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This chapter examines how the Mongolian race was perceived in nineteenth-century Western medicine. More specifically, it considers medical explanations for certain conditions deemed to be associated with “Mongolian” bodies and endemic in, or in some way linked to, the race as a whole, including the “Mongolian eye,” the “Mongolian spot,” and “Mongolism” (now known as Down syndrome). The chapter argues that each of these “Mongolian” conditions became a way of distancing the Mongolian race from a white Western norm, since they were taken to be either characteristic of irregular East Asian bodies. It also contends that “Mongolianness” served as a rationale for racism just as much as the other way around.

This book investigates when and how East Asians became yellow in the Western imagination. It follows a trajectory that emphasizes an important shift in thinking about race during the course of the eighteenth century, when new sorts of human taxonomies began to appear and new claims about the color of all human groups, including East Asians, were put forward. It also examines how the “yellow race” and “Mongolian” bodies became important subjects in nineteenth-century anthropology and medicine, respectively. “Mongolian” bodies, for example, were linked to certain conditions thought to be endemic in—or in some way associated with—the race as a whole, including the “Mongolian eye,” the “Mongolian spot,” and “Mongolism” (now known as Down syndrome). Finally, the book considers how the Far East came to be seen as a “yellow peril,” a term coined in 1895 and often attributed to Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.

This introductory chapter begins with a description of a small district called Ashinga, in Hentii Province along the Mongolian-Russian border, where the author conducted her PhD fieldwork between 1999 and 2000. It describes the area, its people, and how they go about their daily lives. The chapter then sets out the book's purpose, which is to address a set of seemingly paradoxical questions that emerged out of the author's placement in a family and extends to wider spheres of social life for the Buriad: How do people who traverse the border zone between two countries and have no private land or state of their own accumulate possessions and grow things? How can people who have lived under intense persecution during the socialist period, when most of their male relatives were either killed or taken away, harness such loss and absence to generate a proliferation of relations? Why is it that when these people display wealth in a stationary form, they destroy these exhibits through acts of arson that separate them from such accumulation? An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter looks at how things continued in China after antiquity. The Han dynasty existed at almost the same time as the Roman Empire but it fell in the early third century. The Han Empire broke up in China but the resulting individual parts basically continued the same culture that had served as the foundation for the Han dynasty. It would continue until the beginning of the twentieth century. Northern people of the steppe, nomads, repeatedly managed to conquer a China that was no longer militarily fit and to set up their own dynasties. But each time, the foreign rulers eventually became even more Chinese than the Chinese themselves. Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, in all their more or less profound reformulations and conceptual extensions, always oriented themselves toward their roots. The Mongolian rule from the thirteenth into the fourteenth century and the following Ming and Qing dynasties were markedly more autocratic than earlier eras.

This chapter sheds light on the scientific revolution in medicine in the centuries following the decline of the Song dynasty to the end of the empire in 1912. There were a couple of initiatives, but no one was able to provide a blueprint to give medicine new momentum. There had been a new momentum in the Han era when the innovation was expressed and accepted and there was new momentum again in the Song era also. There have always been movements. The movements in the Mongolian, Ming, and Qing eras were certainly noticeable and perhaps even traumatic for the contemporaries but they were not fundamental. They could not fundamentally question the structures of the imperial period. The Neo-Confucianism of the Song era was elevated by the Qing dynasty to official state doctrine. There is no special new path in culture, as in medicine. The end of the imperial era led to the emergence of the new path.

This chapter examines how the “yellow race” became an important focus in nineteenth-century anthropology. More specifically, it considers how the whole notion of skin tone had become inextricably linked to scientifically validated prejudices and normative claims about higher and lower forms of human culture. The chapter first discusses why the term “Mongolian” was selected to represent the people of the Far East and compares it to “Tartar” before exploring how the new field of anthropology became preoccupied with the idea of anatomical quantification, and especially the measurement of skin color using an instrument known as the color top. It shows that the desire to find yellowness in East Asians was so ingrained in the Western imagination that some anthropologists tried to prove that their skin really was yellow.

The rulers of the Mongolian People's Republic (MPR), the name of the country since 1924, had had abundant experience in managing such spectacles, but they would be unable to manage the events of December 10, 1989. Mongolian celebrations of International Human Rights Day did not proceed as planned. As snow drifted down gently, two hundred people marched around with banners and signs calling for the elimination of “bureaucratic oppression” as well as a promise to implement perestroika (restructuring of the economy) and glasnost (openness and greater freedom of expression). Later, hunger strikers, with backing from the Mongolian Democratic Union, expanded the scope of their demands, challenging the legality of the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (MPRP) and government institutions. The reformers took advantage of the government's indecisiveness to make effective use of nonviolence.

Without additional resources and a stronger government, the prospects for protection of the fragile Mongolian environment appear to be dim. The communist government did not value Mongolia's traditional artworks, and many statues, paintings, and textiles, as well as texts, were lost during the purges directed at Buddhism. Buddhism, the dominant religion of the Mongolians from the late sixteenth century to the early twentieth century, has revived somewhat after seven decades of a communist state hostile to its precepts and its leaders. Meanwhile, the government dominated the media in the communist era. The governments' human rights record since 1990 is certainly better than in the communist era, although democratic reformers have some complaints. The elimination of domination by the USSR in 1990 resulted in a ringing reaffirmation of the Mongolian heritage, which, however, began to fade as economic conditions worsened.

This chapter examines traditional aspects of Mongolian culture that differ from both Asian practices and Western modernity, focusing on contemporary imaginings of autochthonous culture and especially the disconnect between its urban and rural forms. It considers Mongolia’s contemporary construction of ethnicity, which consists of cultural and biological elements, and is suffused with imagery and metaphors pertaining to the realm of the imaginary. The chapter first discusses the Mongolian spot, or “blue spot,” a birthmark whose existence in other populations confirms the Mongols’ genetic legacy. It then explores the connection Mongols make between themselves and the environment, along with the attachment of “Mongolian animals” to the nation. It also looks at the Mongolian language and its connection to the natural environment and concludes by highlighting the inherent tension in contemporary Mongolian culture between a form of modernity closely aligned on European models, on the one hand, and the idealized countryside as both repository of genuine Mongolianness and undeveloped backwater, on the other.

This chapter analyzes the views on the nature of authority in Islam, diverse visions of the caliphate and its relation to sultanate as a political regime, and portrayals of the perfect ruler through archetype-building and reinterpretation of Islamic history. The emergence of Turko-Mongolian dynasties whose Islamic credentials were at best questionable, the decline of the power of the jurists, and the spread of Sufi orders in response to spiritual anxieties of fragmented Muslim society enabled the Sufis to resolve this question in their favor. It was consensual among Ottoman Sufis to argue that the Prophet had three distinct natures: spiritual, political, and prophecy. Political and prophetic nature emanate from the spiritual. In this configuration, the jurists, as inheritors of Muhammed's prophecy, and rulers, as claimants for his political nature, were obliged to submit to the spiritual authority, namely the perfect human being among the Sufis whose identity was disclosed only to the worthy.

This chapter discusses how structural and emotional issues are intertwined in the lives of men and women in Huhhot, capital of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China. It explores how gender ideals are displayed in playful and earnest conversation among men and women in unisex groups, as well as between men and women in the domains of marriage, emotional intimacy, and parenting. By focusing on the relationship between the subjective and the structural aspects of Chinese family, it provides some insight into the emotional dilemmas Chinese men experience in striving to find a place in society as well as in the family, at a period when both are undergoing rapid change. The material that forms much of this study is collected between 1981 and 1983 and again in 1987. Its description of family dynamics comes from the author's regular visits to seventy households during those periods.

Even after the defeat of its candidate for president in May 1997, the Democratic Union did not revise its policies. Prime Minister Mendsaikhany Enkhsaikhan and Davaadorjiin Ganbold, the most enthusiastic advocates of the market economy, pressed forward with privatization for the remainder of their years in power. Despite indications of abuses in earlier privatizations, the international donor agencies lobbied hard to continue the process. The IMF pressed for the privatization of what it referred to as the Most Valuable Companies and threatened to withhold pledged loans if the Gobi Cashmere Company and NIC, an oil company, were not sold. By 2004, despite thirteen years of one of the highest per capita levels of foreign aid to any country in the world, the Mongolian economy still faced considerable difficulties. GDP was lower than the international donor agencies perennially predicted, although it increased in 2003 and the first half of 2004.

This chapter discusses regroupings of laypeople living around the Mergen Monastery. Their concerns have influenced monastic arrangements. It shows that external people who care for what an institution stands for will intervene and insist, and will place a stake to make sure that their concern is symbolically and physically evident.

This chapter presents examples to illustrate how processes that first appear to be dispersion and disintegration can also be seen, from a wider vantage point, as expansion and renewal. Such is the case with Dalantai's Mahakala. Dalantai, a well-educated and urban person, is the current keeper of the Mahakala's heart stone. The chapter describes the genealogy of this stone, showing how it journeyed across countries, monasteries, and the lay-lama divide. Its power both accreted people to it like a magnet and also acted like a negative charge, causing people to shun it.

This introductory chapter discusses the main themes covered in the book, which is the result of some fifteen years of research at Mergen Monastery in Urad. Its main framework follows eight successive visits to the monastery between 1992 and 2009. The book weaves together two time frameworks. The longer historical one concerns the “Mergen tradition”—the creation, renaissance, travails, ruin, revival, and trauma of a specifically Mongolian way of practicing Buddhism from the early eighteenth century to the present. The other time series concerns the fine grain of the seventeen years of fieldwork.

This chapter first describes certain individuals and through them begins to indicate the complexity of the lives of contemporary monks, the variety of ties they each maintain, and what holds them together as a group. It then provides historical information about the Urad Mongols and Buddhism in Mongolia necessary for readers to understand the major ideas and practices called on by lamas today.