Abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2008 and 2025 among Tungus and Mongol pastoralists of Hulun Buir as well as on written sources, this paper explores the way indigenous people have adopted and adjusted to Chinese alcohol and “ways of drinking” in their own everyday habitual and ritual practices during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I argue that the adoption of Chinese distilled liquors and related drinking practices did not obliterate the traditional values of sociability, reciprocity and hospitality that were once embodied in native liquor. The consumption of baijiu and beer indeed gradually became a common practice for local people and serves as mediators of sociability as well as identity markers.

Keywords: Inner Mongolia, Mongol, Tungus, alcohol, sociability