Christopher Kaplonski (Anthropology,
Archived relations: repression, rehabilitation and the secret life of documents in Mongolia
This paper examines the implications of the legal rehabilitation of victims of political repression from the socialist 1930s in contemporary, post-socialist Mongolia. In a span of about 18 months, approximately five percent of the population were convicted as counter-revolutionaries or spies and executed, roughly half of whom were Buddhist monks. Since the collapse of socialism twenty years ago, the Mongolian state has initiated a process of rehabilitation for those repressed during the socialist period (1921-1990). This process is contingent upon the existence of records of the original act of repression, and it is the implications of this contingency that I explore here.
In particular, I focus upon the way documents are used to judge the fitness of a particular person for rehabilitation while simultaneously constructing the past they seek to document. There is a curious triple process taking place whereby the documents used to originally convict a person, and the descendants of the documents, are used to reinvestigate, reconstruct and overwrite the documentable past.
Drawing upon documents from the state security services in the 1930s and the Supreme Court in post-socialist Mongolia, I trace this process by piecing together the case of a lama, Samdan, who was twice arrested as a counter-revolutionary in the 1930s, and then rehabilitated in the 1990s.
Dispersed within the opaque structures of the state archives the documents -- ethnographic artefacts as well as constructors of ethnographic actuality -- take us through the corridors of archives and the logic behind the state policies (both in the 1930s and post-socialist) and show the creation of new forms of knowledge relationships. In charting these shifting structures, logics and new forms of knowledge I also consider their implications for our models of anthropological research and understanding.
Chris Kaplonski is a Senior Research Associate at the Department of Social Anthropology and the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit, University of Cambridge and Project Manager for the five year, international project 'The Oral History of Twentieth Century Mongolia'.
Chris has conducted research in Mongolia since the early 1990s. In addition to research on political violence and its aftermath, as well as memory and identity, Chris spent two years teaching at the National University of Mongolia. His current project, 'The question of the lamas: violence, sovereignty and exception in early socialist Mongolia' looks at the power struggles between the early socialist state and the Buddhist establishment in the 1920s and 1930s. It uses the Mongolian case to rethink issues of sovereignty, the relationship between legality and political violence, and how and when states resort to the use of physical political violence. Recent publications include 'Prelude to violence: show trials and state power in 1930s Mongolia' American Ethnologist, 2008. and 'Neither truth nor reconciliation: political violence and the surfeit of memory in post-socialist Mongolia' Perpetrators, Accomplices and Victims in Twentieth-Century Politics: Reckoning with the Past. (Routledge, 2009)
In particular, I focus upon the way documents are used to judge the fitness of a particular person for rehabilitation while simultaneously constructing the past they seek to document. There is a curious triple process taking place whereby the documents used to originally convict a person, and the descendants of the documents, are used to reinvestigate, reconstruct and overwrite the documentable past.
Drawing upon documents from the state security services in the 1930s and the Supreme Court in post-socialist Mongolia, I trace this process by piecing together the case of a lama, Samdan, who was twice arrested as a counter-revolutionary in the 1930s, and then rehabilitated in the 1990s.
Dispersed within the opaque structures of the state archives the documents -- ethnographic artefacts as well as constructors of ethnographic actuality -- take us through the corridors of archives and the logic behind the state policies (both in the 1930s and post-socialist) and show the creation of new forms of knowledge relationships. In charting these shifting structures, logics and new forms of knowledge I also consider their implications for our models of anthropological research and understanding.
Chris Kaplonski is a Senior Research Associate at the Department of Social Anthropology and the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit, University of Cambridge and Project Manager for the five year, international project 'The Oral History of Twentieth Century Mongolia'.
Chris has conducted research in Mongolia since the early 1990s. In addition to research on political violence and its aftermath, as well as memory and identity, Chris spent two years teaching at the National University of Mongolia. His current project, 'The question of the lamas: violence, sovereignty and exception in early socialist Mongolia' looks at the power struggles between the early socialist state and the Buddhist establishment in the 1920s and 1930s. It uses the Mongolian case to rethink issues of sovereignty, the relationship between legality and political violence, and how and when states resort to the use of physical political violence. Recent publications include 'Prelude to violence: show trials and state power in 1930s Mongolia' American Ethnologist, 2008. and 'Neither truth nor reconciliation: political violence and the surfeit of memory in post-socialist Mongolia' Perpetrators, Accomplices and Victims in Twentieth-Century Politics: Reckoning with the Past. (Routledge, 2009)
