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A Monastery in Time is the first book to describe the life of a Mongolian Buddhist monastery—the Mergen Monastery in Inner Mongolia—from inside its walls. From the Qing occupation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the Cultural Revolution, Caroline Humphrey and Hürelbaatar Ujeed tell a story of religious formation, suppression, and survival over a history that spans three centuries. Often overlooked in Buddhist studies, Mongolian Buddhism is an impressively self-sustaining tradition whose founding lama, the Third Mergen Gegen, transformed Tibetan Buddhism into an authentic counterpart using the Mongolian language. Drawing on fifteen years of fieldwork, Humphrey and Ujeed show how lamas have struggled to keep Mergen Gegen’s vision alive through tremendous political upheaval, and how such upheaval has inextricably fastened politics to religion for many of today’s practicing monks. Exploring the various ways Mongolian Buddhists have attempted to link the past, present, and future, Humphrey and Ujeed offer a compelling study of the interplay between the individual and the state, tradition and history.
"This volume consists of twenty-four chapters containing a collection of selected original sources of Mongolian Buddhism, composed either in Tibetan or Mongolian language. This collection brings new material that has not yet been available in any of European languages. Translated sources serve as a lens through which to examine Mongolian Buddhism in its variety of literary genres and styles and religious and cultural ideas and practices. Each chapter includes a translation of a shorter text or a selected section of a longer text, and each contributor also provides the introduction to a translated text or texts, which contextualizes text, references and endnotes. The volume contains twenty-fo...
Domestic animals have lived with humans for thousands of years and remain essential to the everyday lives of people throughout the world. In this book, Natasha Fijn examines the process of animal domestication in a study that blends biological and social anthropology, ethology and ethnography. She examines the social behavior of humans and animals in a contemporary Mongolian herding society. After living with Mongolian herding families, Dr Fijn has observed through firsthand experience both sides of the human-animal relationship. Examining their reciprocal social behavior and communication with one another, she demonstrates how herd animals influence Mongolian herders' lives and how the animals themselves are active partners in the domestication process.
An ethnography of the Mongolian capital city of Ulaanbaatar during the nation’s transition from socialism to a market-based economic system Urban Hunters is an ethnography of the Mongolian capital city, Ulaanbaatar, during the nation’s transition from socialism to a market-based economic system. Following the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, Mongolia entered a period of economic chaos characterized by wild inflation, disappearing banks, and closing farms, factories, and schools. During this time of widespread poverty, a generation of young adults came of age. In exploring the social, cultural, and existential ramifications of a transition that has become permanent and acquired a logic of its own, Lars Højer and Morten Axel Pedersen present a new theorization of social agency in postsocialist as well as postcolonial contexts.
How do memories circulate transnationally and to what effect? How to understand the enduring role of national memories and their simultaneous reconfiguration under globalization? Challenging the methodological nationalism that has until recently dominated the study of memory and heritage, this book charts the rich production of memory across and beyond national borders. Arguing for the fruitfulness of a transnational as distinct from a global approach, it places the issues of circulation, articulation and the scales of remembrance at the centre of its inquiry. In the process, it sheds new light on the ways in which mediation, post-coloniality, migration and regional integration affect both t...
How do prophets and their prophecies influence the processes of decision-making, concepts of authority and ideas about causality and time? How can we talk about prophets and prophecy in the Mongolian cultural region when prophetic forms and people seem so varied? This book brings together anthropologists, historians and religious specialists to focus on the role of prophets and the distributed language of prophecy in relation to these questions. Central Asia has a longstanding tradition of prophets who have either challenged or collaborated with political leaders, and due to new uncertainties about the future, current interest in prophetic announcements has recently re-surfaced. This volume explores the arenas in which prophets and their prophecies have influenced the processes of decision-making, concepts of authority and ideas about causality and time in the Mongolian cultural region.
Western policymakers, political activists and academics alike see patronage as the chief enemy of open, democratic societies. Patronage, for them, is a corrupting force, a hallmark of failed and failing states, and the obverse of everything that good, modern governance ought to be. South Asia poses a frontal challenge for this consensus. Here the world's most populous, pluralist and animated democracy is also a hotbed of corruption with persistently startling levels of inequality. Patronage as Politics in South Asia confronts this paradox with calm erudition: sixteen essays by anthropologists, historians and political scientists show, from a wide range of cultural and historical angles, that in South Asia patronage is no feudal residue or retrograde political pressure, but a political form vital in its own right. This volume suggests that patronage is no foe to South Asia's burgeoning democratic cultures, but may in fact be their main driving force.
In Inviting Happiness: Food Sharing in Post-Communist Mongolia Sandrine Ruhlmann offers a monograph on food practices of Mongolian families, which are linked to a conception of sharing food and obtaining happiness in relation with the good rebirth of the human soul.
A significant aspect of this work is the emphasis on source materials, including some translated from Mongolian and other languages for the first time. The source materials and other articles are all fully contextualized and situated by introductory material by the volume’s editors. This is the first work in English to bring together significant articles in Mongolian studies in one place, which will be widely welcomed by scholars and researchers in this field. This essential reference in two volumes includes works by noted scholars including Charles Bawden, Igor de Rachewiltz, David Morgan, Owen Lattimore and Caroline Humphrey. It also includes excerpts from translations of source documents, such as the works of Rashid al-Din, The Secret History of the Mongols and the Yuan Shih. In addition, more recent historical periods are covered, with material such as Batmonh’s speech that heralded Mongolia’s versions of glasnost and perestroika, as well as Baabar’s Buu Mart, a key work associated with the Democratic Revolution of 1990.
Mongolia’s mining sector, along with its environmental and social costs, have been the subject of prolonged and heated debate. This debate has often cast the country as either a victim of the ‘resource curse’ or guilty of ‘resource nationalism’. In The State, Popular Mobilisation and Gold Mining in Mongolia, Dulam Bumochir aims to avoid the pitfalls of this debate by adopting an alternative theoretical approach. He focuses on the indigenous representations of nature, environment, economy, state and sovereignty that have triggered nationalist and statist responses to the mining boom. In doing so, he explores the ways in which these responses have shaped the apparently ‘neo-liberal’ policies of twenty-first century Mongolia, and the economy that has emerged from them, in the face of competing mining companies, protest movements, international donor organizations, economic downturn, and local and central government policies.