The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 17 | Issue 14 | Number 1 | Article ID 5293 | Jul 15, 2019

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Nomads and Their Inner World

Burensain Borjigin

A dialogue between Uradyn E. Bulag andBurensain Borjigin

This is the text of the 2019 “Nomad Relays”Academic Lecture

Nomad Relays is an annual non-profit eventcelebrating nomadic culture on a Saturday ofevery June. Initiated by film director Uragshaa(Wuershan), musician Yalagch (Ilchi),anthropologist Uradyn E. Bulag and artistChyanga (Qin Ga) in June 2018, the event aimsto bring academic lectures, art exhibitions,films, musical performances and other relatedactivities together to present the charms ofnomadic culture, explore its contemporarysignificance, and reflect on its inheritance andfuture development.

On 8 June 2019, in the second annual NomadRelays event held at Mongol Camp (SouthCamp), Chaoyang District, Beijing, BurensainBorjigin, a renowned Mongolist historian basedin Japan, was invited to lecture on the innerworld of nomads and engage in a dialogue withUradyn Bulag. In the lecture, Borjigin sharedhis educational and academic researchexperiences and his embarrassment at his ownidentity as a peasant Mongol. He vividlyinterpreted the problems of diversification intoday’s Mongolian world caused by a variety offorces such as sedentar isat ion cumagriculturalisation, and marketisation cumurbanisation. In the dialogue, they furtherdiscussed significations of “diversity” fornomadic culture in different contexts. They alsoemphasised the importance of understandingnomads’ inner world in order to strengthentheir confidence to communicate with the

outside world. Below we present a lightlyredacted English version of Borjigin’s lectureand the impromptu dialogue between Bulagand Borjigin.

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Hello everyone!

First of all, I am very grateful for the invitationfrom the “Nomad Relays”. When I first heardthe term "Nomad Relays", or “Youmu Jihua”(Nomad Plan) in Chinese, last year, I wonderedwhat the so-called "Plan" was. How differentwas the “Plan” from the “Naadam” whereMongols gather together for wrestling, horseracing, drinking and singing? I was curious. Inever expected that I would be lucky enough toparticipate in this "plan" the following year.Many thanks to the “Nomad Relays” itself, andto the four organisers, who are innovators andpioneers, exploring new ideas to support andlead the future direction of the nomads. Ipersonally think that, strictly speaking, thereare no nomads in Inner Mongolia or in Chinatoday. However, the gathering of all of you herein Beijing demonstrates that nomadism is stillvibrant. We can claim to be nomads today, orwe can call ourselves "the descendants ofnomads." I am even more grateful to all theguests who are interested in the descendants ofthese "nomads". I am very happy to be able tomeet you all.

Knowing myself and accepting myself

First, let me introduce myself. I want to do thisbecause the beginning of my academic

experience and thinking began with knowingmyself and accepting myself. This process isclosely related to today's topic, so let me dosome detailed self-introduction.

In the early 1960s, I was born in a small villagewith 30 Mongolian families in Khüree banner,located in eastern Inner Mongolia. When I wasborn, this was a semi-agricultural and semi-pastoral area. I remembered that there weremany flocks of sheep and goats, and herds ofcattle and horses in our village when I was inelementary and middle school. Of course, theybelonged to the Production Brigade. Theseherds of animals would spend the late autumnand winter in a desert 40 kilometres away fromthe village, which we call "Tobu". In spring andsummer, when the herds returned to thevillage, we could also eat some dairy products.Therefore, more precisely, I should say that Iwas a child of a semi-agricultural and semi-pastoral herding family in spring and summer,and a peasant’s child in winter.

Unfortunately, with the disintegration of thePeople's Commune, the Production Brigade wasdisbanded in 1980. Those herds were assignedto individual households, and I have never seenproper herds of cattle, sheep or horses eversince. Since then, the homeland in my memoryhas become more like a farming village.Gradually, the so-called semi-pastoral elementsin the semi-agricultural and semi-pastoral areashave drifted away. The proportion ofagriculture has become larger and larger, andthe village’s farming characteristics havegrown stronger year by year. Therefore, eventhough I was born in a semi-agricultural andsemi-pastoral area, I actually grew up in afarming village.

In 1980, the third year after the collegeentrance examination system was restored, Iwas admitted to Inner Mongolia University.1980 was the beginning of China's reform andopening up. It was a very extraordinary time.Frankly speaking, I was very fortunate to have

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grown up during this period. After graduatingin 1984, I was assigned to the Inner MongoliaRadio Station as a journalist until I went toJapan to study in 1992. That is to say, afteruniversity graduation, in the extraordinary eraof the early days of reform and opening, Itravelled throughout Inner Mongolia and muchof north China as a journalist. The history ofour Mongolian people has been less than athousand years since the time of Genghis Khan.In this historical process, the Mongols in Chinain the 1980s were the first among worldMongols to taste the market economy. FromEjine in the extreme west of Inner Mongolia toHulunbuir in the easternmost part, I visitedherdsmen in the depths of the grasslands andsemi-herders living in the desert, trying tounderstand and report how they met thechallenge of the wave of marketisation that hadnever been experienced before. Of course, wewere then still in a more complicated state inwhich the “planned economy” and the “marketeconomy” coexisted. In short, I had theprivilege of doing journalism in Inner Mongoliaduring this extraordinary era in the mid to late1980s.

I went to Japan for further study in April 1992.As China's reform and opening up progressedin the 1990s, there was a wave of self-fundedstudy abroad. I have lived and worked inJapanese for 27 years. This is a long time. Ihave lived in Japan for the same period of timeas I lived in China, but I have spent most of myadult life in Japan. Interestingly, the years Ilived in Japan have been a special period afterthe end of the nation’s bubble economy, whichthe Japanese call "the lost 20 years." At thesame time, these two decades have been aperiod of rapid economic growth in China, somy 20 odd years in Japan have seen China'seconomic and social rise, while Japan hasremained relatively quiet. I don't quite agreewith the statement that Japan has been goingdownhill for the past two decades, especiallythe view that Japanese society has stagnated.Instead, it is better to say that China has

developed rapidly in these years.

I have been living in Japan feeling the gap andtravelling between China and Japan. I feel sorrythat I did not have the chance to personallyexperience the development of my homeland.Honestly, I’m sometimes envious of everyoneliving in China in such a vibrant era. Of course,I come back many times a year, hoping to keepup with the pace of development in China, butmy flesh is weak. Today, I would like to talkabout the question of nomadic tradition fromthe perspective of a Mongolian who lives andworks abroad.

My first impression after I arrived in Japan wasthat Japan was one of the countries that likedMongolian people and nomadic culture themost. When they heard that I am a Mongol,they were extremely excited, showingunreserved curiosity, saying "You must haveridden a horse to school", "You must havegrown up in a yurt". The purpose of my stay inJapan was to pursue an academic career, and Ibelieve an academic should be honest and tellthe truth. So I told them: Although I am aMongol, I did not go to school on horseback,nor was I born in a yurt. I was born in a mudhouse. I never had a chance to ride a horsewhen I was young. I rode donkeys for sometime, if that counts. That greatly disappointedthe Japanese; they did not want to recognisethat I am a Mongol. At that time, I thought,“whether I am a Mongol or not, it is not up toyou to decide”. I felt that the Japanese had astandard, equating Mongols with nomadicpeople. They were not willing to accept me as aMongol, and any further explanation on mypart was futile. Under this kind of psychologicalentanglement and struggle, I entered Japanesesociety step by step. I thought at that time: howdid I become such a person who claimed to beMongolian while others would not agree? Myancestors were originally nomads. They alsolived in yurts. They rode fast horses on the vastgrassland. How did I become a peasant later? Iwas determined to figure out how I became a

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peasant. Otherwise, I couldn’t accept myself,let alone others. How could I conduct researchwhile I didn’t even know who I was, and how Iturned into such a person today? In thispsychological entanglement I began to think.My Japanese friends around me, including mysupervisor, were all confused about my peasantMongolian background; I seemed to haveshown them a Mongolian identity which wasnot quite the same as they had imagined. I usedto wonder, even worry, about how to become a"decent Mongol". I began to think about howthe nomads of the past became peasants today,and in such large numbers. It was so hard toexpress my cultural trauma: how can a personwho grew up riding a donkey dare to say thathe is a real Mongol?

Although I haven’t been riding a horse, I haveto keep up appearances. In order to "makethings up", in the summer of the 2008 BeijingOlympic Games, I rode a horse from the WestUjumchin grassland to the Dushikou Gate ofthe Great Wall (in Chicheng county) to thenorth of Beijing. I rode for 10 days and coveredmore than 700 kilometres, trying my best tofeel what it was like to be a Mongol. I also triedto feel the greatness of our ancestor ChinggisKhan and his army’s military expedition onhorseback hundreds of years ago. In thefollowing summer (2009), I again tried to ride

from West Ujumchin to Hohhot, but had toreturn after travelling for more than 500kilometres due to drought. Thus, I spent twosummers riding through the central part ofInner Mongolia, making the experience a“compensation” for my growing up riding adonkey! The greater gain was a three-dimensional experience I obtained of thehistorical process of the Mongols.

There is a stereotype in the internationalcommunity: the Mongols are nomads and ahorse-riding people. Apparently, the world isnot willing to acknowledge our changes. In myacademic journey, frankly speaking, the term"nomad" is a kind of burden. It does not like apeasant child like me, but it does not give up onme, either. On my part, I like it but I can't becompletely accepted by it, and it is difficult tobe freed from it. This is a very complicatedrelationship. How to confront "nomad" andthen go beyond oneself? This is also myacademic motivation. I have always had bothtroubles and motivations, and it has promptedme to make further explorations. Therefore, myself-recognition process is my academicjourney, a journey also to understand thediversity of the Mongolian world. To make anadditional point, Japan is a place not far awayfor understanding China, understanding InnerMongolia, and understanding the Mongolianworld; it takes just three hours to reach aninternational stage from where one can thinkabout the Mongolian world independently.

How to understand the diversity of theMongolian world?

Looking back at history, since the end of the19th century, Inner Mongolia has beeninundated by immigrants from inland China.Because of the massive land reclamation, theentire grassland in the south shrank in waves.The number of times the herdsmen movethroughout the year decreased gradually, andthey were forced to settle down when there

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was no space for moving. After settling down,since they could not make a living by raisinglivestock, they began to grow crops. Also lowyield of crops in arid areas led to theenlargement of cultivated land so that pasturesbecame smaller and smaller, graduallyresulting in semi-agricultural and semi-pastoralareas. In the end, there were no pastures foreven raising a few cattle or horses, and the onlyrecourse was farming.

Great changes have taken place in the shortperiod since the end of the 19th century. Fromthe Tumed Plain at the foot of the YinshanMountains to the Harchin–Eastern Tumed area,the Shiramörön River and the Nonni Riverbasins, cultivated land is everywhere. MostMongols in the eastern region have beenfarming for less than a hundred years. Strictlyspeaking, the eastern Mongolian banners in the1930s and 1940s still retained a very strongpastoral culture. The Inner MongoliaAutonomous Region has a total area of 1.18million square kilometres, in which a vastMongolian farming village society has formedon the land of 210,000 square kilometres to thesoutheast of the Great Hingan Mountains. I callthese settled farming communities in thesoutheastern part of the Great HinganMountains “Mongolian farming village society”.This conception is what I have always used inresearch, and it seems to have become aconventional statement in the academic world.Nearly 3 million Mongolians live in a smallspace of less than 210,000 square kilometres,and the population density is probably secondonly to that of Ulaanbaatar. For example,nearly 400,000 of the 540,000 people in theHorchin Left-wing Middle Banner are Mongols.In our history, rural Mongols have never livedso crowded together.

In the 20th century, we experienced anotherwave of modernisation. How did modernisationcome about? Of course, it came from the theoryof social evolution, the application of theprinciple of “the Law of the Jungle" from

Darwin’s theory of evolution in the process ofsocial development. In such a f iercecompetition, the Mongols were obviously avulnerable group struggling to survive. At thebeginning of the twentieth century, with thewave of modernisation and the socialism thatfollowed, our most precious nomadic culturebecame the target for elimination. Nomadismwas considered to be a backward mode ofproduction, so we were compelled to seize theopportunity to settle down. In other words,nomadism, the most treasured part of theMongolian culture was rendered “waste” to bediscarded. Settlement has become anirresistible hard mission imposed on theMongols since the twentieth century.

China launched reform and opening in 1978,and last year (2018) happened to be the 40thann iversary o f re form. Th is was anextraordinary period of 40 years. Mongolia hasentered democratisation and marketisationsince 1990. In other words, since the 1980s,Mongols living in Central Asia and North Asiahave met with an even more severe test. Thepastoral economy has faced the impact of themarket economy, the nomadic culture hasentered the market, and the Mongolseverywhere have begun to urbanise. In thisdramatic change, we have lost the mostprecious nomadic tradition.

However, having said this, our history andtraditions are great and they are not out ofreach. The “Nomad Relays” like today hasbrought together Mongolian people from allwalks of life to meet each other and accepteach other. Instead of blaming or questioningwhether we are real Mongols and who we are,this event has provided a good opportunity forus to accept and embrace each other.

"Fantasised singularity" and "diversity ofreality"

In the past, our traditions and honours came

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from tolerance and diversity. The cosmopolitannature of the Mongol Empire was predicated onits tolerance for people of different culturesand beliefs and on the accommodation ofmulticulturalism. The Mongol Empire was adiverse world. It can be said that one of theimportant factors that enabled the MongolEmpire to become a great world empire was itsdiversity. This greatness came precisely fromthe openness and tolerance of the nomadsthemselves. The problem is that there is adifference between the tolerance of the strongand the tolerance of the weak. The Mongols atthe height of the Mongol empire were militarilythe most powerful people in the world, andtheir tolerance came from their self-confidenceand power. But today, do we have theconfidence for tolerance? There is also afundamental difference between the diversityof the Mongol Empire and the diversity oftoday. What do people l ike in us? Ourunconstrained nature, open-mindedness, orinformality? However, we Mongols seem to bepursuing what may be called singularnomadism. Using nomadism as a standard forbeing Mongolian, if someone does not meet thestandard, they begin to feel inferior or mutuallyexclusive. People like our tolerant attitude, butour heart yearns for another very different self.Where did this disparity come from? I believethat the nomadic singularity we are pursuingnow is a fantasy world, and the reality beforeus is diversity. That is to say, there is a sharpgap between the “fantasised singularity” andthe “diversity of reality”.

A song popular both in Inner Mongolia and inMongolia sings "bi malchin hün, bi jinheneMongol hün", which means “I am a herder, so Iam a real Mongol.” It can be seen that peopleare fighting for who is a real Mongol. Mongoliahas nearly three million people, and there aremore than six million Mongols in China. It isnot much together, but the debate aboutauthenticity is endless. If you want to provethat you are a real Mongol, you can go back tothe countryside to look after animals. However,

most Mongols seem reluctant and they have allrushed to the city. So, everyone is arguingabout a problem that doesn't make much sense.This "nomadic singularity" not only becomesthe conceptual boundary with the other, that is,exclusivity, but also constitutes the violentexclusivity of the internal world. This is mybiggest concern. It is like a double-edgedsword, which is a very delicate matter.

The mental infighting of our Mongols is serious.Where does this spiritual internal friction comefrom? In less than a thousand years of history,the Mongols have transformed themselves froma strong confident people proactivelyembracing diversity to one that experiencesdiversity in a passive way, thanks to the arrivalof immigrants and the change of lifestyle in thelate Qing Dynasty. Later, we started fantasisingabout "nomadic singularity". Now nomadicculture has become a spectre for us, visible, butuntouchable. The diversity of the MongolEmpire brought glory and the vast world to theMongols at that time, while today's diversityhas brought us nothing but crisis, threateningthe remaining self-identity of the Mongols. Thehistory of the Mongols, brilliant but heavy, hasbecome an unbearable weight almost crushingour weak Mongol consciousness today. Mongolhistory is too great for us to abandon, but weare frightened of the prospect that we mightlose it one day, for this legacy is also too bigand too heavy.

Today the word “nomad” has become the onlykey word or point for our connection with aglorious history. Afraid of losing this link, todaywe refuse to change and refuse to recogniseour non-nomadic elements. Like me, if someonesays that I am not a nomad, I feel frightened,not knowing what to do for not being a"nomad". It has even bothered me to a pointwhere I dare not say: “I’m a Mongol”, still lessthat I am a descendant of Chinggis Khan. Eventhough my family name is Borjigin – the royalfamily – I can't say that I am a descendant ofChinggis Khan because I am a peasant. In the

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twent ie th century , we deve loped acontradictory attitude towards nomadictradition, that is, experiencing pride and crisissimultaneously.

Here is an example. In the first half of thetwentieth century, there was a representativefigure called Lubsanchoidan, an intellectualfrom the Harchin Left Banner. In 1907 he wentto Tokyo University of Foreign Studies as aMongolian language teacher. We can imaginethat although the Japanese like Mongolians, ifit was today, they would never have set up aMongolian language major in a nationaluniversity such as Tokyo University of ForeignStudies. However, after the Russo-JapaneseWar (1905), Japan attached great importanceto the Mongolian region, and established aMongolian language major at the TokyoForeign Languages School (the predecessor ofTokyo University of Foreign Studies).Lubsanchoidan was the first overseasMongolian teacher who was invited to theschool. He lived in Japan for four years anddiscovered two things: First he discovered thegreatness of the Mongol Empire and ChinggisKhan. At that time, Japan was expanding toAsian countries, and they were very interestedin the Mongol Empire. And Lubsanchoidan,who almost had lost confidence in Mongoliansociety, re-recognised the greatness of hisancestors during his time in Japan. At the sametime, he encountered another terrible problemin Japan, that is, social evolution. He wasshocked to see modern architecture, railwaysand factories in Tokyo and Yokohama.

Looking back at the Mongols, there was aworld of difference. At that time, it was an eraof imperialism and the theory of evolution wasfierce. He felt that the Mongols faced a crisis ofbeing eliminated. So, Lubsanchoidan foundboth the greatness of his ancestors and thecrisis faced by the Mongols at that time. It canbe said that his famous book MongolianCustoms was a work written out of a sense ofcrisis. After he returned to China, he wrote a

lot about what he had seen and heard in Japanand published it at a printing company createdby Temegtu in Beijing. Lubsanchoidan believedthat the root cause of the infirmity of theMongols today was that they had been in anomadic state for a long time. Moreover, healso saw that nomadism had ceased to exist inhis homeland Harchin, and it had evolved into afarming society. The Harchin area had lost itsnomadic industry as early as the Jiaqing era(1796-1820). Therefore, his discovery of thethree very different facts about the history andthe present state of the Mongols during his stayin Japan troubled and overwhelmed him.

In the second half of the twentieth century,Mongols in Central Asia and North Asia werebaptised into socialism, another wave ofmodernisation. Fear of change was alsoprevalent during this period, and this fear camefrom the segregationist policy of the QingDynasty, which had confined Mongols in theirbanners. If you wanted to buy something, youhad to wait for Chinese traders to come to yourdoorstep. It is usually the case that isolationdeprives people of any contrast with theoutside world, thereby making them lose themechan i sm fo r p rogress . Peop le ’ scommunication with others is to measure andexamine themselves through comparing withothers and finding their own strengths andweaknesses. The segregationist policy of theQing Dynasty made us very introverted and wecould only praise the glory and greatness of thepast. In a passive state of mind, once youchange, you are worried about losing yourself.But everything in the world is changing and itcannot be resisted.

Today our mission is to turn the negativementality of resistance into a positive mentalityof challenge. What is the nomadic spirit in theera o f marke t i sa t i on? In the e ra o fmarketisation, we have in fact seen hope in thatour nomadic culture has begun to be consumedand is considered a meaningful resource. Thatwe have gathered here today in a yurt at the

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centre of Beijing, the capital of a big countrywith a population of 1.3 billion, is itself ademonstration that we have new hopes andopportunities. The more highly marketised andurbanised, the more people become nostalgicabout nature and the cyclical lifestyle, and ournomad ism i s l i kewise increas ing lyromanticised.

Thank you very much!

A Dialogue between Uradyn Bulag andBurensain Borjigin

Uradyn Bulag

Professor Borjigin’s lecture is very easy tofollow, but it has struck our heart. From yourspeech, what can we learn? When we inspectthe inner world of nomads, we perceive agony.Indeed, the starting point of your discussionwas precisely your own agony. I wonder wherethis feeling came from.

In my opinion, we have probably experiencedtwo types o f agony . One s tems f romhomogeneity. In the Qing Dynasty, Mongols onthe whole had become very pure becauseborders had been imposed between ethnicgroups, with the Mongols being segregatedfrom the Manchus, Han Chinese, Tibetans andother groups. Exchanges between differentethnic groups were forbidden. Therefore, each

ethnic group was able to keep its owntraditions and customs, maintaining itshomogeneity. For two to three centuries duringthe Qing, Mongols were not allowed to studyChinese language, and were isolated from theoutside world. If you were interested in theoutside world or longed to see that world, youwould be punished. In this way, Mongols hadmaintained their “purity”. However, as soon asthis isolated world began to crumble at the endof the Qing empire, the Mongols immediatelyexperienced a sense of agony as they felt theirculture was being “polluted”.

On the other hand, our agony may have comefrom failure to meet Stalin’s definition of anation as “a historically constituted, stablecommunity of people, formed on the basis of acommon language, territory, economic life, andpsychological make-up manifested in a commonculture." If we examine ourselves by thisstandard, we realise that our “nation” or our“minzu” doesn’t satisfy any of these criteria.Many of our people don’t speak Mongolianlanguage anymore. You (Borjigin) are a peasantMongol, and although I was born into anomadic culture, I’m no longer a nomad. Wheneveryone recognises us as nomads, yet we can’tlive up to the great nomadic traditions to meettheir expectation, we are bound to feel agony.

So, from my perspective, our agony existsmostly on these two levels. Now the question iswhether or not agony is a necessary evil. Do wewant to put an end to agony or should we keepsome of the pain? Putting it in another way, dowe want to pursue a type of absolute happinessor do we need a certain degree of pain? I wouldlove to hear your insight.

Burensain Borjigin

Concerning agony, here are my thoughts.During the Qing dynasty, or by the end of theQing dynasty, the Mongolian people werebasically nomadic, to different degrees. People

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nowadays, who have trouble with a variety oflife choices, tend to believe that the nomadicsociety during that time must have been free ofemotional pain. But the truth is that agony didexist, because we were unable to see theoutside world, unlike the type of agony weexperience today. When people couldn’t see theoutside world, they lost track of time andspace. In fact, they lived in a world that wasgradually changing, but they did not notice thechange, and they could not control it, whichmeans they lived in a passively changing state.The most dangerous thing about passivechanges is that people can lose their identityand become “polluted” without even noticing it.All the troubles were caused by isolation.However, I believe a sense of agony isnecessary. Agony can lead to self-discovery,self-recognition, and eventually self-acceptance. If an ethnic group fails to acceptwho they are, it is very difficult for them to takethe first steps towards the outside world. Thatis my view. Agony is necessary because it is thenorm.

I want to add another point. The Mongoliancommunity changed fast and dramaticallybetween the early 1920s and the 1950s.Chinese society has also gone through dramaticchanges since the 1990s. Many people tend tolose their direction at a time of extraordinaryand rapid changes. They might not understandwhat they have experienced or know what tobecome. In a way, we have not had the time toobjectively analyse and summarise theuncommon experiences of the Mongols in thefirst half of the 20th century. And yet, we face asimilar problem today. When we have tochange passively, it is very difficult for us tocatch up with the times as well as to figure outthe past, the present and the future. I believewe need t o ca lm ly r e - o rgan i se ourunderstanding of the history of the past fewdecades. During the two to three centuries ofthe Qing dynasty, we did not change much. Inthose slow and carefree years, Mongolianpeople lost their curiosity towards the outside

world. Nowadays, major societal changes havemade people lose their direction. Therefore, theprocess of understanding oneself must beaccompanied by a sense of agony, which willlikely continue in the future.

Bulag

I remember our first meeting over ten yearsago and we have been joking about it eversince. I claimed that I was a descendent ofnomads, but you were not.

Most people know that Inner Mongolia isdivided into eastern and western parts. Theeastern community is mostly agriculturallybased whereas the western part has maintainedsome nomadic traditions. These traditions havefilled western (Inner) Mongolian people with astrong sense of pride, especially in front oftheir eastern counterparts. However, I feltfrustrated while doing research in Mongolia(The Mongolian People’s Republic) at the time.Initially, I was pretty proud (compared toeastern Inner Mongols), but when I went toMongolia, people there thought nothing of me.In their eyes, Inner Mongols were all the same.There was no difference between the east andthe west. I felt humiliated and was driven towrite a book on the topic. The book isNationalism and Hybridity in Mongolia (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1998). When I told you aboutthis book, you were very happy. You werehappy to learn about my frustration, weren’tyou?! Anyway, I mean to ask: can we seekmutual understanding despite all thedisagreements and conflicts? We have internaldifferences, but from what angle should weinterpret the differences? In my view, ourinternal conflicts are historical, and it isactually an issue of authenticity – ‘Who is thetrue Mongol?’ Nevertheless, looked at from theoutside, we are all the same, simply one type ofpeople. At this point, how do we look at thediversity inside our culture?

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Borjigin

When Professor Bu lag and I v i s i tedUlaanbaatar, I witnessed people calling him bythe offensive name ‘hujia’ (Chinaman). I was“thrilled” about this for whatever reason! Whilewe were in Inner Mongolia, you called me a‘farmer’. Now we were in Mongolia, and peoplethere did not see you as a ‘Mongolian’. Forsome reason, I felt we had at last become‘equal’. This is of course a taboo topic for theMongols, but the fact that we are able todiscuss it today shows that “equality” betweenus has improved. Both of us live and workabroad, which gives us more opportunities toobjectively discuss the problems between oursubgroups. When we observe the entirety ofInner Mongolia from the outside, we oftenwonder – why do issues such as “the problem ofthe east and the west” exist at all in InnerMongolia? Why do we have such a strong senseof mutual exclusivity? I believe we still have notbeen freed from the mentality developed as aresult of the banner divisions imposed by theQing dynasty. Banners were exclusive to eachother, because each banner had its own jasaγ(hereditary ruler) and pasture. Therefore itoperated on its own. For example, normally, Iwould never go to Ordos where you are from. Iwould not care about the way you live. We havenever formed a system of mutual recognition.Admittedly, we live in a high-tech world nowwhere we do work on computers and play withsmart phones every day . But on thepsychological level, we still hold on to oldbeliefs, which is a fact we tend to overlook.Therefore, within our culture there has alwaysbeen this meaningless argument aboutauthenticity. Besides, Inner Mongolia is aprovince-level region known in China for itspastoral economy. Who can represent thateconomy in Inner Mongolia? Of course,herdsmen are the rightful representatives.From a cultural perspective, I think agriculturalMongols probably have never wanted to

represent Inner Mongolia. As a matter of fact,no one has ever told us how to develop our self-identity; it is just that we have never been ableto overcome our internal differences. It stillmight take a long time.

Bulag

Now it’s very interesting that you brought upthe concept of cultural representation. Myperspective is slightly different. On the onehand, pastoral culture and pastoralist Mongolsare known to be more representative of InnerMongolia. But it is not an achievement we(pastoralists) have scored through struggle;this honour came to us not because we arepowerful, but because of a different kind ofimagination.

Let me try to look at it from a historical angle.Many vanguard revolut ionar ies andintellectuals in modern Inner Mongolia areagricultural Mongols. Take the Tumed Mongolsfor example. They don’t speak Mongolian.Another instance is the Harchin Mongols. Mostof them don’t understand the language, either.Modern intellectuals from these communitiespondered the fate of the Mongolian nation andthe revival of its culture, and they actuallybegan to imagine what Mongolian peopleshould be like. These intellectuals worked veryhard, and became modern revolutionaries aswell as leading thinkers of the nation. Theyearned a lot of political capital. Compared topastoralist Mongols in western and centralInner Mongolia and Hulunbuir, they occupiedkey positions in the government and the Party.With their political capital, they started to sortout and re-organise nomadic culture largelybased on their imagination since they hadgreater discursive power. As a result, nomadicculture in Inner Mongolia today was rewrittenmostly by agricultural Mongols instead of byreal nomadic people.

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Borjigin

I think there are many reasons for this. One ofthe main reasons lies with the Mongols inwestern and central Inner Mongolia who havemaintained some degree of nomadic culture.They would love to go back to the old nomadiclifestyle if they had a choice. But the Harchinintellectuals had realised long ago that theheyday of traditional nomadic society hadalready passed. They were like the nomadicArabs in oil-rich countries. Prior to the 1950s,most people in these Arab countries werenomadic, and now they have become citizens ofrich nations. Today at the time when the wholeworld is worried about the depletion of fossilfuels, I imagine that they don’t fantasisereturning to the nomadic age anymore. Theyknow that the era has passed. When InnerMongolian intellectuals in agricultural areasrealised that there was no going back, theyresolutely decided to turn nomadic traditionsinto a symbol to represent the national spirit inthis brave new and diverse world. Pastoralistgroups that maintain a certain nomadicheritage still dream of returning to the past.They struggle over the small size of theirpasture every day: they used to move five timesa year, but now they can move no more thantwice or even can’t move at all. On the otherhand, in arid areas, small and narrow pasturescannot be turned into farm lands. Survival is aserious matter that requires rationalassessment and wise choices. It is not a matterof like or dislike.

Bulag

When we discuss the inner problems of ourculture, we have two different perspectives –rational and emotional. Intellectuals tend toadopt the rational perspective, as you say. Butto what extent have they really been rational?

Let me put it in a different way: We have seen astructural problem, namely, the internalstructure of the Mongols is so complicated thatthey cannot communicate with each other anymore. So the question is: when we think aboutthis issue, should we take it as an internalproblem, a matter for discussion only amongstus? Or should we work with outsiders toexplore whether nomadic culture can be acommon resource for all of us?

Borjigin

I think there are two aspects. On the one hand,descendants of nomads discuss nomadicculture in order to regain self-recognition andbuild confidence. In a way, we want to injectnomadic elements into our spirit. Our culturehas been changed “beyond recognition”. Weneed to find a root, and build strong self-confidence. On the other hand, outsiders orforeigners love nomadic elements, theirintention being to enrich their inner world,because they feel that nomadic elements have astrong culture of tolerance. Besides, sincedescendants of nomads in modern society arefragile, and we haven’t even managed toestablish ourselves, outsiders have easy accessto us. In this case, when a strong power lovesyou to enrich itself, we, as a weak power,cannot directly resist it. Because if we do, wewill look less likeable. In the modern,globalised world, it’s unavoidable that differentcultures interact and influence each other. Ifwe successfully build self-recognition andrationally inject the nomadic elements into thedepths of our soul, we shouldn’t be afraid of“love” from outsiders. Then we can turn the“love” of others into a power to serve us. Butbefore that happens, we are still fragile. We’reworried that people will take away what we likebefore it becomes part of our soul. It will take along time to build self-recognition in a rationalway. I appreciate that the “Nomadic Relays”project is one of the tangible actions to develop

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such self-recognition.

Bulag

You brought up a key issue about being activeor passive. From the historical point of view,nomads were considered to be active duringthe Mongol Empire. They actively embracedthe world. For this reason, nomadic culture wasconsidered to be tolerant of different cultures.Today, the homeland of the nomads has beenknocked open, their world has been opened up,and they have been forced to accept the outsideworld. I wonder, however, to what extentnomads were really confident during the activephase. They might be very confident when theywere conquering the rest of the world, but theydidn’t necessarily know what they reallywanted. At a certain point, they must ponderthese issues including who they were, how tomaintain their identity in the vast empire, andhow to maintain their superiority over the restof the world. To some extent, the process ofembracing the world could involve losing theirown identity. At this point, the nomads beganto lose confidence. To stay true to theiridentity, they chose to retreat. Retreat wascaused by the resistance of the outside world,but it was also a manifestation of their owngiving up of any effort to sustain their empire.This is my personal interpretation, perhaps ananthropological point of view. You are ahistorian. What do you think?

Borjigin

I have a different interpretation. One of thereasons why Mongolian people have surviveduntil today is that they were able to retreat,and they could do so because they werenomads. The Mongol Empire ruled Chinaproper for over a century. When circumstancesturned bad, they were able to run back to theMongolian steppe because they had not been

completely adjusted to the sedentary lifestyle.When they were in inland China, they managedto maintain their identity. Therefore, they couldrun away at the critical moment. The year 1368(the fall of the Mongol Yuan dynasty) was asetback for them, but they survived becausethey had maintained their identity. Later,during the chaotic era of the Northern Yuan(1368-1635), they also ran away when the oddswere against them. Why not if you don’t holdmuch chance of winning? Although runningaway was humiliating for Mongols in decline, itwas actually a strength that allowed them tosurvive. The biggest problem we Mongolianpeople are faced with today seems to be theloss of this strength. We are no longer ‘able totake things and let them go easily’ as before.Admittedly, we live in a different era. We facedifferent circumstances. How do we put our“natura l ta lent” to use under thesecircumstances? We have not been exposed tomarket economy for long; thus, we face a newchallenge in this fast-developing environment.Can we become flexible again when we needto? In order to adapt to the changingenvironment and survive, we must incorporatethis gene of ‘being able to take things and letthem go easily’ into the Mongols’ mental world.

Bulag

I’m afraid that I haven’t studied this gene youmentioned. But I do believe, regardless of whatera or environment we live in, we mustmaintain our identity, that is, stay true toourselves. You brought up the topic ofsingularity and diversity in your speech. If Iunderstood you correctly, you were saying thatwe (researchers) tend to emphasise diversity asan essential aspect of nomadic culture butnomads stress nomadic singularity, that is, theythink of themselves as true nomads and theyexclude others. I should say, however, yoursingularity and diversity conception follows abinary logic. I would like to re-organise it from

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a different angle. Here are some of mythoughts. Building on the German sociologistGeorg Simmel’s social geometry, we cancategorise human society into three types byusing numbers. A unitary society is formed byone person, its ultimate goal being to meld allpeople into one. But in reality, our modernsociety is largely organised along thedemocratic principle in which the majority haverights and are able to cast away or marginalisethe minority by voting. That is a binary ordyadic society, formed by two people. If youadd one more member, that becomes a triadicsociety. What does a triadic society look like? Itis a society in which the weak is not alwaysweak. They can form an alliance with otherweak people to fight against the strong. Atriadic society is a fluid society in which peoplecan play games. A unitary society is still andunreachable, but people want to pursue it. Abinary society is very tragic because in it theminority is always inferior to the majority,thereby forming a stable structure. Can weturn your diversity into a triadic or triangularsociety so that we can turn the tragiccircumstance you described into a happy one toprovide a possibility for minority nomads tosurvive?

Borjigin

Allow me to introduce the third monographwritten by Professor Bulag: CollaborativeNationalism: The Politics of Friendship onChina’s Mongolian Frontier (2010). It talksabout a collaborative gaming theory. He putforward the anthropological theory of“triangularity” of nationalism for the first time.What he just said derives from that book. You’llunderstand it better when you read the famousbook which won the International Conventionof Asia Scholars Book Prize in the category ofSocial Sciences in 2011. Now coming back tohis question. In retrospect, I did treat‘singularity’ as an unfortunate phenomenon in

my presentation. Looking at singularity vs.diversity, I believe that “singularity” is thecore. Why do we strongly hold onto thenomadic heritage? Because that is our core andwe must accept it. The reason is that currentlydiversity works to our disadvantage. We are toofragile. If we are not careful, before we find ourcore, diversity will leave us with nothing.During the Mongol Empire, “singularity” and“diversity” were both easy to control and theMongols used it to their benefit. But today wedon’t have power to balance “singularity” and“diversity”. I understand that it may benecessary to stress this “singularity”. However,immature people are always volatile, they areeither too happy or too sad. They can’t find abalance. Therefore, we need a rational process;even when we are not happy, we must still keepcalm.

Bulag

So, could I interpret this to mean that we(Mongolian people) can’t afford to play thegame yet; we need to build our strength, andthen come back to play, right? I have one lastquestion. Our internal world has manyproblems, and we have also gained experienceand learned lessons. Do other nomadic peoplehave similar agony? How do they cope with it?Could we possibly inspire them? Or whatlessons can we learn from their experiences?What are the similarities and differencesbetween different nomadic groups in theworld?

Borjigin

I have found some comparable examples. Thereis a dry arid area that starts from North Africaand stretches across Europe and Asia. We callit “the Afro-Eurasian Dry Zone”. This is thecradle of pastoral cultures. There are two typesof pastoral cultures: one is “Grassland Pastoral

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Culture” in the dry steppes of Inner and NorthAsia; the other is “Desert Pastoral Culture” inthe Arab region. The former stretches fromKazakhstan eastwards. The nomadic peoplesand countries of Central Asia, such asKazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, haveexperienced a history similar to that of theMongols. Apart from religion, our pastoralmethods are basically the same. We have allexperienced modernisation and socialism.However, the Arab “Desert Pastoral Culture”developed differently from us historically.Countries like Kuwait, the United ArabEmirates, and Saudi Arabia became wealthyafter World War II because of their oilresources. By the 1960s, they had become veryrich. Nowadays, they are very happy about"showing off" the culture of their nomadic era.For example, Kuwaitis are proud of their falcon

culture, but I think few people in Kuwait arewilling to return to “the era of falcons”. TheSaudi Arabians have camel racing. They alsoreinterpret their traditional culture from amodern viewpoint. I don't know if the Arabshave a sense of reality regarding crisis. Forexample, how will we live if oil is depletedsomeday? Will we return to the nomadic era?The evolution of the Arabs’ nomadic tradition isirreversible. There is no return, no matter whathappens. Arabs treat their traditions differentlyfrom us. The descendants of Central and NorthAsian nomads seem to be more stubborn. Theywant to go back to the past if possible.However, when the descendants of nomadsrealise that the nomadic lifestyle is goneforever, we may have more courage to view ourculture as soft power, and use it in our futurelives. We can understand this situation from theway Arabs treat their nomadic culture.

Burensain Borjigin is professor at the Department of Humanities and Culture, ShigaPrefectural University, Japan and a member of the Board of Directors of the JapaneseAssociation for Mongolian Studies. His main research areas are social history, modernChinese studies, and Mongolian studies. He is the author of Formation of the MongolianFarming Village Society and co-editor of Understanding Inner Mongolia in 60 Chapters.

Uradyn E. Bulag is reader in social anthropology, University of Cambridge. His interestsbroadly span East Asia and Inner Asia, especially China and Mongolia, ethnicity andnationalism, diplomacy and statecraft, imperial heritage and its (un)sharing. He is the authorof Nationalism and Hybridity in Mongolia (1998), Oxford: Clarendon Press, The Mongols atChina’s Edge: History and the Politics of National Unity (2002), Lanham: Rowman andLittlefield, and Collaborative Nationalism: the Politics of Friendship on China’s MongolianFrontier (2010), Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, which received the InternationalConvention of Asian Scholars 2011 book prize in social sciences.