Culture Clashes Part I: Collectivism vs. Individualism

This is a narrative on the insanity that is my life.

I just came back yesterday after spending five days with Zaya in two of the most eastern Mongolian aimags (aimag is a state equivalent) collecting a survey on body image.  I will write about that survey later (which is super interesting!), but this post is about me dealing with the absurdity of culture when I –a white, western woman- travel with Mongolians or alone through the Mongolian countryside.

The other side of the absolutely amazing experiences and time I have spent with some of the most remote people left on this earth is that I find myself very frequently incredibly irritated and/or confused by things these same people do.  I know this has to do with culture; there are just some behaviors and tendencies that have been ingrained in me since birth that clash with Mongolian culture.  Despite what the tomes of anthropological theory would have you think, no cultural adaptation can ever erase my white skin and my feminist, individualist (that each person’s rights are equal and should not be infringed upon – not in the neo-conservatism sense) leftism.

So, I decided I wanted to do a few posts on aspects of cultural particularities that either irritate me, fascinate me, or both (which is the most common).

Collectivism vs. Individualism

One of the more interesting for me, sometimes exciting, sometimes draining, aspects of Mongolian culture is its focus on the collective and the stipulation of putting your own personal needs and space second to the multitude.

Considering I have spent the majority of my life either in North America or Europe, the concept of individuality is one that has been rammed down my throat since day one.  The foundations of Western society (I think I can safely generalize on this one) revolve around the idea that each person is in individual with independent thought, ability, and desire.  So, what’s a girl to do when she lands in a collectivist society, where the thinking of her own needs first is not encouraged?

Even in the Mongolian language, a word for private space or sphere does not exist.  The closest description in Mongolian is the phrase “хувиа хичээх,” (huvia hicheeh) which essential means egocentrism.  Mongolian society is still largely a kinship-based, collectivist society (in the city it is less but still persistent) and that means most actions taken are enacted with the interests and repercussions on others, family, and not only the self in mind.

For me in my life in this country, this has cool aspects and bad aspects. 

The extension of collectivist thinking is that there is no private sphere, which includes physical, mental, and emotional privacy.  People historically lived in yurts/gers, where everything was done in a very very small space, so there was never any room for yours and mine.  Physically, people touch each other, hold hands, bump into each other, sit practically on you in tight spaces and get crammed together frequently.

I have woken up on several occasions in the countryside, like this weekend, cuddled by countryside men, which always jolts me awake.  After initially getting freaked out by these occurrences, I learned from others that these were very platonic attempts to keep warm.  Beds exist but are hard to move and most people sleep on the floor, so these cuddle attacks are only people trying to make the shared space nicer and warmer.  In busses, when packed like sardines for a long ride, my lap has been used as a pillow without my consent on a couple occasions, I have slept on other people, my shoulder is frequently up for grabs, and I have learned that I just have to abandon the idea that I have a private sphere around my body that is not encroached upon.  But it still bewilders me sometimes.

Even in relationships with others the abstract idea of mental privacy is a shadowy area.  The equivalent of “how are you” in Mongolian text messages is “yu hiij baina” (what are you doing?), which is quite innocuous until you start dating a Mongolian man who writes you seven times a day to ask you what you are doing (a tendency that has quickly ended most of my relationships with Mongolian men).  Last week while in the countryside, Zaya’s boyfriend wrote her over 300 text messages one day (she didn’t even blink an eye at this… this would be a relationship killer for me).  Simply the concept that everything you do is not shared with either your family or in your close personal relationships is not self-evident.

One of the cooler aspects of Mongolian collectivism is the openness to strangers (if you are Mongolian –this doesn’t always include foreigners) and sharing that results from it.  Although this can occasionally irritate me – for example, yesterday morning when an old man in the bus was thirsty so he grabbed the closest bottle, mine, and drank half of it – I generally really enjoy the increased sharing of Mongolians.  On long bus rides, frequently anything that is opened by anyone can be shared by anyone.  The idea that mine is yours is really prevalent and can be traced back to the nomadic lifestyle.

Historically, Mongolians had to travel a lot (obviously, they are nomads) and very large distances on horseback.  People were thus dependent on total strangers for yurts to sleep in and thus the tradition developed that any foreigner who entered a Mongolian household needed to be offered tea and food.

So, last week Zaya and I found a car from one aimag to another by standing at a gas station until we met a person who called a friend to drive us.  When we arrived in the following aimag after the 6-hour drive, we discovered that all of the hotel rooms in the entire area were full because of a conference.  So, the driver, who was distantly related to one hotel owner (of COURSE he is… oh the smallness of Mongolia) asked the hotel owner if we could sleep in his apartment.  And so we spent the next two days in the hotel owners’ apartment who shared all of their food and drink with us… and we chased after their kids like we were members of the family.  Mongolians are incredibly ready to open their home to any distant relative or friend of a friend traveling and feel obligated to give that person any food, drink or accommodation they require.  Their home becomes yours and I do love that about the collectivist nature of Mongolia.

Even when Zaya and I had to hitchhike back from one nomadic camp a few months ago, we knew that if we didn’t get a ride, we would just sleep on the floor of the nearest yurt.  ❤

So, essentially, my getting pushed and pulled, sat on, my stuff being touched and used by strangers, me getting 20 texts a day from dates, NEVER being alone, living in tiny spaces with 10 people, having to share with everyone, and being quiet in certain situations because of the interests of others are all things that can potentially be very very very irritating to me.  But traveling through Mongolia and having family after family open their home to me, give me a corner to sleep in and a cup of milk tea is super priceless.

OK, so I have practically finished writing another entry on shamanism (because the hotel owner’s sister was a shaman who shamanized while we there and effectively freaked me out).  After that I wanted to write about gender and alcoholism…so… thanks for reading!

Hey Girl, Love Yourself!: The Cult of Body Image Obsession in UB

After all I have written about nomad and countryside beauty, you might be wondering if Mongolian women have any real beauty image problems at all.  I mean a Mongolian nomad woman is ostensibly totally appreciated!  She’s told constantly that she is beautiful, that her internal qualities matter more than her external, she has tons and tons of songs written about how fantabulous she is, and the concept of beauty she lives up to is a totally realistic expectation.

So, if nomadism teaches women and men that being large, capable, and natural are positive and beautiful qualities, why are UB women some of the best-dressed, fanciest, thinnest and high-maintenanced women I have seen in my entire life?  Going from the country to the city is like taking a leap through time and has left me contemplating what exactly it is about modernity, which has transformed fat-loving, custom-laden, internal beauty-focused nomadic women into fashionistas on high-heels.

What changed on the way from the steppe to the city?

So, my city interview phase has started.  And last week, I had the opportunity to interview a woman who had been in a pretty famous Mongolian band the last ten years, who I thought could give me some insight into the intensity of body pressures inherent in Mongolian city life.

I asked her what is considered attractive, and she told me that for a man it didn’t matter how he looked in the slightest.  If a man had a good heart and personality she would marry him.  And the other woman in this conversation agreed completely with this statement.

Odgerel: Former mongolian top model also well known for her extensive plastic surgery.

So, I asked her if this also applies for women. Both women shook their heads.  “Nope, definitely not,” she said.  She told me that many people don’t even take a woman seriously if she doesn’t look attractive, and by ‘attractive’ I mean dressed to the nines.  When a woman wears make-up, people treat her differently, she said, and there is a direct effect on her success.  And when this singer personally goes out the door without make-up and expensive clothes on, everyone she encounters on the street gapes in horror and then the media start talking about her “fall from grace.” Like, OMG what happened to her? She was once so…. successful.

The extreme double-standard existent amongst Mongolian urban women is that to gain ‘success’ a woman has to not only be well-educated, well-mannered, sympathetic and friendly, she has to look incredibly good.  She needs to have the newest and right brand of purse, cell-phone, a popular phone number (a phenomenon in many Asian countries), expensive jacket and high-heels, and she needs to show it.  Her looks are her worth.  A man’s is his mind.

A woman who is not physically beautiful can not be and is not considered successful, period.

So, how did this change happen?  Who’s the culprit?

The capital city of Mongolia is not, like the countryside, largely affected by nomadism and tradition, but more so affected by the free-market and foreign cultural influences.  The countryside and the city of Mongolia are really two completely different worlds, and the beauty and body maintenance of women are a representation of this divide.

A lot of urban Asian women are going through the unique congruence of stresses formed when the ‘traditional’ East meets the free-market West to create a uniquely precarious and dangerous body image security situation.

In the case of Mongolia: Even amongst Mongolian nomads, women were traditionally handed over to the husband’s family like an object of exchange and unable to maintain any public duties.  Amongst the beauty ideals of shapely, natural, hard-working, and sympathetic women, were ones describing dutiful, well-behaved, traditional, and quiet Mongolian women.  Mongolian nomadic women were traditionally confined to an incredibly rigid gender divide that made her domain almost exclusively the felt walls of the yurt and never expanded beyond that.  Don’t get me wrong, that was her domain and her invaluable work was highly regarded amongst nomads (thus the tons and tons and TONS of songs about how amazing mom is), but this leaves NO room for dissent or divergence from this role.

The traditionally nomadic divided roles of female and male, private and public, respectively, have permeated Mongolian psyches so extensively that it makes it hard for city women, even though they are extensively better educated than men in Mongolia, to gain any type of recognition in the public sphere.  The concept that men are naturally better equipped to handle public duties is so strong that women have to outdo men in almost every capacity to gain equal footing.

Women not in the yurt??! crazy talk.

Furthermore, capitalism came… and the media.

The lovely ideals of meritocracy (that our success is directly dependent on how much we work at it) and consumerism inherent in free-market media displays lots of pictures in Mongolia (and around Asia) of thin, intensily body-focused, attractive white women buying, consuming and eating their way to happiness.  The result is that the MORE access to modern forms of media (television, magazines, bill-boards, etc.) the LESS secure a Mongolian woman is about her own body image and the more she is pushed to consume along certain lines to increase physical attractiveness.

Here are some examples of how I came to this conclusion:

1) In the countryside, no woman gets plastic surgery nor considers it.  Nomadic traditions are still very strong and she also has next to no access to computers, internet, magazines, and only T.V. exposure.

2) However, my first nomadic home-stay mother from the Gobi did tell me that she had never thought about make-up or beauty until she got T.V.  Then, after realizing that according to T.V. she needed makeup, she drove the 35 km into the nearest town to order some beauty products.  Her husband still thinks this is ridiculous and unnecessary as a nomadic woman and tells her to please take if off whenever she uses it.

3) In the shantytown-esque yurt districts around UB: The poorer a girl seemed to be (in my interviews) and thus the more unable she was to have a working television or able to access any form of media, the LESS insecure she was about her body and the more she loved her own beauty.

4) However, the city does provide them with some rising ‘luxeries’ and pressures:  Some of the girls in my interviews told me that around 1/3 of all girls in the yurt districts (these are POOR women) also have had blepheroplasty, aka eyelid surgery to make the eyes bigger, and they get them done illegally for dirt cheap at district clinics.

5) And amongst middle to upper class urban city women: There are no statistics about this, but from my interviews and general impressions I would say that about one-third of all women graduating from high-school in UB right now have had the double eyelid surgery or nose bridge restructuring to make the nose more prominent.

6) When I went to interview a plastic surgeon nurse last week who works exclusively with wealthier women, she told me that the most popular surgeries are blepharoplasty (eyelid surgery to make the eyes bigger), rhinoplasty (the elevation of the nose-bridge) and the shaving off of extra jaw bone to give the jaw a pointier look (not round).  Besides larger eyes, none of these beauty ideals have any root in Mongolian traditional culture.

Undral: A top Mongolian model. Which part of her screams Mongolian to you?

7) Furthermore, if you look at a Cosmopolitan Mongolia or Goodali or some other prominent Mongolian women’s magazine around 70 percent of the models are Caucasian – a media form only city women have access to.

In the city, female physical attractiveness = success.

So, a Mongolian city woman, who is inherently disadvantaged through traditional society in public roles, needs to not only outdo men in intelligence and education, she needs to consume, consume, consume to maximize her physical (Western-influenced) attractiveness, and by default, success.  Women are left with the belief that they are only worth as much as their appearance gives others the impression they are worth.

Note: I am also not trying to say that women who get plastic surgery are trying to look white.  No, they all say they are trying to look more beautiful and increase self-confidence.  Yes, 30 percent of Asian women naturally have a double-lidded bigger eye, but this is more than that: This is Western brand clothing and chins and eyes and face shape and blue contact lenses and heightening surgery and intense body fixation.  WHERE did these ideals of beauty come from and WHAT makes some Mongolian city women have a lack of self-confidence in the first place?

This is a quote from a blog I found recently on gender, feminism and pop culture in Korea that discusses the issue of the plastic surgery amongst Korean women and why they have the highest rates of plastic surgery per capita in the world:

“Why did those certain aspects become what was “Beautiful?” when it wasn’t before? Although Korean women may not know that they are changing their eyes based on white standards of beauty, (in fact many wholeheartedly believe the double eyelid surgery is tailored to make Asian eyes more beautiful) single-lidded eyes were problematized because of confrontations with the West and now it has become so commonplace in Korea that these origins have been forgotten and it is now a natural thing to think. That single lidded small eyes are ugly and big dopey eyes are pretty and that is just the way it is because they are told that and they consume that every day of their lives.”

And thus… you are left with chin, nose and/or eyelid operated-on Mongolian urbanite fashionistas on high-heels.

We are trying to combat this.

So, we have a plan.  Before I went to Hovsgol, I had the opportunity of drafting and implementing the first “Love Yourself: Women’s Body and Beauty Image Workshop” together with the women at the Young Women’s Club.

The point behind this workshop is to give urban women in UB and in other areas in Mongolia knowledge regarding the new stresses they are facing, including increasing their media literacy, see body and beauty as inextricably linked to culture (and thus not universal and pre-determined), and increase their health knowledge and personal self-confidence.  And we are also going to try to create a mini-movie about Mongolian medial portrayals of women, because all of the information available on this issue pretty much comes from the States or from Britain and thus hard for Asian women to relate to.

If all goes according to plan and the funding proposal we are currently working on goes through, I will be spending the next months training women to give this workshop. *cross my fingers*

And doing this workshop with the girls at YWC was very successful and fun, but also shows how much work we need to do… At the beginning of the workshop, we ask the girls to describe what a beautiful woman looks like (to compare their ideal to reality) and they described every SINGLE aspect of the female body (I mean ears, toe-nails, fingers, eye-lids, skin color on face and body, ankle bones, neck EVERYTHING) in such excrutiating detail that I had to wince listening to it.

and i’ll leave you with this fine thang:

'nuff said

Hovsgol: The Mongolian Wild West

I know it has been two months since I have updated – I mentally slap myself on the wrist and will try to avoid that in the future.  I have just been SO BUSY!  Not to mention out of internet reach for the last three weeks since I decided to return to the place that kicked off my whole Mongolia obsession five years ago.  Namely: I returned to Hovsgol to surprise my first homestay family.

Ok, for those who don’t know what I am talking about: I participated in a study abroad program called SIT five years ago (the only study abroad program in Mongolia) that takes small groups of university students to communities of Mongolian nomads and places those students with families for extended periods of time.  In my semester, we had the great fortune of having two extended homestays: one in the northern region of Hovsgol, in an area known as Ulaan Uul (Red Mountain) closs to the Russian border, and the other in Bayankhongor in the Gobi desert.  I am still in contact with the program director and most staff members and thus when I heard that SIT was heading back to this Hovsgolian community with a new group of students, I asked if I could hitch a ride ;).

Ulaan Uul is in the very most northern part of Mongolia in Siberia where there are no roads and very few people, so getting there required an old-school russian bus (поргон) and over 20 hours of driving through Siberian taiga (if you are lucky and there is no snow as my return trip evinced: it took me around 40 hours to make it back to the city).  It is located in the Darkhan Valley, which is also well known because of the presense of the Tsaatan, reindeer herders, and now because of a recent influx of ninja miners in the mountains.  It is most probably the most beautiful place I have ever been and comparable only to (as a member of Mongolian parliament said to me) Yellowstone National Park or the Alaskan wilderness.

Since my family from five years ago did not have TV or electricity at the time I thought there was no way I could really inform them of my coming.  My plan was originally to just show up and say surprise and see their faces, but since my family was so fantastic, SIT had planned to give them a new student this year.  Thus, I was not ‘allowed’ to live with them, but SIT offered me another family.  So, basically I repeated what I did five years ago with a new family: except this time, I was older, everyone in the community knew me, I decided to do a beauty survey amongst the nomads which required extensive travel between the various families, and last, but by no means least, I can speak Mongolian.

After driving the 15 hours to Mörön (the capital of Hovsgol), picking up the new students, and driving another 7 hours to the local sum

Five years ago: This is a picture of my home-stay mom and dad that I took five years ago.

(district) center and another 1 and half to the remote community where we lived, I found myself entering the same ger (yurt) I had entered five years ago when I was picked up by my home-stay dad on horseback.  I sat down amongst the students and all the Mongolian occupants of the ger starting wispering furtively about the surprise number of students (“Eleven? I thought there were only supposed to be ten??!”).  I had on a scarf, which I used to (I thought surreptitiously, but I now know bogglingly obviously) to cover my piercings.  My family’s gesture for me three years ago was forming their thumb and pointer finger in the sign of a ring and placing it on their lip (I had a fairly big lip ring then), and I thought my piercings were a dead give-away.  So, I sat in the corner with a scarf covering half my face…

Bold (current): My home-stay dad from five years ago. He didn't have a motorbike back then, much less electricity and television, but now greatly enjoys hearding on motorbike.

And my former homestay dad walked in – a wrestler, big guy with his two front teeth missing and a tiny goatee – who sat down next to me, not recognizing, and lit up a cigarette.  Amused, I decided I would just go to their ger and shock them all at once, but my plan was thwarted when my former homestay mother arrived.  Even though I covered half my face, I walked out with the students to get a quick horseback riding tip lesson, at first not realizing that she had been secretively eyeing me and asking everyone who I was.  She waddled after the group of students and from a distance starred at me with a quisical, mustering look…

So, I cracked and ran over to her and their faces light up with recognition and shock and laughter at my badly obvious attempts at covering my face.  (Apparently, she spent the next three weeks telling this story to every visitor to the ger, animatedly imitating my covering attempts).  She then took me by the hand and started leading me to the horses to take me ‘home’ (“well now I have my daughter back, we can go”), but my insistance that they had a ‘new’ student and couldn’t take me home, stopped her.  Instead, I spent the next few weeks riding/walking/motorcycling between the family I was staying with and my former homestay family, learning songs with them (since I could barely speak any Mongolian five years ago, we communicated and bonded through singing) and now being able to communicate ideas about my life and theirs.

It is incredible to now be able to talk to the nomadic families that took me in five years ago and I

Reunited

decided to utilize the opportunity by doing a little beauty survey.  So, while in Hovsgol the last few weeks, I horse-back rode and repeatedly drove the several kilometers between various families, explained my research to the nomads in the area and ended up collecting 20 surveys from them (20 doesn’t sound like much, but the population density of this place is very low) regarding beauty ideals.  Amongst the questions were, of course, what does it mean to be a beautiful woman, but also if this was different than a ‘sexy’ woman, which ellicited a lot of really funny comments from older nomads (“wait.. you mean a sexy woman is not someone who just wants to have sex? aren’t we all sexy?”).  I am not finished evaluating them yet (it is really hard for me to read cursive Mongolian), but cursory looks already reveal what I already knew to be true: that beauty amongst Mongolian nomads is very functional and internal based.  Comments on “what does it mean to be a beautiful woman” included the classic answers, hard-working, well-behaved, well-versed in tradition, commonsensical, good-mother, but also others like “a woman who drinks milk,” “not a miss (beauty pageant) contestant,” and “a humble looking woman.” External physical qualities are almost never mentioned.

So, I guess I can now be sure that the nomadic conception of beauty varys little amongst nomads on complete different sides of the country (since I have now been in the Gobi, in horse-country and in the Siberian extremes), but more so amongst city and countryside.  But I guess I knew that already.

Modernity vs. Nomadicism?

Ulaan Uul is the most isolated place I have ever been – with it taking over 30 hours in an industrial-style Soviet bus over terrain with no roads- to get there.  The Darkhan Valley is relatively protected from the currents of change in the rest of the country, but even the Darkhan are on the cusp of modernity.  Five years ago, my home-stay family and about half of the other families in the valley did not have either electricity or TV, and only a few had motorbikes.  Everything was still done by candle and fire-light, people generally went to sleep and woke up with the sun, and entertainment consisted of card games and singing.  I once asked my home-stay dad if he knew where America was (and Germany for that matter) and still remember very clearly the shrug of his shoulders as an answer.  Why is it important for a nomad in a remote valley to be concerned with America anyway?  I found this super refreshing.

The powers of marketing: Even nomads now drink Pepsi and Cola and discuss which is better.

Now, five years later, all the nomads in the valley have cell phones, TV and electricity.  Television commercials make nomads wonder what these new wonder products are (coca-cola? oriflame beauty products? pepsi?) and they go into town to try them out.  Global warming makes people have to move, because the grasses are getting shorter, and families complain to me about the changing health and increased drunkeness of the nomads since the advent of free-market capitalism.  Entertainment often consists of TV (especially among younger families).  And in the last two years, SIT could not go to this valley, because the discovery of gold in an area 60 km away caused the valley to be overrun with ninja miners who arrived, incured debt for the equipment to search for gold, found some gold, drove up the prices in the area and ruined the nature, and then peaced out as quickly as they came.

What you see in this area is kinda the same old story seen amongst all sorts of indigenous groups the world over once they started adapting to Western capitalism and ‘modernity.’  Rises in modern diseases (cancer, hypertension, high blood-pressure), changes to nature dependent on market forces (mining), break-down of old bonding activities replaced by TV, increased consuption of refined sugars (thank you coca-cola and refined flour) and alcohol abuse.  And with focus on my research, I see these changes reflected in the changes of beauty ideals amongst Mongolians – a gradual but definite spectrum from large, healthy, motherly ideals to skinny, fast, ‘sexy’ ideals the closer you get to the city and sedentary life.

It has kinda left me questioning at the moment if teaching people about Western nutrition (which I had planned to do by creating a health booklet for women before leaving Mongolia) is really the best idea.  The West doesn’t know everything either.

And in case you were wondering, my nomad dad still doesn’t know where America is. 🙂

Culture shock

Driving back to UB: Only way we got home was by picking up other busses that got stuck in the snow, helping them, and then forming a chain of busses that helped each other when one got stuck.

Well, now I am back in the city and physically and mentally exhausted.  I separated from SIT a week ago, when they continued to the local lake with their students, and I was left getting back from Ulaan Uul on my own.  And since we live in Mongolia, snow had already fallen between Hovsgol and UB, but, also since we live in Mongolia, that didn’t phase people and drivers decided they wanted to drive through it anyway.  What ensued was a 40 hour Soviet bus ride over Mongolian terrain, mountains, and through cliff-passes in a bus designed for 12 people where we had stuck 17 and which got stuck in the snow at night for 10 hours and had to wait until the snow thawed a bit to keep moving.  Furthermore, we had to get out several times and trudge through the snow pulling on a rope attached to the back of the bus as it went down slopes to make sure it didn’t skid-out and fall off the cliff.  Luckily, we were also in a Soviet bus, because the larger busses has also decided to go, which definitely got stuck and spent over 25 hours stuck in the snow out of any cell-phone range.  These are the vageries of traveling (and doing anything for that matter) in this country.

The constant unpredictability of life here, coupled with language difficulties (my Mongolian is

No, I can't be vegan in the countryside; but there is something to be said (and to be tasted) about drinking the milk you just milked yourself. Totally different way to relate to animals and food.

advanced, but not fluent – so I get confused a lot), extreme cultural differences (which I encountered a lot of while doing my survey with the nomads), and radical changes of dietary routine (I was vegan for five years, went to the countryside for 3 months and lived with 8 different carniverous families, came back to the city and was vegan again, and went back to the country where I drank the yak’s milk I had just milked myself every morning and ate freshly slaughtered marmot), and hygienic circumstance (nomads don’t use soap for washing most things, the word for privacy doesn’t even exist in the Mongolian language, and I have not showered for several weeks repeatedly in the last months) have taken a huge toll on my body.  I have actually never been so repeatedly physically uncomfortable in my life.

I kinda feel like I am physically and mentally tettering between Western ideals and Mongolian nomadic culture and I don’t know which one is right anymore.

My mongolian teacher told me my home-work this weekend was to rest cause I looked so exhausted… oh je.  At least my life in this country is ridiculous.

I hope the lengthiness of this entry has made up some for the silence… I have also drafted another entry about the beauty image workshop Young Women for Change and I held a few weeks ago, which I will post very soon (I promise!)

As previously mentioned, I also spent the last few weeks learning songs from my former nomadic family.  In vein with my research, my former home-stay sister taught me this song about a beautiful woman called монгол бүсгүйн үзэсгэлэн (Mongolian female beauty).  Below is an mp3 with my home-stay sister singing the song, including my (as of now hastily done – I will correct it soon) translation and the cyrillic lyrics, if you are interested.

Харзны ус шиг мэлтэлзсэн     Emotionally contained like the water in an ice hole
Намуун зөөлөн аашаараа     With calm soft temperament
Хараацайн жигvvр шиг тахиралсан     Curved like the wing of a swallow
Нарийн сайхан хөмсгөөрөө     With thin beautiful eyebrows

дахилт (Refrain):

Миний хайрыг татах     Pulls my love
Учиртай төрөө юү     Like the reason you were born
Монгол бүсгуйн үзэсгэлэн     Mongolian female beauty
Улам ч хөөрхөн болгоо юу     Forever becoming prettier

Гурваар дарсан гэзгийг чинь     Your three modest braids
Элбэн таалахад ханамгvй     When caressed calms
Гуалиг тєрсєн биеийг чинь     Your natural graceful body
Налан суухад уйдамгvй     lovely to sit next to

УЙлэнд урнаа илчилсэн     Good at needle-work
Сvмбэн цагаан хуруугаараа     With rod-like, white fingers
Vрийн бvvвэй аялсан     A mothering lullaby is sung
Сvvн цайлган сэтгэлээрээ     With a heart kind like milk

биедее таарсан махтай = meat that fits your body

The phrase mentioned in the title, биедее таарсан махтай, is one of the most common answers I get from nomads when I ask them what beauty is. My research in the last few months amongst Mongolian nomads has revealed to me a concept of beauty completely different than the one touted in the West and that even reigns in the capital city, Ulaanbaatar.
I am a Western woman, and as such, am not free from the body focused culture that Western women and men are raised in. Asking someone the question, “What is a beautiful woman?” almost always invokes ideas of physical attributes and rarely elicits purely internal qualitative comments. Even as a member of a subculture, I have a form of dress that I tend to find is more attractive than others, and am not completely free from judging based on these external attributes (as I am sure very few people raised in body-focused cultures are).

But nomads are raised in a veryveryvery different environment, relatively free from the constant medial presence (most Mongolian nomads have only received TV in the last 5 years) and cultural prescription of what it means to be ‘beautiful.’ So, I have been traveling around asking nomads and countryside Mongolians precisely what ‘beautiful’ means.

What I have found out is that the economic livelihood, subsistence forms and functionality are the keys to determining what a society or group of people think is beautiful. In a pamplet I was given by a professor in UB on traditional requirements for husbands and wives, I found the phrase ‘ууц нь тэнүүн махлаг’ (A woman’s body should be wide and fat) as a requirement for a beautiful Mongolian woman. Tell that to all the waif’s walking around downtown UB.

‘Wide and fat’ and ‘meat that fits your body’ are kinda typical answers I receive from nomads regarding beauty ideals. In fact, most nomads -man or woman- give me next to no comments on external body appearance when I ask them what it means for a woman to be beautiful. The most common answers are “good heart and mind,” “well-behaved,” “pleasant,” and “hard-working.” They like fat because, as I was told, it is ‘warm to cuddle with in the winter and offers shade in the summer.’ And almost every nomadic man tells me that a woman can be pot-ugly externally (really!), but as long as she is good inside, he would marry her and love her. So… why is this so different from the city?

Functionality, functionality, functionality. What good is a thin woman in the countryside of Mongolia? Every nomadic woman has to wake up at 6 in the morning to light the fire in the ger, go out and get the goats, and head with the flock to the well to lift up a 20 kilo bucket of water 30 times to feed all the goats. In the winter, she has to go outside in her deel (traditional dress) to milk all the livestock everyday in -40 degrees. And in the spring (the hardest season in Mongolia), she has to milk all the livestock and batten down the ger hatches, even in the hardest of sandstorms (which are very common during Mongolian springs). A thin woman can not heat her body long in -40 degree heat, can not lift up at least 30 buckets a day and thinner women have a lot harder time birthing kids (which are an asset and a great help when you have a LOT of physical work to do everyday of your life). Her makeup would stream down her face from all the work, and -as my first home-stay mother demonstrated to me- she would lose any jewelry or status object in the hustle of nomadic life.

In fact, the hardness of traditional Mongolian nomadic lifestyle deeply affects the beauty and gender ideals amongst Mongolian nomadic women. When asked what the role of a woman is in society, all countryside people first say ‘to have kids’ and then ‘to maintain the ger.’ From a Western perspective, this seems like the cliched answer that has historically limited women’s participation in society and kept them subdued in the gender hierarchy. However, in the context of Mongolian nomadicism, this answer seems like a completely logical one, which also is completely in line with their female body ideals.

Life out on the steppe is hard. Really hard. I have now lived with over 5 different nomadic families, milked goats in rain or shine or hail, chased baby camels up and down mountains, gathered dung several times a day, almost been run over by *really* pissed off wild horses, and lifted buckets of water over and over and over…. In this lifestyle, you need to work, and you need to do a lot of really hard bodily work. In contrast to the definition of work in ‘modernized’ societies, a definition largely mentally based (i.e., an executive can sit in front of a computer and lift barely a finger all day, but still be considered hard-working), the definition of work is very bodily focused. Thus, the description given by many people that a beautiful woman is ‘hard-working.’ Cause, man, if you don’t work, say goodbye to your flock and livelihood.

In the massive and constant workload, children are really important. Especially as nomads age, which they do very quickly (more quickly than most Western individuals who don’t have the constant weather stresses that nomads have), they needs kids and a large family to help them maintain their livelihood. So, the birth of a child is viewed as a very very important and significant event. It allows for a sharing of workload and eases the load on all individuals in the family. And thus it’s immense significance to Mongolian nomads and the description of a woman’s chief importance as a child-bearer.

Furthermore, the role divide in the traditional nomadic lifestyle is also a function that developed as a result of the hard work in nomadicism. Of course, this divide (man who does heavy lifting outside the home and a woman who is constantly cleaning the ger) is somewhat fluid, especially when life gets hectic (I have seen nomadic men do all sorts of cooking while the women have to chase camels for milking). However, women being largely in the ger to entertain, raise kids, milk, clean and cook, while the husbands grab horses, shear the livestock, and build gers has developed to lighten and simplify the workload on each of them. (*Note: this is no call for or justification of traditional gender divides, just an explanation of how these developed amongst Mongolian nomads and thus modern Mongolian culture and is linked to ecological circumstance.)

Thus, with this definition of work and gender role due to the lifestyle, it is no wonder that nomadic women and men are less image focused. To maintain your livelihood, success, and health, you need to work hard and have many kids, which allows you to make more milk products and have more livestock. Your success is almost completely equivalent to how much your body works. And thus, a woman’s internal abilities become much more important than external features: how much she can work, if she can have kids (which is easier with the natural fat storage women develop around the hips and waist), if she can get along with all the neighbors (so that people will help their family in hard times), and if she can be a good partner and mother are the key factors that assure a nomadic family’s success and thus are the true definition of ‘beautiful’ amongst Mongolian nomadic women.

But, unfortunately and fortunately for us, most of us live in capitalist, consumer-driven societies, that lay immense significance on meritocracy and individualism, thus teaching us that our beauty is a direct result of how much we consume and invest in it. Furthermore, gender roles also change, because day to day stresses no longer make this gender divide a necessity, and with the changed definition of work (the shift from body to mind), women become just as capable as men.

I still have another month of research amongst nomads (my next nomadic family is one of the richest in the area, which will be interesting since I have only been with poor or middle-class families thus far), but am really excited to go to the city and interview all the women that let themselves get plastic surgery (this is INCREDIBLY common in UB, more so than in any country I have lived in thus far) and make teenagers draw pictures of what they thick beautiful is (hehe). The contrast to the nomads will be incredible.