“Being Cultured”, Changing Culture: Public Health Messaging in COVID-Era Ulaanbaatar

Public Health Messaging in COVID-Era Ulaanbaatar

Abstract

As poetic and political, images mobilized by public health campaigns are often dense with meaning and associations, even as they make certain assumptions about the good, virtuous, natural, and right. This article explores the assumptions about “being cultured” that underlie the “Let’s Make the City Cultured” campaign and related public health messaging in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s capital city. In the image-slogan complexes mobilized by such campaigns, “being cultured” (soyoltoi), healthy (erüül), and clean (tsever) is linked to curbing specific behaviors such as urinating and spitting in public, which took on new urgency in health-related discourses during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a concept that retains the legacy of meanings and associations in connection with state socialist era values, “being cultured” has been used in different yet connected ways across the 20th and 21st centuries to dis- seminate hegemonic messages. Drawing on the “Let’s Make the City Cultured” and related ideological public health campaigns, this article explores discursive efforts to generate a subject of the state that espouses bourgeois values.