Fermented mare's milk, salty goat-milk tea and marmot meat dominate local fare in Mongolia. After the marmots — think big squirrels — are killed and gutted, they're roasted from the outside, while at the same time slow-cooked from the inside using fiery-hot stones. Arkhangai Province, Mongolia, 2015.
The Kazakhs have a rich culture, close extended families, and many traditions that are still practiced today that are centuries old. The Kazakhs are the second largest ethnic group in Mongolia after the Khalkhs, with 101,000 people comprising 5% of the population. Most live in Bayan-Olgii Aimag, where they make up 90% of the inhabitants. The aimag or province was created in 1939 as a semi-autonomous homeland for Kazakhs living in Mongolia. Today, Bayan-Olgii has a distinctly Kazakh culture. Kazakh is the language of everyday communication, with Mongolian used for inter-ethnic interactions and official communication. Islam is the primary religion of the Kazakhs. Olgii, Western Mongolia, 2015
This is Bat Erdene a thirty year old mongol who lives in the Arkhangai province in central Mongolia. He shares his Ger with his wife, his six months old baby named Hulan and his widowed father. His extended family live in Gers next door. The family owns a substantial amount of cows, yaks, sheep, goats and horses. Mongolians, unlike the settled agriculturalists to the south, have never valued complex extended families, and in the 1980s most lived in nuclear families composed of a married couple, their children, and perhaps a widowed parent. The high birthrate, however, meant that large families were common; the 1979 census showed 16 percent of families with 7 to 8 members and 11.8 percent with 9 or more. Urban families were larger than rural families, perhaps because rural people tended to marry and to set up new households at younger ages. The average size of rural families also may have reflected the high rates of migration to the cities Mongolian family, Mongolia, 2015
