Workshop on Aesthetic Perspections in a Mongolian Context

Workshop on Aesthetic Perspections in a Mongolian Context

Workshop Summary

 

Aesthetics is a concept little used in anthropological studies. Its cultural and historical background make the notion of little interrest for the construction of our objects. Since Kant, aesthetics means non-functional and contemplative perception. But we don’t have to take this definition for granted. The term didn’t appear in the 18th century. Its etymology conveys a more general idea about what is perceived by our senses. It is worth noting that if the concept is released of the contraints of its historical meaning, it can become useful in a range of crucial situations encountered during fieldwork. The speakers of this session will contribute to a better comprehension of fundamental topics in a Mongolian context (Mongolian and Kazakh) where the idea of beauty, of a well-made artefact or the conception of a right gesture, seem to be one of the foundations of daily practices. In contexts as various as funerary, culinary and photographic practices, or in the study of social relations, the analysis of breeding, singing and decorative practices, participants provide new understandings of important questions such as: what is the notion of beauty in different observed situations; to which domains of everyday life is this concept connected; what are the social effects of valued objects and behavior; what is the relation between beauty and other phenomena and ideas such as domination, morals or spiritual life; how do our informants learn this kind of value, how do they speak about it, and what are the criteria which make appreciation possible? Through a multiplicity of approaches and topics, we hope to show that the concept of aesthetics, enriched by fieldwork data and thus increasingly precise, can stimulate a host of innovative analyses in an anthropological context?

 
Coordination: Laurent LEGRAIN
Discussion leaders:
Roberte HAMAYON (Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités GSRL UMR 8582 CNRS)

For Mongolian lunar New Year, the woman of every household prepares in advance large steam ravioli. As the shape of the dough resists to cooking, these ravioli are prepared with the utmost care: the wrapping draws beautiful folds, the ravioli is well formed, with a flower or moon shape. During funeral, noodles are proceeding from a know-how maintained by Buddhist families. The death person consanguineous or affine relatives conform to a technique of preparation so that noodles are “beautiful”, in this case as fine as possible. A young woman prefers to eat roughly cut raw noodles than undergo the reprimands of an elder. In both contexts, the term “beautiful” employed by these women refers to a perfection of technical gesture and to its “perfect” result. This “culinary“ aesthetic reveals that this is the shape given to the dough that gives to farinaceous foods an “aesthetic“ quality. If both are not assimilated, beauty, good or goodness seem associated in the scope of alimentation. The food aesthetics has major social issues: besides the fact they provide pleasure, to be eaten, they are part of a metaphysics in which the ongoing concern to act and do well allows to attract to oneself happiness and to save a good fate for the soul after death.

 

The Kazakh yurt in western Mongolia is richly decorated with handmade textiles. Children and young girls learn to make these soft furnishings in the course of everyday life, and begin to contribute to craft production from an early age. Throughout their lives, these skilled craftswomen continue to improve their craft, improvise with materials and designs, and innovate in technical terms. In this paper I look at how Kazakh craftswomen’s aesthetic appreciation may be understood as part of their wider creative dialogue with the material and social environment. I suggest that the aesthetic appreciation of an artifact is intricately tied to evaluation, and through evaluation to improvement and learning. Contrary to the often passive portrayal of the ‘beholder of beauty’ in the anthropological literature, I argue that technical virtuosity may be at the heart of aesthetic appreciation, and that the materiality of an object, both complete and in the making, can be the medium of an aesthetic experience.

 

In the 1950s, the government of the Mongolian People’s Republic undertook, among other major works (collectivisation, urbanisation), a funerary reform aiming at replacing open air burial of the dead by their “mandatory inhumation” in cemeteries supervised by the State. Enclosed spaces decorated with flowers were to replace corpses rotting out in the open and the violent experience of encountering half-eaten limbs abandoned by the dogs in newly expanding urban areas. These permanent and supervised cemeteries were intended to foster a dignified memory of the dead, whereas “giving corpses away to dogs and birds not encourage one to respect one’s relatives and could provoke disdainful dispositions to them”.

The aesthetic aspects of these decrees’ rhetoric mark an evolution from a concept of “dead people’s corpses” set “disorderly” to “mortal remains” properly interred in cemeteries. Some of the measures taken, for example the budget allocated to the manufacture of funerary equipment show the great concern dedicated by their authors to the decoration of graves and cemeteries. In fact, the aim of these decrees appears to be a radical change of the very aspect of death: the substitution of a Buddhist and a Shamanist aesthetic by a new socialist and modernist aesthetic.

The analysis of the technical relationships of various Mongolian peoples, belonging to pastoral nomadic traditions, to their environments brings to light the importance of the sociography of space. Deeply rooted in their motherland, the pastoral nomads perceive their environments according to the pathways they can follow. The techniques of movement, then, offer a synchronic axis for reading space. They bring to light the "return on the training", registered in the diachrony of the life cycle. With its temporality, the body is the first space to be occupied. It must be envisaged in a vectorial perspective. The synchronic reading of certain habits reveals an aesthetic of social relationships, based on the "taming" of bodies. In other words, the control of the body and its professional skill has a role to play in the definition of social status and in their hierarchical setting. The individual control of its own body results in the control of the body of the Other or the domination of over woman. The examination of the techniques of movement reveals a social and collective rhythm of the body, the training of which draws an aesthetics of domination.

Photographic practices are part of many Mongolian social practices. By displaying photographs in the yurt, the family shows the extent and depth of its social network. Pictures of dead persons are also an essential medium of maintaining relations between living and dead family members.

The act of photography implies the cleaning and tidying of the people from the settlement chosen to stand forward. In the act of taking the photograph, posture is controlled and conveys changing social statusof the person.

In addition, the making of a new picture from an old one is a frequent practice. For example, upon an individual’s death, old photographs may be transformed. In the most elementary manipulation the picture is said to be “tseverleh”. This term has a wide range of meanings including tidying, curing, purifying, or putting things in order.

Through these different practices, we can highlight certain criteria of a general aesthetic that is nevertheless flexible and dependent on social context and the future function of the pictures.

Long songs, rivers and memory
In this paper, I examine the strong link between the melodies of Dakhad long song and rivers in this remote part of nothern Mongolia. Drawing on the widespread idea that methaphor plays an active role in people’s aesthetic appreciation, I circumscribe, after a detailed examination of the descriptive vocabulary of the song, a first potential link between river and melody: both are characterized by movement. These two ‘objects’ are thus connected by a first iconic bond. But this bond is not sufficient since movement can be a characteristic of many other objects present in the darkhad environnement. After a short description of various situations in which long melodies are sung, I propose a second bond which and reinforces the association between rivers and songs: melodies as rivers are the tangible indices of a remote sublimated past.