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MongoliaTraditional Patterns
Mongolia's modern rulers, using common Marxist categories,
describe society before 1921 as "feudal." The term, although not
totally accurate, better fits traditional Mongolian society than
it does many other societies that have undergone communistdirected revolutions. In traditional Mongolian society, almost
all statuses were hereditary. Most exchanges were embedded in
long-term, multifaceted social relations rather than transacted
in an impersonal market through money; the political system was
based on a hierarchy of all-embracing service owed to hereditary
overlords; and such limited formal education and social mobility
as existed took place within the monasteries of Tibetan Buddhism,
or Lamaism (see Glossary).
The society was dominated by
hereditary nobles, who claimed descent from Chinggis Khan and
governed the commoners. The nobles were vassals of the Manchu
emperors of China's Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), and the hierarchy
continued down to the level of the common herders
(see Caught Between the Russians and the Manchus
, ch. 1). In this system,
people owed broad and ill-defined service, including military
duty, the temporary provision of horses to those traveling on
official business, and the supply of sheep and livestock on both
fixed and special occasions to their overlords. Mongol social
life was marked by an elaborate etiquette that expressed degrees
of hierarchy and deference through words and gestures.
Above the level of the herding camp, Mongols were enrolled in
larger groups that had exclusive rights to use of territory and
were, in their formal structure, hereditary military units. Such
groups, the names of which varied from place to place and from
time to time (banner, aymag, and so forth), were
established by political rulers, and people originally were
allocated to them regardless of kinship or preexisting social
bonds. Membership in such groups was thus fundamentally a
political status. Although Mongols recognized exogamous lineages
based on patrilineal descent, lineages were not political or
property-holding groups, and their membership commonly was spread
over several territorial groups.
Commerce was in the hands of foreign merchants, most of them
Chinese. Traditional Mongols exhibited a cavalier disdain for
money and practiced careful pecuniary calculation. Mongol
aristocrats ran up huge debts to Chinese and Russian merchants,
and when pressed by creditors, tried to exact more livestock or
services from their dependent commoners. The merchants controlled
the interface between the internal Mongol economy--which operated
largely with the social mechanisms of reciprocity and
redistribution--and the larger market economy, and they profited
in the conversion from one economic sphere of exchange to the
other. During the 1920s, foreign merchants were expelled from
Mongolia, and the debts owed to them were repudiated.
The only alternative to the all-embracing feudal system of
subordination was provided by the Tibetan Buddhist church, which
recruited both young boys and men as monks, or lamas, and offered
careers to those with talent. Although rational and bureaucratic
in its organization and accounting, the Buddhist church was
distinctly otherworldly, not interested in progress, and, with
some justification, was considered the major obstacle to the
modernization of Mongolian life. Between 1925 and 1939, it was
destroyed as a significant political and social force
(see Modern Mongolia, 1911-84
, ch. 1;
Religion
, this ch.).
The structure of traditional Mongolian society consisted of a
large number of equivalent units: herding camps; basic-level
territorial units; and Buddhist monasteries, integrated only
through their common subordination to political superiors and the
shared values of Tibetan Buddhism and Mongol ethnicity. Most of
the population occupied only a few occupational roles; herders
and ordinary monks accounted for more than 90 percent of the
population. Hereditary aristocrats--8 percent of the population--
occupied a larger range of occupational roles and offices as
political leaders and administrators; so did the higher monks,
with their more differentiated internal organization. The society
was traditional in its preference for status relations over
contractual ones, for ascribed statuses over achieved ones, for
functionally diffuse over functionally specific organization, and
in its very low levels of division of labor.
Data as of June 1989
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