Dissertation in Cultural Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison 2020
Abstract:
“On Wooden Horses: Music, Animals, and Heritage in Post-socialist Mongolia” asks what there is to learn if we take Mongolian traditional musicians’ use of heritage as a form of future-making, rather than past-making. This dissertation is based on 20 months of participant-observation, musical apprenticeship, and interviews with musicians, music teachers, composers, heritage administrators, herders across rural and urban spaces in Ulaanbaatar and Dundgovi, Mongolia. My focus throughout the dissertation is on the practices, transmission, and institutions surrounding urtyn duu, or long-song, and a two stringed spike fiddle called the morin khuur, or horse-fiddle. These two intertwined aspects of Mongolian music are two of the first elements to have been included on Mongolia’s UNESCO List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding. Throughout the dissertation I present cases in which nonhumans actively participate in the transmission and performance of heritage music. The musicians I profile take a broad variety of nonhumans, including horses, mountains, and ghosts, as bearers of a shared heritage. I argue that designation as “cultural heritage” brings these more-than-human networks into modernist institutions, allowing for people to imagine outside of both capitalist and socialist modernities. In Mongolia, the effects of anthropogenic climate change are currently bringing desertification and winter storms that make the rural pastoral lifestyles increasingly less tenable each year. For many in the country, the loss of habitable land in rural pastures foregrounds a more dire potential, the degeneration of the planet beyond rejuvenation. These calamities come together with the economic and political crises caused by the disjuncture between the socialist and capitalist approaches to modernization, both of which were imposed on the country in the 20th century. Now, many Mongolian people are thinking of alternatives to modernity and looking to what might come after. Traditional musicians are reacting by using pastoral music and the more-than-human relations this music requires to rebuild connections with the pasture while there is still time, and to prepare their art to survive in a future where such a reparation may not be possible.