Mongolia

Located in Northeast Asia between the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China, landlocked Mongolia covers an area of roughly 1.6 million square kilometers. Vast steppe regions, mountain areas, and desert areas dominate the country's physical geography, and its continental climate yields long cold winters and brief summers. These basic ecological features have provided the foundation for past and present understandings of the history and culture of the area's peoples. Given the country's considerable size, its population is relatively small at approximately2.5 million people. Fully 80% of the population is considered to be Khalkha Mongolian, with the second largest group, the Kazakhs, represented in much smaller numbers at 6%. Peoples identified as being of Mongolian descent, however, live beyond the country's political borders in neighboring regions to the north and south. Mongolian populations have been fluid, contracting and expanding across the region and varying with the time period under consideration: the pre-Mongol Empire, the Mongolian Empire, the Manchu-Qing period, or modern Mongolia. This situation is recognized by most anthropological work, which predominantly examines mobile pastoralism, genetic origins, cosmology and religion, social organization, and postsocialist transformations within a broad framework that does not necessarily limit itself to the borders of the modern Mongolian state.

With the establishment of the Communist-based Mongolian People's Republic in 1924, Russian and [Page 1612]Mongolian scholars trained in the Soviet tradition of ethnology dominated research throughout much of the 20th century. Anthropologists from the West gained greater access to research with the country's transition to a democratic system of government during the 1990s. Many research teams now conduct multiparty cooperative research with international teams such as the Joint Mongolian–Russian–American archaeological expeditions. Although a significant amount of research from scholars around the world has been conducted since this period, much of this work remains unpublished or available only in journal articles and online materials. Popular perceptions of Mongolia and its peoples have arguably been shaped by the country's most well-known historical figure,Chinggis (Genghis) Khan, and by the early expeditions into the region by explorers best exemplified by Roy Chapman Andrews (1884–1960). Andrews's expeditions in Central Asia for the American Museum of Natural History provided a wealth of archaeological and ethnographic data that still contribute to ongoing research.

Early anthropological work sought to identify and describe the various groups in the area, emphasizing cultural traits that would, on the one hand, distinguish these groups from each other and from the more sedentary peoples around them and, on the other, enable anthropologists to hypothesize their origins and the possibility of common ancestors. Archaeologists continue to examine material artifacts to help them uncover the different ethnic identities present on the Central and Inner Asian steppes. Physical and biological anthropologists, using genetic and morphological studies, are reassessing evolutionary frameworks for the earliest migrations of modern humans and later migration patterns and development within Asia and the Americas, underscoring the need for more complex understandings of migration. Language has also been used as a marker for differentiating the peoples of the steppe region. Placed within the Altaic language family, the Mongolic languages and their similarities in general structure, agglutination, and vowel harmony have been considered as evidence of the origins of and links between Altaic peoples and also been used to posit theories about shared ancestors or waves of migratory groups. Anthropological inquiries into the peoples of Mongolia have been prompted not only by questions about the population's genetic history but also by historical and contemporary research into the relationships between the area's ecology and its peoples, especially their social practices. Research on Mongolian populations have also focused on the role of borders and boundaries, challenged stereotypes and assumptions held about pastoral peoples both within the discipline and in public perceptions, examined the relationship between ecology and social organization, and highlighted the sociopolitical dimensions of cultural change (particularly during recent years with the impact and aftermath of the socialist transformation).

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