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.

Mongolia is Awesome: Mare's Milk and Meat, Meat, Meat

When traveling to exotic locales, the food is often part of the appeal. People want to eat at authentic restaurants and savor the spices of India or the cheeses of France or the genuine, cilantro-free molé of Mexico. As for Mongolia… Well, I get a lot of sympathy from people over the food. People want to know, how awful is it? Have you eaten rancid yak butter? Fermented mare’s milk? Wouldn’t you kill for a burger? And I myself was concerned about having to eat sheep shoulder and brain or whatever. In UB, the food is generally average—There’s mediocre foreign food (i.e. cheeseburgers, pastas, sandwiches) and mediocre Mongolian food (tasteless dumplings or mutton soup). But after spending a week in the countryside, eating real actual Mongolian food, I am categorizing my Food post under “Mongolia is Awesome.” So let me explain why. 

Firstly, I want to say that with the exception of the first day of my trek from UB, I was never hungry on my trip. While actually in Darkhad, I had not a single hunger pang, nor even a feeling, “I’d like to eat now.” The reason for this is threefold: Mongolian hospitality, milk tea, and the nature of Mongolian food. Mongolians are known (at least by those who know about Mongolia) for their hospitality; they have a sort of “open door” policy on visitors, meaning that in the countryside, you can just stop by a ger and be welcomed as a guest. They’ll provide tea, food at meal times, and you can pitch your tent outside their ger. So pretty much any time maybe I might have been hungry soon, I was being offered a bowl of soup and a cup of tea. And when I say, “They’ll provide tea,” I really mean it. The first thing that any Mongolian does when you arrive in her home is pull up a stool for you (or gesture to the bed/couch) and pour you a cup of tea. It’s as necessary a rule as asking if a guest wants a drink in the States, except here it’s performed with absolute consistency.  So, visiting 3-5 gers a day, I drank a lot of tea. The other thing about Mongolian hospitality is that you’re required to accept. It’s rude not to take any of what’s offered, though you can take just a small amount, if you like. When someone offers you vodka, you at least take a sip; when someone offers you snuff, you sniff the top of the bottle if you don’t want any. So when a nomad offered me tea, I had to accept. Although theoretically I probably only had to take a sip, the American in me still found taking only a sip and not finishing to be ruder than not accepting at all, I guess. So I drank every single cup of milk tea. Even if I hadn’t been eating a lot, I imagine the constant supply of milk tea would have kept me from getting too hungry. And the final reason for my lack of hunger is that the food is always filling. Apart from being offered a lot of it, it is all dairy, meat, and flour based, which I assure you kept me very satisfied. A cup of milk tea and a khuushuur (meat wrapped in a flour shell and then fried in oil) is pretty filling. And three cups of tea (from three gers) and three khuushuurs (because they are so damn good) is beyond filling.

So what exactly did I eat in Darkhad? To be honest, I’m not 100% sure. The meat and dairy products they served me were generally pretty ambiguous. Prof C told me on the first day in Darkhad that I was eating beef, but at some point in the week, they pulled out an animal’s leg that was definitely not cow—goat, I think, or sheep. And for our journey back, we ate some neck meat that came from a bone that did not look bovine sized. (Note: I do not recommend neck meat.) And though I ate a lot of cream, the family milked both cows and yaks, so I’m not sure which it came from. (Actually, I didn’t notice them keeping the milks separate, and they always referred to both cows and yaks as “ukhur,” so I probably had a mixture of both.) So I can’t give many details as to the type of meat/milk I was eating, but I will say this: It was delicious. A diet based in meat and dairy and bread is my kind of diet. ( I do confess, though, that the lack of fruits and vegetables—or should I say, the absence of fruits and vegetables in Darkhad—really got to me. It may not be an exaggeration to say that no one has ever been as excited about pickled carrots, peppers, and cucumbers as when I was offered vegetable preserves in Ulaan Uul.) At our family’s home, we ate a lot of noodle soup with bits of meat, and one night I had just noodles mixed up with meat. Though everyone else added milk tea to theirs to make it more soupy, I loved it just as it was, and I ate two bowls of it. I had fried fish (with just the right amount of pepper ) out of a paper sleeve (from my notebook) and both meat and fish khuushuurs. While still on the drive up, we stopped by a ger for wild strawberries and cream on bread, and in Ulaan Uul, I had beef ripped straight from the bone. The most glorious food of all, though, was breakfast. Every morning I got homemade bread (with such a delicious crust) topped with some substance that was half-cream, half-butter (it reminded me of clotted cream, actually), and loads of sugar. It was amazing. Although at times I felt like maybe bread, sugar, and cream wasn’t the healthiest start to the day, I figured it’s not much worse than American breakfast cereals, and at least mine was real sugar and not corn syrup, and fresh full cream instead of the ultra-pasteurized half-water skimmed milk parents sometimes make their kids have.

And that might be the secret to Mongolian country food: It’s fresh. I got to see the family milking the cows (and even helped a tiny bit myself!), and then I got to eat that delicious milk the next morning. We bought tiny (non-GMO!) wild strawberries from kids who’d just picked them on the mountain, and we ate them by the handful. One special treat was sitting by Tsaagan Nuur (White Lake, named for the whitefish in abundance there), watching some boys pull fish out of their nets, standing by while they scaled and gutted them on the banks, and getting to eat those fish for lunch. There is nothing quite like fresh fish, and from lake to plate in less than an hour is about as fresh as it gets. (Lake-to-plate is just an analogy, though—there were no plates.) Most people in the countryside didn’t have a refrigerator, so food had to be consumed that day. If there was extra, it had to be eaten before any new food was made. And most of it was made from scratch. Though the herder families don’t grind the grain themselves, they do raise the animals whose milk and meat they eat, and they make all their bread, dumplings, noodles, etc. themselves. In the afternoons, the girls would be kneading bread dough or rolling out flour dough and cutting it into noodles, and in the mornings, the mother of the family pulled bread out of the pan and cut it into slices for us. Simple food made by hand from a farm’s own resources can be a million times better than refrigerated, cleansed, chemistried, packaged products sent from miles away. And back-to-the-basics is just so delicious. I don’t care what the gastrochefs say: Wild strawberries with fresh cream on newly baked bread… to me, that’s gourmet.


That all being said, I did have a few culinary adventures, not all of them good. The milk tea (often with salt, thus described as “salty milk tea”) took getting used to. The first few times I drank it, I literally had to hide my gagging, but now I can drink two cups at a time, though I don’t see why I would. (A note: It is often served scaldingly hot, so I used to have to wait a while before I could start on it, and even so my tongue was permanently burnt. Prof C, however, explained that you’re supposed to slurp at hot tea. The very idea of slurping was repulsive to me at first, but I have to say, it works. That may have been the hardest thing for me to get used to --even harder than sleeping on the floor, wearing clothes for 5 days straight, and Mongolian toilets-- getting over years of stringent manners education and learning how to slurp up my tea.) For a final adventure, though I had managed not to encounter all the really nasty bits of animals in Darkhad, on the way back I ended up having to try some. We stopped in Moron to sleep and for Prof C to meet up with some friends, and we stayed in his friend’s guesthouse. For lunch, a woman brought in a huge bowl filled with something that smelled kind of inedible. I looked into the bowl, and there was some sort of a head. It was sheep-sized, but it had a weird brown skin stretched over it, so it didn’t have eyes or ears or anything. The only thing that identified it as a head (besides its general shape) was a twisted black and red tongue sticking out of a gaping maw near the bottom of the shape. I was thinking, “Oh my God, I cannot eat that,” and my face probably expressed as much. Everyone else dove into it, while I sat and hid in my guidebook. At one point, though, Prof C pointed to the bowl of meat he’d just been tearing from the jawbone and said, “Alice, please, take.” And there’s that damned Mongolian rule of unrefusal. So I reached out and took a piece that looked more like meat and less like gums than the rest; it was fine, and I nodded and retreated back to my book, my duties done. Or so I thought. A minute later, Prof C picked up some gel-like snowy white bit. “Alice, eat this. It is sheep’s tail; it is very good. It is not like fat—it is like cream.” I had to assent, and he cut off a piece and handed it to me. I bit at a tiny bit. It was mostly like fat. Or, it was like eating a slimy gummy bear that tasted like sheep. As I gnawed away, Prof C explained that in Mongolia, they give babies sheep tail to suck on instead of pacifiers. So I was basically eating a nomad binky. I ate it all off the bit of hairy skin still attached, put the skin down, and thankfully I was not offered more. In fact, Prof C seemed to take pity on me and told a girl to give me some khuushuurs she was preparing.

And, in case anyone was wondering, I did get to try airag, Mongolian fermented mare’s milk! Airag is a Central Asian quirk that is just repulsive enough to get a lot of attention, as in this article. Wikitravel describes the taste as ranging "from bile-like to a mixture of lemonade and sour cream.” So although I was apprehensive, it’s actually really good for you, and it’s very Mongolian, so I wanted to try some. Luckily, I got my chance pretty soon into the countryside. On our first day trekking, we stopped to lend a wrench to a stranded family. When they’d finished with it, they offered us some mare’s milk. As he poured it into a bowl for us, Prof C told us that we should only drink a little because it was our first time. (Fermented milk products tend to cause stomach upset upon first consumption.)  Nervous about the gastrointestinal repercussions, I only had a small sip. And I have surprising news… It was fine! Maybe that says something about my taste, but I actually could have drunk a whole cup, and maybe later this trip, I will. It tasted somewhat familiar; Prof C suggested like yogurt, which is possible, though I despise yogurt. Later I realized that it might remind me of the aftertaste of Old Rosie cider, my favorite cider at the Turf Tavern at Oxford. Most people dislike or sort of hate Old Rosie (one man described it as just “quaffable”), and though I didn’t like the aftertaste, I didn’t mind it because I like the cider as a whole better than Strongbow’s. So I guess that got me used to the aftertaste, and now I can drink airag like a pro (or at least, not like an American). But I have to say, I do worry if the cider I was drinking for 6 months had an aftertaste like fermented mare’s milk…