The moral authority of the past in post‐socialist Mongolia

There are likely to be some peculiar problems when people look for moral authority in the distant past. What happens when one's own recent past and the times of one's parents and grandparents are generally seen as bankrupt and permeated with injustice and cruelty? Many, perhaps most, Mongols wish to break with the structures of the socialist period, yet they do not look to any external contemporary society for inspiration. Both of their immediate neighbours, China and Russia, are regarded with apprehensive aversion. Capitalist societies, though widely regarded as having the secret of some magically succesful economic mechanism, are distant and foreign. The Mongols are now in the process of rethinking their 'deep past', not only because this is for once their own, but because historical origin in Mongolian culture is the source of moral authority in the present. Thus the 'deep past ' is being called upon to provide inspiration for a discontinuity with the immediate past. I shall suggest that there are two kinds of iterative enactment by which this is being done. Although the specifics of this are Mongolian, the types I shall later describe may have analogies in other societies emerging from state socialism.