The shaman’s call employs khöömii (overtone singing) and throat manipulation to produce sounds that seem to come from the earth and the sky simultaneously. This vocal art is believed to create a vibrational bridge between the three worlds—the Lower, Middle, and Upper. When the shaman calls, the spirit is compelled to come. The response may be a shudder, a gust of wind, or the possession of the shaman’s body.
In the vast, windswept landscapes of Mongolia, where the horizon swallows the sky and silence is as expansive as the steppe, sound becomes more than mere vibration; it becomes a lifeline. Within the conceptual framework of Mongol Heleer —the Mongolian language not merely as a tool for communication but as a living repository of nomadic consciousness—"The Call" (Дуудлага - Duudlaga ) transcends its literal definition. It is not simply a shout or a summons. It is a profound, often invisible tether that binds the human to the natural, the individual to the collective, and the living to the spiritual. This essay argues that the concept of the Call in Mongol culture functions as a central organizing principle of existence, shaping identity, survival, and the sacred relationship with the land. The Call as Ecological Dialogue For the nomadic herder, the Call is an act of environmental negotiation. Unlike the fixed addresses of urban civilization—street names, numbers, walls—the steppe requires a dynamic, acoustic form of location. The Duudlaga is how a mother finds her child lost in a sea of grass, how a herder gathers a scattered herd at dusk, or how neighbors locate a ger (yurt) miles away across an undulating valley. The Call Mongol Heleer
This spiritual Call extends to everyday animism. Before pouring a libation of mare’s milk ( tsatsal ), a Mongol will call out to the spirits of the ancestors, the mountain, and the water source. A traveler passing an ovoo (stone cairn) will circle it three times and call out a blessing. In this worldview, the universe is not inert; it is listening. And the act of calling makes the invisible visible, transforming silence into presence. To stop calling is to forget the spirits, and to forget them is to invite their wrath—drought, disease, misfortune. Today, as Mongolia rapidly urbanizes, with over half its population living in the concrete ger districts surrounding Ulaanbaatar, the ancient Call is fading. The cellphone has replaced the vocal summon. A text message silences the need to project one’s voice across a valley. The cacophony of the city—car horns, construction, pop music—drowns out the subtle acoustic markers that guided the nomadic ear. The shaman’s call employs khöömii (overtone singing) and