Between 1937 and 1939, Mongolia's shift from a 300-year-old Buddhist theocracy to a modernizing socialist state culminated in the killing of about 18,000 lamas. The country's population was less than 800,000. In The Lama Question, a historical-anthropological study of this violence, Christopher Kaplonski makes us think about how we should study state violence—not only in a post-socialist space, but in political anthropology at large. According to Kaplonski, scholars of political violence tend to adopt a view that states choose violence because they see it as largely effective. Such a view leads researchers to concentrate mostly on acts of violence and destruction. Instead, Kaplonski suggests looking closely at questions of legitimacy and power, the issue of choice, and political processes.
Through a careful combing of archival materials (many in closed archives), Kaplonski discovered that for two decades the new socialist government carried out a complex set of programs and policies in order to gradually take over the power of the Buddhist establishment. Physical violence was not in the minds of the revolutionary statesmen at that time, as an immediate attack on Buddhism would undermine the new government's legitimacy and its attempts to win support among the deeply Buddhist population.
The Mongolian case helps to enrich Giorgio Agamben's notion of “the state of exception,” which maintains that the establishment of the sovereign power is achieved through the enactment of the exception by suspending the law. Although such exception gives rise to the judicial order, Kaplonski argues against Agamben's juxtaposition of the rule of law with the rule by decree (exception). He shows that the relationship between the two is much more dynamic and nuanced. Because the Mongolian government was preoccupied with building its political power within a modern legalized regime, it strived to contain the “exceptions” within legality and make them unexceptional. In conversation with scholars of violence such as Gyanendra Pandey, Veena Das, and Arthur Kleinman,Footnote 1 Kaplonski argues that instead of a single unitary state of exception, the state instituted multiple, encompassing, and complex “technologies of exceptions” that were often “routinized” and normalized through “everyday” actions like the use of language, gender politics, or taxation policies.
The Lama Question is organized chronologically, as Kaplonski distinguishes three sets of technologies of exceptions with individual lamas' stories representing their impact on the victims and their families. The first set of these technologies, in the period from 1926 to 1934, ranged from anti-religious propaganda to taxation and economic subdual. The second set of technologies was class-based and included more rigorous surveillance and reeducation propaganda until 1937. Arrests, jailing, and subsequent releases were common until the period of mass extermination. Many lamas experienced all three technologies of exceptions. The lama Gonchigjantsan (pp. 166–78), for instance, lost much of his property in the 1920s, then was arrested and jailed in 1931 for counterrevolutionary activities, released because of his ill health, and then rearrested and killed in 1937.
Kaplonski argues that the mass killing of lamas (and also of intellectuals, aristocrats, ethnic minorities, and wealthy herdsmen) in 1937 may not be the mark of a powerful state. Indeed, throughout the book, Kaplonski reveals how threatened by the traditional establishments and vulnerable the new socialist government felt. More tellingly, after two decades of undermining the power of Buddhists, the state, unsatisfied with its results, admitted the limits of law and resorted to physical violence, albeit reluctantly. The act of raw killing was an exception and the government's last resort. In a context where the state strived to keep violence, authority, and exceptions within the legal confines of the state, such violence hardly counts as a sign of power. Even in the midst of mass killing, the state needed the public trials of chief lamas on the stage of the central theater. The trials served as the state's fictionalized justification for its mass violence.
Kaplonski's contribution to Mongolian studies as well as to the Mongolian people involves rerouting the ways in which the violence is (un)remembered. For most Mongolians, the substantive details of the violence, such as the events that took place and the experiences of the victims, have not been a primary concern. Instead, Mongolians tend to question why violence of such a massive scale occurred in the country. Complimentary narratives blame Stalin, geopolitics, and local politics. They mask the agency of the Mongolian state and obstruct further questioning. This book offers a way out of this conceptual obstruction and opens possibilities for more commemoration.
The Lama Question is an encompassing tour de force that traces the many ways in which the formation of the state, the use of law, sovereignty, and governmentality were implicated in the development of the massacre. Anthropologists, historians, and interdisciplinary scholars and students of political violence will gain valuable insights from this book.
