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MongoliaScience, Progress, and Tradition
By the end of the twentieth century, Mongolia's achievements
in economic development and popular education will have produced
deep, and probably irreversible, changes in the structure of
society. After several decades of devotion to increasing the
indices of economic growth and brooking no disagreement with its
policies or methods, the ruling Mongolian People's Revolutionary
Party, responding in part to trends toward political reform in
the Soviet Union, was encouraging greater public discussion and
criticism of past practices. Mongolian leaders seemed ready to
step back and to consider the price of progress and to discuss
the future course of the country's development. As indicated by
the 1989 moves to reevaluate the prerevolutionary past and its
heroes, the reconciliation of progress with tradition and
national identity is likely to be a major theme of discussion in
the 1990s.
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Mongolia's contemporary society, unlike its history, has not
attracted much scholarly attention in the West. The best sources
available to the English-speaking reader are Mongolia,
The People's Republic of Mongolia, and articles in the
Far Eastern Economic Review, all by Alan J. Sanders;
Robert Rupen's Mongols of the Twentieth Century and How
Mongolia Is Really Ruled; George G.S. Murphy's Soviet
Mongolia; and Urgunge Onon's Mongolian Heroes of the
Twentieth Century. History of the Mongolian People's
Republic, translated by William A. Brown and Urgunge Onon,
has useful sections on society and the environment. Articles by
Daniel Rosenberg in Mongolian Studies provide relevant
material on modern Mongolian society. Owen Lattimore's Nomads
and Commissars is somewhat out of date, but very readable and
useful. A helpful, and more recent, source is Thomas D. Allen's
article in National Geographic. The traditional culture is
set out in Sechin Jagchid and Paul Hyer's Mongolia's Culture
and Society, Lattimore's Mongol Journeys, and Herbert
H. Vreeland's Mongol Community and Kinship Structure. The
U.S. Joint Publications Research Service publishes occasional
translations of Mongolian and Russian statistical summaries and
yearbooks on Mongolia. Mongolian broadcasts and newspapers are
translated and appear in the U.S. Foreign Broadcast Information
Service Daily Report: East Asia. Readers also are directed
to the American Bibliography of Slavic and East European
Studies, the Bibliography of Asian Studies, and
Citation Index for new publications on Mongolian society.
(For further information and complete citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of June 1989
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