What is it about?
In the 1960s, the People's Revolutionary Party and the socialist government directed a new movement to teach adults how to read and write. This mass literacy instruction was also connected to three other aims of the Cultural Campaign, which included health, cleanliness, and ideology. In a short time period, the communist Mongolian party and government were able to transform a large and widespread pastoral population to fit modern socialist values and practices.
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Why is it important?
This article shows how closely connected reading and writing are to larger political forces. Though we may oftentimes consider literacy in terms of the reading and writing that is learned by individuals at home or in school, this article uses the Cultural Campaign of socialist Mongolia in the 1960s to show how reading and writing can be important in how a government exerts its power and shapes how people represent themselves.
Perspectives
As I was able to use the Oral History of Twentieth Century Mongolia, a large archive of interviews of Mongolians who experienced the 1960s Cultural Campaigns, I was able to collect many specific details about how a large, national literacy campaign was conducted. This article opens up a country and a time period that will be unknown to many readers.
Phillip Marzluf
Kansas State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Literacy under Authority: The Mongolian Cultural Campaigns, The Journal of Asian Studies, December 2016, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/s0021911816001194.
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