoidance of, 73–74; power of, 61; and social relations, 60. See also words Lattimore, O., 1, 3, 4 Lévi-Strauss, C., 16, 27n5, 81n3, 172 loss: and belief, 166n2; concern with, in post-socialist era, 137–38; as productive category, 138. See also absence Lovon Badam Junai, 123, 126, 136n16 lus (spirit master of rivers/springs), 67, 111–12, 130, 167n6; misfortune attributed to, 144, 145–46, 151 Luvsan (Khan), 29n8 magic: absence/lack of knowledge and, 140–41, 142; contagious, exchange of object compared to, 18; gossip associated with, 67, 69; innovations in, suppression of religion and, 165; in postsocialist space, 142; transfer of qualities analogically in, 82n6 Malinowski, B., 16 Manchu Qing dynasty: collapse of, 137; rule over Mongolia, 7–9, 29–31n8, 118–19 mantras (tarni), 136n18; diviner’s use of, 66; protection provided by, 21, 164; red lama’s use of, 21, 125, 128 market-based economy, transition to, 13–14 markets, and centralisation, 38, 47 Mauss, M., 15–16, 17, 19, 172 medals: at Alungua celebrations, 43, 44; enduring importance of, 13, 41, 44; in socialist era, 133f, 134 merit (buyan), 111; as anticipated possibility, 113; belief in, in pre-revolutionary times, 121; stupas and, 129; unifying/ centralising forces and, 120

metacommunication, 92 milk/milk products: household production of, 51; at ovoo ceremonies, 40; purity and supremacy of, 114; at Tsagaan Sar celebrations, 88; at weddings, 98 milk-spirit (shimiin arhi), 2; at ovoo ceremonies, 40; at Tsagaan Sar, 91; at wedding ceremony, 99, 100 misfortune: angering of spirit masters (gazryn ezed) and, 67; breaking of customary rule and, 93; conflict and, 63; diviner’s explanation for, 144–45; hel am and, 76–77; objects associated with, 18; as preliminary topic of research, viii; reluctance to speak about, 83n17 mistrust/suspicion, among Mongols, 1, 3, 5, 19, 21, 23, 158; delayed exchanges and, 55, 56; generalised witchcraft and, 24; hel am and, 71; hospitality rituals allaying, 20; post-socialism and, 52; red lama on, 125; Red Sect Buddhism and, 132, 134; research focus on, 4; yellow lama on, 121, 125 mobility: everyday dynamics of, 47–49; as precondition for business activity, 38 monasteries, Buddhist, in Mongolian territory, 118–19; destruction during purges of 1930s, 115, 137, 139; remains of, 141f money: diviner’s pronouncement on, 150; exchange based on, 52, 54; in ovoo ceremonies, 40; as payment to diviners, 144; in ritual exchanges, 107n6; saving in bank, 56; services requiring, 59, 61; in Tsagaan Sar, 91; in wedding ceremony, 99 Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party, 13, 43, 110, 134 morality: red lama on, 125, 127; yellow lama on, 121, 127 Mörön (provincial centre), 5, 8f, 9 Moses, L.W., 118 mountains: laying of deceased on, 136n23; spirit masters (gazryn ezed) of, 67, 111; worshipping of, 130 movement: of body, rules for, 92, 93–94; between village centre and countryside, 48–49

198 • Index

names: avoiding mention of, 75–76, 83n18; honorifics used instead of/in addition to, 95; on written charm, 164–65 national celebrations (ulsyn bayar), 65 nature (baigal’): and lus (spirit masters), 67, 111–12, 167n6; and religious beliefs, 111; taming of, Yellow Sect Buddhism and, 129–30 negdel. See collective farms news (sonin), 60; Mongols’ concern about, 60; spread in Chandman’-Öndör District, 59 New Year, celebrations of, 86. See also Tsagaan Sar nomadism: and curiosity about news, 60; wavering between unity and dispersal in, 1, 4. See also herders Nyingmapa order of Tibetan Buddhism, 122 objects: importance of holding on to, 34n18; potential danger in, 17–19, 138, 162. See also religious objects obligation: exchange based on, 52, 53; offerings and, 162 Ochirbat (lama), 121, 125; on impact of socialism, 137; on seter, 162 Odhüü (local friend), 40, 105 offerings: to deal with dangers, 158; obligation stemming from, 162; at ovoo ceremonies, 40; to seter, 160, 162, 169n32 Oirats, rule in Mongolia, 29–30n8 omens: self-made, 74–76, 83n14, 83n15; words as, 74, 75–76 ongod (shamanic spirit representations), 112; Buddhism and, 118; Christian pamphlets replacing, 115; seter compared to, 160, 168n27 others/otherness: avoidance of, 25; social relations and absorption by, 24; unknown, danger associated with, 4–5, 23. See also self-other continuity ovoo(s), 39; hoimor compared to, 114; next to Alungua statue, 45, 46; shamanic cult sites transformed into, 118 ovoo ceremonies, 39–40, 39f, 110, 114; Buddhist readings at, 114f; collective and hierarchical ‘wholes’ in, 47; food prepared

for, 41f; geographical distribution of, 130–32; at Lake Hövsgöl, 111f; raining after, 112; red lamas and, 131–32; during socialism, 134; yellow lamas and, 130, 132 Övör Shirhten, 10, 33n9. See also Arig Urianhai people Paine, R., 82n6 parents, relationship with children, 75, 103 Park, H.-Y., 52–53, 54 past: return to, in post-socialist era, 42; socialism and rupture with, 137–39 Pedersen, M.A., 22, 33n12, 34n23, 68, 75, 108n27, 135n15, 169n27 Pegg, C., 42 perspectivism, 22 post-socialism: hel am (injurious talk) in, 72; increased reliance on self-sufficiency in, 47, 49–52; indeterminate social relations in, 173; kinship networks in, 52–53; present absence in, 165; social distance accentuated in, 49; uncertainty and societal breakdown in, 14, 56 Potapov, L.P., 29n8 praise, and white hel am, 77 present absence, 139, 165, 166n3 presents. See gift(s) privatisation, post-socialist, 13, 14 protective devices: mantras (tarni), 21; saw hung over door, 165; seter, 112, 159–62, 159f; written charm, 163–65, 163f proverbs, Mongolian, 74, 82n4, 82n11, 174 Pürev, O., 168n27, 169n31 purges of 1930s, 11, 115, 120, 122, 137, 139 purification: by fire, 102; ritualised, 103; in Tsagaan Sar celebrations, 87, 88; unifying/centralising forces and, 120; in yellow vs. red direction of Buddhism, 127 reciprocity: conceptualisations of, 15–17, 22, 96. See also exchange(s) Red Sect Buddhism, 110, 121–26; and anti-social relations, 126, 132, 134; black (shamanic) part of, 123; and hierarchy,

Index • 199

166, 173; lamas in, 63–64, 64f, 116, 122–26, 124f, 127–28, 130; secrecy of, 128; shamanism and, 123, 125; vs. Yellow Sect Buddhism, 125–32, 134, 135n15 regressive sorcery, 24 relationships. See social relationships religion: ambiguity/incoherency regarding, 110–14; believing vs. acting out, 114; in post-socialist era, 137–38; pragmatic attitude toward, 109; socialism and, 110, 137; socialism’s attack on, and labour of the negative, 139–41; and state, dual principle of, 135n7; suppression of, and magical innovation, 165. See also Buddhism; shamanism religious objects: handing over to temple, 138, 155; present absence of, 138–39; relations with, 162; selling of, and misfortune, 166n1; during socialism, 13, 156 religious practitioners, 115–16; drinking by, 1–2, 3, 65, 126, 127–28, 144, 150; purges of 1930s and, 11, 115, 120, 122, 137; smoking by, 127, 128, 151. See also bone-setters; diviner(s); lama(s) river(s) (gol): communities based on, 39; fetching ice blocks from, 51, 51f; spirit masters of, 67, 111. See also lus Rousseau, J.-J., 4, 27n5, 172 rules/conventions, for right behaviour, 85–86, 92–93; and emotions, 103–4; household as locus of, 106n2; old people as embodiment of, 94, 104; reasons for, 107n9; slips in, 104–5; at Tsagaan Sar, 88–92; at weddings, 97. See also yos rumours (tsuurhal), 60. See also gossip Russia: ethnic Mongols in, ixn1; and recognition of Mongolian independence, 135n9 Russians, in Lake Hövsgöl region, 29n8, 31n8, 32n8 Sahlins, M., 14–15, 16, 54–55 Samuel, G., 110, 127, 132, 136n21 Schechner, Richard, 92 schismogenesis, 68, 175, 175n1

school, in Chandman’-Öndör village centre, 5, 41–42; settlement patterns associated with, 48; socialist ideology and, 11, 12–13, 79 Secret History of the Mongols, 33n10, 46, 120 self-other continuity, 4, 27n5; anthropological perspectives on, 21–23; practices/discourses avoiding, 4–5, 23, 24–25 self-sufficiency: increased reliance on, in post-socialist era, 47, 49–52; valued over kinship networks, 55, 56 seter, 112, 159–62, 159f, 167n7; animals depicted on, 112, 153, 159, 159f, 160; danger associated with, 162, 169n34; deities associated with, 160–61; divination focusing on, 152–53, 154, 155; misfortune attributed to, 144; offerings to, 160, 162, 169n32; ongod compared to, 160, 168n27; protection provided by, 161–62; Tibetan phenomenon related to, 168n25 settlement patterns, in Mongolia, 19–20, 47, 48–49. See also countryside; village(s) shaman(s): divination by, 144; vs. elders, 110, 115, 132; female (udgan), 143, 151–54; socialist destruction of paraphernalia of, 140 shamanism: and Buddhism, 10–11, 33n12, 118, 123, 125, 128, 132; post-socialist transition and, 22; as underground religion, 118 shops/kiosks: in Chandman’-Öndör District, 37–38, 37f; exchange in, 54 Siegel, J., 72, 82n11 Simmel, G., 174 sin (nügel): red lama on, 125; yellow lama on, 121 singing: and expression of emotions, 108n24; at weddings, 98, 100 smoking, religious practitioners and, 127, 128, 151 Sneath, D., 34n16, 34n20, 52, 107n8, 107n13, 168n17 sniffing, in greetings, 98, 100, 106n5

200 • Index

socialism, in Mongolia: absence as byproduct of, 140–41, 142; attack on superstition, and labour of the negative, 139–41; belief in, 12; Buddhism during, secret practice of, 12, 13; Buddhist qualities translated into, 132–34; Chandman’-Öndör District during, 11–13, 35–36; cities during, 139; collapse of, 13–14; countryside during, 139; and divinatory knowledge form, 156; enduring practices/symbols of, 13, 36, 41, 44–45, 57n10; illicit practices during, 12; and landscape of empty places, 156; and loss of knowledge, 137–38, 165; nostalgia for, 35, 72; ovoo ceremonies during, 134; political repression during, lack of public response to, 83n17; power centres during, 11, 35; present absence in, 165; privatisation contrasted with, 14; and purges of 1930s, 11, 115, 120, 122, 137, 139; and religion, 110, 137; revolution of 1921 and, 11; and rupture with past, 137–39; secrecy and privacy during, 13; seter during, 160; Tsagaan Sar during, 86; vacuum left by, and return to distant past, 42; values of, merging of national values with, 43–45 social relationships: avoidance of, 5, 21, 24, 25, 171, 172; danger associated with, 4–5, 21, 24; language and, 60; in post-socialist era, 173. See also anti-social relations Soyod Urianhai, 7–9, 10, 32n8, 130; in Chandman’-Öndör District, 10; stigmatised as backward, 57n13 spectre, notion of, 166n3 spells: hel am (injurious talk) compared to, 80; Red Sect Buddhism and, 126; Sinhalese, 169n38 spirit(s): gossip, 68; offerings to, obligation stemming from, 162 spirit masters (gazryn ezed), 67; as anticipated possibility, 113; avoiding attention from, 75–76; belief in, 111, 112, 114; ovoos as dwelling places of, 39; power attributed to, 67; Red Sect

Buddhism and, 130; stupas and, 129–30; Yellow Sect Buddhism and, 129. See also lus spring(s): in Chandman’-Öndör District, 167n9; sudden emergence of, divination regarding, 151; visits to, 65. See also lus standing out: danger in, 61, 65, 73, 77; foreigners and, 65, 73; and hel am, 75–76, 81. See also attention Stasch, R., 25 stillness, cultural value of, 93–94 Strathern, M., 15, 16 stupas, Buddhist, 129–30 subbotniks (collective workdays), 13, 57n10 subdistricts (bag), communities based on, 39 substantivism, 17 Sünjeesenge (Hotgoid ruler), 30n8 suspicion. See mistrust Swancutt, K.A., 34n15, 61, 68, 76, 81n2, 84n19, 122, 136n20, 141, 148 Szynkiewicz, S., 13 talk (yaria), 60; dispersive/nomadic capacity of, 60; power attributed to, 67; and spread of information, 59–60. See also gossip; hel am Tambiah, S.J., 82n6, 82n11, 107n12, 169n38 Tannu-Urianhai (Tuva), 7; early history of, 29–31n8, 32n8 Taussig, M., 24, 69, 139 teachers, status of, 95 television, 59 temples, Buddhist: in Chandman’-Öndör District, 119, 120; destruction during purges of 1930s, 115, 137, 139; efforts to revive, 115–16; religious objects handed over to, 138, 155 Tibet: consecrated animals in, 168n25; exorcism of malicious gossip in, 82n9 Tibetan Buddhism: in Mongolia, 117, 137; Nyingmapa order of, 122; shamanism and, 118. See also Buddhism Tibetan text, on written charm, 163f, 164 Toren, C., 107n7

Index • 201

transportation, long-distance, 59 trees, spirit masters (gazryn ezed) of, 67 Trobriand witchcraft, 82n11 truth, in divination, 142–43 Tsaatan. See Duha people Tsagaan Sar, 86–91; Buddhist teachings and, 88; drinking during, 91, 104; eve of, 88; exchanges during, 91, 95, 96, 97; first morning of, 88–89, 95; food for, 87–88, 89, 91, 94f; greetings during, 89–91, 95, 106n4; libations during, 89, 90f; and metacommunicative aspects of Mongolian life, 92; preparations for, 86–87, 87f; purification at, 87, 88; rule-like practices of, 91–92; visits during, 89–91, 95–96, 103, 105; weddings compared to, 97, 100 Tsagaan-Üür District, 6, 32n8; Dayan Deerh cave in, 138; pupils from, 48 Tsendee (mother of host family), 61; compound (hashaa) of, vii, 49–51; employment of, 52; relations with foreign guests, 62, 78, 79 Tupinamba, in Amazonian Brazil, 25 Turkic-speaking people, around Lake Hövsgöl, 7–9, 10, 28n8, 32n8 Tushetu Khan Gombodorji, son of, 117 Tuva, 7. See also Tannu-Urianhai Tuvinians, 7–9, 28n8; Üüriin Urianhai and, 29n8 udgan (female shaman), 143, 151–54 Uighurs, 9, 32n8 Ulaanbaatar: distance to Chandman’-Öndör District from, 5; hierarchy centered in, during socialism, 11, 35; lamas from, arrival in Chandman’-Öndör District, 115–16, 120; suburban compounds in, 20 Ulaanhüü (father of host family), 61; attitude toward religion, 110–11, 113–14; compound (hashaa) of, vii, 49–51; conflict with Düütsetseg, 62, 65; as dangerous outsider, 70, 71; income of, 51–52; relationship with Düütsetseg, 78, 79; relations with foreign guests, 78–79; reputation for hel am, 63, 69, 71, 73; and transgressive lama, 1–3

unknown: cosmology of, 156; danger associated with, 138; divination as judgement of, 142; as problem in Chandman’-Öndör District, 137 Urianhai: in Chandman’-Öndör District, 10, 29–30n8; claims to Mongol vs. Turkic descent, 46; low status of, 53; use of term, 10. See also Arig Urianhai; Soyod Urianhai Üüriin Urianhai, 28–29n8, 32n8 uuts: at ovoo ceremonies, 40; at weddings, 99 village(s), Mongolian: in Chandman’-Öndör District, 5–6, 6f, 11, 19f, 41–42, 47, 48, 73f; exchanges between countryside and, 52, 54–56, 58n23; family compounds in, viii, 20 Viveiros de Castro, E., 25 vodka: in Buddhist ritual, 64; and divining energy, 144; Red Sect Buddhism and, 126; ritual prior to drinking of, 103; at Tsagaan Sar, 91 volt sorcery, 81 Wallace, V.A., 135n10 weddings (hurim), 97–101 West Papua, Korowoi in, 25 Wheeler, Alan, 29n8 white food (tsagaan idee), 88. See also milk/ milk products white (tsagaan) hel am, 60, 72, 74, 77, 84n19; countering dangers of, 77 Willerslev, R., 34n22 witchcraft: and deceit, 27n2; generalised, hel am as, 23–24, 60, 80, 114; witches considering themselves victims of, 71 women: at Alungua celebrations, 43, 45; brides, ritualised transfer of, 98, 99f, 100–101; diviners, 1–3, 66, 143, 144, 151–54; drinking by, 2, 108n21; gender hierarchies and, 95, 107n14; in Mongolian cosmology, 57n11; ovoo mountains and, 130; and perpetuation of Mongol nation, 45; shop owners, 37–38; young and unmarried, vulnerability to hel am, 80. See also daughters-in-law

202 • Index

words: and self-made omens, 74, 75–76; taboo, 83n18. See also language; talk (yaria) written charm, Buddhist, 163–65, 163f Yanjmaa, B., 30n8, 31n8 Yellow Sect Buddhism, 110, 117–21, 122; advancement in Mongolia, 117–18; centralising secular power and, 119, 129, 132; in Chandman’-Öndör District, 119; concern with purity in, 88; lamas in, 116, 120–21, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129–30; and landscape, taming of, 129–30; qualities translated into socialism, 132–34; red/black aspects of, 122, 126;

vs. Red Sect Buddhism, 125–32, 134, 135n15; sutras in, 128 Yonzon Hamba, 136n17 yos (rule, custom), 93–94, 105; household as locus for, 106n2; old people as embodiment of, 94, 104; reasons for, 107n9. See also rules/conventions Yüan dynasty, 116, 117 Yukaghir, 34n22 Yurchak, A., 12 yurt. See ger Zeitlyn, D., 149, 167n10 zodiac, Mongolian, 167n11 Zünghars, 9