The fraternal communities, however, had at least two responses to the selfassurance
of the external homeland. The first, mainly found amongst the Inner
Mongols, was to present themselves as the frontline in the defense of the common
culture of their ethnie. Because they faced the practical pressures of assimilation,
they could claim as a victory every day that their culture survived,
and they could contrast their struggle with the apparently easier existence of the
external homeland. They saw themselves as suffering to preserve the purity of
the external homeland, as a kind of cultural buffer zone. This argument could
perhaps best be seen as a riposte to the external ‘homeland’ claims that the fraternal
communities had lost their culture.