Chiefly and Shamanist Landscapes in Mongolia

Abstract

Abstract The Western idea of ‘the landscape’ arises from objectification and is closely related to practices such as painting, map-making, song, and poetry. The secular, appreciative gaze is certainly not unknown among the Mongols. But it was historically intermittent and was inspired by non-Mongol kinds of representation, such as Manchu maps, Chinese and Russian landscape painting, or the ‘genre’ scenes in Tibetan religious paintings. In Mongolian culture itself landscapes are more in the nature of practices designed to have results: it is not contemplation of the land (gazar) that is important but interaction with it, as something with energies far greater than the human. The Mongols do not take over any terrain in the vicinity and transform it into something that is their own. Instead, they move within a space and environment where some kind of pastoral life is possible and ‘in-habit’ it. That is to say, they let it pervade them and their herds, influencing where they settle, when they move, and what kinds of animals they keep. However, this is not a pre-reflective or spontaneous existence, but one recognizing human choice and agencies, which are conceived as interrelated with and subordinate to the agencies attributed to entities in the land. Thus the Mongols choose to avoid forests and narrow ravines, preferring wide-open steppes, where the land is before them in a limitless expanse. But the most featureless plain has its gentle curves, or bushes, or marshy patches, and even such entities are credited with powers of some kind. I shall use the word ‘landscape’ to designate the ways in which these energies are envisaged, or, to put this another way, to describe the concepts by which social agencies constitute the physical world.

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