Mongolian Livestock Breeders in the 1920s – 1930s: Traditional Lifestyles and Health Problems (a Case Study of Archived Records of the RSFSR People’s Commissariat for Health)

Introduction: Soon after the launch of new Socialist healthcare policies in national autonomies (including Buryat-Mongolia), the algorithms and methods developed thereby were required for the similar transformations in Outer Mongolia. Soviet medical assistance to Mongolia followed two ways: employment of Russian doctors for them to join the public Mongolian healthcare service, and organization of medical and sanitary expeditions. The article examines health problems of local cattle herders as viewed by Soviet physicians and healthcare institutors in the Mongolian People’s Republic in the late 1920s – mid-1930s. Soviet health professionals produced a voluminous layer of professional representations regarding the everyday life and practices of local inhabitants. Those have rarely been addressed to as historical sources, and have never studied as cultural anthropology research sources.
Goals: The article aims to identify such narratives as distinct sources for interpretative anthropology studies and to analyze the described representations of traditional Mongolian lifestyles in the eyes of university-educated medical specialists inclined to apply modern approaches and methodologies. From this viewpoint, the article offers a new relevant perspective on a complex issue of medicine as a tool of Soviet-style modernization in Mongolia.
Methods: The research methodology is based on the modern history of medicine. The study approaches the implementation of Socialist medicine in Mongolia as a process of complex multi-layered interactions between European scientific medicine and traditional nomadic lifestyles, including the religious worldview and indigenous medical systems, such as folk medicine and Tibetan medicine. Medical texts are also viewed as sources for interpretative anthropology and textual reflections of the writers’ subjective characteristics, their professional and ethical backgrounds. The approach stems from interpretative anthropology by Clifford Geertz.
Results: The study shows that in the late 1920s traditional Mongolian lifestyles seemed anti-sanitary in the eyes of Soviet physicians. The latter viewed most of the then practices as deviations from the European hygienic norms. Sexual life, traditional dwellings, food, clothes, childbirth procedures, and childcare were the most castigated aspects of the then social norms. In the 1930s, the emerged social changes resulted in that the Soviet medical attitudes to the everyday life of natives — though still seriously contested — became a little more reserved.
Nevertheless, some Soviet physicians in Mongolia actually criticized their colleagues for the subjective vision of the Mongolian life. In part, such criticism reflected the need to fixate the Socialist achievements in medical narratives. However, the critique was basically objective enough as it pointed at the fact that many Soviet doctors viewed the Mongolian traditions as a priori anti-sanitary, giving no credit to all excellent hygienic habits and practices that the Mongols had developed over the millennia.
Most Soviet doctors from the very outset viewed the Mongolian traditions as deviations from the hygienic norms. Even if those were right from the medical viewpoint, it was the lack of cultural knowledge and understanding of how vital those traditions were in the Mongolian context that prevented them from correctly assessing the scale and depth of the social and cultural phenomena they were dealing with.

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