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

By Lars Højer

Set in a remote district of villagers and nomadic pastoralists in the northernmost part of Mongolia, this book introduces a local world where social relationships are cast in witchcraft-like idioms of mistrust and suspicion. While the apparent social breakdown that followed the collapse of state socialism in Mongolia often implied a chaotic lack of social cohesion, this ethnography reveals an everyday universe where uncertain relations are as much internally cultivated in indigenous Mongolian perceptions of social relatedness, as they are externally confronted in postsocialist surroundings of unemployment and diminished social security.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Jul 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9781785332470

Lars Højer

Lars Højer is an associate professor at the Centre for Comparative Culture Studies, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen. He has carried out extensive fieldwork in Mongolia and Inner Asia. His previous anthropological research has mainly focused on social, economic, religious, and political aspects of transition processes in urban and rural post-socialist Mongolia.

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The Anti-Social Contract

THE ANTI-SOCIAL CONTRACT

Injurious Talk and Dangerous Exchanges in Northern Mongolia

Lars Højer

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

Preface

Acknowledgements

Notes on Transliteration

Introduction. Creating Difference from Within

Chapter 1.   Centralisation and Dispersal: A District in the Market Era

Chapter 2.   Dangerous Communications: Injurious Talk and the Perils of Standing Out

Chapter 3.   Safe Communications: Formality and Hierarchy

Chapter 4.   Morality and Danger: Religious Practices and Buddhist Directions

Chapter 5.   Concealed Agencies: Divination, Loss and Magical Objects

Conclusion

References

Index

FIGURES

0.1   Chandman’-Öndör District centre in summer, 2006.

0.2   Contemporary and pre-revolutionary Chandman’-Öndör District in Mongolia.

0.3   Chandman’-Öndör District centre in winter, 2001.

0.4   A home in the district centre.

1.1   Playing chess in a local shop.

1.2   Gathering at the ovoo ceremony.

1.3   Cooked mutton prepared for the ovoo ceremony.

1.4   At the Alungua statue.

1.5   Making hay for the winter.

1.6   Herding at the district centre.

1.7   Fetching ice at the local river.

2.1   Red Buddhist lamas performing a ritual.

2.2   The village.

2.3   Home close to the district centre.

3.1   Preparing meheeriin tos for Tsagaan Sar.

3.2   Making libations.

3.3   Tsagaan Sar.

3.4   Receiving the new daughter-in-law.

4.1   An ovoo ceremony at Lake Hövsgöl.

4.2   Buddhist readings at an ovoo ceremony.

4.3   Red Buddhist lama.

4.4   The Dayan Deerh cave.

4.5   Medals, school uniforms, suits and ceremonial scarfs at the local school.

5.1   Remains of a monastery at the Üür river.

5.2   Ataany seter.

5.3   The protective charm (names in Cyrillic have been blurred).

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. 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 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 (loco-centric) 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.

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 Hugh-Jones, 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 Anti-Social 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.

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 Anti-Social 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

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 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 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 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