ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 discussed how scholars and others tie Mongolia’s nomadic identity to the country’s environmental and climatic conditions. I contextualized the popularity of this view of Mongolia in a critique of environmental determinism and its recent resurgence in the work of Jared Diamond and others. Environmental determinism is fatalistic and affords little credit to human agency. Chapter 2 examines how this ontological assumption feeds into the discursive and epistemological fields that essentialize and romanticize the notion that Mongolia is a land of nomads. A herder in Mongolia is an embodied and symbolic icon of this nomad figure. In examining the popular understanding of Mongolian identity as deeply rooted in nomadism, this chapter explores the processes of constructing the nomad figure. It addresses the basis for the trope and attends to the contradictions between the idea of nomadism and the reality of population mobility in Mongolia. Ultimately, it aims to disrupt these essentializing imaginaries and offer an alternative vision of Mongolia.
