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Nationalism and Hybridity in Mongolia. By URADYN E. BULAG. Oxford Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. ill, 320 pp. $75.00 (cloth).
In Nationalism and Hybridity in Mongolia, Uradyn Erdeni Bulag gives the most provocative study to date of nationalist ideology in contemporary Mongolia. The book also fills a gap in the study of post-Communist Mongolia. This literature has been dominated by institutional reports and the transition gurus, and so has been driven by structural economic and political concerns involved with creating a "free-market democracy." Bulag's work, however, captures Mongolians' pervasive anxieties about national existence ignored by the transition agenda. The work is an indispensable and highly unreliable, theoretically ambitious and often naive, perceptive and curiously evasive study of Mongolia at the close of the twentieth century.
Bulag argues that the socialist era in Mongolia created compartmentalized communities held together by a national ideology of Khalkha hegemony. Economic liberalization and the breakdown of the Soviet empire has generated fears of uncontrolled openness, symbolized by the return of ethnic Mongols and Buriats from China and Russia. This openness challenged the power of what he calls the "socialist 'feudal' hierarchy," and the apparatchiks rallied hostility to the open society by appeals to the nationalist ideology that marginalizes other Mongolian identities to preserve a Khalkha-centered national purity. In "Problems of Biological Reproduction," he links the widely discussed "crises" of mental retardation, in-breeding, and elimination...