This blog post has been planned after coming from Mongolia on an overly long flight from Ulaanbaatar to Istanbul and then back to Frankfurt. So I had enough time to look at the inflight magazine of the Mongolian airline MIAT [1] and I've read two articles related to nomads and men, real men that is. But in the end I only decided to write it after I had been stranded in Kall in the Eifel after a long train ride with a lot of waiting and transferring the rail replacement service (bus). After a long time around the railway station and the bus station I could order a cab and was compensated by a very nice conversation with the cab driver. It became apparent in this conversation, as in others before my trip, that there are still false, romanticizing ideas about nomadic life. Nomads are people who move about, but they don't move to a different place every three days. Otherwise I would have been a nomad with my travel group in Mongolia. The nomads change location twice a year, at the beginning of summer to summer pasture and in autumn back to winter pasture; more on that later. Or the idea of meat on a spit roast. The nomads usually eat boiled meat.
Preparing a traditional Khorkhog -
lots of meat and some roots and onions cooked in a milkchurn
by adding heated stones in between
The romance is quickly lost in the cold and it is immense, because in Mongolia it can easily reach -30° C (-22° F) and even in summer, when you are out with a tent and find hoarfrost on your suitcase outside the tent in the morning, then you know in about what to expect during winter and why you preferred to stay in your sleeping bag that night.
Mongolia is the sparsely populated with about two inhabitants per square km, though this number is misleading as more than 60% of the population lives in Ulaanbaatar and a few minor cities. You will find vast areas that are hardly populated. On the other hand you have not to go far outside a city to find this unbelievable tranquillity of the this country.
The nomads travel great distances, for example, an old couple I met below the edge of a glacier had just opened their ger (Mongolian for yurt) and they had traveled 150 kilometers. The animals also have to cover this distance and they aren't transported by car but driven. Today the ger is transported in a small truck. The ger must then be set up, but this is done in a day; I also helped out once. The material culture of the nomads is more limited than ours, but isn't it better to stick to the essentials? I think that the west could learn something here, but in the meantime objects of western daily life [2] have also reached the nomads; you can sometimes see a television set or, even more often, a refrigerator or a freezer to store meat. The electrical devices are powered by solar power from small panels. The energy is sufficient to operate a freezer with a battery.
Nomads need to know the cycles of nature and also their variations. Conditions are harsh for humans and livestock due to cold, drought, flooding, or lack of forage due to desertification or the Zud (зуд) [3]. There are also other factors, such as oversized herds and therefore overgrazing. Despite this, external factors such as climate change seem to play a greater role [4] because even if there should be enough rainfall, it must occur at specific times to be beneficial, since summer is short and winter is long.
"Over the past 800 years the Mongolian men have demonstrated bravery, taken risks made sacrifices, and even laid down their lives to preserve the independence and land." And the descendants of these men "still retreat to the country during summer". That may all be true, but it is not up-to-date, not even in Mongolia. The experiences I had in Mongolia showed a far greater appreciation of the work and role of women than in other traditional societies.
Is there really a revival or resurge of nomadic life? Perhaps there is a greater reflection on the values of nomadic life nowadays, but the assumption itself seems wrong to me .
There is a rural exodus. Ger agglomerations become settlements, ribbon-build villages, then villages and perhaps later a sum or aimag center [5]. Or one can find gers in large numbers on the outskirts of smaller cities and the inhabitants will no longer return into the steppes.
Xovd (Khovd), a city in the Northwest as viewed from an airplane
During a visit at a nomad ger last year, the daughter also came to the ger and she had just finished her university studies in Ulaanbaatar. The elderly couple below the glacier had a son who was already working as a doctor and hoped that one of the sons would stay and continue the nomadic life. At another place we met two women, both from Ulaanbaatar on a family visit, one was a school teacher there, the other was a third-year dentistry student. The student also wanted to return permanently, but then live in the nearby sum and work as a dentist, so that she will only be a weekend visitor to the ger.
Even if I don't have the optimism of the article writers and have problems with the term resurgent nomadic culture, I wish Mongolia that this would be made possible politically, because large areas of the country will not be agriculturally managable in any other way.
Links and Annotations:
[1] Mongolica, Inflightmagazine of MIAT, Summer 2023. Values of a Resurgent Nomadic Culture, p. 116-124. And: Old Men, p.148-159.
[2] Yembuu, B. (2016). Mongolian Nomads: Effects of Globalization and Social Change. In: Robertson, M., Tsang, P. (eds) Everyday Knowledge, Education and Sustainable Futures. Education in the Asia-Pacific Region: Issues, Concerns and Prospects, vol 30. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0216-8_7
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-10-0216-8_7
[3] The Wikipedia article lists several forms and their combinations of the zud. What they all have in common is that the animals can no longer find food due to the weather conditions (snow, ice, etc.) and die. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zud
[4] Tugjamba N, Walkerden G & Miller F. Climate change impacts on nomadic herders' livelihoods and pastureland ecosystems: a case study from Northeast Mongolia. Reg Environ Change 21, 105 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-021-01829-4
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10113-021-01829-4
[5] Aimags (Aймаг) are the supreme administrative units of Mongolia (provinces). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_Mongolia Among them are the sums (Сум). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Districts_of_Mongolia
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