Abstract
When it comes to education for mobile pastoralists, Mongolia is an exceptional case. Until fifty years ago, herders comprised the majority of the Mongolian population. Although a satellite of the Soviet Union, the Mongolian People’s Republic was a state in which mobile pastoralism was not challenged, and herders were not constructed as social outcasts. Equally exceptional was the country’s modernisation, witnessed in its decided alignment with equal opportunities. In Mongolia, it was not ‘nomadism’ that was associated with backwardness, but illiteracy. Policy-makers aimed to combine spatial with social mobility by building schools further and further out in the grasslands, employing locals as teachers, and fostering interplay between modern formal education and extensive animal husbandry. Yet after 1990, when development discourse pigeon-holed post-socialist Mongolia as a Third World country, the so-called shock therapy led to severe cuts in education. Herders were essentialised as ‘nomads’, which caused donor-driven policies of educational planning to construe pastoralists as challenges. Ironically, during the initial decade of <em>Education for All,</em> the younger generation had—for the first time in Mongolia’s history—less educational opportunities than their parents. This article discusses narratives of inclusion and the political consequences of ascribed social identities.
Highlights
Mongolia1 is the least densely populated state in the world (1.8 people per square km), and has the largest contiguous common grasslands
The country maintained high levels of education, the demographic changes caused by massive rural-to-urban migration led to alarming disparities between Mongolia’s few urban centres and its rural areas. 47.8% of the rural population are considered below the poverty line, and poor households show a high rate (20.5%) of having either no education or only a primary education
With the recent commercialisation of horseracing, it has become customary for schools to allow students to take extra vacations to train racehorses in the steppe; nowadays, poor families who live in urban areas consider racehorse training a welcome opportunity to send their children to the countryside for healthier food and fresh air.8. These examples may illustrate against what background Krätli, who did a comparative study on education provision to nomadic pastoralists, identified as a remarkable “non antagonistic culture towards nomadism” (Krätli, 2000, p. 48) during his on-site research in Mongolia
Summary
Mongolia is the least densely populated state in the world (1.8 people per square km), and has the largest contiguous common grasslands. Mongolians are portrayed as ‘nomads’ par excellence—whether in movies, picture books, photo exhibitions or at the International Tourism Fair, where Mongolia was featured as the official partner country with the slogan Nomadic by Nature in spring 2015. Those who live as mobile pastoralists have never labelled themselves ‘nomads’. The Mongolian case features an additional dimension: before and after the Cold War, two contrary development paradigms determined the designation of herders, which reflected a change in the political frame of reference and entailed a shift in the external audience addressed. In order to shed light on the interplay of selfperception and ascribed attributes as well as their implications for the development discourse, let me start by giving a brief historical account of canonised narratives on Mongolian herders.
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