The rebirth of Chinggis Khaan: state appropriation of Chinggis Khaan in post-socialist Mongolia

Abstract

A massive monument of Chinggis Khaan (Chinggis Khaan's name is spelt differently depending on the language in which it was written and on conventions of transliteration. Among the most common are Chinggis, Genghis, Genghiz, or Jengiz. For the purpose of the paper, the Mongolian transliteration is used.) imposingly gazes down from the government palace in Ulaanbaatar, the capital city of Mongolia. The monument was erected in 2006 in commemoration of the 800-year anniversary of the establishment of “the Great Mongolian State.” Occupying arguably the most prominent national space, the monument serves as an arresting emblem of the state. With its silent yet triumphant symbolization, the monument articulates the state's new ideology in the post-Soviet era. The monument is one of countless symbolic and material grand-scale state expressions appropriating Chinggis Khaan. In this article, I examine the state's appropriation of Chinggis Khaan as the marker of Mongolian post-socialist national identity. In doing so, I critically examine how the state appropriates history, remembering and forgetting certain parts, to cultivate a shared sense of belonging and pride. Unifying the public in shared glorification and celebration of Chinggis Khaan ultimately serves to instill devotion to the national political and ideological project.

Geographies of nationalism

“…In the past few decades, scholars in geography and ancillary fields have traced the wide range of positive emotional experiences enlisted in nationalist practices, covering everything from national holidays and other spectacles, sporting events, monuments, and the most mundane rituals of nationalist participation (e.g., Antonsich and Skey, 2016;Benwell et al, 2019Benwell et al, , 2021Brewster and Brewster, 2010;Dittmer, 2013;Edensor, 2002;Faria, 2014;Ferdoush, 2019;Fuller, 2004;Hagen, 2008;Hung, 2007;Homolar and Löfflmann, 2021;Koch, 2013Koch, , 2015Koch, , 2016Koch, , 2020bKong and Yoeh, 1997;Militz, 2016;Militz and Schurr, 2016;Molnár, 2016;Myadar, 2017;Paasi, 2016;Podeh, 2011Podeh, , 2022Rohava, 2020;Rossol, 2010;Skey, 2011;Stewart, 2021;Tomlinson and Young, 2006;White, 2017;White and Frew, 2019).…”

“…Indeed, the rapid growth of xenophobic and animosity-fueled nationalist storylines, espoused by far-right politicians and populist leaders across the world since the mid-2010s has sparked new interest among scholars, who suddenly became anxious about the perceived threat of these forms of nationalism to the cosmopolitan worldview that they once took for granted. This newer scholarship on the geography of “exclusionary nationalisms” or “ethno-nationalism,” aims to show how hate-based and exclusionary scripts of nationalism work to territorialize a community within an imagined “pure” (or “purified”) homeland (e.g., Avni, 2021; Anderson and Secor, 2022; Bescherer and Reichle, 2022; Bosworth, 2022; Chatterjee, 2021; Conversi, 2020a; Cunningham, 2020; Dahlman, 2022; Decker et al 2022; Dempsey, 2022a, 2022b; Devadoss and Culcasi, 2020; Dossa, 2021; Flint, 2004; Getzoff, 2020; Goalwin, 2017; Goonewardena, 2020; Hart, 2020a; Khan, 2022; Koch and Vora, 2020; Kolstø and Blakkisrud, 2016; Luger, 2022; Mulej, 2022; Mullis and Miggelbrink, 2022; Nagel and Grove, 2021; Shoshan, 2016; Singh, 2022; Stock, 2020; Wondreys and Mudde, 2022; Yiftachel and Rokem, 2021).…”

Placemaking and pastoral park planning in Japan: the Showa case

“…3. See Myadar and Rae (2014) and Myadar (2017) for similarly contested articulations of nationalist nostalgia in landscapes.…”

“…In celebrating this moment, the park omits the painful memories and chaotic upheavals of the Showa era. While some public places result from spontaneous forces and remain rather organic and unnoticed in nature, others constitute symbolic landscapes, which represent patchworks of memories etched purposely and selectively, often for social and political ends (Myadar and Rae, 2014; Myadar, 2017). In its patchwork, the park idealizes the rural Kanto as a shared geography for the Japanese under Hirohito’s and, implicitly, all imperial family rule.…”