ABSTRACT

There are innumerable injunctions as to what constitutes incorrect or improper behaviour for women in Mongolia. Many of these rules have the status of taboos, in other words categorical prohibitions (tseer) whose breach would bring extreme shame and fear of supernatural punishment. But this does not mean that women appear socially paralysed in everyday life. To the casual observer it would be difficult to tell that the prohibitions exist, and he might simply note that women seem to have their own way of doing things. This points clearly to the area I wish to investigate in this study, the fact that taboos, although phrased in the negative, always and necessarily imply some kind of positive action. If one act is forbidden, people do something else. The existence of a taboo means that behaviour in that particular field of action is ‘marked’ or significant, and therefore the acts which substitute for taboos, or are performed instead of them, should not be seen merely as ‘ordinary’ behaviour, as opposed to tabooed behaviour. They should be looked at carefully, both in their own right (because this is after all what people actually do), and in their crucial relation to the forbidden act. This relation of prohibited acts to allowed acts within a given sphere of action is present in all cultures. But it is easier to discuss and perhaps, in fact, is more important in cultures such as that of the Mongols, where the minutiae of daily life are greatly formalised, usually by categorisation into named types of acts. We, for example, think of ‘sitting’ as comprised of numerous unspecifiable variations on one basic idea of body posture, but the Mongols divide ‘sitting’ into six different types; if one is forbidden to sit in the xölöö xiizh suux manner (i.e. with legs stuck out straight in front) one nevertheless has to decide on another way, perhaps söxörch suux (i.e. with knees together on the ground and the weight on the ankles) or tsomtsoix suux (i.e. with one knee up and the weight on the ankles of the other leg), and so on.