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.

Mongolia is Awesome: Talkh Ba Sercus

What could this funny round structure be? If you thought it looks like a giant blue billboarded ger, as I did when I first saw it, then you’ve probably been in Mongolia too long. In fact, it’s actually the State Circus. Like the State Department store, this was government controlled during communist rule, and I think that, like the Department store, it has been privatized. (Though I'm not sure about this.)

Generally the circus features acrobats and jugglers, and its specialty is Mongolian contortionists. (Most cultural performances here, even a little concert performed just for me at a restaurant, feature young contortionists.) One guy I talked to said he even saw a Russian circus traveling through (with elephants!) once a few years ago. Privatization or not, this is probably pretty much what went on here during communism, too.

It amuses me (and I think it’s Awesome) that the socialist state, along with education and health care and a department store, saw fit to fund something as whimsical and unnecessary as a circus. But, of course, I have to remember that authoritarian governments often choose the obvious and unnecessary over more practical but less people-pleasing endeavors. I guess the communists had been reading their Juvenal and thinking that literal “bread and circuses” might work for them, too.

But Juvenal never met a Mongol, and as the 1990 Revolution proved, Mongolia is Awesome enough to decide eventually that bread and circuses, (and education and health care) aren’t a fair trade for freedom.

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.

Mongolia is Awesome: Medieval Freedom of Religion (Wait, What?)

The Mongol Empire doesn't exactly have a great reputation for mercy or compassion or pretty much anything that’s not, you know, conquering the known world and then conquering the unknown bits and then finding another known world to conquer. I can’t say they didn’t have a great PR department, though, because actually their reputation for brutality and total war was deliberately cultivated; as a result of it, some cities would raise a white flag just because they heard the word “Mongol” in order to avoid suffering the same fate as Baghdad. But centuries later, in an era with different values, people tend to remember the cruelty of the Mongols and the destruction they wreaked. One word that probably doesn’t spring to mind when we hear “Mongols”: Tolerance.

Yet the Mongol Empire was a member of a rare  breed of medieval society, the religiously tolerant one. The khans, because they conquered such vast expanses of land, governed peoples of many different religions, and they pretty much had no preference as to what religion their subjects practiced. All major religions were allowed to practice freely in lands the Mongols governed, with the result that many towns had populations and of several different religions, mostly sects of Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, Nestorian Christianity, and (in certain areas) Judaism. There were no forced conversions, no purges, and the khans, to ensure stability in their realms, even had to ensure that they did not offend any particular religious community. Some khans did practice their own religion--Chinggis Khaan relied heavily on shamans, and many khans  (including the originally Nestorian Teguder turned Ahmad) converted to Islam. But most khans were decidedly unreligious, and they catered to multiple religions to gain favor with different religious communities. Kublai Khan, for example, sent messengers to Jerusalem with instructions to worship there on his behalf, and many wives and mothers of Khans were Nestorians, as I’ve pointed out. According to the European diplomat William of Rubrick, who visited Karakorum in the 1250s, the Great Khan actually asked him to participate in a religious debate at the court with a Nestorian, a Muslim, and a Buddhist. The Ilkhan Arghun is a near picture-perfect example of Mongol religious diversity, and the necessary flexibility of the Khans: He was a devout Buddhist married to a Byzantine Christian, and he had his son (who later converted to Islam) baptized into Nestorianism.

Of course, reading about the Mongol Empire of tolerance, my mind can’t help but draw comparisons between it and another tolerant realm—medieval Spain. There are plenty of differences between the nature of tolerance in the two kingdoms. The Mongol khans, as I pointed out, generally had no strong religious affiliations, and even if one did, a new khan would eventually replace him, and probably one of a different religion. In Spain, however, minority religions were usually ruled by the majority, with Christian kings allowing Muslims (and Jews) in their domains, or vice versa. This meant that although religions were tolerated, one was preferred. Furthermore, certain rulers or certain political climates would often have tragic results for minority religious communities, as eventually the reign of Ferdinand and Isabel did for tolerance itself in Spain. In the Mongol Empire, however, religiously motivated violence was not tolerated, keeping people mostly in line. Yet in both realms, the atmosphere could be tense, and outbreaks of religious violence did occur, though more frequently in Spain than in Mongol-ruled lands. Yet it was in the khans’ best interest to keep all religious communities happy, so the communities were, in a sense, forced to get along (or at least accept the existence of the others).

This is another similarity with Spanish tolerance—it was very much practically motivated. Simply put, the khans could not have held onto so much land if they insisted on a single religion. Their policy of tolerance was one meant to keep them in power, and their attempts to appease all religious groups (to gain their favor) demonstrates this. Khans who overstepped this boundary could be quickly ousted and replaced, while khans like Kublai who were careful not to step on any toes were more likely to last. The sparsely populated nature of both the Mongol realm and the Spanish meseta also necessitated this policy; there weren’t enough people to make any sort of religious demands, as everyone who could be spared was needed to work and protect the land. Furthermore, when people of certain minority religions had valuable skills or resources, it was in rulers’ best interest to accept these religions and keep these people around. This was the case with Jews in Medieval Spain; since they spoke Hebrew and often Arabic, and because of their vital position as money lenders (and their even more vital tax revenue), they were key figures in both Christian and Muslim Spanish courts. Similarly, educated Nestorian monks were valuable to Mongol khans, when neither literacy nor governance were strong suits of the Mongols. (This was likely behind Kublai’s request that Marco Polo send 100 Nestorian monks back to his capital so that they could “help convert people.”) And in both these cases, favoring minority religions could lead to unrest with the majority religions. In both Christian and Muslim-ruled Spain, courtiers often resented the presence and influence of Jews; this sometimes erupted in violence, as in the 1066 pogrom in Granada and the multiple pogroms of the fourteenth century. In the thirteenth-century Ilkhanate (the Mongol khanate governing Persia and sometimes, its surrounding lands), Islam was the majority religion, and Muslims often felt that the Mongols favored foreign religions, partially because courts were filled with educated members of the Nestorian clergy, and partially because most Ilkhans at that time were not Muslims.

So although the Mongol version of tolerance and the Spanish version of tolerance were different in significant ways, religiously diverse communities in the Middle Ages fell victim to the same sorts of woes: tension, outbreaks of violence, and a tolerance that was practical rather than ideological. I wonder if/how we have managed, in a modern world, to leave all of these woes behind.

But this isn’t a meditation; I just wanted to let everyone know that, though the Mongols may not have won Miss Congeniality at the pageant, while people (myself included) are looking to the “community of tolerance” in Spain for lessons, they may be missing out on something even more Awesome: an Empire of Tolerance.

Mongolian Connections: Christian Connections

I came to Mongolia (in part) to discover similarities across totally different cultures. My theory was that when similar themes appeared in cultures separated by distance, language, religion, and lifestyle, would reveal something about the nature of humanity as a whole. This tactic can be applied to more than humanity as a whole; looking at similarities between Christianity in the Mediterranean/Europe and Nestorian Christianity in the far East of the Mongol Empire, similar trends appear in different eras that might reveal some features of Christianity that are not immediately obvious.

Though Mongol rulers accepted all religions in their realms (and more on that later), Christians in the Mongol realms were sometimes given special treatment. Kublai Khan funded a spiritual journey of two Nestorian Christian monks to the Holy Land around 1275, and he also asked Marco Polo to send 100 Nestorian monks back to his capital when his party returned to the West. Nestorians were given appointments in the courts of various khanates, and when the aforementioned two Nestorian monks traveled through the Mongol realm, many lesser officials tried to convince them to stay at their court, often offering them wealth and material comfort.

Why did Mongol rulers like to keep Nestorian Christians around? Because they were useful. Mongols were not a very literate population (something that didn’t change even until the twentieth century), and, even up to Kublai’s day, they had little experience actually ruling an Empire. Nestorian monks spent years studying, and though they focused on Scripture and theological matters, their literacy and intellectual skill were prized by khans, so rulers courted favor with the Nestorian community in order to recruit members of the clergy to work in their administration. Of course, in Europe, too, literacy and learning was mostly encouraged by the Church. Monks recorded and preserved not only theological treatises, but also works of pagan philosophy and mythology. The university system began as a way for clerics to study theology, and, as I recently discovered, even Celtic myths about a magical island filled with beautiful women for young heroes to live on forever have only come down to us because they were recorded, at one point, by Christian monks. (If you want to know more about the Church’s role in European intellectual development, I have about 8 essays for you to read. And maybe I’ll write a few more for you, too.)

So Christians in different sects of Christianity and completely different cultures had a tendency to educate their clergy; what does this reveal about anything? For one, it shows the importance of learning and literacy in the Christian tradition. This isn’t necessarily ideological at all—it’s just because engagement with the Scriptures is an important aspect of the religion. Unlike other religions that focused on ritual, meditation, or submission to an authority (not that Christianity cut those out), Christianity had a tradition of placing a great deal of significance on interpreting the Scripture they had. (And perhaps this is just because it can be so vague and/or confusing?) But this isn’t to say that other religions haven’t nurtured educational systems. Universities here are often linked to Buddhist monasteries, and considering my recent unsuccessful forays into understanding Buddhism, I’m going to assume a lot of study needs to go into attempting Enlightenment. As for other traditions: The “madrasa” is an important aspect of many mosques, and the rabbinic course of study is one of the most intellectual and study-intensive ones I know (think pre-Madonna Kabbalah). Buddhist monks seem to have been recruited by khans as well, but not quite as vigorously as Nestorians. (Though this could just be the nature of my reading material.) So why did Nestorian Christians get more special treatment than Buddhist monks in Kublai’s realm or Muslims and Jews in the Ilkhanate? I don’t know. I’m thinking because it designated people whose sole function was to study, unlike Islam and Judaism whose scholars were also encouraged/mandated to participate in the world. And Buddhist training tended to have less of a practical aspect than Nestorian studies. (i.e. Buddhist monks doesn’t study law or medicine as much as Christians—but I don’t know about this.)

But a love of literacy is not the only similarity between Nestorian Christianity in Asia and European/Mediterranean Christianity. Throughout the history of the Mongol Empire, one story repeats itself a lot: the influence of khans’ wives and mothers on their decisions. And threaded through these stories comes, specifically, the influence of Christian wives and mothers on their decisions. One reason Kublai was supposed to have favored Nestorians (in addition to the practical reasons) was because his mother was Nestorian. The Catholicus (the Nestorian equivalent of Patriarch/Pope/Prophet) was once almost executed by the Ilkhan Ahmad, but Ahmad’s pious Nestorian wife convinced him not to go through with the execution. The Ilkhan Abakha was the son of a Christian and married to a Byzantine princess. Although there were not many prominent Nestorian men, many wives (and thus often mothers, as well) of khans were Christians. Part of this may have been simply the ratio—there were more khans’ wives than there were khans, so it was more likely that a wife would be Nestorian. (Nestorian Christianity never actively forbade polygamy.) But part of the reason was simply that women were more likely to convert. Although some khans participated in Nestorian rituals—the Ilkhan Arghun, though a Buddhist himself, had his son baptized—they tended not to be as fervent supporters of Nestorianism as many women of the Mongol elite.

Similarly, when Christianity was still a new religion, many of its converts were elite women. In fact, the growth of Christianity was in part attributable to these women; when one converted, she often convinced her husband to convert, and thus the entire household (the paterfamilias thing again). Just as women would be attracted to Nestorian Christianity later, in the first couple centuries of Christianity, many upper-class women in the Mediterranean world found something worth devoting themselves to (and in this case, dying for) in the Christian message.

What this reveals about Christianity is a little less clear. Some scholars speculate that Christianity initially attracted both women and the poor because of its emphasis on equality and its downplay of traditional markers of status. In a Christian service, women were just Christians like their husbands, which was appealing to them. This could apply to Mongol women, as well, and though (as noted), their husbands did not always convert with them. In a world where men held the power, women likely found something encouraging about finding a religion that didn’t isolate them as starkly as Islam and Buddhism may have. And, considering what I’ve found about women influencing just about everything from behind the scenes, the message of the last being first might have had a ring of truth to it.  

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.

Mongolian Connections: Coffee Empire

I’m sure there is some deep sociological significance behind a “Coffee Republic” knockoff in Mongolia called “Coffee Empire,” but it’s just too deep for me to dissect. I’m hoping it has to do more with historical than with political ideology, but who knows?

Mongolian Connections: Arizona

Sometimes there are no words.

Why there is a building in downtown Ulaanbaatar called “The Arizona Center” is beyond me. Why it has a steampunk Battlefield Earth style robot in front of it must completely defy explanation. Important note: The dreadlocks are made of bike chains.

I predict someone will suppose it’s because Arizona, like Mongolia, is just that Awesome.

Mongolian Connections: For the Birds (Deer?)

Above the doors to many Buddhist temples, Buddhist centers, even stores selling religious items, golden sculptures of two deer sit looking at a wheel. Usually one deer is a female, and the other has a horn (or two?). When we first saw this, Prof. O pointed out that the reason was because Buddha, when he first began to teach, preached to two deer. Thus, when one enters a temple, one passes below the deer, Buddha’s first disciples.

Of course, this story reminded me of the story of St. Francis preaching to the birds. I don’t know much about the Buddhist background, but in Francis’s case, his preaching demonstrated not only his humility, because he desired at that moment to preach to lowly animals, but also his power, because the animals fell silent for him and cocked their heads as if they understood.

It certainly seems plausible that the Buddhist story has a similar lesson. So I wonder, why does this story strike chords across cultures? What is it exactly that makes a learned man preaching to those who presumably can’t understand him (until they do) so appealing as a leader? Is it the humility? Is it the power? Is it, paradoxically (or not), both? And is there a fundamental difference between this story set in the context of a religion that forbids the killing of animals (Buddhism) and this story set in the context of a religion that does not believe animals have souls, or at least, not souls as worthy as men's?

EDIT: Oops. Mistranslation. Having now done more research on Buddhism, I've discovered that Buddha was preaching to human disciples in a deer park--not quite the same thing as Francis's situation. So I guess that's not a connection, after all, but I'm keeping it as a Meditation, because, why not?