Inviting Happiness. Food Sharing in Post-communist Mongolia

The aim of this paper is to draw attention to the changing practices and perceptions of the Han residing in Inner Mongolia. Arguing that studies of Inner Mongolia all too frequently focus exclusively on the Mongols, and that the few Han appearing in them tend to be portrayed as agents of modernization and acculturation, the article seeks to challenge this limiting framework and to propose a more integrative approach. Taking dietary practices as its focus, the article suggests that the consumption patterns of foods traditionally marked as ‘ethnic’ do not neatly follow ethnic boundaries, and that limiting ethnographies of the region to the Mongols in fact obscures and conceals the numerous trends that cut across ethnic lines.

2017

In Inner Mongolia, where Mongols and Han Chinese live as cultural neighbours in close and long-term social and cultural interrelations, ‘white food’, that is dairy products, is conceived as a boundary marker. the (non-) shared use of one and the same product and the product´s characteristics itself can be ignored, reinterpreted or stressed differently. Minor differences or imagined differences can become extremely important because these differences (imagined or real) are the basis for the feeling of the own otherness (generally perceived as positive) as well as the basis for the feeling of the strangeness of the others (generally perceived as negative). that is how an exaggerated perception regarding the consumption or non-consumption of milk products occurs. This process allows the construction and emphasis of Mongolian and Chinese identity in Inner Mongolia in the process of demarcation despite all proximity and cultural neighbourhood.

2017

1993

Dissertation, 2022

In this dissertation, I show how leaders in the Mongolian People’s Republic used the collectivization campaign from 1956-1960 to change the way in which Mongolians interacted with animals and the environment. Collectivization, which followed the Soviet model, was the confiscation of private livestock to create collectively owned and worked livestock herds, and was seen as one of the building blocks of a modern socialist state. Mongolia had, and still has, a nomadic pastoralist economy, but this was subject to change over time, rather than being a romanticized and timeless way of life, and one of the largest changes occurred during the socialist era. My sources for this dissertation are Mongolian and Russian language archival sources, oral histories, socialist era handbooks, periodicals, and histories, as well as Mongolian short stories, poetry, songs, and films.

Asian Medicine, 2006

Peoples of central Asia have long been a world apart with their own unique way of life and foodways. These have been based primarily upon carefully harboured dairy products, supplemented by occasional meat and whatever else could be obtained from the environment without limiting pastoralism. The paper describes these foodways and the changes that they have undergone over the centuries in response to contacts with the outside world, conquest, and empire. Focus is on the Mongols, whose world empire gave rise to a world cuisine, and Turkic groups such as the Kazakhs. The paper concludes that, due to globalisation and the destruction of traditional pastoralism, steppe foodways are now in rapid decline. The social base that has supported them for centuries has now been all but destroyed.

2003

Edited by Ole Bruun and Li Narangoa This volume examines the process of cultural change in Mongol societies since the early twentieth century by considering: • the interaction of the basic structural features of pastoral nomadism in Mongolia with larger economies, both communist and capitalist; • the effect of deliberate cultural reconstruction (ranging from changes to the education system to purges and outright cultural destruction) on the conduct of the pastoral economy and; • the efforts of Mongols themselves to develop aspects of their own cultural identity under conditions of territorial partition, episodes of intense political repression, and (in the Russian and Chinese regions) very substantial immigration by non-Mongol groups. In particular, this volume will examine those modernization processes entailed in urbanization, secularization, industrialization, democratization and national identity formation. A central question is to what extent these take a different shape in a pastoral society as compared to an 'ordinary' sedentary agricultural society.