Gegentuul Baioud – Language on the Move

Minority languages on social media

Gegentuul Baioud — Sun, 27 Feb 2022 21:26:48 +0000

On this year’s International Mother Language Day, the UN is encouraging us to reflect on the role of technology in multilingual learning. Here, we are looking at the role of the Mongolian language social media Bainu (meaning “hello or are you there”) in disseminating metalinguistic discourses in China.

The Bainu social media platform in China

Bainu was founded by two young Mongols in 2015 and now it is the only surviving Mongolian language social media platform in China. A 2015 news report claims that there are around 400,000 registered users although that number has shrunk significantly since the government’s crackdown on Mongols’ protests against the 2020 bilingual education reform.

Although many subjects cannot be discussed openly on Bainu, one topic has never stopped attracting Mongols’ unwavering attention: the “purely” linguistic matters which include but are not limited to Mongolian grammar, spelling, translation, standardization, and regional dialects. Perhaps it is precisely because of the strict policing of social media spaces that seemingly “professional, innocuous, and apolitical” discussions of language proliferate there.

This map briefly settled the debate over “sheep meat” vs “sheep’s meat”

Big debate: “sheep meat” or “sheep’s meat”?

A long-running debate has been over whether it is honin mah (literally “sheep meat”) or honin-ii mah (“sheep’s meat”). To support their respective arguments users post pages from their old middle school grammar textbooks or carry out surveys among speakers from different regions. Recently, the debate was briefly settled (it has now flared up again) when one Bainu user, to the awe of many, triumphantly posted a self-made language map.

This map at least temporarily resolved the question that has intrigued, excited, and frustrated Bainu users for months. The map maker, having attributed the differences in expressions to regional differences, did not forget to settle another long-lasting debate, too: whether it is “putting on a hat” or “wearing a hat”. According to the map, the regions with red shade are areas where “sheep meat” and “putting on a hat” are commonly used, while the rest say “sheep’s meat” and “wear a hat.”

Translation debates

Apart from grammatical problems and dialect differences, the translation of new terms is another field of battle where foes and friends are made. In June 2020, the question of how to translate “emoji” into Mongolian sparked a spirited debate. Some advocated for a native Mongolian word while others supported charaiin ilerel, which is a word-for-word translation from Chinese: 表情 (“facial expression”). Yet others have adopted an internationalist stance and have chosen emoji. My observation over the year 2021 suggests that emoji seems to be winning out among Bainuers.

But not all terms are controversial as shown in their almost unanimous approval of translating “barbecue” into shorlog, or the terms translated by the volunteer translation group anabapa, mostly comprised of Bainu users (see “brake light” image).

Why do metalinguistic discussions proliferate on social media?

Emoji on Bainu

You might wonder why Bainu has become a key platform where metalinguistic discussions proliferate or why users are so keen to translate new terms to replace the common Chinese loans in Inner Mongolia, or to what extent these Mongolian translations are successful.

You can find an answer in a new study of Mongolian linguistic purism discourse on Bainu by myself and my co-author Cholmon Khuanuud. In the study, we situate purist discourses in the sociopolitical, cultural, and linguistic context of Inner Mongolia. We show that the weakened autonomy of minority Mongols compounded by the spread of market economy, and China’s drive to build a nation essentially following the “one people, one language (Mandarin Chinese)” model exerts tremendous pressure on the maintenance of Mongolian language. This produces linguistic anxiety, and it underpins purist discourses saturating mediatized spaces such as Bainu.

“Mixed” Mongolian as an emblem of loss

We find that, apart from translating new terms, another two key purification strategies are prominent in Bainu. First, as with language activists in many other minoritized communities, Mongol purists construct “mixed” Mongolian as an emblem of loss, including the loss of land, culture, political rights, racial “purity,” and language over the last seven decades. By doing so, they stigmatize “mixed” speech forms, raise awareness about ethnolinguistic boundaries, and invoke historical experiences.

What is noteworthy is that the explicit association of the losses experienced by minority Mongols with mixed language has almost disappeared since the 2020 reform for fear of punishment.

Another widely used purification strategy is to faithfully transcribe “mixed” everyday speech and post it on Bainu. In particular, by positioning the transcribed “mixed” speech vis-à-vis the “pure and correct” Mongolian, purists banish the “mixed” speech to the realm of non-language.

In the context of Inner Mongolia, the stigmatizing power garnered by the orthographic representation of “mixed” Mongolian also has to do with the highly-ideologized classical (vertical) Mongolian script. This traditional script has been retained in Inner Mongolia while abandoned in the country of Mongolia for the Cyrillic script in the 1940s. Clearly, the purists’ transcription of “deviant and impure speech” through the medium of a valued classical Mongolian script enhances the shaming effect.

To learn more, including how the transnational status of Mongolian language influences purist discourses, who exactly Bainu users are, what “wooden Mongolian” is, or how technology impacts minority language ideology and practices or vice versa, our article has just been published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics – it is open access so feel free to click through to the journal!

Reference

Baioud, Gegentuul, & Khuanuud, Cholmon. Linguistic purism as resistance to colonization. Journal of Sociolinguistics, n/a(n/a). doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12548 [available open access]

Will education reform wipe out Mongolian language and culture?

Gegentuul Baioud — Sun, 30 Aug 2020 06:58:34 +0000

A herder guards the Mongolian script (Image credit: Ayin)

As the danger of life-threatening Covid-19 has subsided, Mongols in Inner Mongolia, a region of northern China, have faced a new threat: losing their bilingual schools. In the words of a community member: “in Spring we were afraid that we would die from Covid-19, now Autumn comes and we are afraid that we may become extinct”.

Two forms of bilingual education

To understand these fears, one needs to understand bilingual education in Inner Mongolia.

In brief, there are two different modes of bilingual education in Inner Mongolia. The established mode of bilingual education over the last 73 years has been: school subjects taught in Mongolian; plus a Chinese language and literacy course from Grade 2; plus an English language and literacy course from Grade 3. What worries Mongols is the new mode of bilingual education, which involves the gradual replacement of Mongolian-medium teaching with Chinese-medium teaching across all school subjects. In the new mode, this Chinese-medium education will be complemented by a Mongolian language and literature course. This is dubbed a second type of bilingual education but it is, in essence, monolingual, Chinese-medium education.

According to a document released on August 26, 2020, from this September the Chinese language and literacy textbook used in Inner Mongolia’s bilingual schools is going to be replaced with the national Chinese language textbook. It’s also going to be introduced a year earlier, from Grade 1. This national textbook is also used in Chinese-medium schools and is much more demanding than the one currently used in Mongolian schools. This means that children whose mother tongue is Mongolian have to learn the same content as their Chinese-mother-tongue peers, and will be evaluated in direct comparison to them.

Another subtle change is in the course name: the Chinese language and literature textbook (in Chinese: 汉语文) assumes a new name, Language and Literature (in Chinese: “语文”) while the new Mongolian language and literature textbook is “Mongolian Language and Literature” (in Mongolian “mongol hel bichig”), whereas it was previously simply called Language and Literature (in Mongolian “hel bichig”) in Mongolian schools. That is, the marked version is now the Mongolian course, no longer the Chinese course.

Some Mongols have compared this name swapping to “the step-father taking the place of the father.”

The new model jeopardizes Mongolian educational achievement

This reform poses several problems.

The famous Mongolian poem “I am a Mongol” is written on a blackboard (Source: WeChat post reminiscing and mourning the impending loss of the mother tongue)

First, are Mongolian-mother-tongue children able to learn the new, and much more difficult, Chinese language and literature syllabus at this new pace, while they simultaneously learn to read and write their own language, Mongolian, from Grade 1? How will the reform increase students’ study load?

Second, what kind of national university entrance exam will be designed for those Mongolian students?

Here let me explain briefly how students from Mongolian high schools currently participate in the national university entrance exams. Broadly speaking, the national exams across subjects are written and administered in Chinese, but the exams are also translated into Mongolian for Mongolian test-takers. For instance, maths, history, politics or chemistry are examined across the nation using the same tests, except that they are translated into Mongolian for students coming from Inner Mongolia’s bilingual high schools. There is also provision in the rules for these tests to be translated into five other official minority languages, e.g. Korean, depending on demand.

Every year around 12,000 students from Mongolian bilingual schools sit translated national university entrance tests in Inner Mongolia.

There is a compulsory language component of the university entrance exam across the nation, and what differs most for Inner Mongolia’s Mongolian exam takers is this component. Their ‘foreign language’, i.e. Chinese language and literature, comprises 70% of the score, and their English language test result counts for 30%.

So what kind of Chinese language test is now going to be used for minority Mongolian students’ university entrance exam? The announcements and documents so far do not answer this important question. Surely, Mongolian students cannot compete with Chinese-mother-tongue students and the imposition of the same Chinese language test will further disadvantage Mongolian students.

Language shift in education will push Mongolian to the brink

The Mongolian language is already fragile and has entered the early stages of endangerment. In today’s Inner Mongolia, less than 40% of Mongol parents choose Mongolian bilingual schools for their children; the rest enroll their children in mainstream Chinese schools. In such circumstances, this reform pushes already emaciated Mongolian language and culture further towards the abyss of extinction within the Chinese borders.

“Save the Mother Tongue!” Protest sign against the reform on a delivery bike

Language shift in education is known around the world, and elsewhere in China, to be a major push in a wider shift away from using a minority language at home or transmitting it to younger generations at all.

The nourishment of bilingual education

Personally, I have been nourished by the well-established bilingual education system in Inner Mongolia. When I was in Grade 4, my parents sent me to a boarding school which was around three hours’ drive from my home, over a muddy, pebble-paved country road. Even though I was intimidated by the new environment when I first arrived – most people on the street and in other public spaces spoke Chinese – this bilingual school, with its Mongolian-speaking teachers, classmates and dorm mates acted as a safe haven.

This bilingual school was the mediator for the ten-year old me to transition to new urban settings and to be socialized as both an ethnic Mongol and Chinese citizen. The importance of local, co-ethnic teachers and educational environments for the well-being of minority or Indigenous children has been proven in many studies around the world.

By contrast, the poignancy and tragedy of how a mainstream educational system can fail children from non-mainstream language backgrounds, from the start, is nowhere more heart-wrenchingly illustrated than in the documentary “In My Blood It Runs” about Indigenous children at school in Australia’s Northern Territory. If the original bilingual education system is smoldered and buried underground we will see the birth of numerous minority children who follow in the footsteps of 10-year old Arrernte boy, Dujuan – the main character in the above documentary – and totter precariously on the edge of two worlds.

Established Mongolian bilingual education has proved itself

The 73-year-journey traversed by the established bilingual education system, where all classes are taught in the medium of Mongolian, and alongside that Chinese and English are taught as single subjects, has proved that this is a mature system and suitable to the situation of bilingual Mongols in Inner Mongolia.

Numerous scientists, writers, artists, translators, teachers, other essential workers and “model citizens” have grown and blossomed thanks to the environment of bilingual education. Moreover, this year, several Mongolian bilingual high school graduates gained admission to top universities such as Beijing University and Tongji University, and they outperformed their Chinese-medium-education peers in Inner Mongolia.

In addition, the current bilingual mode of education in Inner Mongolia has facilitated inter-ethnic relations and the unity of the multi-ethnic people on the northern frontier of China. But once the established mode of bilingual education in Inner Mongolia is destroyed, the change will be irreversible. This is already clear from a historical analogy: Buryat Mongols (a Mongolian minority within the Soviet Union) failed in their attempt to revive their schools and language in the 1980s, even with the backing of Soviet policy-makers who had realized their mistakes in eradicating bilingual education the 1960s (Chakars 2014).

A dark future for China’s minorities based on the Western model

If history and political education/morality subjects are taught through the medium of Chinese from 2021 onward in Mongolian schools, the rest of the curriculum will soon shift too. Then in a few years’ time Mongolian teachers, textbook translators, publishers, writers and a host of others who are involved in industries related to Mongolian language, culture, and education will lose their livelihoods. I anticipate that this will be followed by the shrinkage and eventual disappearance of Mongolian media such as TV and digital media, which are currently thriving.

If all the courses shift to Chinese-medium instruction, the university entrance exam will soon follow suite and policy makers will simply adopt nation-wide Chinese tests for all Mongolian students in a few years. If this happens, Mongolian students cannot compete against millions of Chinese high school graduates in the world’s most competitive university entrance test, which will certainly further marginalize and systemically exclude young Mongols from higher education and the job market. It will exclude them in a way similar to the exclusion of minorities in the West, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia. As such, the internal colonization of ethnic Mongols will reach its epitome and Mongolian language and culture will be wiped out in China.

Mongolian teachers’ protest sign against the education reform in central Inner Mongolia, 28 August, 2020

Concomitantly the production of large numbers of unemployed, poor, institutionally discriminated and marginalized minorities including Mongols in coming decades will plague China with many unforeseen sociopolitical and economic problems. This dire consequence has obviously been brushed aside by the group of eminent Chinese scholars Ma Rong, Hu Angang and Hu Lianhe, who boldly proposed a Second Generation of Ethnic Policies (第二代民族政策) to solve ethnic “problems” by aggressively assimilating minorities (Leibold 2012). They envisioned the “melting pot” (大熔炉) formula of the West, in particular USA, as the ultimate “solution” to the ethnic “problems” of China, even though China’s native minorities are drastically different from diasporic immigrants in America (for further details, see Elliott 2015).

China’s ethnic policies have certainly taken a drastic turn in recent years, and this has sent shock waves through the “less-famous” ethnic minorities such as the Mongols, Koreans, and those in less visible areas such as Gansu, Jilin, Liaoning, and Qinghai. What are the consequences of bringing such tribulations onto the very groups that China has held up as “model minorities”, including the Mongols? Who gains most from this rash move? Indeed, up until now, many Mongolian speakers have identified as Chinese people, and there is no need to suppress a non-existent ethnic separatism by abolishing bilingual schooling. What is the point of destroying the Mongolian language and culture that is already staggering toward the brink of extinction and to whose speakers barely anyone pays any attention?

Opposing the new medium of instruction

At present, despite their tenuous position, Mongols are fighting against the reform. In particular, they were devastated by the secret implementation of the second category of “bilingual” education mode, which violates the national Constitution, Ethnic Minority Law and Education Law as well as the Mongolian Language Act and its Regulations.

It is this surreptitious and illegal way of implementing reform that spurred Mongols in Inner Mongolia, but also outside China in Japan and Europe, to protest against it within the framework of law. In fact, from June this year the “rumor” of cancelling the first category of bilingual education surfaced and has been simmering in Inner Mongolia, yet many Mongols didn’t take it seriously as there were no official documents. It was only a week before the commencement of the new semester on Sept 1, that documents were released by the Inner Mongolia Education Bureau. Now, Mongolian parents have been actively campaigning against the reform and are refusing to send their children back to school. However, teachers and public servants are silenced and threatened with the possibility of losing their jobs if they were to speak out. For other Mongols the phantasmagoric memory of the Cultural Revolution is revisiting them and has locked their tongue. Yet others take their mourning and frustration to social media spaces despite the constant disappearance of what they post.

The goal of the on-going protests in Inner Mongolia is not to reject the content of the new national curriculum, rather it is to abort the attempt to teach it all through the medium of Chinese. Mongols hope to translate the new textbooks into Mongolian and teach them in the medium of their own language, as they have been doing for the last 73 years. Thus, our aim is to maintain the original bilingual model of education, which ensures the maintenance of the Mongolian language and facilitates the multi-ethnic Chinese nation’s progress and stability in the long-term.

References

Chakars, Melissa. 2014. The socialist Way of Life in Siberia: Transformation in Buryatia. Budapest: Central European University Press.
Elliott, Mark. 2015. The Case of the Missing Indigene: Debate Over a “Second-Generation” Ethnic Policy. The China Journal (73): 186-213,308.
Leibold, James. 2012. Toward A Second Generation of Ethnic Policies? China Brief 12 (13)

Fighting COVID-19 with folklore

Gegentuul Baioud — Thu, 27 Feb 2020 03:07:16 +0000

Jin Gang performing a fiddle story about the heroism of health workers

Nothing seems further from the fight against COVID-19 than traditional folklore. However, an ancient Mongolian art form, the khuuriin ülger (“fiddle story”) can be found at the forefront of public health efforts.

Since late January around seventy Mongolian fiddle stories focusing on the prevention of and the fight against the coronavirus outbreak have been posted on the public WeChat account Khuuriin Ülger.

So, what is a “fiddle story” and who is a “fiddler”?

Well-known storytellers are usually referred to as khuurch, “fiddler, bard”. In the past, they were often recognized by the four-stringed Mongolian fiddle on their back. They were one of the most popular entertainers among the nomads, and they were welcomed by rich and poor alike. Some stayed in a region or at the court of a princely family until they had exhausted their repertoires. Many of the khuurch recited long epic tales accompanying themselves on the fiddle. The stories they told were usually in poetic verse mixed with prose. They not only recited familiar epic cycles such as Geser and Janggar, but also developed their own repertoire. Many of the above-mentioned storytellers not only entertain, but often they serve as comedians, satirists, religious proselytizers, and political propagandists (Hangin 1988:69-70).

Poster designed by China Daily to pay tribute to virologist Zhong Nanshan

Fiddle stories are used to praise and bless new couples and are often performed at wedding ceremonies, as I show in my PhD thesis. Furthermore, criticism of and satire on the transforming Mongolian society are sometimes cloaked in the traditional garb of Mongolian fiddle stories. Even today, ancient Mongolian fiddle story-telling practices are profoundly productive.

The contemporary successors of the traditional khuurch quickly sprang into action when the coronavirus epidemic hit. The first performance to emerge on social media was by Jin Gang. It was first posted on Tongliao Daily and attracted around 75.3k viewers.

Possibly encouraged by the successful reception of his first work on the virus, Jin Gang soon produced another fiddle story titled hamagiin hairtai khün (“The Most Lovely People”), which celebrates the heroism of health workers.

These fiddle stories produced in the new context where the coronavirus is wrecking havoc worldwide preserve the formal poetic structure and styles of the traditional Mongolian fiddle story while inserting new contents that are intertextual with the slogans and propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party.

For instance, in the lyrics of The Most Lovely People, there is a particular mention of Zhong Nanshan, who is the leader of the high-level expert group of the Chinese National Health Commission. The song line translates as follows: “The respected expert Zhong Nanshan, I heard your encouragement and advice, I saw your tired look in this smokeless war”.

Here, the fiddler is evoking the nation-wide circulated image of Zhong Nanshan while he was taking a nap on the train as he hurried to the epicentre of the disease, Wuhan. This photo was widely eulogized by Chinese online users and then weaved into the familiar narrative of heroes and sacrifices across China.

Other fiddle stories about the disease similarly voice confidence that the nation will triumph over the challenge and praise the leading roles of the Party in addition to sharing advice how to prevent the spread of the virus. Therefore, these Mongolian fiddle stories serve a dual purpose: they communicate public health information but they are also part and parcel of the grand narrative endorsed by the Chinese state.

In fact, this is nothing new in the historical trajectory of the Mongolian fiddle story. As Hangin (1988:70) argues fiddle stories “have not only served as preservers of cultural tradition but also as media among the nomadic people and sometimes as advocates of religious and political ideology”.

However, the ideological function of fiddle stories should not make us overlook the entertaining, informative and creative aspects of Mongolian fiddle stories. For Mongols who are in quarantine these stories have been a vital source of joy that help to mitigate their fear, anxiety, and loneliness. As one of the comments underneath Jin Gang’s first performance said: “Easy to understand and didn’t trigger fear”. Someone else commented: “In artistic form it tells us safety is first, prevention is key.”

It is this flexibility and adaptability of Mongolian fiddle stories that has ensured its very vitality throughout history. The danger of the new coronavirus outbreak only provides yet another context for the flourishing yet polyphonous fiddle stories in contemporary Inner Mongolia.

Reference

Hangin, John Gombojab. 1988. “Mongolian Folklore: A Representative Collection from the Oral Literary Tradition (Part Three).” Mongolian Studies 11:47-110.

Can speaking dialect make you ugly?

Gegentuul Baioud — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 02:31:01 +0000

The link between language and identity is a subject written about most profusely by linguists, and it never seems to fall into obsolescence. Yet, novelists manipulate the association between language and identity most expertly.

Murakami’s Yesterday – a short story that forms one of the seven stories collected in a book titled Men without Women – constitutes a case in point. The story amused me as much as it took me back to some of my recent academic reading: “novelists and journalists constitute a cadre of producers or senders of metadiscursive messages about speech and accent in public space” (Agha, 2007, p. 302).

Novelists not only spread the indexical stereotypes of speech further among the public but also play with and suspend such indexical typification. Let me illustrate how Murakami achieves this via his story Yesterday (for a synopsis see here).

In the story, two young men change their accents to take on different social persona yet in different directions with divergent results. Tanimura, a native of Kansai picked up the standard Japanese language in Tokyo within the first month of his arrival at Waseda University. Clearly, he falls within the group of ‘normal’ people who switch to the standard Japanese in Tokyo.

By contrast, Kitaru, a Tokyo-born-and-bred high school graduate permanently metamorphoses himself into a Kansai dialect speaker. As you can guess, Tanimura fits well with his surroundings and happily starts his university life in cosmopolitan Tokyo without betraying any traces of his Kansai origin.

It is Kitaru with his new Kansai dialect who causes problems for people around him. His dialect use adds an air of eccentricity to his otherwise relatively unremarkable person. He is even described as weird and not normal by his girlfriend Erika, in response to which Kitaru retorts, pointing at Tanimura: “this guy’s pretty weird too, he’s from Ashiya [Kansai dialect area] but only speaks the Tokyo dialect”. Exasperated, Erika said: “that’s much more common, at least more common than the opposite”.

At this point it is helpful to take a short detour to look at how the Kansai dialect spoken mainly in Osaka and its adjacent areas is enregistered. A survey conducted by Södergren (2014) has shown that Kansai dialect was regarded as ‘straightforward’, ‘frank’, ‘expressive’ as well as ‘warm’ and the flipside of which equally applies as it is also seen as ‘rude/over-familiar’, ‘vulgar’, ‘sloppy’ and ‘too intense and too aggressive’. The researcher goes on to note the link between Kansai dialect and comedy. This is related to the boom of manzai, where a comic duo entertain their audience through a comic dialogue in Kansai dialect.

Conversely, the standard Japanese linked with Tokyo conjures up images of ‘new Japan’, advancement, internationalization, politeness and so forth. Clearly, such juxtapositions over-simplify the complexity and nuances of language use and attitudes since they are freely-floating decontextualized stereotypes. However, it is exactly these stereotypical indexicals of accents that are presupposed and reworked in the story Yesterday.

Kitaru, a somewhat idiosyncratic young man who has failed college entrance exams and has ended up in cram schools while his girlfriend enjoys all the freshness a university life can offer, defies his Tokyo identity by uttering everything in Kansai dialect completely disregarding the consequences of such non-congruent linguistic practice in Tokyo. Tanimura aptly describes this strangeness caused by Kitaru’s Kansai dialect as:

Kitaru wasn’t what you’d call handsome, but he was pleasant looking enough. He wasn’t tall but he was slim, and his hair and clothes were simple and stylish. As long as he didn’t say anything you’d assume he was a sensitive, well-brought-up city boy. He and his girlfriend made a great-looking couple. His only possible defect was that his face, a bit too slender and delicate, could give the impression that he was lacking in personality or was wishy-washy. But the moment he opened his mouth, this overall positive effect collapsed like a sand castle under an exuberant Labrador retriever. People were dismayed by his Kansai dialect, which he delivered fluently, as if that weren’t enough, in a slightly piercing, high-pitched voice. The mismatch with his looks was overwhelming (p. 51).

What is animated here is the image of a language rather than a person. The object of representation is Kansai dialect through which the novelistic figure Kitaru is represented. This technique of foregrounding the image of dialect runs through the whole story and acts as a key motif to the extent that we can even argue that Kitaru is animated and created through the objectification of his accent.

Even more crucial for the portrayal of Kitaru are the mismatches in his identity: his looks, his hair, his place of origin do not match with his language. This mismatch is what makes him a misfit, despite its effectiveness in setting him free from the ‘shackles’ of his undesirable Tokyo life.

The discomfort and dismay caused by Kitaru’s incongruent semiotic practices challenges the default perception of an essentialized link between language and identity. Most importantly, his actions subvert the norm and lay bare the contested nature of the authoritative and near-universal use of the standard language in the nation’s capital.

In the process, Kitaru engages in the resignification of the social field, to borrow from Butler (1992). Multiplying the voices in a delimited and centripetal place is not without consequences.

Novelists are indeed the senders and producers of metadiscursive messages about accents. Yet, they also reveal the discursive processes through which we build and solidify our own sand castles to avoid communicational mishaps and social castigation.

References

Agha, A. (2007). Language and social relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Butler, J. P. (1992). Contingent foundations: Feminism and the questions of “postmodernism”. In J. P. Butler & J. W. Scott (Eds.), Feminists Theorize the Political. New York: Routledge.
Södergren, S. (2014). “Metcha suki ya nen”: A sociolinguistic attitude survey concerning the Kansai dialect. BA thesis. Uppsala Uppsala University.

One Orientalism or many Orientalisms?

Gegentuul Baioud — Thu, 10 May 2018 00:49:08 +0000

Students at the German-Chinese College, ca. 1910 (Source: German Federal Archives)

The dichotomy of East and West is a recent phenomenon and associated with European industrialization. Yet, it is difficult to escape this dichotomy in contemporary thought, where orientalism continues to inform debates inside and outside the academy. The increasing construction of an opposition between East and West – rather than a view of Eurasia as a complex whole – can be dated back to the 19^th century, as social anthropologist Chris Hann explains in this 12-minute lecture.

Even when the divergence between East and West materialized in colonial contexts, it was by no means straightforward and clear-cut. Instead, the discursive construction of East and West was polyvocal and dialogical. A good example of these shifting discourses can be found in the fluctuation in European views of China. Since the Middle Ages, European views of China veered between Sinophilia and Sinophobia, as the historian George Steinmetz explains in his study of German colonialism, The Devil’s Handwriting, a summary of which is available here on Language on the Move.

In the 16^th and 17^th century China emerged as a highly positive model in European discourse. The Jesuits, who were the first Europeans to spend extended periods there and to seriously engage with China, described China as a stable state governed by learned men, the mandarins, in the manner of Platonists. They found a lot to admire in China: the practical philosophy of Confucianism as well as Chinese politeness, medicine and language. During that period, the Chinese were rarely regarded in racial terms. If they were, they were usually considered white. In short, Chinese civilization was viewed as equal to European civilization and in some respects, even as superior.

With increasing European colonial expansion, this changed from the late 18^th century onwards and another – negative – discourse began to emerge. The rise of Sinophobia was an “intradiscursive response to Sinophilia” (Steinmetz, 2008, p. 388). In this discourse, the traditional stability of the Chinese state came to be seen as stagnant, despotic and the sign of a decaying nation. The learnedness and politeness of mandarins became a time-wasting pretension. The Chinese state exam for the selection of mandarins was no longer seen as a meritorious system but was now perceived as breeding imitation and copying. Confucianism was demoted from admired philosophy to false religion. And, last but not least, the Chinese became racialized as “the yellow race”, which was considered semi-barbarian and half-civilized.

Opening ceremony of the German-Chinese College, Qingdao, 1909 (Source: German Federal Archives)

These opposing discourses and the polyvocality inherent in interweaving discourses shaped a distinct native policy in the German colony of Qingdao. For a general overview of the colony, see Ingrid Piller’s summary of The Devil’s Handwriting.

The forces of Sinophobia were resounding at the dawn of colonization and during the first periods of segregationist German native policy in Qingdao (1897-1904). However, the precolonial discourse of Sinophilia had never fully retreated from the scene and it resurfaced again after 1905 in German Qingdao. Against this resurgence, German-Chinese cultural exchange emerged in the second phase of the colony (1905-1914), which can best be described as “an open-ended joint cultural program” (Steinmetz, 2008, p. 487). A key expression of this joint cultural program was the German Chinese College.

It was one of the stated goals of the German Chinese College to share the best of the two cultures.

At the school’s opening ceremony in 1909, speakers from both sides endorsed the idea of combining the best of their two cultures. A toast was raised to the Chinese emperor, the “national anthem” of the Qing Empire was sung, and the school’s German director proclaimed that “all of the cultural peoples [Kulturvölker] are linked by a common bond” and should “share their discoveries.” Here the Chinese were unambiguously (re)inscribed into the dominant pole of the German racial-anthropological binary. The imperial German and late Qing dynasty flags flew side by side in front of one of the school’s provisional buildings. (Steinmetz, 2008, pp. 486f.)

The German colony has left its traces in photos displayed on the wall of a Qingdao backpacker hotel (Photo: Gegentuul Baioud, 2012)

One of the men who pushed forward this cultural syncretism was Richard Wilhelm (1873-1930). Wilhelm was a colonial officer who lived in China for 25 years and became a renowned Sinologist in Germany after World War I. His cultural hybridity was admired by many and Carl Jung lauded him as a “mind which created a bridge between East and West and gave to the Occident the precious heritage of a culture thousands of years old” (quoted in Steinmetz, 2008, p. 505).

In sum, European representations of the Chinese were highly polyvocal and linked to different forms of cultural syntheses.

This raises an important question for our conceptualization of Orientalism. Can a universal concept of Orientalism explain the diverse representation of non-Europeans by Europeans and the subsequent multiple forms of cultural engagement ranging from clashes to cooperation? To put it differently, is there one orientalism or are there many orientalisms? To reflect on the multiplicity of the discursive space that has put East and West in opposition is crucial for mutual understanding and transcending this artificial binary.

Related content

Is English stealing the home of Mongolian?

Gegentuul Baioud — Wed, 18 Apr 2018 04:58:38 +0000

The website of Hohhot Baita International Airport provides information in Chinese and English but not in Mongolian

Update, Sept 16, 2020: A Mongolian translation of this blog post is now available here. Translated by Cholmon Khuanuud.

In April 2016, a Mongolian family missed their flight at Baita International Airport in Hohhot, the capital city of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR), an autonomous region within China. People missing their flights happens all the time, of course, in every corner of the world. However, this mishap made national headlines and became symbolic of the struggle faced by speakers of small languages such as Mongolian vis-à-vis a large national language such as Chinese and global English. It demonstrates how even Mongolian, one of the official languages of IMAR, can be sacrificed to the discourses and practices of global English.

Let me relate the incident: an elderly woman from Shiliingol League (also spelled “Xilingol” in English) in mid-eastern Inner Mongolia required medical attention that was not available in her hometown and had to fly to Hohhot for the procedure. Her son and grandson accompanied her to provide support. Mother and son are both monolingual in Mongolian, the official language of IMAR (along with Chinese). The grandson, who brought this story to the attention of Mongols across the country, is bilingual in Mongolian and Chinese. None of the three speaks any English, a language that is irrelevant to people in Shiliingol League, as it is to people in many places around the world.

On their way back home from Hohhot to Shiliingol this family arrived at the airport in good time but missed their flight when they could not make it to the gate on time. As the grandson relates the story, they missed the flight for two reasons.

Map of Inner Mongolia (Source: TravelChinaGuide)

First, announcements at the airport were only provided in Chinese and English but not in Mongolian. This made it impossible for them to obtain timely information. When the Chinese announcement was made, the young man happened to use the bathroom. On his return, his grandmother told him that the loudspeaker had just chattered something in Chinese. A few seconds later, the English announcement for the flight was made but, naturally, they did not think it would be relevant to their flight within IMAR and they could not understand it anyways.

Second, by the time they realized their flight was being called up, an excessive security check caused them further delay. The grandmother was asked to remove her scarf and two layers of winter coats and was checked from head to toe. As no one else was subject to such excessive scrutiny except the old woman wearing minority dress, it is reasonable to assume that the family was the victim of racial profiling.

Realizing they had missed the last flight for the day was distressing, particularly as they had no idea how to spend the night with the sick elderly lady. They approached the service desk to ask for help. There, they received the following response, which infuriated the young man:

This is not Mongolia; this is Inner Mongolia. In Inner Mongolia we have to speak Chinese, it is our official language. Of course, English is also our official language. [my translation]

He has shared his frustration on social media:

After hearing this, my heart was struck as if by ice. It is unbearable. My Chinese is not good enough to argue with the service agent, although I know very clearly that Chinese is the national and official language, and Mongolian is the official language of Inner Mongolia together with Chinese. English is definitely not an official language. [my translation]

Then he continues:

This is my home but why does it look like the home of someone else? Is Britain my country? Is Britain my home? Why do we have to use English? Why can’t we have a service in Mongolian? [my translation]

The young man’s account was shared widely by Mongols, as was his anger. Luckily, IMAR’s Mongolian language regulation and guidelines actually stipulate the use of Mongolian in the public service: government offices and institutions have to be staffed by reasonable numbers of Mongolian and Chinese bilinguals, even if the story shows the gap between the language policy and its implementation (see also Grey, 2017, for another Chinese case study).

In the end, the story had a happy conclusion. The airport apologized to the family and reimbursed them. Even more importantly, Mongolian language announcements are now being offered at Hohhot’s Baita International Airport.

In this concept image of Hohhot Baita International Airport on the designer’s website, the predominance of white travelers is symbolic of the vision of the airport as a “global” rather than “home” space

“The discourses and practices of global English produce an orientation to the global at the expense of the local”, argues Ingrid Piller in her book Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice (2016, p. 202). The incidence clearly demonstrates that the spread of English not just further subordinates the oppressed but also deprives them of their language rights on their own land, where they are, at least, the titular nationality. The presence of English in this Inner Mongolian airport gives this peripheral region which vies for investment and economic development an international and advanced outlook. The motivation and desire behind the replacement of Mongolian with English resembles what Bulag observes with relation to the replacement of the Mongolian administrative term aimag (盟, “league”) since the 1980s:

Cities have emerged as the centres where industrial miracles and ‘actions’ occur, pointing towards a future utopia, departing from Mao’s ideological ambivalence, and are represented in the media as an embodiment of modernity replete with much of the palette of global capitalist renderings of “modernity” and its radically persuasive imagery of the good life, progress and development. Such a modernity is what I will call alter/native modernity, that is, not just an alternative Chinese modernity, but one which hinges on altering the native Mongol cultural and political institutions and properties (Bulag, 2002, p. 198).

The presence of English instead of Mongolian at Hohhot airport shares so much similarity with the replacement of the “backward” Mongolian administrative names with modern capital-desiring cities. Or as Piller states, “the promotion of English is tied to an external orientation to development”, which ultimately serves only the interests of global and local elites.

However, in the context of Inner Mongolia, the promotion of English at the expense of Mongolian in public space does more than serve the interests of the small elite; it simultaneously delivers a severe blow to all Mongols. The public presence of Mongolian signifies the “remaining token degree of autonomy” (Bulag, 2002, p. 224) of Mongols; and the destruction of these remaining token means the loss of home. Or, as the young man in his account moans, it begins to look like someone else’s home.

Related content

Access explorations of the linguistic landscape at other airports here.

References

Bulag, U. E. (2002). From Yeke-juu league to Ordos municipality: settler colonialism and alter/native urbanization in Inner Mongolia. Provincial China, 7(2), 196-234. doi:10.1080/1326761032000176122

Grey, A. (2017). How do language rights affect minority languages in China? An ethnographic investigation of the Zhuang minority language under conditions of rapid social change. (PhD), Macquarie University.

Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fighting for ‘pure’ Mongolian

Gegentuul Baioud — Mon, 10 Apr 2017 02:51:30 +0000

Image of dictionary burning circulating on social media

On New Year’s Eve, when many people around the world were excited about firework shows, a group of Mongols in remote Inner Mongolia had “fireworks” of a different kind: they were busy burning dictionaries. The dictionaries that ignited their rage were the Mongolian Chinese Dictionary (Mongol Hyatad Toli; 1999, Inner Mongolia University Publishing House) and the Dictionary of Correct Mongolian Spelling (Mongol Jüb Bichilgiin Toli; 1998, People’s Publishing House of Inner Mongolia). The scenes of destruction (in addition to burning the dictionaries, copies were also destroyed by soaking them in water) were photographed and videoed and widely shared on social media.

What attracted the book burners’ ire on social media was the inclusion of Chinese loanwords in the Mongolian-Chinese dictionary. Controversial examples such as the following were discussed on social media: jintüü (Chinese pinyin: zhen tou; English: “pillow”), damen (Chinese pinyin: da men; English: “gate”), leu (Chinese pinyin: lou; English: “building”), yeye (Chinese pinyin: ye ye; English: “grandfather”) or yintai (Chinese pinyin: yin de; English: “addicted”). Examples such as these – transliterated Chinese loan words – were viciously attacked in WeChat groups. Equivalent Mongolian expressions exist for these words: there is der for “pillow”, üüd for “gate”, asar for “building”, ebeg for “grandfather” and shunaltai for “addicted”.

Image of dictionary burning circulating on social media

By way of background, it is important to know that Khorchin Mongols, who live in the eastern part of Inner Mongolia and who are “notorious” for code mixing, use the offending Chinese expressions often in their everyday Mongolian interactions. Nevertheless, seeing these local vernacular expressions printed in the dictionary as “Mongol” words is unacceptable for many Mongols, including Khorchins.

The outrage against the inclusion of Chinese loan words in the dictionary had been simmering even before the actual book burnings took place. For instance, a WeChat page entitled Please Speak Pure Mother Tongue (in Chinese pinyin: qing jiang chun mu yu; please note that WeChat pages can only be registered with a Chinese name) complained already on December 21 that Mongolians did not even have “a good-quality dictionary”. This WeChat group posts a transcript of a Mongolian-Chinese mixed conversation every day. This “incorrect” version is then followed by a “pure” corrected version of that same conversation underneath. In a third version, the transliterated Chinese words are highlighted and they are followed by “correct” Mongolian and Chinese characters, like a vocabulary list.

Loan words in the dictionary that stirred debate on social media

Mongolian and Chinese have a long history of language contact and so Mongolian-Chinese code-switching is nothing new. Why then does it attract so much anger and sensitivity at this point in time? Why the ever-increasing emphasis on language purity, as expressed in the public destruction of “poisonous” dictionaries, social media campaigns for “pure” Mongolian or a recent rally in Hohhot for Mongols to sign their names in Mongolian (instead of Chinese) on bank forms? Why do we see this outburst of anger now when the offending dictionaries were, in fact, published in the late 1990s and have been in circulation ever since?

In my view, it is the contemporary context of language shift and assimilation in Inner Mongolia that drives Mongols to feel increasingly protective about their language and to promote “pure” Mongolian.

The young generation in Inner Mongolia, a society that is rapidly urbanizing and where Mongols now constitute a minority in their own land, is switching to Chinese at an unparalleled rate. According to the title of a WeChat post: “the Mongolian language is facing an unprecedented crisis”. The post goes on to cite Hexigtogtah Č., a scholar at the Central University of Nationalities in Beijing, who shows that the number of textbooks published in the Mongolian language for primary school students dropped from 68,000 in 1992 to 21,000 in 2012.

Another indicator of language shift in the younger generation comes from the fact that the average Mongolian language test score in the university entrance exam is lower than it was in the early 2000s. During my fieldwork in Inner Mongolia in early 2016, one of my informants, a junior high school teacher said: “Nowadays it is very hard to find a satisfying essay from students; some high school graduates can’t write a proper essay Mongolian.”

“Pure” and “impure” Mongolian juxtaposed on WeChat

This decline of the mother tongue is largely caused by urbanization, as studies carried out by master students in the Department of Ethnology and Sociology in Inner Mongolia University have shown. They have found that the socialization processes of Mongol migrant children in Hohhot differ significantly from traditional ways (Sachirengui, 2013). They also illuminate the problems caused by the closure of primary schools in pastoral areas after “The Decision on Basic Educational Reform and Development” issued in 2001 (Uyanga, 2014) and the effects of the changes in pastoralism as a result of the development and “opening-up” of Ujumchin right banner (Bai, 2007). These studies all illustrate from different angles how urbanization and industrialization has sped up the process of Sinification and caused the dissolution of the Mongolian community vital to Mongolian cultural and linguistic transmission.

In sum, social transformation provides both the context and one explanation for the language purification efforts described above. While it is the key factor in rapid language shift and the related blow-back in the form of language purification movements, other factors also play a role, including cross-border influence from Outer Mongolia and social media use for ideological dissemination.

References

Bai, F. (2007). Neeltiin yabch deh übür mongoliin maljih oroni soyol-in hobiralt [Cultural Change in a Pastoral Region in the Process of Development]. (Masters thesis), University of Inner Mongolia, Hohhot.

Sachirengui (2013). Mongol nüüdel hüühediin niigemchileltiin tuhai sudalal [A Study on the Socialization Process of Mongol Migrant Children in Hohhot] Masters thesis, University of Inner Mongolia, Hohhot.

Uyanga. (2014). Hüdee-gin surguulii nigetkhen tüblürülsenii daraa üüsen asuudaliin tuhai sudalal [A Study on the Regulation of Primary Schools in a Pastoral Region]. (Masters thesis), University of Inner Mongolia, Hohhot.

‘Detours’ taken by Mongols on WeChat

Gegentuul Baioud — Tue, 17 Nov 2015 21:46:46 +0000

A monument near Baganuur (Outer Mongolia) with an inscription of poem “My Native Land” by Natsagdorj (Source: Wikipedia)

In the middle school Mongolian textbooks there is a well-known text called “Huuchin Huu” (“A young man fallen behind the times”) written by the famous Mongolian writer D. Natsagdorj. Most of us still remember how it starts:

Hudeegin baidal shaltar boltar, chagin ularil oroo bosgo …

(“The rural village is messy and shabby, the society is full of ups and downs…”)

I was impressed by the author’s ironic way of describing a Mongolian young man who was caught in the sudden change of rural life and in the end saw a light under an ‘upside-down’ big metal pot during the Mongolian revolution in the 1920s.

Recently, one of my friends sent a short story called “Suljeen Huu” (“A young man living in the Internet”) written by an online writer, whose pseudonym name is Tatar, in which he describes a phone-addicted young man in a Mongolian village in the same ironic way by employing almost the same sentence structures as those in “Huuchin Huu.”

It starts like this (the full text is available here):

WeChat version of “Huuchin Huu”

Suljiyen ne baidal uimeen shoogaan tai, suruglegsen humus eniyed tai haniad tai. Haaltai Google haxiltai Facebook uruu haya nig hoyar hun herem haraiju orona … gar chenegin haluun yilqi nuur ood nil geju hums in setgel ig bohinduulna… barimjiya abiya gi urbuulen hurbuulen xinjigseer uder sarig uliruulna… boljoo doyan Mongol soyol ba Mongolchuud in garh jam, delhei dahini hugjiltin tohai hedun mur bichije… nig urloo gi barana.

(Life on the internet is full of noise and hustles, the crowds are smiling and coughing… looking at one or two guys jumping out of the ‘wall’ and wandering on Facebook and Google occasionally… the heat from phone battery flowing to his face and his heart is wistfully wondering… surfing and thinking about the online debate about standard Mongolian implementation, writing and boasting in heaps and bounds from time to time….) [my translation]

The parody focuses on the young man’s “wide knowledge” including others’ secret affairs, the prize money won by celebrity wrestlers, online medicine, the “deteriorating” quality of Mongolian women, and the politics of “hateful” Japan and “evil” America. Off the Internet, this young man leads a reckless yet aimless life: in the winter he plays Mah-jong, and goes bathing in the banner centre; in the summer he frequents fairs in various towns and banners, drinks with “table girls” and sings songs about the wide open grasslands.

This satire shines a critical spotlight on a life characterized by limited information, declining morality, enjoyment of drinking and partying, pursuit of cars and beauties, and boasting about the great Mongols of the past. It shows the dark side of a society under tremendous transformation that can be found in many small towns across Inner Mongolia.

Mongol-related headlines on WeChat

Let us look at some “detours” taken by Mongolians in the north eastern part of Inner Mongolia. Marois (2006) notes that former herders today live in sedentary house as their Chinese counterparts in this area. But they arrange their houses differently from Chinese villagers and engage in different occupancy practices. They keep their ger (“tent”) next to their house and move seasonally to graze their cattle on fertile pasture. Inside the settled-down house the honorific zone is kept at the back of the room as it is in the ger, and they locate the hearth in the room immediately behind the door. This is due to the fact that for Mongolians the fire is a purifying element. By contrast, Han villagers would locate the kitchen and the fire at the back of the house.

Marois (2006) argues that the adoption of sedentary life, fixed dwellings and other material objects are not enough to say that the herders have become sinicized. While making choices from a variety of objects modernity offers the herders, they take detours to make their choices suit their own needs and to express their distinctiveness.

The author Tatar very vividly tells about the life of young Mongolian village men. It is very hard for such men to find a wife, particularly if they do not own an apartment or a car.

But I also want to stress the adaptation made by the herders as they embrace modernity thrust upon them by the nation state and globalization. For instance, an increasing number of villagers in my hometown are buying cars and using WeChat now. The cars have increased the frequency of visits between relatives and friends, and some of them formed a WeChat Mongolian song competition group of over 100 people across several Mongolian villages.

Administrative map of Inner Mongolia (Source: Inner Mongolia News)

I therefore favour the term “cultural strategizing” (Silverberg, 2007) – instead of “cultural borrowing” – to explain the processes of social change that can be observed in the lives of Mongols. The emphasis on cultural strategizing is predicated on multifaceted dialogic interactions between local and global, between tradition and modernity.

Instead of wasting their lives on the Internet, contemporary Mongols also strategically use the Internet to commodify their culture and in search of profit. On sites such as 蒙古丽人 (“Mongol beauty”), 蒙古圈 (“Mongol circle”) or Onoodor (“Today”), Mongol photography is intended to lure tourists to Inner Mongolia. Traditional costumes and Mongolian girls and women are becoming something to be gazed at, and the herder with his sheep is parading before online users.

The virtual space also allows young Mongols to experience a sense of symbolic connection with their community and a form of ethnic identity, even if one that is entwined with the manipulation of markets.

Online Mongols are beautiful and glamorous people, with an amazing homeland and culture. By contrast, mundane news such as the dropping price of lamb, the harsh weather with summer droughts and winter storms, or the high levels of pollution are rare.

The Mongols’ nostalgic imaginings and pride related to the beauty of traditional life or pristine scenic spots divert their attention from many of the realities of their circumstances.

Social media “recreate” Mongolian lives for their followers, though cloaked ones.

Wedding party in Horqin, Tongliao, Inner Mongolia (Source: Xinhuanet)

The question then is how to play out their identities in their desired symbolically cloaked communities? Maybe attending one of the popular Mongolian weddings to “feel” more Mongolness is not a bad idea; at least our Internet boy can leave his phone for a moment and take a walk in another symbol-cluttered event. He might meet his soul mate dressed in traditional costume.

References

Marois, A. (2006). The Squaring of the Circle: Remarks on Identiy and Change from the Study of a Mongol-Han Community in Hulun Buir, Inner Mongolia. Mongolian Studies: Journal of the Mongolia Society, 28, 75-86.

Silverberg, M. R. (2007). Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mongolian on the market

Gegentuul Baioud — Wed, 01 Jul 2015 00:12:21 +0000

‘Luxury permanent’ Mongolian yurt for sale on Alibaba

Last week when I saw in my friends’ Wechat group an advertisement for delicately made Mongolian yurts, I thought of an article I had read earlier written by Mongolian scholar Naran Bilik. In his paper about urbanized Mongolians Bilik writes:

In the Inner Mongolian region, emotional discourse and collectivism are welded together by events and inventions of the past, as well as by regular cultural activities. […] To be modern means to rebel against or modify a tradition that legitimizes the ethnicity previously taken for granted. If the gap between modernism and traditionalism, which is often translated into one between practicality and emotion, can be bridged, it is by symbolisms that overlap, touch upon, invent, or transpose reality. However, this sort of reconciliation is bound to be short-lived, situational, superficial, and manipulable (Bilik 1998, pp. 53-54).

The bridging of traditional symbols and commodification is indeed situational, relatively superficial and easily manipulable for different interests, but not necessarily short-lived. I kept visiting my friends’ Wechat group, and I found notices in traditional Mongolian script (Mongol Bichig) about looking for a sheepherder, about renting grassland, and also about selling camels. There are also advertisements for teaching how to play the Mongolian horse-head string instrument, and notices about an evening class for Mongolian costume making.

Ad for teaching how to play the Mongolian horse-head string instrument

The enthusiasm for learning a traditional musical instrument, the lack of tailors due to the increasing popularity of Mongolian costumes, and those very artistically made Mongolian furniture items and yurts confirm Naran Bilik’s argument: the gap between practicality and emotion is bridged by the reinvention or transformation of ethnic symbols.

However, in this case the reinvented symbols are also a commodity with high symbolic and material value, as Trine Brox, a scholar from Copenhagen University, explains with reference to a Tibetan market in Chengdu. In that market, Tibetans and Han Chinese meet to buy and sell ethnic minority products (Brox, 2015).

Since the mid-1980s the Chinese central government has embraced a more lenient and tolerant policy concerning religion and this has allowed a revival of Tibetan Buddhism. And Tibetan businessmen began to trade in religious commodities and set up shops in Chengdu, where they sell stone beads, ceremonial scarfs, Buddha statues, carpets, etc. to the Tibetans, Chinese and foreign tourists.

Brox speculates at the end of her article whether we are witnessing the transformation of the minzu (‘ethnicity’) categorization from a political collective identity to an economic collective identity. While she does not suggest any de-politicization of ethnic identity, she speculates that markets may be the future of ethnic culture.

Even if a market does have the potential to provide ethnic groups with a new form of ethnic collectivity, the reality will be replete with contradictions resulting from the tension between ethnic culture, on the one hand, and national and global structures, on the other hand. These tensions will leave particular Mongolian and other ethnic identities more fuzzy and shaky, but Mongolian identity will undoubtedly endure the ‘modernization’ process, as it is reinvented or reinterpreted (Bilik & Burjgin, 2003).

WeChat containing Mongolian script

Let us look at the advertisement written in traditional Mongolian script on Wechat: Mongolian script is very eye-catching because it is surrounded by other information that is predominantly in Chinese. In this case, the traditional Mongolian script is not only telling us the content of the advertisement, but also, more importantly, acting as an advertising image. In other words, the symbolic or emotional meaning of the script outweighs its practical purpose. Of course, it also demonstrates who is excluded and included, given that there is no Chinese translation provided.

The traditional scripts, the Mongolian yurts or the costumes are indeed commoditized for diverse interests, but their dynamic interaction with Mongolians’ identity and their role in both compliance with and resistance to inescapable structures should not be neglected.

So when ethnic culture and identity meet the market and go through the process of commodification, we cannot simply assume that the ethnic identity or traditional culture is undermined in the ‘modernization’ or that they are in opposition to commodification. What future research should focus on is the interaction between ethnic practices and overarching structures and influences from modernization, or globalization.

References

Bilik, N. (1998). Language Education, Intellectuals and Symbolic Representation: Being an Urban Mongolian in a New Configuration of Social Evolution. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 4(1-2), 47-67. doi: 10.1080/13537119808428528

Bilik, N., & Burjgin, J. (2003). Contemporary Mongolian Population Distribution, Migration, Cultural Change and Identity. Armonk, N.Y.: Armonk, N.Y. : M.E. Sharpe.

Brox, T. (2015). Tibetan minzu market: the intersection of ethnicity and commodity Asian Ethnicity, 1-21 DOI: 10.1080/14631369.2015.1013175