THE ROLE OF NOSTALGIA IN (RE)CREATING PLACE ATTACHMENTS FOR A DIASPORIC COMMUNITY

Abstract

The concept of nostalgia implies a level of romanticization of a place or time period, a selective “remembering” of a place held in the imagination of an individual or group of people. These imaginings produce a narrative that both extends place attachments to other community members, and potentially create shared myths of place. We use the Mongolian Kazakh population as a case study of how, over time, strong place attachments evolve into place-based narratives of home and identity for diasporic communities. We argue that strong place attachments are the foundation of place-based narratives, but these narratives are nostalgic as well, highlighting key ethnic and cultural practices that reinforce ethno-cultural unity and create idyllic images of place to help maintain a collective place valuing despite residence far away.

Keywords:

• Kazakh
• mobility
• Mongolia
• nostalgia
• rural idyll

Imagining the “Nation”

Endless open land stretches into apparent infinity across much of the Mongolian landscape … Random gers,¹ roaming herds here and there, surrounded by nothing but nature’s own sculptures, further contribute to the romantic notion that Mongolia is an unbounded land, where nomads wander free. (Myadar 2011, 335)

Orhon Myadar describes the images promoted by tourism agencies seeking visitors to Mongolia. Myadar continues, critically, to unpack these images, writing:

The essentialised and romanticized construction of Mongolia as the ‘timeless home of nomads’ has endured – despite the fact that ‘nomadic’ hardly describes modern Mongolia or the majority of its people. Rather, the Mongolian landscape and Mongolian herders are used to construct and perpetuate the romantic, if medieval, portrayal of Mongolia in order to serve the need of outsiders for an imagined Other and the need of Mongolians for a cultural demarcation and social bond. (Myadar 2011, 336)

As Myadar so succinctly illustrates, the romanticized images of rural people and places helps establish narratives and imaginaries that can bring populations together—a nationalist trope. Myadar is speaking broadly of Mongolia and the imagery that is perpetuated about this rapidly developing and urbanizing place. These images stand in contrast to reports of life in Ulaanbaatar, where 45.7 percent of the 3.1 million population resides (NSOM 2016b, 27) and which Joseph Hincks gives the dubious distinction as “the most polluted capital in the world” (2018). Myadar’s comments speak to the influence of imagery on national social imaginations and the portrayal of idealized, if highly unrealistic, images of place. But these images are grounded in a history that many Mongolians remember. Mongolia’s rapid development moved the nation from a socialist society where 57 percent of the 2 million population resided in rural places in 1989 (NSOM 2003, 79) to one that is now 68 percent urbanized (NSOM 2016b, 50). But these images do not speak to all young Mongolians, who occupy a digital, globalized world, travel internationally, and seek the latest trends via their mobile phones, and who may see their history, but not their selves, represented in these nationalist rural images. As one young, affluent, Western educated Mongolian woman laments in flawless English, “ … they still don’t have real coffee in the countryside … ” Although a seemingly offhand comment, it nonetheless underscores a tension between place imaginaries and place realities, and the evolution of place attachments at different spatial scales and across time periods and generations.

Much has been written about nationalism, ethnonationalism, and homelands as these concepts relate to the emergence of new nation-states in post-Soviet countries (Esenova 2002; Diener 2009; Tsuda 2009), as well as nationalism specifically in Mongolia (Batbayar 2002; Bulag 1998; Sneath 2010; Diener and Hagen 2013). The project of nation-building in Mongolia began during the Socialist period and was reoriented during the early transition years (from early to mid-1990s) when Mongolia shifted to a democratic form of governance and capitalist economy. Much of the imagery associated with Mongolia’s nationalism reflect those images so aptly described by Myadar. These images depict landscapes and livelihoods that are common in Mongolia to the majority of the Khalkh ethnic group (84.5 percent in 2015), if not to the 22 other ethnic groups (NSOM 2016b, 36). The Kazakh population, however, has taken a different path. In the early 1990s, Kazakhs became the second nationality (ündesten) in Mongolia (Bulag 1998; Sneath 2010). This group, comprising 3.9 percent of the total population of Mongolia, is not only ethnically and culturally distinct from the dominant Khalkh ethnic group, but is largely clustered in western Mongolia, primarily Bayan-Ulgii aimag (province) and Hovd aimag (Figure 1). In Bayan-Ulgii, Kazakhs comprised nearly 88.6 percent of the total population in 2015, making the province an ethnic minority-majority area (NSOM 2016a, 28, 40). Mongolian Kazakhs are recognized by the state as a separate nationality and maintain an ethno-cultural territory in an isolated region of the country, where they maintain a strong presence, despite successive and sometimes extensive migration flows to Kazakhstan (Diener 2009; Werner and Barcus 2009) and more recently to Ulaanbaatar (Barcus and Shugatai 2018). Holly Barcus and Cynthia Werner (2015) argue that regardless of the ebb and flow of migrants from this region, Mongolian Kazakhs continue to maintain strong place attachments to western Mongolia. These place attachments take the form of religiosity, kinship ties, and language versatility—elements visible on the landscape in the form of mosques, and Kazakh language business signs (Barcus and Werner 2015). As migration trajectories shifted towards Ulaanbaatar in the later 2000s, many Kazakhs continued to remain in place, acting as cultural anchors of place attachment and ethnic identity for those who migrated away (Barcus and Shugatai 2018).

Fig. 1 Kazakh Population in Mongolia

In this paper, we argue that the strong place attachments, developed in western Mongolia and perpetuated by Kazakh migrants to Ulaanbaatar, are evolving into a form of rural idyll, which is passed to younger generations through images of bucolic places, material reminders of place, and community festivals and celebrations. Kazakh migrants to Ulaanbaatar actively seek to keep these culturally specific rural images vibrant for younger generations, despite having no inclination towards return migration. We build our conceptual framework around three key literatures—nostalgia, place attachment and identities, and the rural idyll—in our attempt to better understand how connections to place evolve over time for populations who have moved away from the home place. Drawing from Leila Scannell and Robert Gifford’s (2010) conceptual framework of a multidimensional place attachment, we build on the idea that place attachment is a process extending from the individual scale to broader community scales via social imagination and processes of memory and nostalgia. We use the Mongolian Kazakh population as a case study of how, over time, strong place attachments evolve into place-based narratives of home and identity for diasporic communities. In the next section we provide an overview of the literatures upon which we draw to develop our argument, followed in the third and fourth sections with our case study and methodology sections. Our analysis highlights our findings and the last section offers concluding thoughts.

Conceptual Framework: The Imagination of Place, Migration, and Nostalgic Rememberings

Place Attachment and Place Identities

Since Edward Relph’s 1976 book, Place and Placelessness, highlighted the question of whether people were losing their connections to place, scholars have sought to define and understand the connection between people and places. Relph focused on concepts of insideness, outsideness, and authenticity of place. Taking a different track, behavioral psychologists, such as Proshansky and others (1983), consider place from the perspective of the self. For Harold Proshansky and others, “[Place Identity] is a sub-structure of the self-identity … consisting of … cognitions about the physical world in which the individual lives” … including “ … memories, ideas, feelings, attitudes, values, preferences, meanings, and conceptions of behavior and experience which relate to the variety and complexity of physical settings” (1983, 59), basically place identity is about the self, a form of self-identity. John Harner, however, argues that “[p]lace identity is a cultural value shared by the community, a collective understanding about social identity intertwined with place meaning” (2001, 660). Culture, thus, is deeply intertwined with place identities (Relph 1976), although individual agency mediates the extent to which either place identities or cultural practices are internalized or practiced.

In 2010, in response to the growing number of definitions and dimensions within the place-attachment literature, Scannell and Gifford proposed a multifaceted definition for place attachment, which they termed the Person-Process-Place (PPP) Model (2010) (Table 1). “According to [the] person-process-place framework, place attachment is a bond between an individual or group and a place that can vary in terms of spatial level, degree of specificity, and social or physical features of the place, and is manifested through affective, cognitive, and behavioral psychological processes” (Scannell and Gifford 2010, 5). This framework is useful for laying out the nuances of place attachment, how at different scales place attachment can be both highly specific to an experience of one person while capturing a broader sense of connection for the group. It also helps us consider disentangling the existence of place attachments from the process of creating place attachments.

Table 1 “The Tripartite Model of Place Attachment” (Adapted from Scannell and Gifford 2010, 2)

Place Attachment
Person		Process			Place
Individual	Cultural/Group	Affect	Cognition	Behavior	Social	Physical
Experience Realizations Milestones	Religious Historical	Happiness Pride Love	Memory Knowledge Schemas Meaning	Proximity-maintaining Reconstruction of place	Social arena Social symbol	Natural Built

Evaluating the PPP Model and other definitions of place attachment, Bernando Hernández and others assert that much attention has been paid to defining and measuring the “person” aspect of the PPP Model, with more attention needed on the “process” and “place” dimensions (Hernández and others 2014, 134). While one aspect of process is how place attachments develop for either an individual or a group, another perspective is to consider how place attachments change through time. In other words, once one establishes that place attachments exist, do these same attachments remain static through time? Two recent dimensions of this research include the importance of “memory as an enabler of place attachment” (Lewicka 2014, 49) and the interplay between mobility and place attachment. As others have noted, there is much evidence that length of residence in a place affects place attachments, with place attachment often increasing with length of residence (Gustafson 2014; Lewicka 2014). However, as astutely pointed out by Maria Lewicka, although this association seems clear, it is of moderate strength with many additional factors clearly contributing to an overall sense of place attachment (2014, 50–51). Mobility and place attachment, however, are also not mutually exclusive; rather, many examples exist of high-mobility societies with strong place attachments (Gustafson 2014, 38).

Place attachments and identities, when viewed from afar, whether by geography or time, and especially when held in comparison to a challenging living environment in the present, may simultaneously take on positive images and lose negative aspects. The imagined home place takes on a mythical existence in personal and group narratives, complete with key social and familial practices, and bucolic images of peaceful, beautiful places. Such narratives can be specific to an individual, a group, or indeed a nation, as Myadar (2011) so aptly notes.

Linking Place Attachment, Place Elasticity, Nostalgia, and Migration

Migration away from a beloved home place, whether voluntary or forced, can create a desire to remain connected, however imperfect, through cultural practices, oral histories, or storytelling that evoke portrayals and imagery of a faraway place. Family histories and genealogies, for example, are a means by which individuals establish connections to the past, inclusive of people and places (Lewicka 2014, 53-54). The concept of place elasticity further describes how individuals who move away from a home place seek to maintain connections and identities associated with that place, including strong place bonds, permanence, and portability (Barcus and Brunn 2010). Place elasticity is premised on an individuals’ connection to a place—that there is a reason to perpetuate connectedness between people and place. In a previous article, we argued that “ … immobile populations play a key role in maintaining and perpetuating cultural narratives for ethnic minority populations by anchoring cultural narratives to place” (Barcus and Shugatai 2018, 8). For example, places such as summer pastures, or local institutions, or burial sites might foster strong place bonds through direct experience with these places. Out-migrants may also maintain a continued dialog with a place (portability) by staying up-to-date on local news and events via social media or other telecommunications technologies, visiting, or attending family events. Lastly, permanence describes a “ … desire to perpetuate place bonds through time and generations … .” (Barcus and Shugatai 2018, 8). In this article, we see place elasticity as establishing a connection between migrants and western Mongolia, and a broadly shared sense of identity specific to place. In other words, these are not just cultural or ethnic identity practices but rather they are cultural and ethnic identities that are associated with a specific territory or place that is at once experienced and reimagined through time. It is this aspect that we see connecting to concepts of nostalgia.

The concept of nostalgia implies a level of romanticization of a place or time period, a selective “remembering” or “creating” of a place held in the imagination of a person or group. Such rememberings or imaginings are held not only by individuals, but begin to produce a narrative that both extends place attachments to other community members and also potentially creates shared myths of place dependent as much upon selective forgetting as selective remembering. “Nostalgia is adaptive—it helps to put together broken parts, builds a bridge between past and present, increases self-esteem and life satisfaction, and reinforces social ties” (Lewicka 2014, 53). Nostalgia and place elasticity, then, find common ground linking people and places through memory and imagination.

While the concept of place elasticity helps us understand how people remain connected to a specific place after migration, the idea of nostalgia describes how memory and imaginaries interact to (re)create or preserve particular valued characteristics of a specific location, thus potentially transferring place attachments across generations.

Creating a Rural Idyll?

Although discussed extensively in Global North studies of rurality (Bunce 1994), scholars have not sufficiently applied the concept of the rural idyll to Global South and Global Middle² countries. In the rush towards urbanization, modernization, and “development,” sentiment for the rural and the old somehow seems to have escaped the scholarly gaze in these world regions. Or more likely, the quest for the modern, global urban lifestyles portrayed on television and the Internet can leave rural places seemingly distant and disadvantaged in comparison. But the view from within a population that has moved away may be quite different from outsider perspectives.

Writing of the origins of the rural idyll concept in his book The Countryside Ideal, Michael Bunce describes the link between “agrarian simplicity and rural nostalgia.” “At heart it is an idea which romanticizes pre-industrial culture, casting the traditional rural lifestyle and communities of the past in nostalgic contrast to the dynamic individualistic culture of the present. Perhaps the most important element of this is the attachment of reverential status to farming as a way of life” (Bunce 1994, 29). Although, for Mongolia, we might substitute “herding” for “farming,” Bunce captures the sentiment of nostalgia for rural places and the associated imagery of the rural idyll in North America. He further asserts that the theme of rural nostalgia is, historically, a relatively common “ … social response to the urbanization process … ” (Bunce 1994, 5). Key terms that embody the concepts of the rural idyll include “Nostalgic/part of national identity, traditional, problem free, closely knit/friendly, better environment, place for play, simpler/more natural,” while the rural anti-idyll is described as “backward, unsophisticated, unfriendly, environmentally damaged, dull, boring, poorly provided with services, sleepy” (Yarwood 2005, 24). Each set of terms reflects a different perspective on rural. Richard Yarwood, however, is making a broader point, which is at least in part about how rural places are interpreted differently by different groups of people, and the images and associations with rural vary accordingly (2005, 21).

While nostalgia is a key aspect of the rural idyll (Yarwood 2005), linking nostalgia to national identity is also important for the development of a rural idyll. These linkages have been less common in Global South and Global Middle countries where the rush to “develop” often depicts rural places in terms similar to the rural anti-idyll. Mongolia, in this case departs from this portrayal of its rural spaces, at least on a national scale. Instead, bucolic rural images are the essence of nationalist images in Mongolia, despite scholarly critique (Batbayar 2002; Myadar 2011).

In summary, memory, nostalgia, and the narratives of place attachments and identity shared by migrants, with each other and across generations in the new destination, perpetuate a shared place attachment that reinforces social imaginations of a place. The following case study provides an example of this process. We argue that linking ideas of nostalgia, place attachment, and the rural idyll are increasingly important in Global Middle countries, where newly affluent urban populations may reflect on aspects of their rural origins that are less present in their urban, modern lifestyles. By using memory, knowledge, stories, narratives, artifacts, pictures, language, and urban festivals, former residents of western Mongolia create a “rural idyll” for younger generations. Western Mongolia becomes a social symbol of Kazakh culture and history—a rural idyll that, while specific to the Kazakh population, also embraces the images of landscape and rurality common to the broader nationalist images utilized by the Mongolian government.

Changing Mobilities and Place Attachments amongst the Mongolian Kazakhs

To develop our argument, we focus on recent urban in-migrants, whose ethnicity and cultural histories are closely tied to a particular remote, rural region of Mongolia, to explore the permutations of place attachment and identities as expressed through daily life. We further explore how these place attachments are communicated to younger generations, typically children, whose only personal experiences with the rural home of their parents or grandparents is through stories and short visits. In these ways and in everyday rememberings, place is invoked and created through memories and imaginations of others, thus creating in the social imagination of ethnic Kazakhs in Ulaanbaatar, a level of nostalgia for the rural places from which they or their kin migrated.

Who Are the Kazakhs in Mongolia?

Kazakhs comprise the second largest ethnic group in Mongolia (3.9 percent of the total population), after ethnic Khalkh Mongols, although the overall size of the Kazakh population is quite small (NSOM 2016b). From the perspective of cultural, linguistic, and religious practices, Kazakhs are distinct from the Khalkh Mongol majority, as most Kazakhs are Muslim, whereas Buddhism and Shamanism are more common among other ethnicities in Mongolia. In Bayan-Ulgii, while Mongolian is the language of interethnic communication and official business, ethnic Kazakhs primarily utilize Kazakh as their first language. In a relatively isolated and borderland province such as Bayan-Ulgii, this practice did not represent significant challenges to the Kazakh population and was one aspect of a strongly felt sense of ethnic identity in the region. The presence of mosques, especially in towns and in the provincial center Ulgii, further cemented a sense of place specific to this ethnic group (Barcus and Werner 2015). In essence, then, Bayan-Ulgii Aimag, despite being sparsely populated and on the borderlands of Mongolia, has a distinctively Kazakh human landscape; the mosques are both visible and audible, as the calls to prayer occur throughout the day. Kazakh is the primary language and celebrations, food ways, gers (portable, round dwellings), and handicrafts all reflect the influence of this ethnic group. Importantly, this is also a place in which ancestors are buried, and this is an important element of Kazakh place-based identities (Barcus and Werner 2015). The experience of having both a visible landscape reflective of the presence and material artifacts of the Kazakh population, as well as the ability to converse in Kazakh, creates a sense of place that is distinct culturally and linguistically from other places in Mongolia.

Movement away from western Mongolia can represent a significant disruption in an individual’s sense of identity and place. It is not the intention of this research to ascribe identities and interpretations of individual identities to a group or individual, but rather to describe how living in this particular place with many coethnics can create a living environment and coethnic community that is not easily replicated elsewhere. It is also an important aspect of place elasticity and nostalgia—when an individual is far from a treasured place or home, elements of daily life may be ascribed more significance in remembering than might have been given originally.

The Case Study

The physical, cultural, and social landscapes of western Mongolia stand in stark contrast to those of Ulaanbaatar. As the primate city and capital of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar is a sprawling, densely populated urban area with extensive ger districts, significant pollution issues, congestion, and social competition for employment and education. In our interviews, Kazakh respondents revealed levels of discrimination in access to services, as well as small acts of discrimination that make daily life much harder in Ulaanbaatar.

Internal migration from the countryside is a top challenge facing urban planners in Ulaanbaatar, including issues of overwhelming levels of air pollution, traffic congestion, and lack of infrastructure development (NCPH and UNICEF 2018). The city is divided into districts, including areas in which the residences are primarily apartments and those that are dominantly ger districts. Ger districts are areas of housing and commerce characterized by small, privately owned lots often utilizing the traditional felt ger. These districts lack water and sewer infrastructure and are largely unplanned and sprawling, although they include householders with a range of income and education levels. Nearly 60 percent of the population in Ulaanbaatar reside in the ger districts (NCPH and UNICEF 2018, 15).

Kazakhs comprise only a small portion of the overall migrant flow to Ulaanbaatar, are widely dispersed across the city, and compete with other migrants and residents for education, health care, and other basic social services and employment. While several districts are home to a larger number of Kazakhs, they are not significantly clustered into neighborhoods and therefore individuals must seek out coethnics through friend and family networks. A few large mosques exist in Ulaanbaatar (Figure 2), but they are distant from many Kazakh households so individuals must either travel greater distances or find alternative spaces to observe religious practices.

Fig. 2 Mosque in Ulaanbaatar. Summer 2016. Photo by Holly Barcus

Methodology

We draw on 100 questionnaires and 36 in-depth life-history interviews with ethnic Kazakh migrants to Ulaanbaatar who previously lived in rural places, mostly in Bayan-Ulgii and Hovd aimags in western Mongolia. Questionnaires were collected during the summer months of 2015 and life-history interviews were conducted during the summer months of 2016. All data were collected in Ulaanbaatar. We chose participants using a nested quota sample incorporating age, sex, and migration experience, although we utilized a snowball sampling method to find potential participants. The majority of respondents migrated post-1989, with a small handful migrating pre-1989. Respondents have highly diverse levels of education, life experience, and human capital. Some migrated to Ulaanbaatar to attend university, others came with families to create better lives for their children, and others moved as professionals. The life-history interviews included a subset of the 2015 questionnaire sample as well as additional interviewees and are evenly divided between male and female respondents. About 33 percent are 18-34 years, 39 percent are 35–54 years, and 28 percent were 55 years and over. Questionnaires and life-history interviews covered a wide range of topics including demographic, occupational, and household information; migration histories and questions about migration; social and economic situations; access to services; and perspectives on cultural practices and life in Ulaanbaatar.

Our sample is intentionally divided to include respondents with different living experiences spanning the ger districts and apartments. We also added field notes and observations of the ways in which place attachments and nostalgia are expressed and intertwined in homes and daily lives. These include observations about how place is discussed, connections to place that may be displayed or evidenced in respondents’ homes, and, occasionally, the foods served and discussed during our interviews. All life-history interviews and questionnaires were conducted by the authors, in Kazakh, Mongolian, or English, depending on the preference of the interviewee, although the majority were conducted in Kazakh. Interviews were transcribed and translated in English, and Atlas.ti was utilized to identify preliminary themes in the data. The authors are native speakers of Kazakh or English and one author is fluent in Mongolian. Interview location varied, although most interviews took place in interviewees homes, other locations included workplaces, parks, or cafés. In this article we primarily utilize the life-history interviews, although some questionnaire data are incorporated.

One advantage of this work is our long association with this population. While the research team has changed over the years, several of the original members remain part of the team. We, the authors, self-identify as women, and represent insider and outsider perspectives to this population. Engagement with this community includes multiple fieldwork periods in Bayan-Ulgii, including 2006, 2008, and 2009, as well as two fieldwork periods in 2015 and 2016 in Ulaanbaatar, and informal visits during 2014 and 2019. Migration trajectories have changed over these time periods, and it is not unusual to interview individuals in Ulaanbaatar during the later fieldwork periods (2015, 2016) that we interviewed in Bayan-Ulgii during the earlier fieldwork periods. We did not seek these individuals out specifically, but their insights over time illuminate variation in migration priorities that evolve at the individual level in response to policy changes and social and economic opportunities or challenges in both Mongolia and Kazakhstan over this extended period of time.

Finally, official statistics from the National Statistics Office of Mongolia (NSOM) allow for a tabulation of the total number of ethnic Kazakhs residing in Ulaanbaatar at different points in time. As we have noted in previous articles, the migration patterns of ethnic Kazakhs in Mongolia have shifted over time, favoring migration from Mongolia to Kazakhstan (and return) during the early and middle years of the economic transition (1990s to early 2000s) and then shifting towards Ulaanbaatar in more recent years. There are many reasons for the shifting mobility patterns, not least of all including practical citizenship considerations as well as more subjective imaginings of home and homelands (Werner and Barcus 2009; Barcus and Shugatai 2018). Interviews and ethnographies are important qualitative means of collecting information about place and migration and in particular, about the nuances of both the migration process, outcomes, and insights into home and place (McHugh and Mings 1996; McHugh 2000; Mendoza and Morén‐Alegret 2012).

Analysis and Findings ~ Perpetuating Place Attachments

Our data and field notes reveal three dominant themes supporting the contention that place attachments are reimagined and (re)created by those who move away forming a nostalgic and often idyllic narrative of a rural home place for this small and dispersed population.

Bucolic Landscapes and Happy People

Telling and retelling of particular family and community narratives encourages a group-based nostalgia for western Mongolia. We situate this within the process-place dimensions of the PPP framework. The narratives highlight specific themes that underscore social and physical place characteristics that are difficult to replicate in Ulaanbaatar. They include narratives of close-knit family, friend networks, and reciprocal caretaking; ease of communication; a shared appreciation of religion, language, and foodways; and stories of nature, environment, and place. While these are descriptive of place, they are also essential to the process of reaffirming a particular place as important to this particular group of people. These portrayals, whether oral or symbolized in artifacts and practices, exemplify Yarwood’s description of the rural idyll as, “Nostalgic/part of national identity, traditional, problem free, closely knit/friendly, better environment, place for play, simpler/more natural” (2005, 24).

For example, the first theme from our life-history interviews is the importance of the physical environment. We see this manifest not only in the interviews, but also in artifacts and images present in some of the interview spaces and the stories told by our respondents. Common elements of these stories include animals such as horses and sheep, gers, activities such as milking the animals, and natural features such as mountains and rivers. The environmental images are bucolic in nature, never indicating the harshness of the real environment, but rather focusing specifically on positive images, such as the beauty of the landscape.

Gulnar,³ for example, is a 34-year-old mother of two with an economics degree from a Mongolian university. She and her husband travel widely due to their respective occupations, but own an apartment in Ulaanbaatar where we conducted the interview. Gulnar (LH_1_0016) is deeply concerned about the loss of Kazakh culture and the process by which they are educating their two young children. The family speaks only Kazakh at home, attends festivals when possible, and seeks to educate their children in Kazakh practices. When speaking about western Mongolia, she talks softly and thoughtfully, clearly drawing a picture for us of her experiences there. Her fondest memories include feeding and milking the animals and playing outside her family’s ger. “I was too small for the horses but I learned how to milk the goats and the sheep the first time. It was really amazing … ” (LH_1_0016).

Her memories of western Mongolia, like many other respondents, reflects the peak summer season experiences, when landscapes are beautiful and green, the weather is mild, and there is sufficient food for animals and humans (Figure 3). A middle-aged male, Bolatkhan, also from western Mongolia, draws a similar sense of longing for this place (LH_802_119): “My birthplace is very close with my heart. Sometimes I miss my birthplace. The beach by the river, herding livestock. I love them.” He tells us that his most important reminders of western Mongolia are “ … the clean environment. The water is clear, there is also clean air. Here [in Ulaanbaatar] there is no fresh air. [In western Mongolia there are] cool and nice places.” Both Gulnar and Bolatkhan tell these stories to us, but it is clear that these are also the images and stories frequently relayed to their children.

Fig. 3 Pastures in Western Mongolia. Summer 2009. Photo by Holly Barcus

These memories and images of place describe the physical landscape and are deeply entwined with positive images of social and familial experiences. Alikhan, a 30-year-old male, for example, links the closeness of the auls (encampments of interlinked families in the countryside) to feelings of belonging and happiness. “The main difference is that in the small provinces we’re close, you know everybody. So in that sense, I think that the atmosphere of life and the day-to-day life is that you can interact with everyone you know and say, ‘Hi. How are you?’ … I kind of remember mostly playing together with the other kids. Activitywise, we went out in the morning and came back at night” (LH_3_0018). Again, these stories are frequently told to children about life in the countryside. For a widely dispersed urban population, these narratives portray Kazakh families as tightly linked and closely woven into the fabric of the broader community.

In each account, the respondent conjures images of bucolic rural landscapes, creating an idealized and nostalgic version of rural life, of life in the summer pastures. These images, however, are not stand-alone. Each also includes a social landscape that is equally harmonious. For example, Beibut, a 67-year-old male respondent living in the ger districts tells us of his childhood: “When I was young, I had three sisters and a little younger brother and I was the eldest boy in my family. When I was a little boy, I remember riding a horse. My father had many horses and he participated in horseracing. I enjoyed it very much. I was riding a horse still when I was 16 years old. In the summer my family moved [to the summer pastures] from Tsengal to Dayan. It was a nice place to camp. In the summer we usually milked the mares. All our relatives were living there. It was nice” (LH_19_0034). Our interview took place at his home in Ulaanbaatar, a compound we described in our notes as a bit worn, with two aging gers occupying the center of the area. Beibut, a retired scientist, worked with the Russians until 1990. He lived in Bayan-Ulgii until 1997 when he migrated to Ulaanbaatar, bringing his family to live with him later. On the day of our interview, he was dressed in white with an embroidered Kazakh tebeteika (an embroidered hat worn by Muslim men), surrounded by traditional handicrafts, including felted wool rugs (syrmaqs) with tus kiiz’s (traditional embroidered wall hangings). Behind him were black-and-white pictures of family members, as well as medals for horse riding and eagle hunting. He is active in the Kazakh community and interested in preserving Kazakh culture. In this theme, the importance of both the environmental and social landscapes convey a sense of belonging and beauty ascribed to western Mongolia. These images stand in contrast to experiences in Ulaanbaatar, where Kazakhs are rarely able to converse in Kazakh, except at home, and the environment is more urban and industrial.

Material Reminders of Place: Textiles and Artifacts

A second theme linking place attachment to nostalgia and the creation of a rural idyll is the presence of material artifacts in many homes. Traditional textiles are often subtly displayed, integrated amongst everyday items, and used for daily activities. For example, in many kitchens where we conducted our interviews over tea and baursak (a type of fried bread), the small kitchen tables were covered with pieces of Kazakh embroidery overlain with clear plastic for protection. Other textiles were often visible in homes; textiles that are clearly not made for general consumption, but rather either produced by or for the household specifically.

Syrmaqs are felted wool rugs (Figure 4), handmade by women and often given to a young couple as a marriage gift from the bride’s family (Portisch 2009). Although we never witnessed syrmaq production in Ulaanbaatar, it was clear that households used them for various purposes. In one home, Ainur, a middle-aged woman, was caring for a group of young children. As we conducted the interview, the children were settled in an adjoining room watching cartoons on television and having a snack while sprawled on several layers of overlapping syrmaqs. Portisch writes about how textiles, and syrmaqs in particular, are often incorporated into the daily living and life lessons of children.

For a child learning about syrmaq, this process may begin in a number of different situations. The child may begin to learn to recognize and remember this artifact as a woolly surface that is rough and itchy to sit on against the bare skin. It may be warmer sitting on a syrmaq than elsewhere on the floor, and the child may have a visual impression of the colours and patterns as well as an olfactory impression of the syrmaq, which smells of the unwashed lamb’s wool it is made of. Later, the child might know this type of artefact as an object that has been designed and created by her mother or grandmother, and is used in certain situations. (Portisch 2009, 476–477)

Fig. 4 Kazakh Syrmaq. Summer 2009. Photo by Holly Barcus

Syrmaqs, tus kiiz’s (Figure 5), and other embroidered textiles did not dominate living spaces, but were subtly integrated with more contemporary furnishings. They nonetheless point to a connection between place and community. Discussing craft production in Bayan-Ulgii, Guldana Salimjan writes that “[j]ust as falconry became a vital connection to the Kazakh historical past, natural environment, and traditional culture across Eurasia, handicrafts have also allowed Kazakhs to maintain their identity and traditional knowledge as an ethnic minority in Mongolia, and have become an attribute of ‘authentic’ Kazakhness” (2018, 2). Unlike falconry, which takes on a somewhat iconic symbolism, crafts, such as syrmaqs and tus kiizs, are everyday reminders of ethnic identity and place connection. Handicrafts are dominantly produced in households in rural places and they are unique to the individual women who produce each item. Typically this is a family member. Tus kiiz, for example, may be passed from mother to eldest daughter at marriage, thus creating another familial link to place and identity, as, in these cases, the textiles were produced by women in western Mongolia and passed through the generations—a further reminder of the importance of place passed along between generations.

Fig. 5 Kazakh Tus Kiiz. Summer 2009. Photo by Holly Barcus

Salimjan writes that “[t]us kiiz is a medium for such traditional knowledge transmission as well as identity formation … Material culture speaks to embodied memories around interpersonal relations and people’s connections to land and the materials around them” (2018, 14–15). Finding tus kiiz in our respondents’ homes, and additionally, similar embroidered pieces that are reimagined into everyday items, such as tablecloths, reflects the connections that Kazakhs residing in Ulaanbaatar still wish to maintain to western Mongolia. Such material reminders of place underscore the reflective, nostalgic aspects of place attachment for migrants living far from western Mongolia, acting as reminders of place and home and continuing to connect migrants to a distant but important place. They become the everyday items that younger generations now also see as part of their connection to this faraway place.

The Practice of Place: Festivals, Community, and Language

The third theme emerging from the interviews is the role of food, festivals, and language in perpetuating place attachments and cultural identities. Festivals and festival attendance are one manifestation of culture on the landscape. Two large and widely celebrated events for Kazakhs in Mongolia include the Eagle Hunting Festival(s) and Nauryz (the Kazakh New Year celebration). Family events such as the birth of a child, weddings, and funerals are also important festive gatherings of kin. As one respondent notes, “It is very difficult to keep our religion and culture and tradition. We are a small ethnic group in Mongolia. So we often organize Kazakh religious and cultural events” (LH_36_0051). From our questionnaires, we know that 82 percent of respondents attended at least one Kazakh festival in Ulaanbaatar in the year preceding the interview and only 2 percent had no knowledge of Kazakh festivals (Barcus and Shugatai 2018).

Celebrations, whether public or family-based, create an atmosphere of shared culture and reinforce place attachments and cultural identities across generations. For example, Nauryz is publically celebrated but also has an after-party among smaller kin and friend groupings of Kazakhs. Gulnar, a 34-year-old female respondent tells us, “Yes recently I attended Nauryz … All the Kazakhs in Ulaanbaatar gathered there and they also gathered together [after the official celebration] and celebrated Nauryz together in a big hotel and had a ceremony” (LH_1_0016). The Eagle Hunting Festival, of which there are several, including one in Ulaanbaatar and one in Bayan-Ulgii, also provides a level of public pride in cultural identity. The Eagle Huntress movie released by Sony Pictures in 2016, for example, displayed to the world the unique cultural practice of falconry with golden eagles that is tied specifically to the Kazakh population and now, through this mass media form, to western Mongolia specifically. Another way in which Kazakhs evoke images of western Mongolia at these public and private gatherings or celebrations is through music and musical instruments. Jennifer Post argues that musical expression, particularly with “ … the dombra, a long-necked lute widely considered a symbol of Kazakh identity … ”, is utilized by Kazakhs as a component of place-making in a community context (2007, 47). There are also NGOs that provide Kazakh language instruction, dance and dombra lessons for children, and a “Kazakh Students Bolashak Association” in several universities in Ulaanbaatar. Children may attend after-school or weekend “cultural classes” to learn Kazakh dance, music, and language, performing later at recitals or Kazakh festivals. In these ways, place attachment and cultural identities are perpetuated across generations through performance and public group affirmations.

Lastly, while most questionnaire respondents (87 percent) reported speaking Kazakh at home at least sometimes, gatherings provide a community-based forum for collectively speaking Kazakh, a sense of unity that is not possible when engaging with non-Kazakhs in daily life. Language and its perpetuation come up in every life-history interview—the importance of maintaining the Kazakh language, of speaking it at home and teaching children, and of the desire for Kazakh language and cultural schools in Ulaanbaatar are common threads. Encouraging children to learn Kazakh is significant to many families, even those that noted how important fluency in Mongolian or English, and sometimes Russian, was for social mobility in Ulaanbaatar. Some Kazakh migrants see a lack of fluency in Mongolian, or speaking with an accent, as an impediment to finding employment or doing well in Ulaanbaatar, where the remainder of the population speaks Mongolian. Interviewees perceive speaking English as essential for international business, and to some extent Russian is still valued, albeit distantly to Mongolian and English. Memories of western Mongolia center on the ease of language and communication and not needing to worry about speaking Mongolian. By extension, there is also an underlying fear that the children will not learn to speak Kazakh and so the language will be lost.

By using memory, knowledge, stories, narratives, artifacts, pictures, language, and urban festivals, former residents of western Mongolia create a “rural idyll” for younger generations. These are integrated into daily living as well as through events such as festivals. Western Mongolia becomes a social symbol of Kazakh culture and history—a rural idyll for this small population. Children are active participants in these activities and practices, absorbing, as children do, their parents and grandparents attitudes. Within the PPP model, this connects directly to ideas of cognition (memory, knowledge, and meaning) and affect (happiness, pride, and love) [Table 1].

For many Kazakh children, these three threads come together during summer holidays when families and sometimes only the children spend time in western Mongolia with relatives. “In summer vacation [children] should go to their grandparents [in the countryside] … .it is important to keep language and religion and respect our language and religion” (Batima, age 22, female, LH_25_0040). In the countryside, children are further exposed to traditional lifeways as these visits most often involve extended stays in summer pastures, living in traditional gers, and engaged in daily practices of milking, food preparation, horse riding, and living amongst an extended family. Children are fully immersed in the Kazakh language. Families generally return to the same pastures each year and this becomes another aspect of inscribing place and identity through everyday practices for children who ultimately will return to the city.

It is important that these place attachments and their perpetuation, however nostalgic, also reflect the types of nationalist images that Myadar (2011) depicts in the opening paragraphs of this paper. These images and narratives have a specific Kazakh flare, exemplifying Kazakh culture and practices. Post argues that “[n]ational markers (including language, food, clothing, social patterns, religion, musical instruments and musical expression) reinforced nationally and internationally have few connections to the everyday lives of the Kazakh people” (2007, 47). Belonging to the Mongolian nation is an important aspect of Kazakh existence in Mongolia, but so too is the specificity of this particular region of western Mongolia. The two sets of images align generally, but the place attachments expressed by Mongolian Kazakhs are much more specific to their cultural and ethnic identity, inclusive of language and religious practice, and to the western Mongolia communities in which the social networks and social ties also complement the rural imagination.

Concluding Thoughts

This work suggests that the process by which individuals and groups selectively develop narratives of history and place serves to underscore a collective valuing of place through signifiers of place attachment, and illustrates how the process of creating place attachments manifests at both individual and collective scales. We contribute to the discussion of how rural place attachments evolve over time and that place attachments can be as much symbolic as experienced. There is also a generational dimension to these rememberings, where those who grew up in western Mongolia offer nostalgic, bucolic images of life on the steppe to younger Kazakhs, thereby perpetuating positive imagery and imaginings of western Mongolia. The younger respondents offer equally thoughtful and positive images of western Mongolia, but are clear that life there would not be desirable. Thus, life in western Mongolia, for the Kazakh ethnic minority population living in Ulaanbaatar, is evolving into something of a mythical place—a place where the air is clear, the scenery is beautiful, where all Kazakhs take care of one another, and where Kazakhs collectively speak their own language and practice their religion. In the absence of discussion about the challenges of poverty and environmental hazards (dzud), the narrative has evolved into one of nostalgia—a set of images and ideals that are now passed along to a much younger generation, through small everyday practices and experiences as well as through attending and participating in festivals and summer holidays spent in western Mongolia. Bayan-Ulgii, with its majority Kazakh population, is likely to live in the memories and imaginations of Mongolia’s Kazakh population as this mythical place, despite many of its more-harsh economic and environmental realities.

Our work underscores how place attachments are carried with migrants to new destinations (place elasticity) and then passed along to younger generations through stories, material artifacts, cultural practices, and images. This contributes to our understanding of the process and place dimensions of place-attachment literatures as proposed by Scannell and Gifford (2010). We also pose the question of whether the concept of the rural idyll can be applied to Global South and Global Middle countries. So far, the concept has largely been reserved for the Global North. But as populations continue to move to urban places, can we expect that the rural imagination will expand? That instead of being viewed negatively, as the place left behind, there will be elements of nostalgia and positive imagery shaping the narrative of particular populations, especially ethnic minorities who find themselves widely dispersed after migrating to urban places.

We move the literature forward by seeking to integrate the notion of nostalgia into the conversation about rural place-making and place identities or attachments. Nostalgia exemplifies the positive aspects of place and pushes us to consider how rural imagery and imaginations influence the place-making and place-attachment process, which begs the question of whether the rural idyll concept can be extended beyond the Global North. Rural Mongolia, with its wide-open spaces, green rolling grasslands, horses, gers, and blue skies inhabits the imagination of tourists and is a key component of nationalist images promoted by the Mongolian government. It is, however, unusual to suggest that a rural idyll has emerged in a Global Middle country. We argue that while the urban elite of Mongolia still view the rural as undeveloped, the narrative of the idyll is indeed emerging for smaller, ethnic minority populations for whom the urban environment is often alienating and hostile. Nostalgia for the simplicity of a remote, rural territory takes on greater meaning. It is romanticized and narrated to younger generations, much like the rural idyll, but not with the expectation of return migration. Image 1 Image 2 Image 3Image 4

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation [New Directions Fellowship].

Notes

¹ “A portable round dwelling, typically made of felt and wood” (Myadar 2011, 357).

² Mongolia is considered a Global South country as well as a “Lower Middle Income Country” by The World Bank (World Bank, 2020, https://data.worldbank.org/?locations=MN-XN).

³ We use pseudonyms to protect interviewee identities.