This research was done in collaboration with fellow colleagues from the ACMS fieldcourse: Dono; Nancy; Stephany and Tumi.
We all have cultural blinders. When doing anthropological work, or simply when one encounters a person from a different background than ours, we must engage in reflexivity and consider the ways in which our background shapes our worldview, assumptions, understandings and ways of life. This goes beyond mere “open mindedness”, it is about celebrating and acknowledging the multiplicity of experiences and worldviews, and importantly, recognizing that ours is infinitely narrow. After having been in Mongolia for a week, it became evident that I came here assuming that semi-nomadic folks might have different concepts of “belonging” to place or concepts of “home” given their lifestyles. Rather than just noticing my assumption, I decided to engage and negotiate with it. I was also curious to know how “home” played out in the experiences of people who migrated from one part of Mongolia to another while having a semi-nomadic background. Along with a few of my colleagues from the American Center for Mongolian Studies field-course, we started to ask: in what ways does the definition of home change with mobility?
I think it is important to ask this question because we must investigate the “home” as a space beyond a sculpture of felt and wood but rather a space of symbolic meaning, reflective of cultural rules, values and grounded in multiple scales of geographies starting from the individual to the larger community and to a broader homeland. Particularly, our team was interested to see the continuum, forms of negotiation and changes that occur in people’s relationship to the concept of “home” and “homeland” as folks migrate internally across Mongolia. After conducting some interviews with families who had migrated internally, our team came to argue that the concept of home fits into peoples’ broader migration narrative, where migration does not start with seeking a home, but rather through migration people happen to expand the definition of “home” to include physical, emotional and other intangibles.
To ground our investigation in the broader literature, I want to briefly introduce you to David Harvey’s three categories of space (2005). I want to bring Harvey into the discussion because his theory helps us think about “home” thematically and at different layers, helping us to capture the multiple layers of experience. As you will see later on, people who migrated touch on different aspects of space, helping us capture what “home” means to them. The first way to understand space is through the cartesian approach, or what Harvey coins as “absolute space”: it refers to the material space, including descriptions, locations, measurements, and feelings related directly to the site (ibid.). The second way to understand space is through a “relative” approach, which includes our experience of time, distance, social conventions and emotions with the site. When thinking of “relative” space, we ask: “what do we believe this site to be?” (ibid.). This way of understanding space is important as it seeks to incorporate perspective (human or geographic). With “relative” space, we think of mobility, exchanges, circulation and flows of people and good into the site (and how long it takes them, how they get there, etc.) (ibid.). The third way of understanding space is as “relational space”, which seeks to capture relationships (ibid.). That is: space is not a dead surface, it is cushioned by stories, feelings, and other non-material things that occur in space such as sounds, odors, feelings (eg. fear) and social relations (ibid.). Thinking of “relational space” helps us to think about people’s experiences, the real experience, or the one filtrated through memory or imagination (ibid.).
The following section will outline the main themes concerning “home” that came out of the interviewees with folks who migrated, organizing by scale size, starting from the most intimate and expanding to include broader scales.
The Concept of Home
Home was described a relaxing and intimate space. The home allows its inhabitant to find peace, to find unity with oneself. This ‘peaceful’ and ‘serene’ notion of the house contrasts with the public and socially engaging notions. The ger, although a fundamentally shared space given the inexistence of divisions, provides shelter and closure away from the otherwise bare and open landscape of Mongolia. Yet, there are very blurry boundaries between the ger and the outer landscape when considering “home”: indeed, ‘home’ was intertwined between the geography of the ger and the beauty of nature in the countryside. All of our interviewees vouched for the beauty of the nature as one of the reasons they settled down, but also as one of the reasons why they feel happy where they are. One of our interviewees mentioned not feeling at home in his son’s apartment, although all the conveniences were present, given the constrictions of the apartment and of the city that were stressful and limiting to him. Moreover, the landscape of “nature” inspires relaxation which contrasts with the bustling city.
Home is a site where values and socialization occurs: this is what creates comfort, convenience and reproduces ways of being in space. As an “outsider” is was evident that I had never been socialized into behaving according to specific values linked with space: I had to “learn” what to do when engaging with the site of the “ger”, practices that my Mongolian colleagues did not have to “learn”. For instance, one has to bend down to fit inside the ger door and step over the door with their right foot. One goes clockwise inside the ger, and should not go through the poles as they represent the unity between the husband and the wife. The lefthand side of the ger is often reserved for guests, while the hosts sit on the right side. The altar, if one is present, is on the opposite side of the door. Polite ways include: not putting your hat lower than your torso if you are to remove it; or accepting and eating food that is offered. Above accepted behaviors, the home is a space where children grow up and where knowledge transmission occurs before they choose to leave.
Having migrated, folks described “home” as including multiple specific special sites that come to fit in a broader life narrative, where sites intertwine with important life milestones. These sites include place of birth, or places where one has met their life partner, where children have been born, and places where one has lived before. In Mongolian language, “birth place” and “homeland” merge into the word “nutag”, emphasizing where one comes from. This homeland often stays significant after migration because of relatives who continue to live there. Although interviewees mentioned specific sites as “home”, they also argued that home is intangible and not bounded to a specific place, but rather bounded to the broader land of Mongolia. Moving internally was still conceptualized as remaining “home”, as one stayed within their homeland.
Home is also understood via the lens of community and support networks. Family is a key unit for Mongolians, and home is often enmeshed with living relatives. The very own geography of the ger speaks of itself: a ger is shared by all its members and does not have any division. This geography reflects how family is often conceived as the smallest unit existing: there is no accurate translation into Mongolian for “individuality”. When asked about “individuality” and importance of “the individual”, our interviewees answered through the family unit. When migrating, a sense of home was lost by going away from relatives, but re-gained once one established a new social network, or when relatives moved in the area. Our interviewees mentioned moving to be with relatives or care for elderly, highlighting a great sense of responsibility and accountability that comes with community and the family unity. In the ger districts of Ulaanbaatar, community building also took the form of community projects, such as the Green Lake Project, which restored a dump site into a lake where families go skating or boating. The leader of this initiative was looking into creating a public space where people can meet one another, as public spaces are largely inexistent in ger districts, given the unplanned nature of the districts. For him, such project contributed to create a sense of community and dialogue across neighbors who often don’t see each other, as fences are built up everywhere in ger districts.
After migrating to a new area, home exists in the broader network of exchange across sites that continues to occur. By settling down in a new area, people maintain links with their previous sites, and increasingly so with cellphones and modern communication devices, facilitating a network of teaching, learning and product exchange. Indeed, people who migrated to the city send goods such as electronics, tobacco, fruits, flowers and other goods to the rural area, while people living in rural areas send meat, dairy products and other animal products. Children often spend summers out in the countryside where they engage with herding practices, and exchange worldviews with folks living in rural areas. An interviewee mentioned that he learned to read text messages from his grandchild, and that although he finds young people’s ways of talking offending, that one should adapt and be open to the changing society and worldviews. These exchanges of knowledge contribute to both the continuity of practices throughout migratory processes, but also exhibit negotiations and interferences with global cultural flows.
Finally, “home” exists and is fed by memory and imagination, creating a form of parallelism between important sites. One of our interviewee mentioned maintaining his birth place alive in his mind by thinking of the nature there as he was going through changes in season in his new living place. He mentioned that his birth place was always on his mind, even if he has not gone back for 10 years. These statements highlight not only the role of memory, but to a certain extent the role of imagination in conferring new attributes and creating new narratives attached to a place one remembers.
Other things to think about
For the families who moved from a rural area to another rural area, their semi-nomadic practices and herding lifestyle continued. That meant that they maintained a certain mobility spectrum throughout the year, averaging about 40 km: they have a seasonal migration where they move to different camps based on the time of the year. They usually return to these camps year after year. The winter camp is the most sheltered from winter storms, whereas the summer camp is often in lower pasturelands. Thus, we can say that “home” exists within a mobility spectrum.
I also want to highlight that while most folks who migrated hoped to see their living conditions improved, it was not always the case, nor was it a straightforward path. Some of the families we talked with had to sell their herd, including their best animals, to move or to respond to a family emergency. Families who moved multiple times had to start from scratch over and over again, which was extremely challenging for them and considerably reduced their livelihood. Throughout these migratory processes, these families also engaged in the process of recreating a home, although that was not an intentional nor their main pre-occupation: they were concerned with some of the reasons that pushed them to migrate, and concurrently had to engage with the process of home-creation as they migrated.
Conclusion
The concept of home fits into peoples’ broader migration narrative, where migration does not start with seeking a home, but rather through migration people happen to expand the definition of “home” to include physical, emotional and other intangibles.
PASSEGGIO 