Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Transliteration and Mongolian Names
- Introduction
- 1 Prefiguring 1921
- 2 Staging a Revolution
- 3 Landscape Re-Envisioned
- 4 Leftward Together
- 5 Society in Flux
- 6 Negotiating Faith
- 7 Life and its Value
- 8 The Great Opportunistic Repression
- 9 A Closer Union
- Appendix: Brief Biographies of Writers
- Index
7 - Life and its Value
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Transliteration and Mongolian Names
- Introduction
- 1 Prefiguring 1921
- 2 Staging a Revolution
- 3 Landscape Re-Envisioned
- 4 Leftward Together
- 5 Society in Flux
- 6 Negotiating Faith
- 7 Life and its Value
- 8 The Great Opportunistic Repression
- 9 A Closer Union
- Appendix: Brief Biographies of Writers
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Alongside universal education, one of the main concerns of the Party was that Westernized health care be made available throughout the country. Along with further limiting the power of the monasteries, the implementation of this policy theoretically brought Mongolia's herding population the benefits of modern scientific medical knowledge. D. Natsagdorj in particular was well-aware of the problems of syphilis following his time in Weimar Germany, and he sought to educate his readers through the brief journalistic and satirical accounts he composed during the early 1930s. Other writers, such as D. Namdag (‘Life and the Cost of Living’ [Ami ba amidralyn üne], 1936), sought to emphasize the efficacy of modern medicine against the traditional Tibetan medicine practiced by monks and, influenced by his reading of Zola, to give an account of the physical hardships experienced by those at the edge of Mongolian society.
Keywords: health, medicine, Western medicine, traditional medicine, social development, syphilis, sexually transmitted diseases
The preceding chapters have examined how politics interacted with literature in an attempt to transform early revolutionary Mongolian society, and how overarching themes – political theory, religion, industry, agriculture – informed the treatment of this transformation in literary writing. This chapter – serving as a bridge of sorts between these thematic treatments and a discussion of how the Great Repression, the Great Patriotic War and the engineering of Socialist Realism helped foster the friendship between Mongolia and the Soviet Union – deals with the way in which literature reflected the individual in Mongolian society and their relationships with their extended family and with society as a whole.
In considering how Mongolia's population was framed by socialist ideology, we should remember that at socialism's ideological center lies the idea of ‘class’. Marx, and those who sought to put Marxian theories to the service of the societies in which they lived, saw history not in individual terms but in terms of class dynamics. Class, however, is not an especially helpful way to analyze the dynamics of nomadic society, and the idea of the ‘masses’ that this taxonomy necessitates denies Mongolian nomadic society the idea of fluid personal interactions and associations across time and space by which it is most usefully defined.
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- Information
- Politics and Literature in Mongolia (1921–1948) , pp. 237 - 266Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020