Invisible things, hiphop and photography in contemporary Mongolia
Since 1999, I have been conducting anthropological research in Mongolia. I started my fieldwork with a project on funerary rituals in a small community of herders in the North West (Uvs province). My aim was to study the consequences of a funerary reform implemented by the Communist government in 1955, which made mandatory the burial of the dead in cemeteries, at the outskirts of the expanding urban centres. Soon, I realised that the Dörvöd herders of this community had never stopped laying their dead in the open air, making them available for vultures and wolves to devour, as was the custom before the revolution. Comparing the composition and repartition of rural and urban grave sites, I sought to elucidate the reasons why these herders had refused to comply to the reform, while it had been widely accepted in other regions.
I then became interested in the relationship people maintained with their deceased parents in the course of their daily lives. Collecting ghost stories in the countryside and the city, I studied the way people described the apparition of spirits, souls and other such 'invisible things' as they are labelled in Mongolian. Even though they are characterised as 'invisible', these things are sometimes visible, as certain people do claim to see them occasionally. Therefore, rather than being 'invisible', ghosts, souls and other spirits can be said to share a similar regime of visibility - or rather a certain regime of communicability. For these things are not only seen, but also smelt and heard. My work has thus been to try and define the regime of communicability these 'invisible things' are attributed with in Mongolia: in other words, what kinds of people are held to see them in what conditions, and how. Lately, I also started to collect and study narratives about 'Chinese ghosts', which are reported to haunt the capital city Ulaanbaatar, where they supposedly remain attached to the wealth they accumulated through their trading activity during their lifetime.
In the course of my research, I also became interested in Mongolian hiphop bands that began to emerge in the capital city Ulaanbaatar at the end of the 1990's. I focussed especially on one of them, Tatar - called after the first 'tribe' subjugated by Chinggis Khaan in the end of the 12th century. The three members of Tatar are not only remarkable for their young age and their early success - they were barely 21 in 2004, and already nationally famous- they are also very interesting for the ethical discourse that their songs promote. Hün hüneeree bai - 'be your own person', sounds like a transposition of the american hiphop slogan 'keep it real' to the world of temptations, social inequalities and make-belief of the post-socialist period in which they grew up. Their songs describe people facing choices that determine the kind of person they are and will be.
Finally, since 2003 I have been involved in a project with Vincent Micoud on Mongolian photography. Photography has developed dramatically in Mongolia since its popularisation in the 1950's, following the beginning of its official use by the Communist government for surveillance and propaganda purposes. Nowadays, there is not a single town without its own photographic laboratory, that people visit in order to develop their pictures or to have their portrait made in the studio. Using Vincent's skills as a photographer during a fieldwork trip in 2005, we offered people to take any picture that they would want and to give them as many copies as they wished. That way, we could collect material on the processes of making and circulating portraits in contemporary Mongolia by producing images that were at the same time the object and the medium of our study.
