Constructing National Culture: Music and the Performing Arts in Mongolia

Mongolia has faced rapid ideological shifts towards global cosmopolitan perspectives since the collapse of state socialism in the 1990s. Contemporary Mongolian music and the performing arts are dynamic and market-oriented, and these new artistic practices contrast with existing institutional patterns and social settings inherited from the previous regime. In the field of artistic practices, there is a conflict between the old state structure, which was left intact as a vessel, and new individual creative content. This book explores cultural spaces, practices, and discourses forming the concept of ‘national culture’ in both state socialist and post-socialist contexts in Mongolia. Further illuminating the social memory and the role of the state in cultural production, this book advances scholarship with expansive perspectives on state socialist cultural politics, as well as on the (dis)continuity between cultural values and their social effects on the two social orders. Using new data on recent transformations in cultural practices since the 2000s, especially in the spheres of music and the performing arts, this book deconstructs current conceptions of cultural landscapes.