ABSTRACT
It is not an immediately easy task to locate ‘morality’ in Mongolian culture. There is no single term in Mongol that corresponds with the European concept, which itself is complex even in everyday usage. I shall adopt a base-line understanding of the word ‘morality’ in this paper, referring to the evaluation of conduct in relation to esteemed or despised human qualities. The combination of terms used by the Mongols to translate the European idea, yos surtakhuun, seems to be of rather recent origin. I shall argue that each of these two terms does, however, denote an area of moral activity which is important in Mongolian culture. Yos means the commonly accepted rules of order, reason and custom, while surtakhuun (literally ‘those things that have been taught’) refers to personal ethics. The two are not unconnected, but I shall argue that, as practices of evaluating conduct, they work in different ways. Through living in Mongolia and talking with Mongols I became aware that, while they of course do have rules, for them the more important arena of morality appears in the relation between persons and exemplars or precedents, that is the general sphere of surtakhuun. The concern here is with cultivation of the self as a moral subject in relation to individually chosen ideals. Morality in this sense is not simply the affirmation of existing cultural ways of life; there needs to be a social space for deliberation about ways of life, amid the pressures that circumscribe the instantiation of personal ideals. The suggestion here is that this is successfully achieved primarily in the discourse of exemplars, despite the fact that Communist governments have attempted to hijack exemplary precedents to their own ends. The sophistication of the relational space constructed in the indigenous discourse of exemplars has enabled Mongols to withstand simplistic party-inspired variants, as will be described later in the paper.
