Mongolian Connections: Lingua Franca

Before Mongolia, I’d never traveled alone in a country of which I did not know the language. Though I was intimidated by this prospect at first, I’ve discovered something: I do know the language. Sort of. Not Mongolian, but English; one can get by in Ulaanbaatar with just English, and even in the countryside, “Hi” and “Thanks” seem to be pretty standard knowledge. Though I feel weird expecting people to know English, I also feel weird trying in Mongolian sometimes, when they probably do know enough English to help me. I’d never had to realize before how universal English is. Sure, plenty of countries don’t have many English-speakers, but generally nations are implementing English in their curricula (which is convenient for would-be traveling Americans who can teach it just about everywhere except Spain). One (very very strange) article I read in a Mongolian newspaper mentions the importance of educating people “in internationally recognized English language.” (There was more to that sentence, but I’m not sure exactly what it said; it in itself is evidence that there should be more English education in Mongolia.) And English isn’t in use just for the benefit of native English speakers; my Bulgarian friend who lives in Switzerland communicated with me and university employees completely in English, and almost all tourists here use English. At a café, I’ll hear a German speaking with a Mongolian, both in English. On one countryside-tour, the Frenchman in our group used an English translator, and he then translated into French for his wife. English has become the language of international communication. With European-Mongolian interactions, this is interesting because the language is a neutral third ground, what Esperanto was meant to be (and sort of failed, but we should keep working on it!) Of course, it’s only a neutral third ground for the non-American/British/etc. But I’m not complaining about that.

This de facto universal language just sort of sprung up organically, as, I suppose, languages have to. (Unfortunately for poor L L Zamenhof.) English is one connection here, but the idea of an international language of communication is another; of course, the idea of a neutral language that different nations used to communicate reminded me of one of my favorite things: Latin. In the Middle Ages, educated people spoke Latin; monks and scholars from different nations communicated in Latin, and texts were written in Latin so that everyone could read them. If you knew Latin, you knew that, even in a very regionally centered world, you could find someone with whom to communicate. In many senses, English is the new medieval Latin.

I wonder what this indicates about the world. The elite of the medieval world used an international language to communicate, before vernaculars came into fashion, and now, after a hiatus when the elite sort of just spoke all the languages they’d need, English has become a necessity for travellers and/or speakers of obscure languages. What does our age have in common with the Dark Age that necessitates such a language? Furthermore, I think it’s significant that not only the elite are speaking in this new universal language; for the first time in a long time (ever?) the common man in one nation can communicate with the common man in another. Of course, for the first time in a long time (ever?) the common man is travelling. But I’m not sure that’s all there is to it.

As much as the similarity between Latin’s function and English’s function interests me, the differences between the languages interest me, too. I’ve always thought English to be near-impossible to learn. Why don’t “through,” “though,” “cough,” and “tough” rhyme? It makes no sense. But when I speak to people who’ve learned English as a second language, they tend to have the same response to my denigrations of my language. They all say that English is easy to learn. Part of this, I think, is the fact that one is exposed to English all the time, even in a foreign country. But the other reason, as my friend K pointed out to me, is because English is so flexible. Though its irregularities must be frustrating, its lack of structure means that there aren’t grammatical tomes to be pored over. Perhaps it is very difficult to learn to speak English correctly (who/whom, “to boldly go,” final prepositions), but it’s pretty easy to pick up how to construct sentences.

English’s flexibility is also one of the things that makes it Awesome. It absorbs phrases and words effortlessly; “je ne sais quoi” and “fajita” are both equally at home in the English language. (Though you don’t even want to know how I just tried to spell that first one.) Somehow, they’re as at home as “whatever” and “hot dog.” Other languages aren’t like this, I think. K says that Chinese is so rigid that foreign words sort of just can’t be imported, while “home run” makes it into Spanish as the bastardized “jónron,” because that fits Spanish’s rules. In Latin, words have to fit a grammatical structure, and so foreign terms often had to be forcibly wedged into that structure. (And looking at how Ancient Greek imported foreign names can lead to hilarity.) English, however, takes words just as they come. I’m sure this isn’t true with some words, but for the most part it is more flexible than other languages.

This might be the reason for another difference between English and Latin: how they change. English is rapidly transforming, picking up new structures, new words, and new grammar in addition to new idioms. Latin, on the other hand? Though style, syntax, and vocabulary changed, I can read Plautus and I can read Abelard, and they were separated by over twelve centuries. Most English speakers can’t even manage Shakespeare fluently, and he was writing sort of recently. This is for reasons other than the rigidity and flexibility of Latin and English, respectively; I think part of it also has to do with who is speaking these languages. Latin was preserved by the intellectual elite, and it was taught to people as a second language. Little monks would be constantly corrected, and one wouldn’t put up with mistakes in scholarship. Latin wasn’t given a chance to evolve much in the structured settings in which it occurred. Compare this to how grammatical errors and stylistic faux pas are allowed not only in everyday conversation, but also even in published works and the New York Times (though not the New Yorker, of course). English and Latin both serve(d) as common languages, methods of communication across cultures, but the ways they play that role, the origins, the evolution, their use, and the repercussions, are quite different.

The modern English/medieval Latin connection is the subject of this Mongolian Connection, but I think I also, after a couple months of writing about why Mongolia is Awesome, want to remind everyone that English is Awsome, too.

(And I’ve used four words or phrases imported from other languages in this post, just by accident.)

Meditations: Marriage for Love or for Money?

Throughout the Secret History of the Mongols, and further throughout my readings on the Mongol Empire, I encountered a theme that’s common in pretty much all history and a lot of literature: marriage as a political tool. Genghis Khaan would take a wife in order to secure his relationship with (i.e. superiority over) that tribe. When you can have as many wives as you want, this strategy works pretty well. Morris Rossabi put it clearly when he stated that “the Mongols often used marital alliances as a means of binding non-Mongols to them.” The Ilkhan Abakha, for example, established a good relationship with the Byzantines because his wife was a Byzantine princess. Even Edward I of England considered marrying a Mongol in order to secure an alliance with them.

Of course this is not a Mongol innovation; East or West, children of prominent families have often been entered into marriages for political or monetary reasons. In fact, marriage was seen very much as a financial alliance for probably most of history. This is old news to pretty much everyone reading this, so I don’t feel the need to go into too much detail about it.

Reading about it this time, for some reason, I didn’t feel like many people do about the whole thing. The general cultural consensus is that we are much more advanced than those people, that our freer society allows us to marry for love, and that this is a much improved system. In our movies and books, girls (and boys) often escape arranged marriages (Pocahontas, Ever After, The Princess Bride, etc.) and end up in happy relationships with the ones they truly love. Awww.

But using marriage as a method of alliance was actually a very good idea. It does not apply so much anymore, because our political/financial systems just don’t work the way they used to, but I think it’s a mistake to view political marriages as just a cruel arrangement for the parties involved. Sure, a princess might get shipped off to a foreign land and wed to a man she couldn’t stand, but that marriage could potentially save thousands of lives. Wars have been prevented by beneficial marriages, and nations have been founded and developed because of a single partnership. In that sort of a context, a single girl’s romantic unhappiness just looks pretty insignificant. And of course, we need to remember that a marriage then did not mean what marriage now means. Mongol khans may not have spent much time with their wives at all, and even for European royalty, one simply was not expected to try to have some lovely romance with one’s spouse. A life in general then was different from a life now, and it usually was not intended to involve rose petals and affectionate glances. (That’s not to say that people in the past did not long for romantic love, just that it took a very different form and was thought to occur in a very different social context, usually outside of marriage.)

Our modern ideal view of marriage is that it should create a happy family; the old view of elite marriage was that it should create peaceful nations. And that seems to me to be a legitimate cause. So my point is, maybe we shouldn’t boo so much when a king insists his daughter marry the slow-witted neighboring prince. And maybe we shouldn’t cheer so much when she elopes with her true love and leaves the countries in the tension that could have been avoided with a  bit of personal sacrifice on her part.

This brings me back to the namesake of this blog, Our Lady of the Mongols. She seems like a heroine in a modern context, someone who stood up for herself and refused to be a victim of the system. Of course, hers is an extreme example, and being shuffled from one khan to the next isn’t conducive to any sort of happiness, and probably not going to produce much of an alliance, either. I do think it’s admirable that she chose her personal religious devotion over agreeing to be sent off to yet another khan on her father’s say-so. But that doesn’t make her father the villain; he was being a politician, and he probably thought he was choosing his constituents’ security over his daughter’s comfort.

Of course, times have changed, and Malia isn’t going to be betrothed to Prince Harry in this lifetime to preserve that “special relationship.” (Though if they fell in love on their own, the Sun would have a field day!) In our world, we are expected to marry for love, and if two young people are being used as bartering chips in corporate deals, we tend to get a little indignant. So why is this? As I mentioned before, the system itself is no longer one that benefits from marital alliance, so that changes things. But even when examining situations in historical contexts, we often think that people should not be unwillingly wed for the greater good. It seems to me to have to do with our culture’s broader philosophy of individualism. The individual now comes above the greater good, often above family or politics. Is this why we now view political/financial marriages as so barbaric? Because we place a higher value on individual happiness? Do we thus place a lower value on community security/success? Is it really a zero-sum game? Does our modern world value individual happiness because, in the newer system, it is thought to contribute to community security/success?

Of course, I don’t have any answers to these questions. (I never do!) But a scenario that lies on the cusp of the marriage as a tool/marriage for love transition showcases all of these themes, and then some. Some of you may have heard of Consuelo Vanderbilt. Consuelo was the only daughter of Alva Smith Vanderbilt and William Kissam Vanderbilt. (I list Alva first very deliberately.) Consuelo’s story is not a happy one; she made her debut in New York society as an elegant heiress, and she was secretly engaged to a man she loved. However, her mother wanted a marital alliance for her only daughter that would be advantageous to the Vanderbilt name, and she threatened/cajoled/manipulated her daughter into breaking off her engagement and instead marrying the Duke of Marlborough, a man Consuelo had met and disliked. The Duke didn’t like her any better than she liked him; Consuelo was marrying him to bring honor to the family name, and the Duke was marrying her for her multi-million dollar dowry. After a few years of unhappiness and the births of two sons, the couple divorced. Consuelo was no longer young, and though she married again, she never lived the Hollywood fantasy that she, as a girl with a secret fiancé and more money than she could possibly spend, could have hoped for. The Duke of Marlborough also married again, and that one ended more poorly than the first.

There was no happy ending for either Consuelo or the Duke; their arranged marriage was not one that ended in love like in the novels. It was just two people whose happiness was sacrificed in order to provide security for their families. But the thing is, it worked. The relatively new Vanderbilt family proved their worth and established themselves, and the Duke filled his family coffers. When I visited Blenheim Palace, the Marlborough family’s estate, one of the tour guides made a joke about me being American and said, “We like American money here. Without American money, we wouldn’t be here like this.” He explained that Blenheim is only privately owned because of the Vanderbilt money. The leftover interest of Consuelo’s dowry is still used to maintain the estate (now supplemented by entry fees), and the Duke of Marlborough lives in a private wing there. Unlike many estates, which could not afford their own upkeep and taxes, Blenheim Palace did not decay due to lack of funds, but flourished because of a single miserable marriage. On the one hand, Consuelo’s life is sad. And if a movie were made about her, we’d probably root for her to marry her secret fiancé. On the other hand, I like visiting Blenheim, and thousands of people now enjoy the estate that was built with a teenage girl’s tears. So what do we think here? Were those tears worth it?  If it were our own daughter, or our own estate, which would we choose, and which should we choose? Our posterity, or posterity in general?

Mongolian Connections: Money Talks, and People Listen

This connection isn’t exclusively Mongolian, because it’s just related to Buddhism in general, but if it weren’t for Mongolia, I wouldn’t have learned about the life of Buddha, and thus wouldn’t be able to make this connection…

For those of you who haven’t been to Mongolia and thus haven’t read the Shakyamuni Buddha’s biography, Buddha was the prince whose father did his best to keep him isolated from the world in order to keep him from becoming a holy man instead of a king. (This is related to a prediction made on the day of Buddha’s birth.) Buddha was raised in incredible luxury, with several palaces, no work to do, and eventually, with a royal wife and child. Despite his father’s efforts, Buddha decided that material wealth was not enough and wanted to meet some of his subjects. When he left the palace confines, he encountered an old man and was so horrified, he decided to become an ascetic to avoid becoming old himself. (And I thought modern America had a problem with aging!) I’m simplifying a lot here, as other subjects came into play, but the gist of the story is that Buddha decided to renounce his royal power, his wealth, and his family in order to live as a beggar. After escaping the palace, Buddha became a mendicant, then a hermit, and finally, after adopting a lifestyle of moderation and meditation, he achieved Nirvana under the Bodhi tree.

Nothing about this story struck me as too remarkable, but as I continued to read about Buddha’s life, a pattern emerged. Another character in the story had a similar tale: Yasa, “the son of a millionaire,” was brought up in the most luxurious of lifestyles, but one day became so repulsed by the excess of his world that he ran away from his home and came upon Buddha teaching. When Buddha preached to him, Yasa became his disciple and eventually achieved enlightenment.

This story—the renunciation of wealth in pursuit of higher ideals—is a pretty common one, not only in Buddhism, but also in other ideologies. Probably the most famous Christian example is St. Francis, the son of a wealthy merchant who decided that charity and poverty were more fulfilling than his friends’ and family’s lives of luxury. He left behind his father (and his father’s wealth), first living as a mendicant, and then founding his own mendicant order. On the political scene, Engels was the son of a textile manufacturer, and if I remember the movies correctly, Che and Castro were both pretty upper-middle class. Though I’m not sure if these guys renounced their wealth exactly, they at least had to put down that sort of lifestyle a bit in order to lead their revolutions, I think. (I am not a historian, so the communism part could be grossly inaccurate, and Wikipedia is being less than helpful. Corrections welcome.) A google search on “renounced his wealth” doesn’t quite know which religion it wants to choose, so common is that theme. (Interestingly, “renounced her wealth” reveals mostly Christian saints, and I’m sure someone who knows better than I could analyze that.)

Buddha and St. Francis were both charismatic leaders who led by example when it came to worldly renunciation. They each gained a cult following and founded pretty influential and enduring movements… So what about this theme is so convincing? Is it just that seeing an example of renunciation leading to spiritual fulfillment makes others more likely to make the leap? (Clare of Assisi, one of Francis’s first and most devoted followers, was a common result for “renounced her wealth.”) Did Buddha and Francis serve as before/after pictures for adopting poverty as a lifestyle? Is this made more convincing because renunciation of property is seen as such a drastic action that it makes people take notice and makes people think, “If he gives up wealth for this cause, it must be a big deal”? I’m not sure, but rich people who choose to become poor seem to have quite a presence, and this theme endures across cultures and centuries.

At first, it may seem like a great thing that these religions glorify figures who give up the material joys that our society so values. They’re sticking it to the capitalist system, right? Except, as your own foray into hagiography may have shown you, (everyone makes a foray into hagiography at some point, right?), this has a major flaw: Only the wealthy have wealth to renounce. The poor that Buddha encountered in his journey? They don’t make much of a statement when they give up their BC equivalent of a cardboard box. In the medieval Christian world, the Church made a big deal about the wealthy devoting so much time and money to charity; this actually gave the upper class a spiritual leg up over the poor, because they had time and money to give. It may be harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but with enough money, all things are possible, and this was especially true if one aspired to sainthood. A boy who was born a beggar would probably be too busy trying not to starve to strive for spiritual enlightenment, and if he started preaching about the beauty of his lifestyle, I don’t think anyone would have cared. This is a complicated issue, and one that’s worth a bit of examination. (Keep in mind that not all grand religious figures follow this pattern; it’s significant that Jesus was born in the humblest of circumstances, and if I recall correctly, neither Mohammed nor Joseph Smith, both also from humble beginnings, took vows of poverty.)

That idea carries over into modern times; we value philanthropy on a grand scale, but you can’t be a philanthropist without being pretty rich first. Warren Buffet gives so much money to charity that his net worth dwindles into single-digit-billions, and he’s a hero. Brangelina adopt more foreign babies for their nannies to raise, and they start a trend. But the everyday families who can’t afford vacations, much less yachts, and still scrape enough out of their pockets to pay their taxes and give to their local shelter? They don’t usually get news stories. In fact, some of them sort of get a lot of flak, on a cultural level, because they aren’t necessarily educated, and they probably aren’t ambitious. And couples that give up their time and freedom to give foster kids an extra chance? Sure, our country values them in theory, but it doesn’t necessarily offer them too much support or encouragement. 

Imagine if People Magazine did a celebrity-free issue, where instead of covering the latest cheating husbands or movie-star elopements, they covered the guy who walks two miles in the rain to help his daughter change her flat tire, or a low-budget wedding only made possible by the help of friends and family. (Though good fathers and happy families are probably harder to come by than gross celebrity antics.) But of course, that’s not what people want to read about. And that is part of the problem; probably it’s not so much that the system values the rich better, it’s that the people in the system (and that means you and me) value the rich better. Once we start paying to hear good news about good people, the media would start covering it… But I guess if we want to read about that, we’re just going to have to wait until Madonna gives up her career and starts working at a homeless shelter.

Meditations: Evolutionary Mythology?

The National Museum of Mongolia has a floor dedicated to the very early history of Mongolia, from at least 5000 BC to the 9th century AD, and some of the earliest featured items are replicas of cave paintings, made by ancient peoples who lived in the Mongolian region. The oldest date from about 5000 BC, and Mongolians are proud of these prehistoric works of art.

While looking at these paintings, I thought to myself, “these look just like most cave paintings.” I don’t know what I expected, but I guess I figured that, separated by a vast distance, Mongolian cave paintings would be different from the paintings at Lascaux. But they aren’t, really. It’s a lot of the same: animals drawn without detail but with a skill unique to artists who spend a lifetime watching those animals, and figures that will eventually evolve into petroglyphs. But why shouldn’t the paintings be the same? The lifestyle of Mongolian cavemen must not have been too different from the lifestyle of French cavemen. I am aware of the gross anachronisms of this statement, and that sort of drives my point home. There was no Mongolia, there was no France, there was only land and people living on it. There was not even culture, really, so how could the cultures be different?

And it occurred to me—I tend to think of similarities in culture as derived from some universal human experience, a horizontal “sameness” that runs through people everywhere. But maybe I’m looking at it wrong; maybe our similarities are derived from the fact that our current cultures were all, at one point, the same. Not a horizontal line, but a fractal tree connects us to a single base. And from this single base derives so much of what we all have in common. From a scientific perspective, this kind of makes sense. Perhaps the greed of everyone, from Ancient Roman politicians to modern Mongolian mining execs, relates to the scarcity of food in our cave ancestors and the need to horde. Perhaps the success of the “dark triad” relates to the fact that the most self-centered got the most of the gazelle. And though I can’t figure out how “odi et amo” would be an evolutionary success, maybe that, too, can be traced back to the owners of same fingerprints found in the paints on those caves. On the one hand, I keep hearing that the world is flattening and cultures are growing ever more similar, but is this just after millennia of different peoples growing apart? Our similarities, perhaps, are not remarkable, but merely holdovers from the days when life everywhere, for all people, was pretty much hunting, keeping warm or cool, and desperately attempting to do two things: survive and reproduce.

Apparently evolutionary anthropology is already a field, but I don’t know how much it’s connected to literature, art, and culture, especially not in the sense of modern connections. The mad Pasiphaë, mother of the Minotaur, and the first Mongolian shamaness, who married a bull and had two shaman sons, perhaps are not odd anomalies, but the remnants of the prehistoric culture that relied very much on two things: Women and livestock. (Note the result of Pasiphae’s liaison in comparison to that of the shamaness, and then compare the implications of that to my earlier post on women in folk literature.) Maybe many more literary/artistic traditions common across cultures are also the result of a commonality that evolutionary anthropologists are examining, but not yet applying to other fields. And maybe anthropologists could research further the gradual branching off not only of the human genome, but of the human condition, and the culture that lies with it.

But I’ll bring up another point; I’m being very culturally egotistical here, assuming that all cavemen were the same just because their rock paintings were the same. They only had certain tools at their disposal, so they could only produce so much in terms of art. Maybe cavemen did have different cultures. Prehistoric means there’s no writing, no concrete records, only the vague but important results of archaeology. It could be (and my mother, a fan of those Geico commercials, will appreciate me giving Neanderthals their due) that the discussions and thoughts and day-to-day lifestyle of cavemen varied widely. Add to this the fact that, actually, a lot of genes have been pruned and pruned and pruned (Neanderthals being a great example), and maybe the diversity of peoples in 10,000 BC was as great as it is now. Maybe they had more cultural variation than we, living in a world of increasing internet and decreasing linguistic differentiation, will in 100 years.

I don’t know about all this, but if we got a bunch of evolutionary anthropologists and a bunch of true humanities scholars together in a room, they could make some pretty Awesome discoveries. But then, they might just get down to their evolutionary roots and throw poop at each other.

Mongolian Connections: Wrestle for Your Ring!

I came to Mongolia to study folk literature, and though my research quickly took off down a different route (the “religious studies” route—go figure), still I uncovered some folk tales that are strikingly similar to our own. One myth that Mongolians seem very fond of repeating is about the traditional costumes wrestlers wear.

Wrestlers don’t wear a lot of clothing, just a pair of briefs, a pair of boots, and a bolero-like jacket called a “jodag” or “zodag.” It pretty much just has sleeves and a back, and then ties around the belly. The exact story of why the jodag has an open chest varies from teller to teller, but it always has to do with a successful female wrestler. The most popular tale says that the costumes used to be full jackets, and at one festival, a mysterious wrestler defeated all the other wrestlers, and after receiving his reward (or after the final victory), he ripped open his jacket to reveal that he was indeed she. From that point on, jackets had to have the chest exposed so that women would no longer be able to compete. Another version says that Khutulun, a niece of Kublai Khan, challenged any suitors to a wrestling match. If she won, he had to give her 100 horses, but if he won, he could marry her. Supposedly she beat enough suitors to win 10,000 horses, and no man was ever able to defeat her so she remained single forever. Though I’ve heard that legend end with, “and since that time, women have not been allowed to wrestle, which is why men wear open-chested jackets,” I fail to see how one (Princess Khutulun) leads to the other (open-chested jackets), and I think two separate Mongolian girl-wrestler stories were merged into that one.

The idea of a woman defeating all the men isn’t confined to Mongolia—the first that comes to mind is the Greek tale of Atalanta, a young girl who beat all her suitors in footraces until one won through trickery. One Celtic myth tells the story of Macha, a woman who was able to run faster than the king’s fastest horses, and who gave birth during a race. The Iliad relates that Penthesilea defeated several heroes in battle before being killed by Achilles, the greatest Greek warrior. I’m sure there are tons of other stories like this, and they are just on the back of my mind, but I can’t quite remember them.

So this got me thinking—why do these stories exist and persist? Why are they so popular? Most of them probably were written by men, or at least recorded and handed down by men... So why did men delight in stories featuring women’s superiority over some men? Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own, points out that the same men who were demanding quiet and meek daughters and wives in real life were exalting heroines like Antigone or Rosalind in their literary works. And this is true in the legends, too—men liked being in power, demanded to be in power, yet read and re-told stories in which women were often the victors. What factors are at work here? Is it that these men, though they, for practical necessity, had to keep women under their power, truly wanted or admired strong heroines and thus put them in their poetry? Or is it the other way around—that though they fantasized that women could have power, the fantasy was best (for them) left as a fantasy, and they didn’t appreciate the reality of powerful women? (Is that even the other way around, or is it the same exact thing?)

But there are also cultural differences at work in these stories. Atalanta did eventually lose her race, and Penthesilea was killed by a man. (For Macha, the Celtic heroine, the story gets much more complicated.)  And not all stories of strong heroines are positive—Look at Lady MacBeth as a classic example, or many portrayals of Cleopatra. (Especially Roman portrayals of Cleopatra versus Octavia; though the reasons for hating one and loving the other might be political, which traits did they emphasize in each? Also, Horace's Ode 1.37 has a portrayal of Cleopatra that fits well into this post's theme of whether men admire or resent real powerful women.) Do the men who passed on these stories use them actually as catharsis, as a way to keep women down even in legends? That is, writing/reading the stories not as “Atalanta/ Penthesilea defeated many men,” but as “even the best woman Atalanta/ Penthesilea could eventually be brought down by a man.” In contrast, the Mongolian legend never has that moment of “But wait! She couldn’t beat all the men!” In fact, the legend of the jorba can be read as one that says that Mongol men still believe a female wrestler might be able to best them; thus they need to keep women out of the ring. This might reflect Mongol attitudes toward women generally; women had a lot of power, from Genghis Khaan’s wife in The Secret History of the Mongols to later queens who ruled when their alcoholic husbands or young sons could not. Marco Polo reported that women were trained as warriors, and though they no longer wrestle, girls are still allowed to compete in archery and horseback riding during Naadam. (There will be a later post, hopefully, about the Awesomeness of Mongolian women.) And there doesn’t seem to be any backlash against this, at least not that I’ve encountered.

What makes the difference here? Mongolia was traditionally a patriarchal society, just like most others, so why do its myths and history reflect more respect for women? Do its myths and history even reflect more respect for women, or am I reading them wrong? What is the relationship between attitudes toward women and women in myth? And finally—what do our myths say about women? (When I say “our myths,” take this however you like, from your religion to your culture to the movies you watch and show your children.) Disney’s Mulan might be an admirable girl, but she impressed her captain and defeated the Huns (who came, by the way, from Mongolia) through ingenuity, not through strength. (Though you'll need both to reach the arrow...) On the other hand, Disney’s Nala ceded to Simba’s authority as king, but she could still always pin him, and it was her advice sent him back to defeat Scar. (So now we know what I consider my mythology.)

You could apply these analyses to many women admired by our society, and look at which religious stories we choose to emphasize (Noah and David get a lot of press-Miriam, Deborah, and Jael? Not so much), which historical figures we exalt, even which celebrities we admire, and, just as importantly, what we admire them for. So how do we stack up? What sorts of girls are we looking back at, and thus, what sorts of girls are we bringing forth?

Meditations: Don't Tread on the Grass, Lam

“Bogd Khan” is not a term that is familiar to most people, but in Mongolia, the Bogd Khan is kind of a big deal. He was the Buddhist religious leader in Mongolia, and also functioned as a political leader after Mongolia declared its independence in 1911. He was the religious leader because he was the eighth reincarnation of the Jebtsundamba, the spiritual head of Mongolian Buddhism;  though he, the last official Jebtsundamba, died in 1924, an unofficial Jebtsundamba now lives in Tibet but is unable to enter Mongolia for some hazy political reasons. These reincarnations lead back to the first Jebtsundamba, Zanabazar, the greatest Mongolian artist of all time who was also Awesome in a lot of other ways, and who was, in turn, a reincarnation of some other big deal Buddhist leader.  

But this post is not about the Jebtsundambas; it’s about the Bogd Khan’s palace. Though the Soviets destroyed the Bogd Khan’s summer palace and temples, they left intact his Winter Palace. His Winter Palace complex also included many of his summer temples, so it’s a mystery why they didn’t tear it to the ground. His property (including religious artifacts) were all auctioned off to get money for the State, and when communism fell, supposedly all the buyers (or descendents of the buyers) donated his things so that they could be placed in the Winter Palace Complex as a museum. If this is true, it’s pretty Awesome. In any case, the Winter Palace is now a museum filled with religious artifacts, and the building of the palace itself is filled with all sorts of luxurious and lovely belongings of the Bogd Khan.

One quick interruption for a Mongolian Connection: It seems like everywhere I go, there are museums filled with the most beautiful luxurious things for the obscenely rich. There are the Crown Jewels in England and the giant diamonds and studded daggers of Topkapi Palace, and the lovely unicorn tapestries of the Cloisters that took 1,000 handmaidens 1,000 days to weave. (Okay, I made the 1,000 thing up. But that gets the point across.)  Everywhere you go, as a constant, there will be absurdly beautiful and expensive things for the top .0001% of society. And every time I see these things hanging on walls or encased in glass, I get the same exact “I want that! Why can’t I have that?!” feeling. Which just goes to show that some things are constant. And also maybe explains how exactly communism did manage to sprout where it did—a society collectively taking its “I want that!” feeling and turning it into a “If I can’t have it you can’t have it!” feeling and turning that into a rebellion. But I don’t know about history or communism, so I imagine I’m grossly oversimplifying everything. What I do know is that seeing the 25 silk cushions of the seat of the Bogd Khan, and his capelet made from 160 mink tails, and his cloth-of-gold del, and a fox fur cloak the size of a bed, and an embroidered silk hat for his pet elephant, and his wife’s peacock feather giant parasol that went above her litter (seriously?), I probably would have started a rebellion if I’d thought I’d get some cloth-of-gold, too.

That’s all just background. I’m really bringing up the Bogd Khan’s palace (and his wealth, and the Jebtsundambas) to talk about the grass. Something struck me as a little off about the grounds of his palace and the courtyards between the temples. It seemed a little shabby, and then I noticed: The grass isn’t cut. The grasses were allowed to grow tall, with some scrappy shrubs and shorter grass and maybe weeds poking through concrete. I tried to imagine it in its former glory, all maintained and sprinkled and shiny. And I thought, “I think, maybe, I like it just the way it is.” There was something nice, something peaceful and pretty about its overgrownedness. I figured maybe it’s just because I was used to Oxford, where they have OCD over grass quads down to an art form. (Ask me someday about their grass clippers that have a tray to collect the grass as they trim the edges of the quads.) A while later, I joined an Australian group and their guide, and one of the women asked, “Why don’t they trim the grass here? It would be so lovely if they trimmed the grass.” This was interesting to me, because though I’d had the first question, my reaction was the opposite.

But then it got really interesting. One of the guides explained, “Oh, that’s the Mongolian way. We don’t like to disturb nature. Maybe they take out the weeds, but they don’t cut the grass because nature is beautiful on its own.” Ohhhhhhhh… At first, this seems like such a nice sentiment, and my favorite gardens at Oxford are the ones that are carefully engineered to look “natural.” But then I thought about all the other parks in Mongolia. They are all like the Bogd Khan’s palace, but when the background is concrete or apartment blocks instead of Buddhist temples, it sort of loses its charm. In fact, I lament the lack of just a pretty space in UB to sit and read outside. There are a few parks, but most of them are overgrown and unkempt and add to the abandoned Soviet city feel of UB.

So why do Westerners prefer nature combed and cut and tame looking? And why do Mongolians prefer it wild? There can’t really be a version that’s objectively more beautiful, can there be? Is it just because of what we’re used to? I think of parks as ideally pretty and nicely cared for, but a Mongolian thinks of parks as beautiful when they are thick grasses pouring out of the sidewalk... Is that it? Or do our park preferences reflect some deeper social phenomenon or philosophy? From our perspective, I think it might have to do with wealth. Taking care of our gardens demonstrates labor and equipment, which cost money. Overgrown areas tend to be poorer areas, because they can’t afford the upkeep. So I see an overgrown park and think it’s overgrown because no one’s bothering to take care of it, which gives it that feel of abandonment/neglect. But what do overgrown parks symbolize for Mongolians? Is there an economic background for their preference, too? Or is it deeper than all that? Is it somehow related to a man vs. nature phenomenon, in which Westerners want to be the victors? Mongolians, on the other hand, are more comfortable with nature and accept their role as part-victim (in terms of nature’s sometimes harsh ways) and part-beneficiary (in terms of nature’s providing for them and its incredible beauty)… Is that it? Or am I reading way too much into this?

And lastly, it occurs to me that in fact there are circumstances in which Americans/ Westerners love natural beauty. The monasteries here with overgrown courtyards and the rock ruins poking through grass are beautiful, in contrast to the urban parks. And in America, sun-dappled meadows overflowing with wildflowers are idealized as nature’s untouched wonder; add a cottage to that meadow and it’s the setting for a heartwarming movie about the importance of family over financial success or something like that. So why are these types of overgrown nature considered good, while too much nature in our parks?—Get that under control! Does it have to do with the idea of things being out of place? We feel a need to control everything, from dirt to trash to our brains to our children’s brains to the weather, and nature fits into this. Having a well-maintained park keeps nature carefully in designated spots, but it’s okay for meadows to be overgrown because that’s what they’re for. That is, nature has its place, but it’s not where we live and work. (Unless, of course, we live in a cottage in a sun-dappled meadow overflowing with wildflowers, probably taking care of a handful of orphans, our senile mother, and a crippled dog, waiting to teach a stockbroker from the city how worthless money really is.)

And I think I’ve just hatched the plot for a new Kate Winslet movie.

Mongolian Connections: Paterfamilias

One of the main banks here is named Golomt Bank, and their signs/branches are everywhere. I didn’t know what “Golomt” means, but it seemed like an interesting word, so I was there with a Mongolian member of the University Staff, I figured I’d asked her. She thought about it for a minute. Then she said, “I don’t know in English; it is like the father of a household, who is in charge of the family.” I followed up with, “So it’s like the ‘head’ or something?” She shook her head. “It’s more than that, but I cannot explain.”

I knew what she meant—though there isn’t an English word with the full connotations (“patriarch” doesn’t quite cut it), there is a Latin word “paterfamilias,” which is literally the father of the household, but has more to it than just that. The paterfamilias had both legal and social jurisdiction over his extended family; his wife, children, slaves, etc. were supposed to obey his will and respect his authority. He was the foundation of the family, the central core whose duty was to keep his family in perfect Roman order.

So I said to her, “I think I know what you mean. It is like the family is a tree, and ‘golomt’ is the trunk, with all the other branches growing out of it and dependent on it, and it is the central authority.” “Yes, yes, that is exactly it!” she said, sort of glad I got it.

I don’t know where exactly that description came from, because I don’t think that quite describes paterfamilias, but her reaction showed that it was pretty much what “golomt” meant. It’s interesting that both Roman and Mongolian society (very different worlds) have the same (or similar) concepts of golomt/paterfamilias. Apparently the patriarchy in these societies is well established and extends beyond mere property rights or even legal rights to the social order within an extended family. Yet it’s not as patriarchal as it might seem, since both Roman and Mongolian high society has a history of women exercising more influence over their powerful husbands/children than the law would like to admit. (And I’ll post more on that later.)

But I wonder why we don’t have this word in English like in Latin or Modern Mongolian. Is it because husbands/fathers don’t have the legal jurisdiction they used to? Or is it because they don’t have the social power? Or is it perhaps because women’s influence was not as common and/or threatening in our society as it was in the Roman/Mongol courts, so there was no backlash to establish the concept of “paterfamilias” or “golomt”? In any case, this connection between two of my favorite empires intrigues me.

Meditations: How We Speak

We all use language to communicate every day, hundreds or thousands of times a day. In a country that speaks the same language we do, we don’t necessarily think about our language. Sure, we might try to use our “I” statements when confronting someone, or carefully put something into the passive to avoid blame. With or without thinking about it, we might use a single word to make a judgment call or an expression to get someone on our side. But these are the cases where we alter normal language for a purpose. We don’t dedicate a lot of thought to modes of expressing ourselves that are considered normal, the commonly used constructions and phrases we utter daily and automatically.

In Mongolia, I am sometimes a little taken aback by the directness of people’s language. There is not a lot of room for politeness; though I repeat “bayarlaa, bayarlaa” (“Thank you, thank you”), Mongolians don’t use the expression nearly as often as in the States. And according to my phrasebook, there’s really no way to say please. So when I order lunch, I always feel like I’m missing that element of respect, and I have to remind myself that they don’t notice the absence. One instance of directness that I found particularly jarring was hearing people on the phone loudly ask the caller, “Khen be?” translated as, “Who is it?” This isn’t too out of the ordinary, but how do Americans ask the same question? With “May I ask who’s calling?” It means the same thing; it would be weird for someone to respond with, “No, you may not” or “Yes, you may,” because the proper response is the same as for “Who is it?” But the fact is, when we say, “May I ask who’s calling?” we are not saying what we mean. This isn’t a big deal, because we are all part of a culture that uses this; we all know what the question really is.

But I’ve taken notice here of how many phrases we use like this, phrases that make perfect sense in America, because everyone knows the code, but that say something different from what they are supposed to mean. This is true even in English-speaking countries; an English friend of mine who went to the States for college was surprised by how many people would ask, “What’s up?” or  “How are you doing?” as they passed. She’d stop and tell them what was going on in her life while they stood there, confused that she didn’t just give the customary response, “Nothing” or “Fine, thanks.” On the other side, a couple times in England people asked me, “Are you all right?” and I got confused, thinking, “Did they hear something about me? Am I supposedly sick or injured or upset? Of course I’m all right.” In both cases, these phrases, though they literally mean the same things, are codified differently in the different countries.

Naturally, though, these differences are compounded in countries where there already is a language barrier. I noticed it first in my homestay, when Prof C would translate that someone was asking if I’d like more tea or yogurt or something. My response was always, “I’m fine, thank you.” Of course, “I’m fine, thank you,” really just means “No.” And probably, Prof C just translated it back into Mongolian as “No.” But for someone who’s just learning the language, “I’m fine, thank you” must be a pretty confusing phrase. Because, though it means “no,” that’s just not what it says--and what it says isn't really "yes" or "no." Ordering things or requesting menus and napkins (in English) here, I face a similar problem. I usually preface my request with, “Could I please get—.” For people whose English isn’t fluent, this could be confusing; what are those extra syllables tacked on to the beginning of the sentence? (It wouldn’t be a big deal if I didn’t say it so unnecessarily fast, as if it were a single word.) And the other day after receiving coffee, I asked, “Would it be possible for me to get some milk?” The woman at the café, understandably, thought I was requesting password and milk. (The wi-fi password.) These are just a few examples; our language is full of indirect demands, requests that aren’t really requests, and implicit statements that just aren’t clear in the literal language. This is one of many, many reasons I think English must be the worst language in the world to have to learn.

Why does English do this? Why is our language so riddled with expressions and conventions that get us around saying what we actually mean? Is this a bad thing? Of course, being me, I actually love these conventions. Saying “I’m fine, thank you” as a way to say “No” actually does say more than that; it expresses gratitude and qualifies the “No.” (That is, it says, “I’m happy how I am, which is why I will refuse.”) This polite phrase is a way for me to say “No” without sounding ungrateful. And “May I ask who’s calling?” or “Could I please get—“ are courteous way to get information or goods; they express respect and deference, but still get the point across. So I’m a fan. But I do worry a bit about a language that teaches us not to say what we mean, and there is always an issue when what I think is an implicit request doesn’t get across, when other people don’t get the rules I think are widely known. (And I’m sure I, too, miss plenty of implications.) So whose way is best? The no-frills Mongolian where you pretty much say what you mean, or the labyrinthine code of English, where almost everything you say also means something else? Does it even make sense to ask which way is “best”? Are they just different traditions, dependent on their own cultures? Is there a “best” middle ground? And do these expressions make a difference in how we think and feel? Does being linguistically courteous actually make an impact on how we feel about other human beings? Or is it all just talk?

Meditations: Rubbish and Resources

My guidebook has a “responsible camping” section, which consists of instructions to limit one’s impact on the environment and ecology of the areas through which one treks. In a country like Mongolia, whose appeal (partially) relies on its seemingly untouched landscapes, and which is home to some of the few completely intact ecosystems in the world, low-impact camping is pretty important. I can appreciate that, no matter how inconvenient carrying trash around for weeks is.

So I was a bit surprised when, while making dinner on the steppe, my Mongolian guide just disposed of trash by dropping it on the ground. Wet wipes and newspaper I could clench my teeth and deal with, but when he left the tinned-meat can and plastic wrappers just sitting there, I furtively picked them up and packed them into a plastic bag to dispose of at a later date. When we finally got to Darkhad, the trash was given to the mother of the family we stayed with to get rid of more responsibly. But what does getting rid of trash “more responsibly” mean? One day, I noticed by the cabins a little mini-landfill next to the family’s toilet. (I think the landfill may have been in a past toilet, actually.) There was the trash, still taking up space, still looking ugly and disrupting the natural landscape. So taking the trash here wasn’t any better than littering, I thought.

But then I realized: Wait, what is the difference between this mini-landfill and our own landfills? I’m (shamefully) not sure exactly how trash disposal works in the US, and though I know there is a concept of “incineration,” there are also landfills, so I don’t know exactly how much trash becomes ash and how much is carted away to out-of-sight garbage dumps. In any case, Staten Island is proof that there are landfills to which at least some of our trash goes to rot away over centuries or millennia or more. But, unlike with the family landfills of the nomads, we don’t see these dumps (and in the case of Staten Island, we actively avoid them). When I think about it, that actually strikes me as a worse method than the Mongolian way. Just like we can go to a supermarket and pick up processed packages of “pork” or “beef,” without having to confront the fact that what we are eating is in fact killed animal, muscle and fat and nerves, we can place our Doritos wrappers and plastic forks into clean plastic bags and have them disappear from the tops of our driveways. This, actually, seems pretty irresponsible. We should have to deal with the waste we produce; we should have to understand the ecological price of all that Styrofoam. I’m not saying we ought to coat the streets with our filth or allow it all to pile up in our living rooms (like Sarah Stout) and out the doors until we have to move our whole town (like Springfield), but maybe it wouldn’t hurt to have to drive by landfills on a daily basis. Or take our trash to the town dump where we can see it all pile higher and higher. If we see the results of our lifestyle, maybe that would make it harder to ignore, and perhaps even be an impetus for change?

But okay, how would we change our lifestyle? How much unnecessary trash do we really produce? We recycle our plastics and magazines and take our canvas bags to the store—so that’s pretty good, right? Sure, but I think there’s still a lot more trash than we think about. After coming from the countryside back to UB, I watched a single lemon I bought get wrapped up in saran wrap for my purchasing ease, and I bought the packaged set of apples and of peppers. A lot of the food we eat is packaged, and we can avoid that waste just by making our own bread, for example, or cookies or lasagna. (Which also means fresh, homemade food!) And in my case, at least, there’s more than that—all those wet wipes for cleaning while camping instead of cloth. And keeping my to-do lists on notebook paper instead of my computer is easier, but isn’t that environmentally irresponsible?

Okay, now I’m being nitpicky. Which brings me to my next point: a partial disavowal of most of what I’ve said. There is more to environmentalism than waste disposal. Resource use is also a big factor. And surprisingly, some “environmental” behaviors are also majorly resource-heavy. (Though none are quite as bad as flying hundreds of people into Copenhagen or using valuable money to buy fake carbon credits.) I’ve heard (but cannot confirm) that recycling paper actually requires more energy and even creates more waste than just cutting trees and creating new paper. Making a ceramic mug supposedly requires the material and energy of 1,000 paper cups, meaning my mug that I bought and left in Oxford is actually ecologically unsound. (This, at least, makes me feel better about spending an entire summer using red Solo cups instead of buying a glass.) Of course, if throwing out paper and disposable plates, etc. uses up valuable space for litter, there are still environmental repercussions. However, a (somewhat dubious) study was recently released calculating that in 1,000 years, all the trash in the US would take up landfill space equaling about 35 square miles. To put it in perspective, that’s less than 8% of the area of Phoenix. (And as far as I’m concerned, putting the landfill right on top of the city would be more than environmentally responsible enough to make up for the landfill itself.) If that study is true, and the facts about the resources used to recycle or make non-disposable silverware are true, actually, creating trash might be the lesser evil. So, all in all, what does this mean for our lifestyle? Should we decrease our use of disposable items? Increase it? Use up our valuable time and energy to make our own food or stick to Doritos? Or does it all add up to not making a damn bit of difference? I’m inclined to think we should move from any and all trash/recycling arguments and focus on bigger environmental travesties like corn subsidies or golf courses. Or Phoenix.

Steppe Trash (At least it's all biodegradable... Wait, is goat horn biodegradable?)

Meditations: Nomadism and Us

I don’t know why I have always been fascinated by nomads. As someone who shudders at the thought of packing for anything, and who looks forward to finally never having to move again, nomads shouldn’t necessarily be on my radar. But for whatever reasons, the concept intrigues me, and nomads were what first sparked my interest in Mongolia.

In Ulaanbaatar, I hadn’t gotten to experience nomad culture, and I was still really pretty fuzzy about how the whole thing worked. Even driving up to Darkhad, stopping by gers and checking out the setup, I was confused about the social intricacies of the community, (is there a community?), as well as the practical aspects of moving, staying, etc. But after living with nomads for a few days, I’ve gotten a much better idea of the lifestyle, and I can’t help but compare (or contrast) it to the increasingly mobile lifestyle of the modern American.

In case you’re as clueless as I was, here’s a rundown of how Mongolian nomadism works (as I’ve seen it): The nomads live mostly in gers, huge, warm tents made of a sort of lattice (for the walls), and stakes (holding up the roof), then covered in thick felt or tarp. The gers have a stove and basic furniture, like beds, stools, and trunks (the trunks in beautiful bright colors with painted patterns). The entire ger, including most of the furniture, can be easily disassembled and loaded onto oxcarts or jeeps. In areas with taiga (thick pine forest), there are also quite a few log cabins, though the furniture is still ger-style furniture. Ger or cabin, the homes generally only have one room (or sometimes an additional kitchen/food storage room), and people sleep on the beds that double as couches or on the ground. Families live all together in the single room, sometimes including grandparents, which means as many as six or seven people may live in one space. The gers/cabins seemed to come mostly in groups of two to four, in a large extended family unit. The family I lived with had two cabins and three gers, along with a storage shed.  I think most of the family was descended from the patriarch, a medicine man who shared his cabin with his daughter and her children (and for the week, with me and Prof C). Nomads move one to four times a year; they pack up their entire ger and carry it all to a different location. I can’t say “new location,” because they sometimes have established spots for each season, from a mile to ten miles away. A winter home by the mountains (as protection from the wind), a summer home on the steppe (fewer flies), etc. This way the herds get fresh grass, and people live as comfortably as they can in the extreme conditions. Though people live in extended family units, they are also part of a much larger community, including all the families in the area. To find someone’s ger, you can stop by another ger in the area and ask; they know where it is and can point you in the right direction. People often ride (or perhaps drive) to other gers in the area to have tea with their friends or help with big projects (building a new cabin would be an example). They enjoy stopping by and spending time with their friends as much as we do, and in the evenings a whole family may play volleyball or frisbee, often with friends from other families. I’m not sure if the whole community moves to the same new area for each season, or if one’s winter friends tend to differ from one’s summer friends. In any case, it seems like if you know most people in your area, and you’re only moving a few miles away, you’ll know most people in that area, too. So that is Mongolian nomadism in a nutshell.

I did not expect the nomadic lifestyle to feel so settled. Their gers are very homelike, very lived in, and are decorated not only with orange furniture, but also with photos of themselves and family members; many nomads also have shrines of some sort, with heirlooms (snuff boxes and precious bowls), religious pictures, offerings, and other religious paraphernalia, like scarves or fake flowers. Most gers have solar panels (or occasionally miniature windmills) that provide electricity, as well a satellite dish and a TV inside. They are warm when it’s cold outside, and there is almost always someone inside, usually stirring up something delicious. Nomads don’t have a lot of stuff, but this means they use all their stuff. No boxes of clothes they never wore or shoes they forgot they had or books they will eventually someday maybe read.

So I’m already starting to compare it to the American life. As Americans, we value the acquisition of stuff, and acquisition is part of what makes a house a home. At weddings and housewarmings and baby showers, people receive bundles of gifts from Ikea or Pottery Barn, as if these things might all add up to feeling settled and complete. Having vases and martini glasses and blenders is supposed to make one feel at home. But how does stuff that one doesn’t use and is generally unfamiliar with make a home? How do two sets of china and a big screen TV increase the utility and familiarity of a house? It seems these things just take up space, and although champagne flutes might be useful, honestly, what should matter is with whom you’re drinking the fizz and how you feel about them, not that you might have to use plastic cups. Part of this, I’m sure, is the commercial, material culture we live in, in which somehow we are convinced we need all this stuff that we simply do not need. Period. Or worse, we’re convinced we need stuff that we don’t even really want. And I think I’ll probably return to that concept in another post.

But here’s something else I find interesting. I have my own perspective on this, influenced by the school-a-year plan I seem to have fallen into. As Americans, and especially as young Americans, we move a lot. I might be an excessive case, but even so, kids move to go to college, then move for their summer jobs, move into a different space (if not community) each year, then move when they graduate, and then probably move a couple more times before they’re thirty (especially with the new trend of travel and post-college gap years in the form of Teach for America, WorldTeach, etc.) Yet because we live in nice sturdy apartment blocks or houses with yards, somehow this doesn’t qualify us as nomadic. I’m going to point something out: We are sort of nomads. Moving is often seen as a sign of success; people who choose to stay in their hometowns are often looked down upon by those who leave. (A friend of mine who left her Midwestern city to go to Vandy lamented that most people from her high school stayed home after graduation and went to state schools. She insisted that they just weren’t trying to make something of themselves, and though I pointed out that maybe they preferred familiarity and family to society’s definition of “success,” she didn’t buy it.) It’s not just individuals, it’s the whole community who moves, but unlike Mongolian nomads who still remain as a single community, we split up into separate sections and establish “homes” with entirely new communities, practically every couple of years.

Apart from just the physical packing and storing and unpacking and repacking that accompanies moving every year into new housing, young adults in America also have to pack and unpack something much more significant: a community. This might not happen every year (unless you’re crazy and switch schools all the time………) but it still happens sort of frequently. Kids go to a college and find a new social network. Then they graduate and find another social network, based on a few existing friendships, but also on new co-workers, new neighborhoods, new haunts, etc. A few times a year, they might go home to visit their families and old friends, but generally, they stick with their newly established networks. Then they get married, maybe have children, move a couple new times, and though they retain some old friends, the scene of their social interactions completely changes. And this is still seen as part of a non-nomadic, “stationary” sort of lifestyle. Hm.

So here’s the thing: Mongolian nomads have communities, they stick with their families, and over the course of their lifetime, though life changes in natural ways (growing up, getting married and getting their own ger, having children, having grandchildren, etc), they get to stay with mostly the same people, utilize mostly the same skills, and live on the same areas of land. They understand their community and land in a way that many Americans don’t get to. (Hey, where does your water come from? Which direction is north from your house? Which plants are naturally endemic to your area? Which nations settled your land, and in what order?) It seems to me that nomadic lifestyles, in which people move locations frequently but retain the same (few) possessions and the same (many) relationships, are actually a lot more settled than the socially mobile modern America. Nomads move their location, but they keep the things that are really supposed to add value to life: People, a job, a lifestyle, and a home.

Am I way off-base here? Am I overestimating American mobility? (Probably based on my own experiences.) Am I glorifying a traditional culture that has its own hardships and ought to progress in our direction? Is the American method of finding new locations and, consequently, social circles really that bad, or is it a great way to experience different environments, encounter new worldviews, and adjust one’s network to one’s (ever changing) personality? Is the American system actually an advancement over either nomadic cultures or completely sedentary cultures in which people never traveled farther than one’s village? Or have we lost something precious in our quest for better-more-faster-greener?

Regarding just American mobility, do new inventions like Skype and email, as well as the ease of air travel, facilitate people moving while not feeling like they are losing their old communities? Or are Skype and email and air travel increasingly important because we are moving more often? Is either the mobile lifestyle (looking for financial/career success and new experiences, and trying to change or improve the world) or the sedentary lifestyle (like the Midwesterners who never left) superior? Or are they just different lifestyles for different people? If so, does our culture really view them as such? Should we be making more of an effort to preserve our communities and social networks, rather than go where the best career prospects are? Or does success take precedence over relationships? Does moving even really interfere with relationships at all, now that we have all the modern conveniences of instant communication across distances? I could go on and on… And I might return to this later, having thought about these questions and probably a bunch of others I haven’t even gotten to.