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Marriage, Body, and Affiliation: The Legal Place of Mongol Women in the 1640 Mongol-Oirat Code Ikh Tsaaz

  • 아시아여성연구
  • 2026, 65(2), pp.7~42
  • DOI : 10.14431/jaw.2026.8.65.2.7
  • Publisher : Research Institute of Asian Women
  • Research Area : Interdisciplinary Studies > Gender Studies
  • Received : June 24, 2026
  • Accepted : July 30, 2026
  • Published : August 30, 2026

Kim, Kyongna 1

1단국대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This article examines provisions on marriage and movement, bodily injury, miscarriage, fosterage, and testimony in the 1640 Mongol-Oirat code Ikh Tsaaz, reading the original Oirat transliteration against the existing translations to analyse how seventeenth-century Mongol women’s bodies and affiliations were assessed within units of compensation and relations of liability. Compensation for acts involving women varied not only in scale but in the category of unit applied: the movement of an unbetrothed daughter was reckoned in individual head of livestock, that of a betrothed bride in the higher collective unit of nine head (yesü), while a former wife whose marital tie had dissolved attracted no compensation at all. In the Ikh Tsaaz, women figured simultaneously as objects of assessment and as agents whose volition bore on the outcome of legal judgement. What the code assessed was the rights and liabilities of the kin who surrounded a woman, and these rights persisted in overlapping layers even after marriage: liability for a dowry woman’s marriage, for instance, reverted to her birth father. Sexual violation drew corporal punishment on the offender’s body rather than livestock compensation, so that gender functioned as the criterion determining which injuries were convertible into property and which resulted in bodily penalty. Women’s volition shaped the scale of compensation and the attribution of liability; even slave women’s testimony was admitted when corroborated by material evidence. This agency was not an anomaly resisting the compensatory order but a variable operating within it. Previous scholarship has described Mongol marriage and kinship largely in institutional terms, without examining in detail the specific units and conditions through which value was assigned to women’s bodies and affiliations. This article identifies the units and limits of that calculus and analyses the legal force that women’s volition carried within it. The findings bear on wider debates in comparative legal history concerning the relationship between compensatory regimes and gendered personhood in pre-modern pastoral societies.

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