Mongolian Music, Dance, and Oral Narrative: Performing Diverse Identities

Mongolian Music, Dance, and Oral Narrative: Performing Diverse Identities. Carole Pegg. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001. 376 pp.

Mongols are often touted, for better or worse, as good singers and dancers by their neighbors, but few readers would be aware of the full range of the Mongol cultural repertoire before reading Carole Pegg's book, Mongolian Music, Dance, and Oral Narrative. In this important publication, Pegg records an extraordinarily rich reservoir of Mongolian artistic traditions, ranging from music and dances, to epic poetry and so on. This richness is largely a reflection of the diversity of the Mongol groups, many of whom are now actively reclaiming their cultural heritage after about seventy years of communist rule in Mongolia. Over ten years in the making, the book is encyclopedic in scope and meticulous in detail. The research draws on the author's unique capacity as a professional musician, a trained anthropologist, and an avid reader of written sources, with linguistic competence to interview in Mongolian. It is admirable that many poems are presented in both romanization and accurate English translation. Readers will also appreciate that much of the illustrative music discussed in the book is made available in an attached CD with 38 sound tracks.

The book is divided into four main parts. Before describing the vocal, instrumental, and dance forms of Mongolian art, the first part lays out an argument, which is then followed throughout the book. Inspired by Marilyn Strathern's theory of "merographic connections," Pegg argues that "the individual, embodying the potential of multiple or partial identities, performs a part of the self by using aspiration and imagination to connect with the aspect of importance at that moment: ethnicity, nationality, politics, history, religion, mythology, status, or gender" (p. 5). Of these registers, ethnicity figures prominently in the book. The author holds that Mongolian performances are largely expressions of ethnicity, celebrating ethnic landscape, ethnic origin, and ethnic heroes. Divided into Western and Eastern Mongols, their "ethnic" cleavages embedded in memories of past conflicts, but suppressed during Mongolia's long socialist period, resurfaced after the overthrow of the socialist regime in...