Memory of the Grassland: How to Keep Singing Mongolian Gür Songs in Today’s Ordos City, China

Abstract

Ordos is a prefecture-level city of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Besides the famous Genghis Khan’s Remembrance Place as its significant feature of the past, it also features some gur songs of the Mongolian grassland. Although little known to the world, Gur songs have long served in Mongolian rulers’ circles from ancient times. Through reconstruction, revitalization, and re-textualization over three millennia, Gur songs are regarded to represent local Mongolian culture as they are deeply rooted in Hanggin (a special district of the city) of Ordos. Crises of a heritage solely built on a single inheritor are emerging: Will the cultural memory of the community decay after the demise of the ‘inheritor’? Will there be a memory gap? Does the orally transmitted ritual music preserve the cultural memory of the Mongolian community in the process? How does the century-old music tradition find its connection to Ordos, a city with an urbanization history of under 20 years? This discussion queries the reconstitution of memory through an ethnography of this Mongolian heritage example in Ordos, expecting to be a critical inspection for the persistence of the cultural memory of the community.