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Cumulus : Hoarding, Hosting, Hospitality

Everyday Hospitality in Mongolia

Obligation, Enaction and Projects of Governance
L’hospitalité au quotidien en Mongolie : obligation, mise en acte et projets de gouvernance
David Sneath
p. 67-88

Abstracts

Hospitality is an everyday part of life on the Mongolian steppe. Visitors to any rural ail (« encampment ») expect to be offered food, drink and, if need be, a place for the night. Rather than a form of reciprocity, Mongolian everyday hospitality can be seen to be enactional, not transactional ; its practices are materialisations of the roles of host and guest and do not imply some sort of return. As Annette Weiner noted, the notion of reciprocity, derived from the practices of emerging mercantile elites of early-modern Europe, has dominated anthropological analysis of « exchange » at the expense of considering older aristocratic principles and, I argue, relations of obligation. Mongolian everyday hospitality does not imply acts of generosity directed towards any particular person ; it is an expression of the status of the householders and their ability to fulfil a public norm. I argue that such hospitality can be seen as both a product and producer of socio-political order ; not as a timeless feature of a holistic culture but as an artefact of historical projects of governance. Order is manifest in the rituals of domestic hospitality in which hosts and guests are physically arranged into positions of relative seniority and subordination. As such, hospitality serves as a mode of inclusion into an existing sociopolitical and cosmopolitical order. Since the overthrow of Mongolia’s aristocracy, hospitality has been reframed as « traditional culture » within the modernist nation state, but the household still represents a micro-domain in which status is enacted through hospitality – the roles of host, guest, dependents, and attachments made manifest through actions and emplacements. An examination of hospitality as a set of practices generated by historical domains of power, and the social forms that flow from them, returns us to Kant’s notion of hospitality as practices constitutive of political subjects.

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  • 1 Stephen F. Gudeman (2001 : 80), for example, notes that accepted anthropological wisdom has made re (...)

1For much of the xxth century « exchange » became a category for universal anthropological application ; used to describe all sorts of material and immaterial transfers. Following Mauss, the notion of reciprocity was central to the exchange concept in ethnographic analysis, so that Sahlins’ popular (1972) exchange model described all sorts of practices, from sharing to theft, in terms of a spectrum of « reciprocity ». John H. Davis (1992 : 29), for example, lists an A-to-Z of 42 types of « exchange » recognised in Britain, from « altruism » to « wholesaling ». But such a sweeping application of the exchange model can be problematic. It implies some sort of reciprocal relationship between the parties (Gregory & Altman 1989 : 203-204), and perhaps a folk theory of human relationality, so that transfers that are unambiguously one-way represent a sort of contradiction, and the « pure gift » became a problem in need of explanation (Parry 1986 ; Davis 1992 : 9-27). It has, of course, long been obvious to anthropologists that a good deal of behaviour could not be treated as transactional, but, as Robert Hunt (2002 : 115) notes, the exchange idiom has nevertheless remained pervasive in discussions of allocation1.

2As Matei Candea and Giovanni Da Col (2012 : 1) remark, the examination of hospitality offers a vantage point to explore alternatives to the exchange logic of the Maussian gift. Unlike the gift, which lends itself rather easily to individual and transactional logics, hospitality is more clearly bound up with wealth and status within a particular political order. I argue that, in the light of post-Weberian theories of power, it is the political order that emerges as the most convenient unit for anthropological comparison, rather than the essentially xixth century concepts of a bounded culture or society.

Mongolian Everyday Hospitality

  • 2 The « unit of hospitality » is usually, but not necessarily, the encampment as such, but is often a (...)
  • 3 This is the interrogative form of the verb « to be » (baikh).
  • 4 I use the term « everyday hospitality » to indicate the practices directed at all visitors in this (...)

3Hospitality is an everyday part of life on the Mongolian steppe. Visitors to any rural ail (« encampment ») expect to be offered drink, food, and, if need be, a place for the night2. Guests can be friends, acquaintances, complete strangers, or foreigners ; neighbours or travellers passing through for one reason or another. In many cases visitors are from sufficiently far away that all parties understand that there can be no reciprocal visit ; the householders will not make a visit in return. But this is not important. Old friend or complete stranger, any visitor to a pastoral household can expect to rest and receive tea, dried curds, and other snacks, and often a meal and overnight stay if they need them. If consumables are visible, then a guest may simply help themselves to them, and the way to ask for something is just to ask if there « is any » (bainuu ?)3. Since anyone can expect such hospitality without invitation, these practices resemble Adam Chau’s notion (this volume) of xeno-hosting (the hosting of strangers), although it is also routinely extended to friends and relatives4.

4Rather than presuming exchange, we can see these transfers of goods and assistance as materialisations of the social roles and relations engaged by the visit. As I have argued elsewhere that (Sneath 2006), rather than as transactions, these routine material transfers to others can be better seen as enactions of certain aspects of persons and roles. Hospitality behaviour (zochlomtgoi zan) enacts the role of host or hostess as an aspect of the householder’s social persona.

5Similarly, the guest enacts his or her role as an appreciative recipient by accepting at least a token of what is offered. This does not resemble the Maussian gift ; the obligations to give and receive emerge from the social settings of host and guest, not the reattachments of the objects involved, and the transfer itself carries no obligation to reciprocate. The social setting allows for improvisation and personal expression. Someone wanting to impress with his or her generosity might choose to act as a superlative host and provide much more than the usual level of hospitality – offering luxuries such as cigarettes, vodka, and meat. Conversely, no offence is taken if there are evident reasons as to why the hosts are unable to provide proper hospitality, but offer some token like cold tea instead. The main point is that those concerned were willing to enact their roles, not the value of the transferred materials.

  • 5 Annette Weiner writes, for example, « Generations of anthropologists, not looking back far enough i (...)

6Mongolian everyday hospitality, then, stands in contrast to Pitt-Rivers’ (1968) notion of « turn-taking reciprocity ». It has more to do with expression than with exchange. In her 1992 monograph Inalienable Possessions. The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving, Annette Weiner argues that the notion of reciprocity, derived as it was from the practices of emerging mercantile elites of early-modern Europe, has dominated anthropological analysis of « exchange » at the expense of considering « other, much older economic principles in Western history » (Ibid. : 32). In the case of Malinowski’s celebrated account of the kula, she argues, Malinowski’s mistake was to present the analysis in terms of reciprocal exchange as it had been theorised in the West5. But, on reflection, the assumption that reciprocity represented a sort of human universal seems to be the unwarranted product of a particular intellectual tradition.

  • 6 Bronislaw Malinowski (1922 : 88-91) actually did compare kula valuables with crown jewels, in passi (...)
  • 7 Harry Powell agrees that « The kula was traditionally forbidded to the commoners » (1951 : 14).
  • 8 This is the subject of a forthcoming monograph provisionally entitled The Savage Noble. The Anthrop (...)

7Rather than the transactionalist logic of reciprocity, Annette Weiner argues, the kula answers to the competitive logic of aristocratic status and esteem6. The most important kula valuables are symbols of past glory, just as royal regalia – crowns and robes of state – are in Europe (Ibid. : 37). « Fundamentally, kula is not about reciprocating one shell for another […]. In essence, these prized shells are like the famous trophies for which Greek aristocrats vied » (Ibid. : 133). Kula is not about the mercantile logics of transaction ; its roots lie in the distinctive privileges of the Trobriand nobility (Ibid. : 138)7. As a thought experiment, Matei Candea and Giovanni Da Col (2012) propose an alternative history of anthropology, in which Mauss wrote a theory of hospitality rather than the gift. My own project is to imagine what the discipline would look like today if anthropology had developed the category of aristocracy (the rule of hereditary elites) as a comparative theme, rather than the concept of kinship structure8. The kula, it turns out, was a product of the history of the Trobriand nobility. Here I argue that Mongolian everyday hospitality is a transformed legacy of the country’s pre-revolutionary aristocratic order, rooted in the historical transformation of obligations placed upon householders within a system of power relations.

8In her 1987 paper « The Host and the Guest : One Hundred Rules of Good Behaviour in Rural Mongolia », Caroline Humphrey describes a list of hospitality rules given to her by a Mongolian teacher friend. They include such things as the customary exchanges of greetings as a visitor arrives at an encampment and announces their presence by calling for the inhabitants to control the dogs that frequently guard them ; how the host should look after the guest’s horse and take responsibility for replacing it if attacked by wolves ; what the visitor can take into the dwelling and what items should be left outside the home ; where and how the parties should sit depending on status ; how to offer and place snuff bottles and pipes ; what the host should provide by way of drink, snacks, and food ; when to make gifts if there are any ; the positions for sleeping overnight ; how to see the guest off when the time comes for them to leave ; and so on. The rules include the proper bodily postures and gestures of the parties depending on their rank ; in the case of adult children visiting their parents, this includes bowing and other signs of respect that they should make.

9Most, but by no means all, of the rules listed resemble practices carried out, or at least recognised, in contemporary Mongolia to some extent. Some of the rules were clearly anachronistic, even when Humphrey received them. Rule 96 is that members of the host’s household should turn prayer-wheels when the guest departs, but these merit-making Buddhist devices almost entirely disappeared from the Mongolian landscape during the state socialist era ushered in when Soviet-backed revolutionaries seized power in 1921. Indeed, the rules have a pre-revolutionary tone to them, referring to senior lamas (who had not been permitted since the late 1930s), Buddhist holy objects, and other items of material culture that had become uncommon by the late xxth century. Some, such as Rule 3 – a host should raise the felt door-flap for the guest, are never practised, since wooden doors replaced felt flaps in gers (« yurts ») many decades ago. Many of the rules are recognised, but only practised in the most formal of circumstances, or to make a point about how knowledgeable a host or guest might be regarding Mongolian custom. Most of the instructions regarding the postures of respect that juniors should adopt in the presence of seniors have largely dropped out of everyday practice.

10To treat this as a case of « the erosion of culture » would imply a notion of culture as continuity, a distinctive system of meanings and practices that is somehow outside historical time. But, as Caroline Humphrey notes :

« These symbolic acts cannot be seen as ahistorical, even if many of the categories they are built from seem to have been present in Mongol culture for centuries […]. If we look at their social functions it is clear that they should be seen as obligations […]. In these rules we see an important indication of how rural Mongol society is meant to be » (1987 : 43).

11The rules, then, are an historical artefact, put together from a range of past sources and describing memories, sayings and probably the writings of particular people at particular times that were recalled by Humphrey’s teacher friend. Some of the rules must have been invented in the xviith, xviiith or xixth century. The rules mention the proper placement of pipes, for example, and tobacco was not introduced until the xviith century. The ceremonial presentation of polished snuff bottles, often made of semi-precious stone, their handling, appreciation, and return, are common greeting rituals for hosts and visitors, particularly older men. Such bottles were introduced into the Qing court during the reigns of the Kangxi and Yongzheng emperors, and met with imperial approval. They spread among aristocrats and commoners in the xviiith century (Olivova 2005 : 229). These practices, then, have biographies and authors ; particular persons gave rise to popular forms of action and expectation that were taken up by others in historical time.

12Secondly, these rules are about obligation, rather than reciprocity. As Caroline Humphrey (1987 : 44) pointed out, in Mongolia this sort of hospitality is required of householders ; it is a duty rather than an act of charity. This does not resemble the grandly abstracted notion of « absolute hospitality » proposed by Jacques Derrida in these terms :

« For if I practice hospitality “out of duty” [and not only “in conforming with duty”], this hospitality of paying up is no longer an absolute hospitality, it is no longer graciously offered beyond debt and economy, offered for the other, a hospitality invented for the singularity of the new arrival, of the unexpected visitor » (2000 : 83).

13Rural Mongolian everyday hospitality is, however, offered out of a sense of duty, and is offered to unexpected visitors. Arguably, this could mean that either these acts are not hospitality ; or that all visitors in rural Mongolia are, in a sense, expected, and so do not represent the singularities that Derrida refers to. But this would be to privilege the imaginary world of Derrida’s thought-experiment over the everyday meanings of the words « hospitality » and « unexpected visitor ». That Derrida has a notion of a more perfect hospitality, judged by his own contingent aesthetic standards, does not make it something real in the world, just as Kant showed, contra Descartes’ ontological argument for the existence of God, that existence is not a predicate.

14Mongolian everyday hospitality does not imply acts of generosity directed toward any particular person ; it is an expression of the status of the householders and their ability to fulfil a public norm. Just as one or more members of a household will take pride in a clean and tidy home or well-appointed interior décor, so the snacks and hospitality for visitors are demonstrative of family propriety. In some respects, such hospitality resembles Adam Chau’s notion of hosting in China, where « a recognition and acknowledgement of social worth is communicated between, and co-produced by, host and guest » (2014 : 496). For Chau, hosting is an expression of household sovereignty, in which the head is transformed into the ruler of the household as a microcosmic kingdom. In the Mongolian case, as we shall see, the host can, at best, be attributed a tightly proscribed and nested sovereignty. Nevertheless, there are some interesting homologies between the position of sovereign and that of host that are worth exploring.

Hosts and Masters

  • 9 The phrase ezen bolokh (« to become an ezen ») means to vouch for something or someone, or to take (...)

15The term used for the host with respect to domestic hospitality is geriin ezen, literally the ezen of the yurt. The concept ezen (plural : ezed) is complex and revealing. Its most common English translation today is probably « owner », but historically it could be used to refer to positions we would describe as « master », and « lord ». This is a concept that applies to proprietorial authority at different scales. It is used at the level of the domestic group (the household) ; at the level of some large resource or enterprise (land, a herd of animals, or a factory may have an ezen) ; and in the past it was also applied at the scale of the whole polity – the common term for the Manchu emperor was Ezen Khan. Historically, most ezed seem to have been men, but a female head of household is also referred to as the geriin ezen, and an old name for the mistress of the house was togoo tulgan ezen (literally : « ezen of the pot and hearth »)9. The ezen concept was a fundamental element of the aristocratic order of pre-revolutionary Mongolia. The lords ruling the khoshuu – the principalities or territorial divisions of the Mongol lands – were officially termed nutagyn ezen « lords of the homeland » among their other titles (Natsagdorj 1967 : 267). Indeed, proprietorial authority was so central to the notion of social order that to be masterless was to be wild or chaotic. The term ezengüi baidal (literally : « a situation without an ezen ») meant « anarchy ».

16Such authority extended to the spiritual world, in which ezen was used to describe the spiritual « masters » of the land. The eight classes of spiritual lords of earth and water in Buddhist cosmology are known as sabdag (from the Tibetan sa bdag), as well as by the term gazaryn ezed (« lords of the land »), and were honoured at annual or twice yearly ceremonies attended by secular and religious authorities in the various administrative districts throughout the realm. These rituals were conducted at ritual cairns (ovoo) and reflected a cosmology in which humans do not hold land as they do other mundane possessions, but must enter into relations with the spiritual powers of the locality to ensure favourable conditions. Many, but not all, of the gazaryn ezed were associated with sacred mountains, and prayers to them typically sought protection from illness, plague, drought, storms, cattle-pest, thieves, wolves, and asked for long life, increased herds, and good fortune (Heissig 1980 : 105-106 ; Bawden 1958 : 38-39 ; Tatár 1976 : 26-33).

  • 10 Much of the historical material we have concerning the rituals for local deities concerns senior se (...)

17In her study of Latin American indigenous politics, Marisol de la Cadena (2010 : 336) makes use of the term « cosmopolitics », not in the Kantian sense of the politics of global citizenship, but to mark the intersection between the cosmological and the political, where non-humans, such as spirits and deities, exist as actors in the political arena. During the Qing period, the wider order was cosmopolitical in this sense. The gazaryn ezed local deities were engaged in the project of imperial and aristocratic rule, within the realms of the Qing emperor, who was himself a bodhisattva (Farquhar 1978). The most important mountain deities held official aristocratic ranks, for example, and had the corresponding salary allocated to them from the imperial treasury (Bawden 1968 : 102). The most senior officials could hold local deities responsible for their behaviour. One senior Qing resident official in Urga (present-day Ulaanbaatar) was apparently caught in a heavy storm while carrying out rites at the nearby Bogd Uul sacred mountain, and responded by punishing the deity, whipping and depositing fetters on its ovoo ; later he fined it by confiscating its horse herd (Zhambal 1997 : 16). The spiritual and the political were entirely commensurate categories that could, and sometimes did, directly interact10. Although the old order was swept away in the revolutionary changes of the xxth century, the rituals for local deities have been revived since the 1990s, and some have been refashioned as state ceremonies of national celebration, attended by the president as head of state. The wider order of these contemporary practices is very different, based on the concept of a national people, and framed in terms of Mongolian culture and tradition, but it could also be seen to be cosmopolitical in Marisol de la Cadena’s sense, since mountain deities are addressed by state officials (Sneath 2014).

  • 11 Anthropologists, both Soviet and Western, rejected the use of the term « feudalism » for a number o (...)

18The concept of ezen, as well as much of the content of the category zochlomtgoi zan (« hospitality »), is rooted in a pre-revolutionary aristocratic and cosmological order that resembled European feudalism in many ways11. The proprietorial authority indicated by the term could be treated as a form of sovereignty ; the jurisdiction of the lord over his estate, the local deities over the landscape. But if so, this was a nested sovereignty, not an absolute or unconditional principle, but a limited authority that existed within the overarching sovereignty of the Qing emperor as ultimate ezen. We do not know if the term geriin ezen was applied to commoner householders in the pre-revolutionary period (my guess is that this became a convention in the state socialist period), but if there was any sense in which most rural householders were sovereign over their tiny household realms, this must have been a proscribed and limited form. The rights of ruling nobles over their common subjects were extensive and, by xxist century standards, authoritarian.

19But there are a number of ways in which hospitality ceremonial resembles the courtly forms employed by the aristocracy of the past. The domestic space of the ger (« yurt ») is, at least in principle, tightly ordered. The placement of objects and bodies materialises a social order, both reflecting evaluations of relative status and, to some degree, producing it – at least within the confines of the home.

20The ger is pitched so that the door faces south, or sometimes south-east. This orientation is so naturalised that the Mongolian words for « ahead », « behind » « left » and « right » are the same as those for south, north, east and west respectively. The space within the ger is conceptually divided using two principles. Firstly, there is that of status. High-status people and things are placed in the northernmost part of the ger in an area known as the khoimor. The more junior an object or individual, the further south – towards the door – they are placed. The second principle is that the western hemisphere of the ger is associated with public, external, and to some extent male items, while the eastern hemisphere is the appropriate place for domestic or inside things, which in some contexts are associated with women. In diagram (a), positions are marked 2, 3, 4, and 5 in the west, and B, C and D in the east in order of decreasing status.

Conceptual division of space within a ger

Conceptual division of space within a ger

(diagram David Sneath)

21In formal situations, there is a recognised system for where people should sit depending on seniority. The highest status position for both people and objects is [1A] on the khoimor opposite the door, where there are generally rugs. Guests (of all genders) will be seated in the west half of the ger. Depending on their seniority, in formal situations they will be placed nearer the khoimor or the door. Unless the women know the resident family so well as to be in some way members of it, female guests will also usually sit in the west half of the ger. The cooking area, however, is a work zone, and is somewhat separate. Junior and senior women generally use this portion of the ger, because they are charged with food preparation rather than status position in an abstract sense, and senior women will often sit on the khoimor. Objects are also organised spatially : valued and delicate items sit behind the khoimor, including family photographs, religious items, a radio or Tv ; kitchen items go in the south-eastern cooking zone ; saddles (if brought into the dwelling at all, which is rare) go in the south-west by the door (although valuable silver-chased bridles are generally hung behind the khoimor by the rifle, if there is one), and so on. It is a highly practical set of arrangements : the khoimor with its carpets or rugs is the cleanest and quietest part of the dwelling, furthest from the doorway, where constant entering and exiting tramps in dust and dirt. The cooking zone by the door allows for water, waste, and fuel to be brought in and taken out directly, and guests know to turn to their left upon entry to keep out of the way of domestic activities.

22This spatial orientation and order of the ger appears to be one of the oldest elements of the contemporary practices. The earliest accounts we have of something akin to this ordering dates from the xiiith century source, the Secret History of the Mongols [= Mongqol-un niucha tobcha’an], which describes a Mongol noblewoman insulted by being placed near the door (Pelliot 1949 : 101).

23Once seated, guests are served drink, usually tea, and then often snacks (usually from a single large bowl) in order of seniority. Snuff bottles may be offered, appreciated, and returned by people on each side. This will also be done in order of seniority, as will the offerings of other drinks such as airag (« fermented mare’s milk »), vodka, or home-brewed milk alcohol, either in a single bowl (which should be sipped from and returned) or small shot glasses (typically used for vodka). This pecking order also appears in the xiiith century Secret History : a prince of the imperial house was insulted by the order of drinking at a banquet, and the dispute became so serious that it had to be referred to the emperor for settlement (Ibid. : 114).

24Whether the practices of the Mongolian aristocracy represented a courtly version of the vernacular practices of their subjects or, as I think more likely, the practices of ordinary households were imitative of aristocratic ceremonial, we can recognise the political significance of these forms of social ranking. In such ritual, the household resembles a miniature court, in which the visitors are treated as envoys ; properly placed and ranked in terms of distance from the sovereign host. In his study of Qing courtly guest ritual, James Hevia notes : « Ritual practice appears radically historical when understood as the processes by which embassies from lesser kings were evaluated, differentiated, and incorporated into an encompassing imperial sovereignty that included the Cosmos » (1995 : 217).

25Returning to Caroline Humphrey’s point that, in the obligations placed on host and guest, we can see an « indication of how rural Mongol society is meant to be » (1987 : 43), we can pose some further questions : who meant Mongol society to be this way, and who placed these obligations on householders and visitors ? We might look perhaps, like Sherry Ortner (1978), to some notion of « community » as the author of these norms and practices. But the vague and faintly egalitarian notion of « community » is a problematic concept, critiqued by Iris M. Young (1986) and Gerard Delanty (2003) among others, and best treated as « an aspiration envisioned as an entity » (Creed 2006 : 20) rather than a reality. It makes better sense to assume that the authors of these practices were persons, individuals and groups, living in historical time. Of course, the identities of such authors are likely to be forever lost, but we can gain an insight into whose interests were served by the ubiquity of such hospitality practices, because some of them are recorded in the law codes by which commoners were governed.

Laws of Hospitality

  • 12 Commoners were subject to quite tight control ; they required permission, for example, to be allowe (...)

26The early xviiith century Qing-era Mongol law code, the Khalkha Jirum, describes a wide range of duties of subjects, and the penalties for not meeting them12. These include the legal requirements of householders to provide transport for the travel of aristocrats and the senior Buddhist reincarnate lama, as well as their envoy/messengers (elch). Patriarchy was enshrined in law ; children were obliged to honour and obey their parents, and could be punished for insulting them. This legislation makes the household an explicit site of political regulation by the dynastic state. The refusal of hospitality for the night was punishable by a fine of one three-year-old stallion (Riasanovsky 1965 [1937] : 114). That such refusals nevertheless took place, however, is clear from the list of compensation fines that should be levied on a householder depending upon the frostbite injuries or death of a stranger refused overnight hospitality.

  • 13 The full passage reads : « If nobles holding offices and tabunangs (« son-in-law of a noble »), jun (...)
  • 14 This distributed aristocracy and what I term « the headless state » is explored in David Sneath (20 (...)

27These laws were not « extraneous » innovations introduced by the Qing. The Khalkha Jirum closely resembles the pre-Qing Mongol law codes that have survived the intervening centuries. The 1640 code, the Monggol-Oirad tsaaji, lists the laws agreed between two sets of steppe rulers, the Mongols on the one hand, and the Oirats on the other – a Mongolic-speaking aristocracy ruling western Mongolia and part of what is now Xinjiang. It describes, if anything, even greater powers among the aristocracy than those found in the Khalkha Jirum. This was at a time when both the Mongol and Oirat noble houses did not recognise a clear overlord or emperor. Aristocratic power, however, is unmistakable : the code makes clear whose rule the code represents – the distributed sovereignty exercised by the Mongol and Oirat steppe aristocracies. Section 18 reads : « If nobles holding offices and […] [other nobles and officials] […] beat a person for the sake of the lords’ (ejed) administration, law and order, they are not guilty, even if they beat someone to death »13. Here the plural form of ejen (« lord ») is used for the « lords’ administration » ; the laws refer to the nobility’s joint government of subjects14. Aristocratic power in Mongolia is much older than this, however, dating from the iiird century Bce at the least, and the xiiith century dynastic empire founded by Chinggis Khan shared many of the same features with later polities. We have only fragmentary and indirect evidence for the Chinggisid law codes, but the Mamluk source al-Maqrizi (1364-1442) notes that one Mongol law decreed that any traveller could join those who were eating without permission (Riasanovsky 1965 [1937] : 84).

28Although the origin of aristocracy as an institution may be lost in the mists of time, the emergence of particular aristocracies is certainly not. The Borjigin nobility that ruled most of Mongolia from the xiiith to the xxth centuries were the descendants of the royal house of the conquest dynasty founded by Chinggis Khan. It was this nobility that chose to swear fealty to the Qing in the xviith century and intermarried extensively with the royal Manchu house of Aisin Gioro.

29If we can speak of hospitality practices as embodying micro-hierarchies of power (Zito, this volume), or as part of the habitus of rural Mongolian households, these are forms that have been powerfully shaped by historical power relations. To explain their presence we need not look to the hidden logics of cultures as symbolic systems. The rulers of Mongolia found it useful to have their subjects offer a certain level of support to those travelling in their dominions, just as they found it necessary to have taxes, corvée labour requirements, and orderly relations between their subjects. Of course, this is an account of only a part of the historical process by which these particular practices took particular forms ; relations of power, or power-knowledge (pouvoir-savoir) following Foucault, must work with, and through, the affordances of human psychology. But the heuristic study of power-relations offers the chance of identifying something resembling structuring structures, since projects of governance generate explicit normative schemas and techniques for orchestrating compliance, if not consent.

30Since the destruction of aristocracy in Mongolia, hospitality has been reframed as « tradition » and « national culture » (ulamjlal, ündestnii soyol) within the modernist nation state. The Mongolian People’s Republic received the Leninist version of modernism and all the trappings of the Soviet version of the European nation-state – secular education system, health service, urbanisation, industrialisation ; together with the ramifying intellectual apparatus to go with it. This included the modernist conception of « national tradition », and a state-sponsored intelligentsia set about editing together elements drawn from pre-revolutionary Mongolian society to form an official national heritage, including music, art, literature, and material culture. The 100 rules that Caroline Humphrey (1987) was given fits well within the logic of this project of national construction – the establishment of definitive Mongolian customs, pictured as inherent features of a sort of essential national culture.

  • 15 The influential poem Minii nutag [= My Homeland] written by Dashdorjiin Natsagdorj, one of the foun (...)

31The household (örkh) represents a sort of micro-domain ; it is recognised as such in state discourse, where it is a census and administrative unit. The nested, proscribed sovereignty of the head of the household now appears within the macro-domain of the Mongolian nation-state, the ultimate holder of the sacred territory and culture of the saikhan ekh oron (« beautiful mother-land ») enshrined in literature, song, poetry, and art15. Hospitality is now seen as a national virtue of « the Mongol people », one that rural residents enact in their everyday treatment of visitors and guests.

32Through hospitality ritual, the roles of host, guest, dependents, and attachments are made manifest through actions and emplacements within domestic space, in compliance with political authority. As an item of law, hospitality is applied to legal subjects. When Derrida critiques Kant’s treatment of hospitality in his 1795 essay Perpetual Peace. A Philosophical Sketch, he notes that Benveniste writes that, in receiving a foreigner, the host asks their name, so that, Derrida argues, « you are responsible before the law and before your hosts, you are a subject in law » (2000 : 27). For Derrida this falls short of an absolute hospitality that would offer « unquestioning welcome » (Ibid. : 28). But the position that Derrida rejects – the notion of hospitality as a mode of incorporation into the sovereignty of political authorities and their legal codes – matches the Mongolian case rather well.

  • 16 In many ways, the hospitality practices that Gilmour describes resembled those set out in the 100 r (...)
  • 17 James Gilmour’s writings also give a sense of the range of people likely to be « on the road » at t (...)

33Are we perhaps dismissing the notion of traditional culture too readily ? Might there not be a longstanding core to hospitality in Mongolia that was enshrined in law but reflected deeper longstanding cultural forms ? Interestingly, it seems that Mongolian everyday hospitality was in some respects rather different in the Qing period than in the contemporary era, in ways that directly reflect the legal codes of the time. The Khalkha Jirum made the offer of overnight hospitality compulsory, but it did not stipulate that hosts must provide their guests with food. James Gilmour was an intrepid Scottish missionary who spent many years in Mongolia in the 1870s and 1880s. Gilmour described the hospitality provided by pastoral households when he was travelling with his local guide16. They were given space in the ger overnight, but not food (and sometimes not even tea), which they were expected to bring with them. The householders, many of whom were very poor, would cook the food and make the tea for their guests, and would then consume whatever was left over themselves17. Gilmour found that his party was :

« […] better treated, and received with a much warmer welcome, in the tents of the poor than in the abodes of the rich. A rich man would make us wait upon his convenience, and expect us to make extra good tea or a meal which, both as regards quantity and quality, would be in keeping with his dignity and status, and even then we left feeling that our visit had been something of an intrusion. In the tents of the poor, on the other hand, we were warmly welcomed, our tea or food was prepared at once and in all haste, our animals were looked to as they grazed, the share of food which we left in the pot was considered a rich reward, and when all was over we were conducted forth and sent on our way again with many expressions of friendship and good wishes for the prosperity of our journey » (1883 : 81).

  • 18 James Gilmour’s comments seem to match the remarks of Sechen Jagchid, who grew up in Inner Mongolia (...)

34For Gilmour, the most hospitable hosts were the subjects that ranked lowest in the social order, those most liable to comply with the requirements of social seniors, and most in need of leftover food and tea. Although clearly complying with legal requirement and public expectation, the « hospitality » of the rich appeared grudging and ungenerous in comparison18. This echoes, to some degree, the oldest accounts we have of Mongol hospitality, the Latin texts written in the xiiith century by William of Rubruck and Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, friars who made independent diplomatic missions to the Mongol imperial court. These both complain of the meanness of their hosts (Beazley 1903 : 121, 200), although the keenly observant Rubruck describes the organisation of interior space in the ger in terms that match that of the present day. The core continuity that we see here is one of order ; the placement and ranking within social space, which is not unique to Mongolia, but was found historically in many parts of Inner Asia (Sneath 2007b).

35The particular requirements of historical hospitality codes appear to have been products of projects of governance, but there is little doubt that being hospitable was also highly valued and could be seen as a source of pride (see Humphrey, this volume). Gilmour notes both the obligatory nature of everyday hospitality and the strong normativity that surrounded it : « Any traveller is at perfect liberty to alight at any village [encampment] he may wish and demand admittance ; and any Mongol who refuses admittance, or gives a cold welcome even, is at once stigmatised as not a man but a dog » (1883 : 128). He also notes the awareness that this form of hospitality may not be reciprocated : « Mongols sometimes complain of Chinamen, who come to Mongolia, enter their tents, and receive their hospitality, but who, when their Mongol friends go to China, will not let them enter their dwelling-houses » (Ibid. : 129).

36Nevertheless, historical hospitality behaviour was clearly rather different from contemporary practices. The relative social status of those involved seems to have been of central concern. As Owen Lattimore notes :

« […] a great many travel writers and travellers go too far in assuming that the nomad air of assurance and freedom means a level of equality. Far from it. One reason why the average man behaves with certainty and poise is because he knows exactly his status and your own » (1941 : 185-186).

37High-status guests were expected to present the host with a gift, commonly a khadag – a ceremonial silk scarf. So it is interesting to note that, in the 1920s, Ladislaus Forbath, the Hungarian traveller, was told that « when you call on a man you must bring him a chadak [khadag] without fail. That’s the custom in this country » (1936 : 20). But this does not seem to have been a rule for everyone. Sechin Jagchid and Paul Hyer (1979 : 132) make clear that this was an expectation for people of high status who might be expected to have access to valuables.

38Overall, we can say that pre-revolutionary everyday hospitality behaviour matched the stipulations of the historical law codes, and seem to have been, if anything, less generous than contemporary standards. How is it, then, that hospitality expectations and practices have come to resemble their current form ?

  • 19 For an account of the Buryat variant of the collective farm and the role of leadership in managing (...)

39The new practices seem to have emerged alongside the wider transformation ushered in by the state socialist regime of the Mongolian People’s Republic. The second half of the xxth century saw increasing levels of material prosperity in the Mongolian countryside, and the disappearance of the extreme poverty that prevented some households from offering guests almost anything other than shelter. By the 1960s, pastoralists were almost all salaried members of collective (negdel) or state farms (sangiin aj akhui), and, by any standards, much wealthier than all but the richest pre-revolutionary commoners. The large state-sponsored enterprises that dominated rural life were explicitly communitarian organisations that promoted collectivist behaviour among the workforce. They created new roles and relationships, and a new rural leadership (Rosenberg 1982) concerned with the management and display of wealth19.

  • 20 Ines Stolpe notes : « the 1969-71 cultural campaign […] proclaimed the “cultured family” (soyolch a (...)

40In particular, from the 1950s until the 1970s, households were subject to a series of vigorous soyolyn dovtolgoon « cultural campaigns » to remake practices in the home in line with modernist conceptions of hygiene and cleanliness (Stolpe 2008). The possession and use of items such as soap, towels, toothbrushes, toothpaste, washbasins, and white cotton sheets were installed in Mongolian homes and subject to an inspection regime of spot-checks and penalties20. The households judged to be « best » by the new criteria received awards, and the « worst » marks of shame and humiliation. As Ines Stolpe notes (Ibid. : 77), socialist competition (sotsialist uraldaan) was a key principle in these projects of normative engineering, and, surprisingly perhaps, this competitive aspect came to be popular among most rural people. The most successful families « greeted the state inspectors by building social ties with them and creating a festive atmosphere. Family members displayed their newest pastoral products and dressed in their finest clothes » (Marzluf 2017 : 151). Households became accustomed to the visits of collective officials of all sorts, senior and junior, as part of the operation of the negdel, as well as other co-workers and friends. The Mongolian home was reshaped in this era, then, with novel items installed within and alongside old forms, and householders held to new standards of modernist respectability, including cleanliness and generous everyday hospitality. The hospitality etiquette of the old elite may have been the source for the documentation of « tradition », but the hospitality of everyday practices reflected the values and conditions of life of the new culture of the rural collectives.

41Julian Pitt-Rivers argued that hospitality rituals « might all be considered as “rites of incorporation”, a variety of the rites of passage through which an old status is abandoned and a new one acquired. In this case it is the status of stranger which is lost and that of community member which is gained » (1977 : 96). This is a suggestive point. But rather than the incorporation of the universal figure of « the stranger » into something conceived of as the « community », in the Mongolian case we might say that hospitality rituals enact the incorporation of the visitor into the micro-sovereignty of the host within a wider political order. This is a form of « hospitality » produced by forms of power in which subjects of an encompassing sovereignty are required to enact their respective statuses as respectable householder and respectful visitor, ranked into seniors and juniors, as part of a wider project of governance aimed at ensuring orderly public conduct. In the pre-revolutionary period, this wider cosmopolitical order was Buddhist and aristocratic ; in the contemporary era it is national, and framed in terms of Mongolian culture and tradition. In both eras, order is manifest in the rituals of domestic hospitality, in which hosts and guests are physically arranged into positions of relative seniority and subordination, as a mode of inclusion into the cosmopolitical and sociopolitical orders of the day.

  • 21 For Sherry Ortner, the setting for hospitality is very explicitly « the community » (1978 : 63). Ho (...)
  • 22 This is not to say, of course, that the practices and norms of everyday hospitality have not create (...)

42Hospitality, then, can be seen not as a timeless feature of a holistic culture but as a product and producer of sociopolitical order, and an artefact of historical projects of governance. This could be thought of, following Sherry Ortner (1978), as generative of integration, but not the integration of a reified « culture » or « society » conceived of in autonomous or systemic terms21. Rather it is the product of historical projects of rulership and governance that ordered social lives in line with the interests of power-holders. The integration generated by everyday hospitality was shaped by ruling elites and reflected the wider cosmopolitical orders that supported them. Good subjects should conduct themselves properly ; and should offer the appropriate amenities to travellers, just as they should honour their parents and respect their seniors22.

43The notion that hospitality represents practices constitutive of political subjects returns us to Kant’s formula for world citizenship critiqued by Derrida, in which hospitality is a matter « not of philanthropy but of right » (Kant 1903 [1795] : 137) within a project of global governance, in which men are « citizens of the word » (Ibid.). In Kant’s vision, universal hospitality is a condition of worldwide « cosmopolitan » law, and is a legal and constitutional matter rather than an essential human trait. Hospitality, then, becomes another normative project that elites and power-holders may seek to initiate, propagate, and regulate. Its exploration offers an insight into the nature of such ordering projects.

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Notes

1 Stephen F. Gudeman (2001 : 80), for example, notes that accepted anthropological wisdom has made reciprocity the primary building block of community.

2 The « unit of hospitality » is usually, but not necessarily, the encampment as such, but is often a form of stem family – a parental couple and one or more children with their spouses and children, if any (Humphrey & Sneath 1999 : 139-147). In most cases the encampment is comprised of one such stem family living in several gers, but may (particularly in summer) include other such families, friends, or dependents. Generally each stem family is counted as an örkh (« household ») and could be a unit of hospitality.

3 This is the interrogative form of the verb « to be » (baikh).

4 I use the term « everyday hospitality » to indicate the practices directed at all visitors in this way, so as to set it aside from other kinds of hospitality, such as that directed toward specifically invited guests, and visitors for special occasions such as the lunar New Year (Tsagaan Sar).

5 Annette Weiner writes, for example, « Generations of anthropologists, not looking back far enough into Western economic history, followed Malinowski and […] continue to take for granted, as did Smith and others, that there is an innate, mystical, or natural autonomy in the workings of reciprocity » (1992 : 43).

6 Bronislaw Malinowski (1922 : 88-91) actually did compare kula valuables with crown jewels, in passing, as Annette Weiner notes.

7 Harry Powell agrees that « The kula was traditionally forbidded to the commoners » (1951 : 14).

8 This is the subject of a forthcoming monograph provisionally entitled The Savage Noble. The Anthropology of Aristocracy and Revisionist Readings of Power.

9 The phrase ezen bolokh (« to become an ezen ») means to vouch for something or someone, or to take responsibility for them. This is the usage in which it most resembles our term « patron » – as someone who backs a junior. Another example of the similarity of the concepts of ezen and patron is the Mongolian term ezengüi khüükhed (« a child without an ezen »), which means an illegitimate child.

10 Much of the historical material we have concerning the rituals for local deities concerns senior secular and ecclesiastical figures. It is more difficult to know how commoners were expected to relate to spiritual « masters of the land », or how they viewed the ovoo ceremonies. It seems that, in the xviith century, the rites explicitly reference status hierarchy, with royal, noble, and common peoples worshipping at different ovoos placed in different locations, although this separation seems to have faded away in later centuries (Sneath 2007b). And it may be that, for commoners and others who were involved more peripherally in the rites than senior figures, the ways of local deities and how to treat them was considered specialist knowledge that they were not required to possess. Owen Lattimore remarks : « Though all Mongols have a deep feeling of reverence for the obo [ovoo] it is a vague feeling. I have never met a man who could explain in detail the various acts of worship » (1941 : 245).

11 Anthropologists, both Soviet and Western, rejected the use of the term « feudalism » for a number of « nomadic pastoral societies », including Mongolia. Boris Vladimirtsov’s classic 1934 study of Mongolian society had described it as « nomadic feudalism », but this approach gave way to the advance of a tribal discourse based on the notion of kinship society that reproduced the old conceptual apartheid by which the colonised were subject to the primitivist language of tribe and chief. In retrospect, the similarities between the Mongolian aristocratic order and that of medieval Europe are striking, and are discussed at length in David Sneath (2007a).

12 Commoners were subject to quite tight control ; they required permission, for example, to be allowed to live in an encampment other than the one that they were allocated to (Riasanovsky 1965 [1937] : 113).

13 The full passage reads : « If nobles holding offices and tabunangs (« son-in-law of a noble »), junior nobles and tabunangs, demchi (« head of 40 households »), shigülengge (« head of 20 households ») beat a person for the sake of the lords’ (ejed) administration, law and order, they are not guilty, even if they beat someone to death ».

14 This distributed aristocracy and what I term « the headless state » is explored in David Sneath (2007a).

15 The influential poem Minii nutag [= My Homeland] written by Dashdorjiin Natsagdorj, one of the founders of Mongolian literature, was published in the journal Mongol Ardyn Ündesnii Soyolyn Zam [= National Cultural Path of the Mongolian People] in 1934, for example, and later work included Gaitav’s book Saikhan ekh oron (1978).

16 In many ways, the hospitality practices that Gilmour describes resembled those set out in the 100 rules and later practices. He mentions the customary calls of visitors approaching an encampment for residents to control the guard dogs, the seating of persons depending on status within the ger, the exchange of snuff bottles, the routine serving of tea, and the hosts offering a plate of dairy products as snacks, in ways that closely resemble later practice (1883 : 126-128).

17 James Gilmour’s writings also give a sense of the range of people likely to be « on the road » at the time, and as such the potential recipients of everyday hospitality. Caravans of both camels and ox-carts were common (1883 : 125, 1893 : 77, 78, 88, 91, 93, 94) ; so were lamas and pilgrims, the poor often on foot (1883 : 121, 1893 : 142, 130). He writes, for example, « a vast amount of foot travelling is done. A large proportion of the travelling on foot is that of poor men who go on religious pilgrimages. Foot-travellers, for the most part, trust to the hospitality of the inhabitants of the districts through which they pass for lodgings » (1883 : 121). As is the case today, some visitors were looking for straying livestock (1893 : 218).

18 James Gilmour’s comments seem to match the remarks of Sechen Jagchid, who grew up in Inner Mongolia in the 1920s and 1930s : « Good treatment of travelers seem to be a Mongol custom from ancient times, at least from the period of Chinggis Khan. Still, a stranger who approaches a yurt on the steppe often gets the impression that a Mongol host is quite cool or reserved compared with people in other parts of the world » (Jagchid & Hyer 1979 : 131).

19 For an account of the Buryat variant of the collective farm and the role of leadership in managing wealth, see Caroline Humphrey (1983 : 300-372).

20 Ines Stolpe notes : « the 1969-71 cultural campaign […] proclaimed the “cultured family” (soyolch ail, sometimes soyolch suur’) as its motto. Families could earn this title plus a red pennant by scoring eighteen points for being in possession of items such as a washstand, tooth brushes, towels, a radio, a home library and newspaper subscriptions. Organized as a competition, this part of the campaign became very popular » (2008 : 72).

21 For Sherry Ortner, the setting for hospitality is very explicitly « the community » (1978 : 63). However, for her, this is « a community of relatively self-contained units, each protective of its property and its social boundaries » (Ibid. : 68), which therefore requires integration. Hospitality, then, is a means of achieving this.

22 This is not to say, of course, that the practices and norms of everyday hospitality have not created and maintained social networks in countless ways, or that obligations have not been appropriated as sources of value and satisfaction by those concerned.

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List of illustrations

Title Conceptual division of space within a ger
Caption (diagram David Sneath)
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References

Bibliographical reference

David Sneath, “Everyday Hospitality in Mongolia”L’Homme, 231-232 | 2019, 67-88.

Electronic reference

David Sneath, “Everyday Hospitality in Mongolia”L’Homme [Online], 231-232 | 2019, Online since 03 January 2022, connection on 29 March 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/lhomme/35537; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/lhomme.35537

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About the author

David Sneath

University of Cambridge – Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (United Kingdom) – ds114@cam.ac.uk

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