Lunchtime Seminar – 4 March – Setsen Altan-Ochir

A spectre of scientificity is haunting Mongolia...or, the making of “scientific” Mongolians

Setsen Altan-Ochir (MIASU Visiting Scholar)

In the history of sciences, there is heated debate around what and when “modernity” was, if the concept stands analytic scrutiny at all (Medievalists would tell you that people back in the “Middle Ages” considered themselves as modern as we do today). However, in our vision of what it means to be “modern”, modernity came to be directly linked, even synonymous with, scientificity. At the revolutionary turn of a post-imperial and disenchanted Inner Asia in the wake of the Qing collapse in 1911, the new Mongolian nation-state established the Institute of Scripts and Letters (Sudar Bichig-un Küriyeleng) in 1921 and its first secondary school in 1923, where subjects like chemistry and physics started being taught. Such an endeavour necessitated translation of modern scientific terms to Mongolian language, which heavily borrowed from buddhist conceptualisations of Geluk scholastics until 1940s (Orluud, 2024).

Using a project I started in 2014 called “Scientific Mongolian”, I will focus on the contemporary manifestations of a second wave of such a scientist vision in Mongolia’s imagined race towards the big M, arguing that it is both a product and a handmaid of the ‘patrimonial’ capitalism (Piketty, 2014; Sneath, 2018) that has formed after the 1990s.