Pagma
Basic information
Interviewee ID: 990307
Name: Pagma
Parent's name: Dejee
Ovog: [blank]
Sex: f
Year of Birth: 1925
Ethnicity: Halh
Additional Information
Education: elementary
Notes on education:
Work: retired
Belief: none
Born in: Otgon sum, Zavhan aimag
Lives in: Tömör Zam sum (or part of UB), Ulaanbaatar aimag
Mother's profession: herder
Father's profession: herder
Themes for this interview are:
(Please click on a theme to see more interviews on that topic)
work
belief
funerals
keepsakes / material culture
privatization
Alternative keywords suggested by readers for this interview are: (Please click on a keyword to see more interviews, if any, on that topic)
belief
privatization
nature and environment
Chinese
consumer goods
deel - clothes
funeral rituals
To read a full interview with Pagma please click on the Interview ID below.
Summary of Interview 090811B with Pagma
We used to put the dead out in the field. The vultures would come around when we were to cast the dead and when the people went away, they ate it sharing between themselves. The vultures didn’t eat some of the dead and the people would say, “It’s a bad thing that his corpse is being wasted. Poor thing might have been a bad person.“ We read many sutras for the afterlife. Today, the living and the dead are all mixed together.
When I was a kid, the cloth material was very rare and we used to make footwear from leather and hide. I went to Arhangai and I bought a lottery ticket and I won satin for making a deel. There was a lot of talk about it. I prepared many things to go to the city and I made many clothes and even my divorced husband drove livestock to the aimag and he bought me many things. There was no leather footwear in the countryside. I asked someone who was wearing blue, sturdy box-calf shoes to sell them to me and so I purchased them and I came to the city. I made many sets of white underwear, pants and shirts. But I found out no women wore such white underwear in the city, so I was ashamed. One day I followed my older sister to the market to buy a colorful dress. Having obtained a nice dress I gave away to my older sister the white pants, shirts and the gutal. In the beginning there was only the ‘Öndör Horshoo’ [then the State Department Store, now the Zanabazar Fine Arts Museum], but then later many consumer goods stores had appeared.
Through privatization I got my apartment. This apartment was given to me from my work in the 1990s. Our darga gave it to me for doing a good job. I represented my organization in sports and amateur art. I used to sing ‘long songs’ (urtny duu) when I took part in the amateur art of the railway cultural palace.
