On the Steppe

In Sükhbaatar Square, in the centre of the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar, there is a gigantic colonnade monument to Genghis Khan, seated and facing south. Along the sides of the square, the Government Palace, an old Soviet-style post office and a neoclassical opera house all date to Mongolia’s socialist period. The monument to Genghis Khan, though, was put up in 2006, and an even more colossal statue of the Khan astride a horse, fifty kilometres east of the city, was completed in 2008. There is an odd tension in this – the static nomad, the monument to mobility – and a banner in Sukhbaatar Square, directly in the sightline of the seated Khan, proclaims Ulaanbaatar the ‘City of Nomads’, another faint contradiction.

Much of the socialist-era architecture is being torn down to make way for new hotels; there is little sign in Mongolia of the nostalgia for the period present elsewhere in the post-socialist world. Art and politics are more likely to be articulated in the idioms of nomadic pastoralism than by reference – positive or negative – to the socialist past. Genghis Khan’s legacy, especially as currently conceived, is inextricable from nomadism, itself the structural underpinning of the Mongolian national imaginary. Yet because ‘herder’ as an identity cuts across Mongolia’s various social categories, the formulation of a specifically nomadic political consciousness requires declarations of solidarity between people who may have very little in common besides the practice of herding.

This is complicated further, a Mongolian academic explained to me, by the fact that ‘herding’ is no longer a singular profession, if it ever was (although the state issues certificates to ‘official’ herders, with the aim of creating a governable category of subjects). A family with horses may use them for meat, dairy, transport, tourist rentals, as mobile warehouses of wealth and for the production of airag – fermented mares’ milk. Preserving the long and much-depicted tradition of hunting with golden eagles is not incompatible with falconry exhibitions for tourists: in one of the national parks, I came across a boy offering visitors the opportunity to hoist his enormous golden eagle for about a pound each.

There is more than one way for herders to move around, too. In the Gobi Desert, I visited a family who had recently won the district award for ‘best herder’, a prize dating back to the socialist era. Their livestock included all ‘five snouts’ of Mongolian pastoralism: camels, horses, sheep, goats, cattle. They had a ger (the classic Mongolian yurt), a few trailers and a cluster of low stone enclosures. In one of the enclosures, a mare nursed a day-old foal; four camels were tied to metal posts outside the ger. I was travelling with a few other academics, and on arriving at the ger we were treated to camel’s and goat’s cheese, fried dumplings, Scotch whisky and süütei tsai – green tea mixed with milk and fat. Yet the ger had been erected, or at least left up, for our benefit; the family now lived in the trailers, which could be towed by heavy trucks, and at night they returned to them, leaving the ger to their visitors.

The next morning, sharing tea and sweets in the main trailer, the family’s matriarch explained that the principal benefit of the trailer over the ger was its mobility: it did not require convoluted assembly and disassembly, and could be moved fairly quickly to any island of pasture in the Gobi. Over the past decade, as the pasture fragmented and receded in the drying climate, herders had to become more mobile. It was no longer viable to erect a ger and stay in one place for months at a time; families required more territory, more mobility, to feed the same number of animals (though the trailers are feasible only in the relatively flat Gobi, and not in Mongolia’s more mountainous areas). The advent of universal education stretched herding families between cities and countryside, and ambitious young people began making the one-way journey from the pastures to Ulaanbaatar, where most major companies, and the country’s only university, are based. There is no question that herding itself will survive; its economic value is too great. But the social and political lives of herders are changing at tremendous speed, often in unpredictable ways.

The Mongolian state’s vocal affection for herders – or at least herding – does not preclude discrimination, both official and quotidian. Often stereotyped and derided by city-dwellers as ‘orcs’ (an English loan-word) who struggle with queues or fail to understand lifts, herders face prejudice and reification at the same time. More troubling are the substantive tensions between herders and Mongolia’s other major industry: mining. The country’s largest mine – Oyu Tolgoi, a vast, and vastly expensive, copper and gold field in the Gobi – uses 4.5 billion litres of water a month. This has placed enormous strains on the already limited water supply available to herders, while drainage from the mine threatens to pollute aquifers, and the fencing around it cuts off herders’ livestock corridors.

Herding depends on the direct transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. Disruptions in the continuity of nomadic land-use are much harder to reverse than they are to cause, and the negative consequences of mining are sometimes difficult to predict. After a uranium mine was opened in Dornod, photos apparently circulated on social media of livestock with birth defects: double mouths, extra limbs, black lungs. According to some accounts, outrage from local herders eventually led to concessions from the provincial government, and the mine was temporarily closed.

Mongolia’s rapid economic growth, combined with the growing challenges to herders, has resulted in breakneck urbanisation in Ulaanbaatar. Surrounding the city’s ever-expanding formal settlements and frenetic new-builds are the ger districts: semi-formal neighbourhoods with temporary architecture and limited public services. Tents, gers and concrete houses exist side-by-side, the city and the countryside in awkward tension. Ulaanbaatar’s existing water problems, and a traffic system designed for a much smaller population, cannot keep pace.

Back out on the steppe, in the growing dark of evening, I watched from the top of a small incline as herders on quad bikes and mopeds swept along the edge of a rock formation, searching for a lost horse. Their headlamps cast small triangles of light over the steppe, slowing or speeding up as the terrain rippled, glancing off the low cliffs edging the meadow, the scent of wild chamomile and mint heavy on the breeze. In daylight, the rocks had looked smooth and rounded, softly undulating like wax or cake batter. At night, illuminated by irregular beams of light, the cliffs took on a different character: watchful, unknowable, seemingly possessed of a strange volition.