The enduring social memory of exemplars
Through which kind of panopticon a social community looks the society in which it lives? How this community gives to the image of this society the appearance of a benevolent totality? This text make the assumption of the perpetuation, in postsocialist Mongolia, of a technology of trust implemanted during the last phase of the construction of socialism in Mongolia (from the end of the Fifties). This technology roots a particular type of social memory – « the social memory of exemplars » (Kaplonski 2004 : 182) - in a common but very well distributed nostalgic feeling : the absence of the beloved beings. I argue that this emotional fundation makes it possible to better understand the perenniality of this kind of technology in a Mongolian postsocialist society characterized by a situation of precariousness of social trust.