Why are Mongolian Infants Treated Like ‘Kings’?

Michelet, Aude

doi:10.1163/22105018-12340045

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 8 publications

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“…Uttered words can also trigger the attention of nonhuman entities, often malevolent ones. Preventive measures are taken to avoid this, especially for young children, who are more likely to get scared by entities, jealous of their human qualities and aware of their fragility (see Empson 2011; Lacaze 2012; Michelet 2015). As a result, praising ( tsagaan hel am ) infants is avoided.…”

Section: Power Of Speech and Economy Of Attentionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Michelet

2022

Royal Anthropological Inst

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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'.

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Section: Power Of Speech and Economy Of Attentionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Michelet

2022

Royal Anthropological Inst

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What Makes Children Work? The Participative Trajectory in Domestic and Pastoral Chores of Children in Southern Mongolia

Michelet

2016

Ethos

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This article presents an ethnographic study of how children in rural southern Mongolia became competent at pastoral and domestic chores in the years 2006 and 2008–2009. Previous research shows that children's spontaneous interest in learning to work in order to be helpful is cross‐culturally pervasive. Little attention has, however, been paid to the fluctuating nature of children's motivation. In this article, I argue that like learning, motivation needs to be “situated.” Following six children's trajectory of participation in work activities at different ages, we see that their involvement was paved by different injunctions from adults, who at times welcomed or required their participation, and at others challenged or rebuffed their involvement. I examine how these children responded to these different modalities of participation and how those shaped their learning practices and motivation to work. The study demonstrates the importance of disentangling children's motivation to learn and participate from children's motivation to work.

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Timeless Traditions as a Culturally Responsive Approach in a Third Space

Writer

Kaye

Batsaikhan

2023

Third-Space Exploration in Education

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While herder culture continues to be a powerful symbol of the rich traditional heritage of Mongolia, many herders want their children to become “well educated” and move to urban areas rather than become herders themselves. The adoption of a standardized, urban-oriented content and pedagogy is posing a serious challenge to maintaining the herder cultural identity and Mongolia's national identity. Drawing from the concepts and literature on culturally responsive education and funds of knowledge, the authors explore an educational future for Mongolia that locates strengths in herder knowledge, values, and lifeways as a developed Third Space. This Third Space defines cultural responsiveness to Mongolian herder ways of life within national curriculum, not in the context of a static, sentimental past, but as part of a robust, attainable future for the next generation in the herder culture.

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Why are Mongolian Infants Treated Like ‘Kings’?

Cited by 3 publications

References 8 publications

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

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

What Makes Children Work? The Participative Trajectory in Domestic and Pastoral Chores of Children in Southern Mongolia

Timeless Traditions as a Culturally Responsive Approach in a Third Space

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