The demographic memory of 20th century Mongolian history

Abstract

The "living memory" of historical events is directly determined by the demographic characteristics of a population. If a country faces rapid population increase, the influx of considerable new births impacts directly the perpetuation of its "living memory" since a growing majority of the population would be born after an historical event. Similarly, the witnesses of an event will decease faster when the mean duration of life is short. Under the assumption linking population regeneration and memory loss, the speed of population regeneration determines the pace of memory loss of historical events. The memory loss is governed by the length of life and fertility. The lower the mortality, all other things being equal, the slower a population regenerates; and the higher the fertility, the faster a population renews. Therefore, memory loss is faster with high population growth, and slower with high life expectancy. From this sole demographic point of view, some historical milestones might lose their significance and importance when the witnesses of an event decease and/or when their proportion in population declines with the entrance of new society members (new birth cohorts).

Privileging such an analytical perspective stresses the importance of demography in the understanding of the social and cultural regeneration of all societies. The renewal and perpetuation of any society have hence strong demographic foundations which influence many social and cultural aspects above and beyond the sole natural population's replacement through new births. This perspective invites to think demographically about non-demographic issues (Ryder 1965).

In this short paper, the sensitivity of the memory/memory loss to demographic parameters will first be assessed in order to understand how demographic characteristics influence the memory of historical events. Then, after this introductive theoretical part, we will see how Mongolian demographic characteristics contribute to the speed of its historical memory loss. The idea is to consider the temporal evolution of the numbers of witnesses of several historical events. The inspiration for this paper, its theoretical part and the terminology used are taken from a recent, simple, but brilliant paper presented by the French demographer Jacques Varonat the 7th conference of the Demography Network of the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie (Academic Agency of French-speaking countries).