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MongoliaFamily Structure
Mongolians, unlike the settled agriculturalists to the south,
have never valued complex extended families, and in the 1980s
most lived in nuclear families composed of a married couple,
their children, and perhaps a widowed parent. The high birthrate,
however, meant that large families were common; the 1979 census
showed 16 percent of families with 7 to 8 members and 11.8
percent with 9 or more (see
table 4, Appendix). Urban families
were larger than rural families, perhaps because rural people
tended to marry and to set up new households at younger ages. The
average size of rural families also may have reflected the high
rates of migration to the cities.
Among traditional herders, each married couple occupied its
own tent, and sons usually received their share of the family
herd at the time of their marriage. The usual pattern was for one
son, often, but not necessarily, the youngest, to inherit the
headship of the parental herd and tent, while other sons formed
new families with equivalent shares of the family herd; daughters
married out to other families. Adult sons and brothers often
continued their close association as members of the same herding
camp, but they could leave to join other herding camps whenever
they wished. In the 1980s, herders were likely to continue to
work closely with patrilineal kins, and many of the basic level
suuri, a subdivision of the
negdel (see Glossary)
herding camps, consisted of fathers and sons or groups of adult
brothers and their families. Herders no longer inherited
livestock from parents, but they did inherit membership in the
herding cooperative. If cooperative officials granted custody of
collectively owned animals and permission to hold privately owned
stock on a family basis, which was how private plots were
allotted in Soviet collective farms in the 1980s, then it would
be to the advantage of newly married sons to declare themselves
new families.
Family background continued to be an important component of
social status in Mongolia, and social stratification had a
certain implicit hereditary element. The shortage of skilled
labor and the great expansion of white-collar occupations in the
1970s and the 1980s meant that families belonging to the
administrative and professional elite were able to pass their
status on to their many children, who acquired educational
qualifications and professional jobs. At the other end of the
social scale, no one but the children of herders became herders.
Some herders' children, perhaps as many as half, moved into
skilled trades or administrative positions, while the rest
remained with the flocks.
Modern family life differed from that before the 1950s
because the children of most herders were away from their
families for most of year. Between the ages of seven and fifteen,
they stayed in boarding schools at the somon center. Most
Mongolian women were in the paid work force, and many (in 1989
there were no complete figures) infants and young children were
looked after on a daily or weekly basis in day-care centers or in
all-day or boarding kindergartens. The efforts to bring women
into the formal work force and to educate the dispersed herders
resulted in separation of parents and children on a large scale.
There was some historical precedent for this in the practice of
sending young boys to monasteries as apprentice lamas, which had
previously been the only way to obtain a formal education for
them.
Data as of June 1989
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