All about Mongolia
- Thread starter Aepsilons
- Start date
sahaliyan
FULL MEMBER
- Joined
- Jan 13, 2008
- Messages
- 742
- Reaction score
- -1
Famous Mongolian musician jantsannorov's music tsagaan suvraga(means white tower)
马头琴音乐【tsagaan suvraga】 白塔—在线播放—优酷网，视频高清在线观看
马头琴音乐【tsagaan suvraga】 白塔—在线播放—优酷网，视频高清在线观看
sahaliyan
FULL MEMBER
- Joined
- Jan 13, 2008
- Messages
- 742
- Reaction score
- -1
Another beautiful Mongol Morin khuur music,I'm a great fan of Morin khuur music
马头琴经典 草原四季_标清—在线播放—优酷网，视频高清在线观看
马头琴经典 草原四季_标清—在线播放—优酷网，视频高清在线观看
The Mongolian pastoral nomads relied on their animals for survival and moved their habitat several times a year in search of water and grass for their herds. Their lifestyle was precarious, as their constant migrations prevented them from transporting reserves of food or other necessities. Rarely having the luxury of surpluses to tide them through difficult times, they were extremely vulnerable to the elements. Heavy snows, ice, and droughts (judging from contemporary times, droughts afflicted Mongolia about twice a decade) jeopardized their flocks and herds and heightened their sense of fragility. The spread of disease among the livestock could also spell disaster. Herders hunted and farmed to a limited extent but were dependent on trade with China in times of crisis.
The most numerous and valuable of the Mongols' principal animals, sheep provided food, clothing, and shelter for Mongol families. Boiled mutton was an integral part of the Mongol diet, and wool and animal skins were the materials from which the Mongols fashioned their garments, as well as their homes. Wool was pressed into felt and then either made into clothing, rugs, and blankets or used for the outer covering of the gers [or tents].
Dried sheep dung was collected and used for fuel. Though the Mongols used wood and currently also use coal as fuel sources, animal dung was often the most readily available source. Women, and secondarily children, were responsible for gathering the dung.
Survival of young sheep (and other animals) was vital to maintaining the pastoral-nomadic way of life, and a significant responsibility for Mongol women was to coax the ewes to nurse their young.
Goats were not as pervasive as sheep in the Mongol flocks, but the Mongols consumed goat meat, milk, and cheese. The poor wore goat skins; and in more modern times, goats have become valuable as the source for cashmere.
Because goats were not as tough and needed more care than sheep, the Mongols kept fewer goats. In addition, because goats consume the grass to the root when they graze, they devastate the grasslands, resulting in desertification.
Mongols in traditional times therefore limited the number of goats in their flocks. Modern demand for cashmere caused many herders in the 1990s to increase their numbers of goats, potentially undermining the traditional ecological balance.
The reproduction of sheep and goats is essential for the survival of Mongol pastoralism. The animals are culled annually for food, hide, and skin, and many do not survive the harsh winters. Replenishment of the herds and flocks, therefore, is vital. But encouraging successful procreation and survival of the young requires tremendous skill and knowledge.
Another threat to the survival of the sheep and goats are wolves. They generally attacked the young but were also known to threaten adult animals. Herders kept and trained fierce dogs to protect the herds from such predators. In addition, the Mongols periodically went on hunts to cull the wolf population.
Yaks and oxen require excellent grazing grounds and cannot endure well in the deserts and other marginal areas. They are found primarily in the steppelands, and thus there are fewer of them than sheep or goats.
Yaks offer meat and milk, and the Mongols often use yak and ox carts to transport their belongings as they migrate from one region to another.
The Bactrian or two-humped camel permits the Mongols to transport heavy loads through the desert and other inhospitable terrain. The camel is invaluable not only for transporting the folded gers and other household furnishings when the Mongols move to new pastureland, but also to carry goods designed for trade.
A camel could endure the heat of the Gobi desert, could drink enormous quantities of water and then continue for days without liquid, required less pasture than other pack animals, and could extract food from the scruffiest shrubs or blades of grass — all ideal qualities for the daunting desert terrain of southern Mongolia.
In addition to the camel's importance for transport, the Mongols valued the animal's wool, drank its milk (which can also be made into cheese), and ate its meat. No wonder then that "in the Mongol epoch the camel enjoyed the highest esteem he was attain in the Chinese lands" [in "The Camel in China Down to the Mongol Invasion" by Edward Schafer, Sinologica, 2 (1950), p. 190].
Horses offered mobility to the Mongols, permitting them to roam the steppes in search of pasture for their flocks, as well as to round up other horses that have been allowed to graze freely faraway from an encampment.
Riders gathering the horses together were equipped with a pole at the end of which was a special lasso. Children, who became skilled riders at an early age, assumed this responsibility on occasion.
In traditional times horses gave the Mongols the decided tactical advantage of mobility in conflicts against sedentary civilizations. They could, for example, initiate a hit-and-run raid on a Chinese village, fleeing to the steppelands and thus evading the less mobile Chinese forces.
Kinship, Family, and Marriage
Kinship
Traditional Mongols traced descent patrilineally, from fathers to sons, and recognized progressively larger and more inclusive sets of patrilineal lineages and clans, thought of as all the male descendants of a common grandfather, greatgrandfather , and so on. By the nineteenth century, such descent groups had no political role, were not coresident, held no common estate, and hence were of little significance in the lives of ordinary Mongolians. The hereditary aristocrats based their status on membership in aristocratic lineages (which claimed descent from Chinggis Khan), but political office was more important for elite status than lineage membership alone. Lineages and clans have not played a major role in modern Mongolian society, and it is doubtful that many contemporary people even know their lineage affiliation. Contemporary Mongols use a single given name with a patronymic, so names provide few clues to common descent or kinship. There is no information on the extent to which Mongolians observe traditional exogamic restrictions on marriage with various categories of patrilateral and matrilateral kin.
Family 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. 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 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.
Marriage
In the twentieth century, most marriages have been initiated by the couple themselves rather than by parental arrangement. The image of courtship presented in contemporary Mongolian stories and pictures is of a young couple riding across the grassland on their horses while singing in harmony. In form the traditional Mongolian wedding was an agreement between two families, with elaborate transfers of bridewealth in livestock from the groom's family and a dowry of jewelry, clothing, and domestic furnishings from the bride's. The wedding, which was a contractual agreement between families rather than a religious ceremony, was marked by celebratory feasting that brought together as many of the relatives of the bride and the groom as the families could afford to feed. Some version of this custom survived in the countryside in the 1980s, as did the practice of the bride's moving to reside in the camp of her husband's family, which traditionally provided a new ger for the bridal couple. Brides usually had their own household and family rather than joining the household of their husband's parents as subordinate daughters-in-law, and they made fairly frequent return visits to their natal families. Among herders, a traditional place to seek a spouse was from the adjacent herding camp that exchanged daytime custody of lambs (to prevent the ewes from nursing the lambs in the pasture). In-laws frequently cooperated in herding or joined the same herding camp.
Kinship
Traditional Mongols traced descent patrilineally, from fathers to sons, and recognized progressively larger and more inclusive sets of patrilineal lineages and clans, thought of as all the male descendants of a common grandfather, greatgrandfather , and so on. By the nineteenth century, such descent groups had no political role, were not coresident, held no common estate, and hence were of little significance in the lives of ordinary Mongolians. The hereditary aristocrats based their status on membership in aristocratic lineages (which claimed descent from Chinggis Khan), but political office was more important for elite status than lineage membership alone. Lineages and clans have not played a major role in modern Mongolian society, and it is doubtful that many contemporary people even know their lineage affiliation. Contemporary Mongols use a single given name with a patronymic, so names provide few clues to common descent or kinship. There is no information on the extent to which Mongolians observe traditional exogamic restrictions on marriage with various categories of patrilateral and matrilateral kin.
Family 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. 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 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.
Marriage
In the twentieth century, most marriages have been initiated by the couple themselves rather than by parental arrangement. The image of courtship presented in contemporary Mongolian stories and pictures is of a young couple riding across the grassland on their horses while singing in harmony. In form the traditional Mongolian wedding was an agreement between two families, with elaborate transfers of bridewealth in livestock from the groom's family and a dowry of jewelry, clothing, and domestic furnishings from the bride's. The wedding, which was a contractual agreement between families rather than a religious ceremony, was marked by celebratory feasting that brought together as many of the relatives of the bride and the groom as the families could afford to feed. Some version of this custom survived in the countryside in the 1980s, as did the practice of the bride's moving to reside in the camp of her husband's family, which traditionally provided a new ger for the bridal couple. Brides usually had their own household and family rather than joining the household of their husband's parents as subordinate daughters-in-law, and they made fairly frequent return visits to their natal families. Among herders, a traditional place to seek a spouse was from the adjacent herding camp that exchanged daytime custody of lambs (to prevent the ewes from nursing the lambs in the pasture). In-laws frequently cooperated in herding or joined the same herding camp.
Similar threads
