• 2  Larry Moses & Stephen A. Halkovic, Introduction to Mongolian History and Culture, Bloomington, Ind (...)

3The OUTREACH project is about supporting the transition of education in rural settings following the collapse of Soviet influence in 1992 and Mongolia’s subsequent entry into a free-market economy. Initially, post-1992, the proposed ‘transition’ resulted in increased poverty. Mongolia is the only state which has survived into the modern era “where nomadic people and a pastoral economy are co-terminous with a contiguous nation state”.2 Pastoral herding is not just a form of economic behaviour, it is a way of life and helps shape a perception of surroundings which leads to an astonishing mobility of mind. For example, there is no ‘real estate’ but rather ‘mobile property’ (i.e. livestock). Livestock are an agency as such, with needs that have to be met by herders more frequently than would be necessary when maintaining ‘dead property’. In order to intensify livestock production, herders have to extensify their radius of movement – the more often the pasture is changed, the more efficient the pastoralism.

• 3  Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khaan and the Making of the Modern World, New York, Three Rivers Press, (...)
• 4  Thomas T. Allsen, Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia, London, Cambridge University Press, 2001

4Mongolia has a rich and varied history. Chinggis (Genghis) Khaan (1162-1227) forged a nation from disparate groups of nomads across a landscape the size of Western Europe and created an empire which spread from the Yellow Sea in the East to Vienna in the West. The Mongolian Empire was in one sense a clash between nomadic and sedentary cultures.3 Allsen suggests that the Chinggis Empire allowed intercultural and intercontinental mixing of cultures and ideas4. Although, as Weatherford argues, sedentary culture subsequently ‘won’, Mongolia is the only country left in the world where the ‘nomadic’ way of life, until the early 1980s, was sustained by the majority of the people. Despite ongoing urbanisation most of the Mongolians now living in towns have their biographical roots in pastoral herding. Hence, even urban settings are shaped by the nomadic in ways that seem unique in terms of frequent, if not omnipresent, interactions between the nomadic and the sedentary spheres of Mongolian society. As Khazanov observes:

• 6  Galen Strawson, “Against narrativity”, Ratio, 2004, XVII.

7Sociocultural theory is a Western construct, an explanatory framework for cultural patterns associated with settled, largely urban, lifestyles. A sociocultural lens that is substantially relational is an important characteristic of this framework: situations, structures and schemata are defined relative to each other. We can legitimately talk about things as ‘context-dependent’ since context is something we define as the backdrop to behaviour. Context is typically seen as part of an historical continuum where the majority of people view the world diachronically, through long-term narratives that have a past, present and future.6 Inevitably, this leads to a degree of pre-specification for given situations relative to social institutions, which in a structural sense are enduring, even if their internal dynamics are subject to frequent change.

• 7  Caroline Humphrey & Urgunge Onon, Shamans and Elders, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996, p. 76.
• 8  Humphrey, Onon, p. 105.

8For example, the Western notion of a ‘school’ is built around physical and organisational infrastructure such as classrooms, curricula, pedagogies, examination systems and so on. For Mongolian nomads, the ‘school’, embodying the values of a sedentary culture, is seen as parallel to, and co-existent with, nomadic culture. The nomadic cosmology of the Daur people of north-eastern Mongolia is not related to abstract thinking about a world which can be separated from the self (and therefore transmitted through a school curriculum), but derived from ‘… direct personal engagement with objects and processes’, from different ways of engaging with the world as ‘landscapes’.7 This situates humanity in many versions of the world, as it were ‘slatted’ over one another, each one elaborated and extended in such a way as to offer different causal understandings of human society and personality. Thus, conventional social divisions are not the only means of differentiation; people, individually and collectively, are likenesses of the world outside.8

• 9  Erika Taube & Manfred Taube, Schamanen und Rhapsoden: Die geistige Kultur der alten Mongolei, Leip (...)

9In Mongolia about half of the population does not lead a settled, largely urban lifestyle. The ‘landscapes’ inhabited by Mongolian nomads are constituted through their engagement with them. These landscapes are enacted or performed and brought into being through that engagement, rather than being seen as something pre-existing. In this sense, the Mongolian sociocultural lens has co-constitutional characteristics. Here both meaning and context emerge from people’s interactions with their environment. Out of this both meaning and context may subsequently be described. In other words, situations are not necessarily pre-defined and outcomes are not necessarily pre-specified.  In co-constitutional situations, things are re-configured as needed and not in anticipation of something happening. Structures often emerge. This is reflected in the way that the culture encodes reality and history. Nomadic songs and dances are formed through what Taube & Taube and Ong call ‘rhapsodizing’.9 They are never simply ‘reproduced’; rather they are created in performance which enables a co-constitution of form and content. Ong argues that this form of cultural production is characteristic of oral cultures and it requires an intimate relationship with the human lifeworld.

• 11  Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, London, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
• 12  Jadambaa, B., “Shuteltsen Bagtsrakhuin Uzel ba Khumuunii Khugjil” in Mongol Ulsyn Bolovsrolyn Ikh (...)

12In contrast to the view of the ‘externality’ of context, the understanding of ‘knowledge’ being situated in a close engagement with the lifeworld, requires the co-constitution of ‘context’ through action and embodiment. The nomadic landscape is a ‘smooth space’ of different landscapes.11The Mongolian’s traditional understanding of space is different to the common Western idea that space is an empty place or container with nothing inside.  Here space isn’t ‘an empty place’, it is a ‘super interrelation’ defined by a potentiality. Potential is that which unifies the place, the time, the quality and the quantity of objects or phenomena. This potentiality is general and relative; it is abstract and real; it is nature and characteristics; it is moment and phenomena, it contains visible and invisible appearances which might change or take shape respectively when their time has come. An object or a phenomenon is ‘potential’, because it exists only in interrelation or interconnection with other objects or phenomena at a certain time.  Time, in turn, is only to be recognised (and even imagined) through movement in space. An object or a phenomenon exists in the interaction between arga and bilig. Arga is the visible aspect of the potentiality of objects and phenomena, bilig is the invisible aspect. In Confucian thought these relate to yin and yang. Instead of ‘objects’ or ‘phenomena’ pre-existing (in an objective sense), they come into being through the interaction of arga and bilig.12

• 13  Ines Stolpe, “’Bolovsrol’, ’surgan khümüüjil’ gedeg ügsiin ukhagdakhuun” [On the meaning of Mongol (...)

14understandings of human development as ‘enlightenment’ and the inherent potential to ‘become human’ through constant change. This process is seen as open and unpredictable; one knows when one has become ‘enlightened’ when one arrives at the state of humanity. For the Western way, where there is no sense of the co-constitutional aspects of arga and bilig, human development is seen in part to be an outcome of ‘education’ – something that is predictable and measurable. In contrast, the Mongolian concept of education deals with the open-endedness of the educational process. The goal is not ‘outcomes-based’, but rather to be imagined as a dynamic balance, which enables the individual the flexibly to interact with his or her environment. It is seen as a process, not as a destination. In education, arga embraces not only the meaning of the visible but also of ‘teaching methodology’. The goal of acting out arga is to enable the student to deal with the visible and the invisible, to develop what the Mongolians call ‘an eye for the invisible’, the potentiality.13

• 14  Patrick Dillon, “Creativity, wisdom and trusteeship – niches of cultural production” in A. Craft, (...)

16It is important to emphasise that we are not dealing with absolutes or dualities. The relational and co-constitutional sociocultural lenses are different, not oppositional or mutually exclusive. The challenge is to find a framework that accommodates both. Dillon has proposed an ecological approach to culture that is flexible and adaptive and thus can simultaneously embrace different stances.14

• 15  John Odling-Smee, Kevin Laland, and Marcus Feldman, Niche construction: The Neglected Process in E (...)

20Niches are constructed through people’s traits and characteristics, broadly their behaviour, interacting with the components of their environment. Evolutionary biologists call the traits and characteristics features, and the components of the environment factors.15 Niche construction occurs when an organism modifies its feature-factor relationship. For the arguments made here, niche construction may be thought of simply as the mutually transformative interactions between individuals and groups and the environments in which the interactions take place.

• 16  Eric L. Jones, Cultures Merging: A historical and Economic Critique of Culture, Princeton, Princet (...)

21In cultural ecology, cultural dialogues are an important mechanism through which feature-factor relationships are modified. Cultural dialogues involve interactions between information and processes associated with artefacts, tools, practices (e.g. designing, cooking), modes of communication (e.g. symbols, language), lifestyles and combinations of these (e.g. agriculture as a combination of tools, processes and lifestyle). Cultural dialogues are affected by and shape customs, norms and values. Cultural values adapt to opportunity: behaviours once unthinkable may subsequently, and surprisingly rapidly, become new norms. Thus every fixed assumption about society alters, at least if one takes a long enough perspective, and whatever forces prompt cultural change, all the values of society do not respond simultaneously.16 This fluidity of culture is reflected in co-constituting interactions between features and factors, behaviour and environment, thought and language, collectively giving rise to cultural patterns.

• 17  Patrick Dillon & Tony Howe, “An epistemology of presence and reconceptualisation in design educati (...)
• 18  Ilya Prigogine, The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature, London, The Free Pre (...)

22Cultural patterns will have novel properties that transcend the properties of their constituent parts, and behave in ways that cannot be predicted from the behaviour of the constituents. This is an important adjunct to niche construction. It helps avoid the criticism that ecological approaches are essentially deterministic. We can describe niches retrospectively, and niche construction enables us to make broad predictions about processes and directions of change, but precise configurations of the feature-factor relationship are emergent. Dillon & Howe and Osberg & Biesta call this coming into presence.17 Drawing on the work of Prigogine, the notion of perturbation in complex systems can be translated into the epistemological notion of ‘incoming of the other’.18 What emerges both transcends (in that it is more than what came before) and subsumes (in that it includes what came before) the prior configurations.  Reality is revealed through active construction, a coming into presence, not fully unexpected, but of unpredictable configuration or actualisation, like in the potentiality of a mosaic.

• 19  Prigogine, 1997.

23A living system is defined as a variety of constituents, parts or events which co-constitute each other in such a way as to form a working unit or unified whole. A ‘constituent’ only becomes a constituent through its definition within the system. Conversely, the system can only be understood as a ‘system’ through the emergent properties of its constituents. Constituent parts do not ‘exist’ outside of systems, and ‘systems’ do not exist independently of their constituent parts. In other words, systems have an internal ‘logic’ that is a property of its interconnected sub-systems - socio-logic, eco-logic, and so on. Systems theory is most commonly associated with the physical sciences where components and their interconnections may be specified precisely. Some physical situations may be modelled as equilibrium systems where external influences, perturbations, are accommodated through processes of positive feedback. Prigogine describes ‘far from equilibrium’ conditions that arise in some systems where responses to external influences give rise to new forms of self-organisation and emergent features.19 This is so in cultural ecological systems because human behaviour is inherently unpredictable.

• 20  Osberg, D. & Biesta, G.J.J., “Complexity, knowledge and the incalculable: the epistemological impl (...)
• 21  Rhys cited in Anne B. Simpson, Territories of the Psyche: The Fiction of Jean Rhys, New York, Houn (...)
• 22  Georges H., Mead, The Philosophy of the Present, La Salle, Illinois, Open Court, 1932.
• 23  Galen Strawson, “Against narrativity”, Ratio, 2004, XVII.
• 24  Ong, Orality and Literacy, 1982.

24Osberg & Biesta have described this as a response to an incoming that is wholly ‘other’ to the responding system.20 The response both transcends and subsumes the prior configurations and thus there is a sense in which the past is represented in the present. The novelist Jean Rhys characterises the response as ‘what was is’:  “The big idea—well, I’m blowed if I can be sure what it is. Something to do with time being an illusion, I think. I mean the past exists—side by side with the present, not behind it; that what was—is.”21 The new configuration is always one amongst a number of possible alternatives. In other words, there is always an unpredictable element to what emerges, and what emerges is not pre-determined. The ‘chance’, the alternatives that were not adopted by the system at each perturbation, cannot be ‘read’ from the system (i.e. – the alternatives that are not actualised are lost). Thus the history of the system cannot be read in linear, temporal terms. Prigogine calls this property ‘time irreversibility’. The notion of time reversibility presents a conundrum: that the history of a system cannot be recovered accurately, yet we are continually producing robust histories. This apparent contradiction is resolved by drawing on Mead’s idea that historical accounts of the past always give us a story of the past from the perspective of the present (i.e. actualisation).22 There is no past that exists independently in itself; for each new present we must rewrite the past. This explains why people who have predominantly episodic (non-narrative) personalities are nevertheless comfortable within a culture that has strong historical narratives.23 Here, following Ong, the ‘narrative’ does not re-present the past as a facsimile, it re-creates it, through performing it. Once fixed within the (literate) approach of the sedentary, the past is literally a facsimile.24

• 26  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, London, Routledge, 1962.
• 27  Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology and the Science of Mind, Cambridge, MA, Harvar (...)
• 28  Thompson, p. 248.

27To ‘belong to the world’ means that one’s primary way of relating to things is neither sensory and reflexive, nor cognitive or intellectual, rather bodily and skilful. Merleau-Ponty describes this as ‘motor intentionality’ - in grasping something we direct ourselves towards it and thus our action is intentional.26 But the action does not refer to the object (Bedeutung) by representing its objectives and determinate features; it refers to it pragmatically in the light of contextual motor goals affected by one’s body. In picking up a tea-cup to drink from it, one identifies it not by its objective location in space but by one’s egocentric relation to one’s hands; one grasps it in light of the goal of sipping from it.27 Thus, ‘space’ (both in the sense of ‘objects’, but also of ‘landscape’) ‘elicits appropriate actions’, that is it affords certain behaviours. The world is projected by the subject (Merleau-Ponty’s ‘intentional arc’), which integrates ‘sensibility’ and ‘motility’, ‘perception’ and ‘action’. The ‘intentional arc’ and ‘being-in-the-world’ are neither purely first-person (subjective) nor purely third-person (objective), neither mental nor physical. They are existential structures prior to and more fundamental than these abstractions.28

• 29  Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, London, Blackwell, 1980.

28If ‘landscape’ offers affordances to pastoral herders, then the ‘performativity of space’, requires the ‘intentional arc’ and ‘being-in-the-world’, but both of these are constrained by relationships between the ‘Given’ and the ‘Made’.29 A parallel for the Given and the Made would be the visible and the potential. Accidental space (where the unexpected happens) and performative space are interrelated, but the Given constrains the Made. In oral cultures this is manifest in individuals interacting with other individuals in order to think, to remember, and to recall. Thus, language is a mode of action, not a countersign of thought among oral communicators and thought is nested in speech rituals not in texts. Oral communicators, in order to remember thoughts must think of them in ways which can be coded memorably. This is done through performance rituals which provide the vehicle and process, not the content. The ‘event’ from which a narrative emerges is reflected through the ‘being-in-the-world’ of the individual’s (or a community’s) enactment of the event.

• 30  Weatherford, Genghis Khaan and the Making of the Modern World, 2004.
• 31  Weatherford.

29Chinggis Khaan’s life is documented in the partly legendary Secret History of the Mongols, but beyond there is no concrete ‘trace’. Despite this he has left a huge spiritual heritage - where did this legacy come from? Weatherford argues that in order to understand Chinggis, we need an “archaeology of movement.”30 ‘Movement’ is encoded by oral communicators through creating larger-than-life heroes. Colourless heroes cannot be remembered. Colourless personalities cannot survive oral mnemonics. In this discussion of space, Chinggis Khaan has moved from phenomenological (performed) space, through ordered space into phase-space and metaphor, because he has ‘become the path’ (the colourful larger than life hero who is memorable), through the archaeology of movement, the trace, not the artefact.31 Chinggis Khaan exists as cartography of movement, not as a corporeality.

• 32  Dillon & Howe, “An epistemology of presence and reconceptualisation in design education”, 2007.

30In relational educational systems experience of the real world is replaced increasingly by pedagogies based first on presentation and then re-presentation of the real world in the classroom. In the first, children are taught about a particular way of life, in the second, they are helped to acquire universal knowledge of a real world outside the school that is re-presented within the school.32 To some extent the direction of change in Mongolia (during socialist and post-socialist times) is similar. However, the school in country districts (soum) is the interface between ‘an education’ and the maintenance and coherence of the nomadic way of life. It provides centres of exchange for nomadic families through maintaining traditional cultural forms: song, dance, wrestling, archery and horse-racing. In this sense the school has become ‘co-constituted’ through enactment. Mongolians appreciate that school offers a ‘surplus’ which cannot be acquired in the educational settings of socialisation. They have ‘Mongolised’ those parts of the Western system that were culturally inappropriate, re-framed them by acting differently in practice. Despite this there is still a separation between the formal education offered in schools and the non-formal education associated with pastoral herding – if only through the fact that higher education is only available within urban centres and this requires translocation of students. There is thus a tension between relational and co-constitutional approaches.

• 33  Ines Stolpe, Schule versus Nomadismus? Interdependenzen von Bildung und Migration in der modernen (...)

31The Buddhist/Lamaist tradition may offer some pointers about overcoming the tension. This tradition is based on sutras – the interface between the literate and the oral. The usual didactic is that the child learns Tibetan characters and reads the texts in Tibetan while learning some of them by heart. At the beginning this happens without knowing Tibetan language. The concept of learning by heart is thought to be useful as it leads to internalisation, and internalisation is seen as a precondition to ‘dive’ into the concepts. Once the child has assimilated the analytic knowledge contained in the word, the child then enters into dialogue with the teacher to develop the understanding of the word in order to develop wisdom. Wisdom is not contained in the sutras, in the logos, in the word; the lama provides the performance of the knowledge to bring into wisdom. The wisdom comes out of the walking, in conjunction with the lama. The teacher provides the performative action to bring the knowledge into being (scaffolding, blossoming, unfolding, etc).33

• 34  Humphrey & Urgunge, Shamans and Elders, p. 85.
• 35  Patrick Dillon, “Creativity, wisdom and trusteeship – niches of cultural production”, pp. 105-118.

33Where tensions exist in the West between ‘education’ and ‘becoming human’, the Mongolian experience suggests a possibility of reframing the educational process as one of a ‘journey in a landscape’, rather than as a ‘journey through a landscape’. If we follow the example of the Daur people of North-eastern Mongolia, who are situated in ‘many versions of the world’, then engaging through the ‘divisions of the world’ through likenesses could ‘supersede those generated by purely social rules of identity, membership and succession’.34 We would like to see a relational and co-constitutional framework which is itself both relational and co-constitutional. In other words, an approach to development and education that is not ‘impositional’ nor ‘transitional’, but rather ecological in the sense that it is locally adaptive giving rise to niches of cultural production which ‘reflect the particularity, subtlety, idiosyncrasy, and patina of locality at scales, at time frames, and through modes of organisation appropriate to those places and the enterprises within them’.35