Anthropology is a common pursuit in most American and European universities. In Mongolia, a landlocked country in Asia of just over 2.7 million people, however, studying anthropology is still considered a relatively new phenomenon. The closest discipline to anthropology in Mongolia was Soviet ethnography (ugsaatan sudlal in Mongolian) which has been around since the mid-1990s.
“Ethnology and ethnography in Mongolia were an incomplete discipline where high-level theoretical analysis was absent,” says Bum-Ochir Dulam, a Mongolian anthropologist and now the chair of the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the National University of Mongolia.
Established in 2004, the department is the first of its kind in the country. Professor L. Munkh-Erdene, a Mongolian anthropologist who had been living in Japan, returned to his native country to become the chair of what was then called the Department of Ethnology, which was in many ways stuck in time since Mongolia’s turbulent transition from communism in the 1990s.
"Professor Munkh-Erdene alone went through all sorts of administrative, academic, theoretical, and methodological confrontations in all levels of the department, faculty, and university, with the hopes and dreams of establishing a faculty of anthropology," says Elmira Shishkaraeva, regional manager of the Academic Fellowship Program, part of the Open Society Foundations' International Higher Education Support Program which helped fund the creation of the faculty.
"He was brave enough to persuade members in the existing ethnology department as well as other academics that it was high-time the university had its own anthropology faculty," says Bum-Ochir Dulam. “We managed to create recognition for anthropology in Mongolia to be further developed as an independent discipline. In order to gain such recognition, we re-organized and built an academic institution of anthropology."
"Thanks to the support of the Academic Fellowship Program my department has been able to recruit the best possible faculty members, to reform the departmental curriculum to offer an internationally recognized program in the field, and to create one of the best research and learning-friendly environments within the National University of Mongolia,” says Munkh-Erdene.
As Shishkaraeva explains, once the department had two anthropologists on board it became a lot easier to redesign the curriculum and introduce new courses. Their first concern was renaming the department to reflect the social and cultural dimension of anthropology, in addition to finding staff members able to teach anthropology.
“It was even more challenging to find anthropologists in Mongolia," said Shishkaraeva. “There are very few Mongolians who major anthropology, in addition to having poor facilities in post-communist Mongolian universities. Since finding an anthropologist was almost impossible they decided to recruit young scholars with some anthropological background or at least with background close to anthropology.”
“The biggest challenge is a weak academic environment of anthropology not only in Mongolia but in the region of Inner Asia, says Bum-Ochir Dulam.
Despite these barriers the department has moved forward thanks to continued support from the Academic Fellowship Program and a grant from the Wenner Gren Foundation, a prominent institution centered on supporting the study of anthropology (only two institutions in the world were selected for funding from Wenner Gren, the other being the Museum of Anthropology in Cordoba, Argentina). The additional funding is being used to develop a doctoral program as well as a training program, for four students at Cambridge University, not mention enhancing their library and getting up to speed on the latest technology available.
Today, the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology boasts a scholarly resource collection of more than 2,000 titles and the collection is still expanding, in addition a curriculum which includes courses such as “Ecological and Economic Anthropology,” and “Kinship, Family and Gender,” among others.
Asked about the future, Bum-Ochir Dulam is optimistic: “Our plan is to bring the department to the international level of academic competition and recognition. In order make such an achievement, first it's necessary to expand the department in the regional level in Inner, Central, and Northeast Asia, which can be accomplished with the involvement of Western anthropological institutions and academics.”
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