Exploring the ethnography of Mongolia & Inner Asia

The following is a list of twenty things to learn from anthropological research in Mongolia & Inner Asia. This document is a work in progress – check back for links to more exhibits and resources as they become available!

1. Inner Asia has been defined as a frontier area, with a frontier culture.

The idea of “culture areas”, developed in the early days of anthropology, has had a lasting influence outside our discipline.

A culture area is a region defined by a significant set of shared “culture traits”.

In the case of Inner Asia, such traits have been taken to include shared practices associated with pastoral subsistence, mobility, and interactions with other peoples along the frontiers of sedentary civilizations.

2. The first ethnographic research in Inner Asia was not done by anthropologists, but by explorers.

Our primary ethnographic sources concerning Mongolia and Inner Asia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries include the reports prepared by missionaries, geographers, and explorers who conducted extended trips across Inner Asia.

Some European ethnographers spent years at a time travelling through Inner Asia in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

You can find out more about who these early explorers were from our listing of Early ethnographic accounts from Inner Asia.

3. Your ideas of “right” and “wrong” are shaped by culture.

Through long-term immersion in a different society, anthropologists are able to recognize that unusual or offensive practices are not always “wrong” – they may simply reflect the learned practices in a given socio-cultural environment.

This idea is reflected as a guiding principle of anthropological research, known as cultural relativism.

By learning and teaching about the culture(s) of Inner Asia through ethnographic work, we hope to make the world a bit more accommodating of cultural difference.

4. We can learn quite a bit from ordinary people’s experiences.

We often make sense of the world through narratives – stories about how we have ended up where we are.

Sociocultural anthropologists will in many cases draw upon personal accounts or "life histories" in trying to understand people's social experiences.

By comparing life stories, we can appreciate that phenomena such as socialism and the transition to post-socialism were experienced very differently by various actors, and in ways that were not always documented in official sources.

5. Inner Asians have co-evolved with their livestock.

Co-evolution is a biological phenomenon whereby two or more species influence one another’s evolution.

In Inner Asia as elsewhere around the world, domesticated livestock have adapted to conditions of human care, to the extent that some species would no longer be able to survive in the wild.

But humans have also evolved in adaptation to their animals – suggesting that culture can influence biology, and vice versa.

6. The most serious health problems are caused by social factors.

Although biology plays a clear role in many illnesses – particularly those caused by infection, cancer, and hereditary conditions – social factors have very strong impact on how people get sick and whether they get better.

Medical anthropologists contribute to our understanding of the social determinants of health, which include factors such as poverty and unemployment, gender difference, poor food security, and inadequate health services.

For example, medical anthropologists have pointed to maternal mortality in Mongolia as a preventable result of structural inequalities.

7. Anthropologists learn about others by participating in their everyday lives.

Since the early twentieth century, it has been customary for anthropologists to seek knowledge about other people by immersing themselves in a different, unfamiliar group or society.

Even though it is becoming more common nowadays to study one’s own culture, many anthropologists remain committed to the idea of learning from difference and “defamiliarization” – that is, putting yourself in an unfamiliar situation, or treating familiar practices as if you were seeing them for the first time.

The principal method for doing this is called participant observation, which involves actively participating in the everyday activities of a group of people.

For many Western anthropologists, this involves leaving everything behind and living far from home, in a place like Mongolia, for one or two years.

8. Anthropologists use photographs not just to document culture, but also to create culture.

Many cultural anthropologists take photographs or visual recordings (video or film) as part of their field research process.

Sharing and discussing photographs and ethnographic films is a means of creating new cultural understandings in conversation with those records.

Drawing on the ideas of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, we might say that visual ethnographic records are dialogic works: they do not constitute self-contained, authoritative records, but instead provide meaning that shifts “in dialogue with” other works and discussions.

9. Stories can often tell us more about people’s lives than surveys or other “hard data”.

The term “ethnography” literally means “writing about people”.

The research process in sociocultural anthropology is often structured around the goal of producing narrative representations – that is, stories – that provide insight into the ways that different people live their lives.

When we refer to “an ethnography”, as a thing, we are usually speaking of a book or article that draws heavily on descriptive and narrative accounts.

Sometimes these accounts may be quite technical, but often they are written in a literary style that can be accessible to the general reader.

10. Nations have been built with music.

Even though we may tend to think of nations as “natural” social formations that have existed from time immemorial, nation-states – and the very idea of the “nation” – came into being quite recently in historical terms.

Anthropologists and historians have studied the ways that nationalism – the idea of belonging to a national community with a shared, national language and culture – has developed through technologies such as print communications and standardized education.

Developing a “national music” and folklore, such as the Mongolian morin khuur and urtiin duu, plays a large part in nation-building.

11. Camels may save the Gobi.

The camel is arguably the most resilient species of livestock in Inner Asia.

Until recently, however, the number of bactrian (two-humped) camels in the Gobi has been in decline due to the falling economic returns from camel breeding.

As we see from experiences in both Mongolia and Inner Mongolia, activities that promote the cultural value of camels can go a long way toward revitalizing camel herds – demonstrating that herders’ economic decisions are not just financial.

Cultural revitalization efforts belong to what we call performative practices, meaning activities that create real-world relationships by communicating something about them (as “performance”).

12. We all may need to become computer programmers soon.

“Coding”, in the sense of tagging and annotating ethnographic records, has long been a part of the qualitative research process.

Today there is an increasing need for computer coding, in the sense of software programming, as part of the ways that social scientists use digital data to probe and model the world.

The text you are reading is partly the result of a project to develop tools for writing ethnography from within digital archives.

13. Anthropologists have studied Facebook and other social media as cultural spaces.

The field of digital ethnography treats online communities as socio-cultural spaces, just like “real life” interactions.

Anthropologists might conduct participant observation on platforms like Facebook, for example, to see how participants in Mongolian online communities reflect ideas about community, nation, and ethnicity.

The cultural boundaries of Inner Asian online communities are surprisingly similar to those in real life.

14. “Hybrid” cultures are the norm.

Anthropologists view culture as something that is always changing.

We use the concept of “hybridity” to describe one form of change, where new practices arise out of contact between two existing cultures.

Localized forms of global or “borrowed” expressive culture – such as Mongolian hip-hop – are obvious examples of hybridity.

Anthropological researchers have also studied cities along the borders of Russia, China, and Mongolia as sites of entirely new cultures, in which the language, physical space, and everyday life borrow creatively from different sources.

15. Pastoralists are the most likely people to survive climate change.

Various international organizations have published reports arguing that pastoralists are among the most ecologically resilient people on the planet.

Herders have historically been able to absorb ecological “shocks” – such as drought or extreme winter hazards – through practices that include mobility, herd diversification, and temporary migration to cities.

Unfortunately, anthropologists have found that the adaptive capacity of African and Eurasian pastoralism is threatened by factors such as rangeland fragmentation, sedentarization of herders, or limits imposed on herd sizes and composition.

16. Mongolians may see the world in completely different ways than others.

The language you speak, the society you live in, the places you know – all of these cultural factors shape the way you see the world.

Some anthropologists go so far as to say that cultural differences can be so extreme, people from different cultures actually live in different realities.

17. Households are a product of the State.

A lot of the quantitative data we use in formulating social policy assumes that people belong to distinct households.

Ethnographic research shows that this is not always the case, however: people often circulate amongst residences, and share resources, in ways that are not captured by official census statistics.

Anthropological research suggests that contemporary idea of the “household” exists, to a large extent, due to models of administration that require citizens to be registered as members of fixed economic and residential units.

18. Anthropologists have asked us to reconsider terms such as “nomadism”.

In the 1990s, British anthropologists Caroline Humphrey and David Sneath published a book on Inner Asian mobile pastoralism, callsed “The End of nomadism? (1999)”

The question mark in their title refers to the possible demise of a way of life, but also to the possibility that terms such as “nomadic pastoralism” might have outlived their usefulness.

The label “nomads”, in particular, has been used by outsiders who imagine fierce, wandering, backward peoples inhabiting the frontier regions of Inner Asia.

But even more apparently neutral terms such as “herders” can be difficult to apply in an analytically meaningful way, as ethnographic research reveals a highly diverse range of pastoral experiences in Inner Asia.

19. You have the right to benefit from ethnographic research.

Given that ethnographic research often depends on highly personal information gathered about study participants, anthropologists must be very cautious not to cause harm to the people they write about.

Beyond this commitment to make ethical use of personally identifiable data, however, anthropologists’ professional codes of ethics assert that researchers’ first responsibility is always towards the people who participate in their research – even when this puts researchers at odds with the institutions who have funded their work.

In agreeing to contribute to an ethnographic study, you have the right to know what information is going to be collected about you, and you also have the right to benefit from the research results.

20. Indigenous anthropologists are trying to “decolonize” culture.

Our modern idea of “culture” was shaped by anthropologists – but many anthropologists avoid using this term as an analytical category today.

Nonetheless, the “culture concept” offers useful openings for Indigenous anthropologists and their collaborators, who may seek to assert self-determination rights on the basis of cultural criteria.

Ethnic, nationalist, and Indigenous rights discourses in Inner Asia sometimes draw on the work of local ethnographic researchers.