Shared secrecy: teasing, attachment, and children's emotional management in rural southern Mongolia

Abstract

In recent decades, anthropologists have scrutinized psychologists' claim that humans process information about others by imputing mental states. The debate remains open whether cross-cultural variability in how people conceive of minds and inner states reflects differences in their folk theories only, or whether it engenders deep-grained psychological differences. In this article, I look at the very onset of children's apprenticeship in emotional management to examine its cognitive consequences. In the context of rural Mongolia in the late 2000s, questions about homesickness prompted by adults raised children's awareness of the existence of a private self and by the very same process discouraged verbalization or public display of personal feelings. I start by presenting interactions where children were routinely teased about homesickness, and invited to deny that they missed their family. I contextualize this teasing routine within local conceptions about emotional control and linguistic ideology to unveil how it introduced children to the performative power of words while also making them face moral dilemmas. The irreconcilable tension between behaving according to expectations of self-control and experiencing separation induced children's discovery of the possibility of disconnecting intimate feelings from public self-presentation, thus transforming the experience of separation into an experience of secret connection. I speculate that the secrecy that hallows homesickness contributed to making it all the more poignant. The way adults constantly checked on whether children were missing their home prompted children to actually identify some emotional state or aspect of their experience as 'missing home'. It gave a name to a personal experience which thus became social and guaranteed that it became a shared feeling, albeit a secret one.Bilgüün 1 was a -year-old girl whose parents were herders and who was living in the home of her uncle and aunt, Erdene and Tuyaa, during the school year. One night in May , her cousins had joined their parents' mattress laid on the floor while she, as usual, was lying alone on the eastern wooden bed. She whispered, 'I think of my home (Bi geree sanaj baina)' . 2 Overhearing her niece, Tuyaa abruptly told Bilgüün that she should sleep.The next day, I asked Bilgüün whether it was hard to be away from her family. She first admitted to missing her home but soon added, 'I don't like explaining this to you, auntie. Missing home is a secret (geree sanah nuuts)!' and finally took her admission back, 'It is not true (Hudlaa)! I don't miss home. It is easy to be in the district centre. I have learned. Two days after my mother leaves, the thought of her goes'.