Byambasuren Enkhee was born and raised in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. She received her bachelor’s degree in English and Environmental Studies at the University of Washington and worked as a community engagement professional in Seattle, Washington, before switching fields to gain an MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on identity, language, and gender in contemporary urban Mongolia.
The Eagle Huntress (2016) portrays thirteen-year-old Aisholpan Nurgaiv as she learns to hunt with eagles despite the disapproval of elders in her community. After these trials, she is shown triumphant after she wins the Golden Eagle Festival in Bayan-Ulgii, western Mongolia. This “girl-power” narrative extended beyond the documentary itself, as the filmmakers claimed (inaccurately) in its marketing that Aisholpan was the “first girl in two-thousand years to hunt with eagles.” Whilst this was an alluring narrative that helped the documentary gain entry to prestigious film festivals, it did so at the expense of portraying her community as an unenlightened backwater.
The Eagle Huntress is valuable as an introduction to Kazakh-Mongolian culture for English-speakers. Yet this exposure is a double-edged sword: the filmmakers didn’t take care to unearth nuance in their portrayal of gender dynamics, claiming that Aisholpan’s community had “a certain kind of ignorance” about women’s abilities. Filmmakers and content creators catering to the American market tend to highlight stories of exceptional individuals overcoming challenges rather than examining the institutions that encompass these challenges and individuals. The film’s narrative insistence on showing Aisholpan’s triumph over patriarchy was built on inaccuracy; the issue was never about whether girls and women are allowed to or are capable of hunting with eagles. They have been for millenia, as historian Adrienne Mayor has shown using early Central Asian artifacts and records of modern-day eagle huntresses.
In avoiding mention of Aisholpan’s predecessors, the documentary gets to exceptionalize Aisholpan’s struggle without exploring more complicated community dynamics. What do Kazakhs feel about the increasingly tourist-sponsored nature of hunting with eagles, distanced from its origins as a subsistence practice? How do economic necessity and gender roles intersect to determine who gets to hunt with eagles? It is for the same reasons that the The Sydney Morning Herald called the documentary a “fantasy for Western eyes.” Aisholpan’s story would have been no less remarkable because of how difficult eagle-hunting already is – for boys and for girls. When Mayor pointed out this condescension in the film and its marketing, one of its producers, Asher Svidensky, responded “‘entertainment isn’t anthropology’.”
In embracing a simplistic narrative about rural western Mongolia, the documentary avoids messier questions about structural difficulties in preserving the practice of hunting with eagles. In 2023, an Al Jazeera reporter, Asha Tanna, visited Bayan-Ulgii in “search of the eagle huntresses,” and found locals encouraging their daughters to pose with eagles for journalists. “‘These girls do not hunt,’ [the local guide, Nurbol Kahjikhan] confesses… We know tourists and photographers want to see girls and eagles. And we want people to visit Altai.” These contradictions exist alongside each other, and filmmakers like Bell and tourist photographers like Svidensky choose not to portray these nuances in favor of a narrative that plays better for audiences at home. Though entertainment is not anthropology, both fields share the tendency to exoticise their subjects.
Aisholpan represents the big “other” in our country: she is of Kazakh heritage, her community is primarily Muslim, and she speaks Kazakh in addition to Khalkha Mongolian. Thus, her visibility is not seen as Mongolian visibility. Kazakhs make up about 4% of the population of Mongolia, the majority of whom reside in Bayan-Ulgii province. Ethnic minorities like Kazakhs, Tuvas, and Tsaatans have less access to education and employment opportunities nationwide (UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination). Aisholpan has had to be careful in celebrating her Kazakh heritage in Mongolian press coverage, having to balance both pride in her Kazakh heritage whilst reiterating that this does not make her less Mongolian. In one Mongolian interview (paraphrased and translated from the interview with O. Shinetsuya, Zindaa.mn), Aisholpan stated that despite many asking her whether her family will shirk their Mongolian citizenship in favour of Kazakhstani nationality, her family is proud to live in the beautiful country of Mongolia, and know they must never forget this.
Interestingly, foreign media like The Eagle Huntress helps fight this othering by forcing Mongolians overall to pay attention to what is being branded as Mongolian abroad. The international attention towards the documentary and its acceptance to film festivals forced Mongolian audiences to pay attention to Kazakh culture more than we have in the past.
The stakes of misrepresentation are intensified when there are so few variations of a Mongolian identity popular globally. Representation like The Eagle Huntress has an outsize influence on how foreigners see Mongolians. Unexpectedly for the better, it will also influence how we Mongolians see one of our own minority cultures. Representation can help us vouch for our existence and lend us validity when there are threats to our cultures, but a system that necessitates inaccurate, attention-grabbing representation before a community’s basic needs are met, or their distinct identity protected, is fundamentally flawed. We should strive for something better.
The 2016 film amplifies otherness for the benefit of foreign audiences while inadvertently challenging it domestically. The documentarians should have focused on “community dynamics for community members themselves, in relation to their own knowledge production about themselves” (Shneiderman, 2021). If they had done so, the documentary could have been a nuanced portrayal of Kazakh girlhood in western Mongolia and provide representation for a marginalized community trying to preserve their culture amidst the changing tourism industry. There was an opportunity for nuance and deeper resonance had the filmmakers dug deeper into the historical dynamics surrounding Kazakhs in Mongolia. In that way, this documentary did a disservice to Aisholpan’s community. The filmmakers showed the trope of unenlightened men presenting an obstacle to the heroine of the narrative, not a nuanced portrayal which acknowledges the greater gender equality that does exist in her community.
Notes
- https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-38874266
- From an interview at the Sundance Film Festival (2016): www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpnm2VcaDQI
- Mayor, Adrienne. The Eagle Huntress: Ancient Traditions and New Generations. AncientOrigins.net reprinted in BUST. www.researchgate.net/publication/301699343_The_Eagle_Huntress_Ancient_Traditions_and_New_Generations. 1 May 2016. Accessed 3 Dec. 2023.
- Svidensky took the initial viral image of Aisholpan holding an eagle in 2013 for the National Geographic. https://www.svidensky.com/projects/the-eagle-huntress
- As quoted in Mayor’s 2016 paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301699343_The_Eagle_Huntress_Ancient_Traditions_and_New_Generations
- As of 2021, according to the National Bureau of Statistics
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