When Wharton sophomore John Levesque visited the University Museum's new exhibit, "Modern Mongolia: Reclaiming Genghis Khan," he walked away with an abbreviated history lesson.
"It gave people an opportunity to see something that a lot of the world hasn't gotten an opportunity" to see, Levesque said on Saturday, the day of the exhibit's opening.
By chronicling the turbulent political history of Mongolia and incorporating it into the exhibit itself, Curator Paula Sabloff implies that democracy may have a place in the historically non-liberal country, according to International Relations Professor Arthur Waldron.
Heralded as "path breaking" by Waldron, the exhibit features over 192 costumes and artifacts shown in America for the first time and 35 archival photographs on loan from the National Museum of Mongolian History in Ulaanbaatar.
"I think that the reason we included Genghis Khan in our title is that that is the person Americans recognize most," said Munhtuya Altangerel, an international student from Mongolia studying at Penn who contributed to the the exhibit.
Most Americans probably hear the name Genghis Khan and think of the greatest conqueror of Asia who ever lived, or a bloodthirsty and ruthless ruler who subjugated the people he efficiently and violently conquered.
But when Mongolians think of Genghis Khan, they think democracy, according to Sabloff, an anthropology professor.
Sixty-two percent of the 195 Mongolians interviewed by Sabloff -- people who endured 70 years of Communism under Russian rule and previous subjugation by their Chinese neighbor -- share this unexpected opinion.
Sabloff said the paradox is not entirely unexpected.
"I got the idea by reading The Authoritative Biography of Genghis Khan and saw all these democratic principles just popping out."
Although this view of Genghis Khan is not widely held, historians have been re-evaluating him for about 20 years now.
"Not every Mongolian specialist or world historian is going to buy into Sabloff's work," Waldron said.
"People are going to argue about Paula Sabloff," he added.
The exhibit is hardly what Sabloff and her colleagues envisioned in 1996, when they first convened.
"We all sat around and talked together and thought, wouldn't it be fun to do a little exhibit in the United States, and that was maybe 30 photographs and five or six artifacts, and it turned into this huge project," she said.
The National Science Foundation and the International Research & Exchanges Board sponsored the research that went into the exhibit, which runs through July.
