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Traditional Medicine, Legitimacy, and Nationalist Doxa in Pandemic-era Mongolia

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Elizabeth TurkORCiD

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Abstract

Considering the legacy of seven decades of Soviet medicine, Western or ‘European medicine’ dominates public health discourse today, and guided most Mongolians’ medical decisions for COVID-19 prevention and treatment. However, over a year into the pandemic, the Mongolian Ministry of Health endorsed traditional medicine as a complimentary strategy for the treatment of mild and moderate COVID-19 cases, a decision coinciding with skyrocketing transmission rates, extreme lock-down measures, and an unprepared and aging medical infrastructure. This article explores how traditional medicine came to be seen as a legitimate strategy in combating COVID-19, and officially endorsed by the state. Drawing on Bourdieu’s work, it suggests that nationalism as doxic knowledge played an important role in legitimacy-making, but not in isolation. By framing traditional medicine as biomedically efficacious, thereby appealing to the disposition to Western conventions of scientific rationality widely held in public culture, traditional medicine was made more palatable to the public.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Turk E

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Central Asian Survey

Year: 2025

Volume: 44

Issue: 4

Pages: 543-565

Online publication date: 10/10/2025

Acceptance date: 22/07/2025

ISSN (print): 0263-4937

ISSN (electronic): 1465-3354

Publisher: Routledge

URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/02634937.2025.2542265

DOI: 10.1080/02634937.2025.2542265

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