MIASU Research Seminar – 24 February – Grégory Delaplace

Weddings, funerals, and social critique in contemporary Northwestern Mongolia

Grégory Delaplace

This paper looks back at a few weddings witnessed for over twenty years in the north-westernmost province of Uvs in Mongolia. Commenting on what appears to have changed and what seems to remain stable during this period, I will propose that Mongolian weddings (like any wedding anywhere, but in their own particular way) are structured in a way that opens a space for social critique. More specifically, the collective travel of the bride’s relatives to the groom’s parents’ place, followed by their grouped return, creates variable scales of gathering that encourage negative comments on the way the other side handles their part of the ceremony. Drawing on Robert Hertz’s famous theory of second funerals, I will argue that weddings as well are moments when society watches itself at work. Yet, whereas in funerals (according to Hertz) constitutive parts of a larger collective become conscious of what unites them, weddings encourage two mirroring “sides” of a family in becoming to insist on what might pull them apart. Looking back at a few adjustments made in this procedure over the past twenty years, this paper will risk hypotheses on some measures taken to keep these moments of social inflammability under control.