Sandrine Ruhlmann's new book on food production, food consumption, and food sharing in Mongolia is the first work to cover this topic comprehensively, and it does so in an impressive manner. Beginning with an outline of nomadic space (the steppe, the social organization of the yurt, etc.) and a detailed description of the stove and kitchen utensils, Ruhlmann explains the fundamentals of the Mongolian meal, basic culinary techniques, and the gendered process of slaughtering and butchering animals. This is followed by an analysis of Mongolian food classification and the distribution, consumption, and sharing of food. Mongolian ideas of hospitality assume a prominent role in an extended section on food sharing practices. The second part of the book relates the Mongolian food universe to religious concepts and extraordinary situations. It contains elaborate chapters, full of ethnographic detail, on the human soul, birth, death, and White Month—the traditional Mongolian New Year according to the Buddhist lunar-solar calendar.
The book, in effect, is a detailed exploration of how food is produced and shared in mainly rural settings in Mongolia—that is, among villagers and nomadic pastoralists—in the postcommunist period from 2000 to 2015. Yet it is much more than that. Food and food sharing are prominent, if analytically underexplored, aspects of the ubiquitous rule-governed universe of rural life, hospitality, and the space of the Mongolian yurt that has been described in many Mongolian ethnographies. Hence, food production and sharing are a new window into Mongolian cultural traditions in their totality. Indeed, it may be said that this—the food-hospitality nexus—is one of the main engines for the reproduction of Mongolian cosmology and social life. The book, in other words, is a must-read not only for scholars interested in food culture but also for anthropologists—and many others—working on Mongolia and for any student intending to go there.
Ruhlmann's book bears the clear mark of a French anthropological tradition in which structure, classification, social order, and impressive empirical knowledge are distinctive features. The attention to ethnographic detail is overwhelming, almost encyclopedic, and attests to Ruhlmann's sound and remarkable scholarly work. In the best Lévi-Straussian manner, “technical operations” are broken down into “atoms of action” (p. 1) and described in detail, and they are accompanied by thirty-nine drawings of cooking utensils, spatial layouts of yurts, and activities related to food. The book is a treasure of information.
On the other hand, Ruhlmann is also very concerned with classification and structure. Some readers may take issue with the way details are framed within an overarching classificatory, rule-based socio-cosmological order, structured by oppositions such as open/closed and white/black. So, does the book not present us with an objectified, ahistorical, unchanging, and neatly bounded universe—and does it not, then, ignore practice, ambiguity, experience, conflict, and lived life when attending to Mongolian reality? I think not. First, ethnographic writing may take many forms, and Ruhlmann is thorough and consistent in her focus on a relatively coherent Mongolian system rather than on personalized accounts inspired by a more phenomenological tradition in anthropology. However, she does add nuance to the “symbolic structures” with transcriptions of everyday dialogues and points to ambiguities, incompatibilities (between, for example, shamanic, Buddhist, and communist approaches) and historical change, throughout the book and in the epilogue. Ruhlmann also makes certain reservations from the outset by specifying that this is “a monograph on some Halh [the main ethnic group in Mongolia] families who self-identify as Buddhist in a post-communist context” (p. xx). More importantly, however, is the fact that systematized and explicit, rule-governed behavior is such a prominent aspect of Mongolian rural life that it is hard to come across an anthropologist who has not written about it in some way or the other. In other words, the structured outline of Mongolian pastoralist culture, as it were, is not so much a French structuralist fiction as it is an ethnographic fact. It is a structure that makes a lot of sense in relation to existing ethnography, and the book thus adds a lot of detail and profound insight to existing Mongolian ethnography.
I could, of course, have hoped for more engagement with English-language anthropological literature on both Mongolia and general theory. The book is a reworked translation from the French, and while it does contain references to English-language academic literature, in only one case does it engage deeply with that literature. The book mainly contains references to the French-language academic tradition. This, however, is a weakness that is found more often than not in publications on Mongolia (and in anthropological literature in general), whether in English or French, and the translation of this work is great step in the right direction. It hopefully signals more mutual engagement across language barriers and regional traditions in the future.
Ruhlmann's book is a great and essential scholarly contribution to the anthropology of Mongolia. While it is focused exclusively on food and food sharing, when processed through Ruhlmann's perceptive analytical apparatus, food turns out to be a gateway to all aspects of Mongolian nomadic pastoralism. The book demonstrates in an exemplary manner how mundane practices—such as cutting meat or drinking tea—may carry within them cosmological clues and how cosmology is deeply ingrained in all details of everyday life. The book will undoubtedly be a key future work of reference for scholars, and many others, working with Mongolia.
