Abstract
Abstract This paper examines cases in which traditional musicians in Mongolia bring the perspectives of rural non-human animals into urban music institutions, troubling the colonial nature–culture and urban–rural divisions around which they were designed. In Mongolia, music has played a central role in the socialist modernisation projects of the twentieth century, as well as the protests that led to the country’s transition to parliamentary democracy in 1990. These projects involved the formation of urban-based national conservatories and orchestras designed around a western model that attempts to separate nature from culture. How, then, do multispecies relationships play out in a post-socialist context, where capitalist and socialist modernities have each left their mark? In this paper I argue that Mongolian musicians incorporate non-human animals into musical heritage institutions in ways that both depend on and resist the interplay between socialist and capitalist colonial projects.
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