Mongolia, moral culture and the mythology of nomadism

The figure of The Nomad has long held a special place in the moral mythologies of classical Euroamerican history, typically appearing as exotic members of the supporting cast in the grand story of civilization. In social evolutionist thought Nomadic Society was presented as one of the major divisions of humankind, to be theorised and contrasted with sedentary agriculture and urbanism. Soviet-era Mongolian scholarship, concerned with recognition and respect for a national culture under active construction, appropriated and valorised nomadism as a distinctive national heritage. The notion of ‘nomadic civilization’ (nüüdliin soyol irgenshil) encapsulated the view that, far from being incompatible with civilization, nomadism was a particular type of civilization, of which Mongolia was the most splendid example. By the time of the postsocialist-era revival of ‘national culture’ the concept was already deeply intertwined with notions of the nomadic, and imbued with a virtuous ethical content. ‘Traditional nomadic culture’ (ulamjlalt nüüdliin soyol) and ‘nomadic civilization’ are central subjects in the Ethical Citizen Education (irgenii yos züin bolovsrol) taught in Mongolian schools. However, since the late twentieth century, trends in history, archaeology and postcolonial scholarship have led to a questioning and rethinking of the notions of nomadism, culture and morality inherited from older schools of scholarship. I argue that ‘the nomadic’ can no longer be seen as a defining feature of a fundamentally different social type, but rather as a label applied to livestock-based political economies with many correspondences with agricultural and urban ones. Similarly, rather than approaching culture as an enduring, abstract collective form, we can better conceive of it as an unstable, changing accretion of particular normative projects for the ordering of the social world.