Part I The Making and Remaking of Mongolia

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

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

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