Ethnic and National Identities in Modern Mongolia: A New Institutionalist Analysis

The nation-state of Mongolia, which embraces just over a third of the world`s ethnic Mongols, is home to more than twenty ethnic identities, most of which are of Mongol culture. Yet, recent developments - resurgent ethnic nationalism and the resurfacing of ethnic Mongolia transcending state boundaries - have challenged Mongolian national identity, entailing multilayered and uneasy interactions and polemics among the Mongols over the questions of ethnicity, nationhood, and national identity. This research, drawing on the recent cognitive turn in the study of ethnicity, race and nationhood, aims to clarify the dynamics of the emergence, formation and continuity of Mongolian national, ethnic, and sub-ethnic identities from the perspective of the new institutionalist approach. Furthermore, the research aims to reveal the roles and functions that state, political authorities, institutions and historical events play in the emergence, formation, maintenance, and continuity of ethnic and national identities. In addition, the research aims to clarify the ways that the Mongolians accommodate these various identities simultaneously. The research will employ written sources, ethnographic and statistical data. Written sources include some 30 chronicles that were completed during the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries which offer rich material on the emergence and formation of group identities in Mongolia. Newspapers, periodicals, history textbooks and other mass oriented published materials are also important sources for capturing how Mongolian ethnic and national identities have been constructed and instilled to a mass audience. Various statistical data will be very important source to analyze institutional arrangements and practices that reinforce and routinize ethnic and national identities. In addition, ethnographic field research will be conducted in Mongolia in order to clarify the Mongolians` way of accommodating these various identities.