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Click on titles for abstracts of articles
The process of creation of national symbols and their adoption in the 1992 Constitution of Mongolia
Jigjid Boldbaatar with Caroline Humphrey
Abstract
The structure and composition of state symbols has evolved and changed through the various historical periods of Mongolian history. This article considers the creation and adoption of the state emblem, standard, flag and national anthem in the Constitution of Mongolia adopted in 1992. Particular attention is paid to the procedures whereby decisions were taken at this important juncture in twentieth-century Mongolian history.
Naran Bilik
Abstract
Nomenclatural tension and pragmatic incongruence underscore the Inner Mongols’ resistance to sinicisation and the process of their integration into the newly constructed nation-state of China. This paper focuses on the interplay between the original sense and the translated meaning of some ethnic, state, and place names that travel inter-lingually between Mongolian and Chinese in modern Inner Mongolian history. It challenges the Chinese nation-building elite’s agenda to depoliticise minzu through lessening, diluting, and assimilating ethnic diversities into Chinese homogeneity.
Tsogt Taij and the Disappearing Overlord
Robert Barnett
Abstract
Three major history films were produced in Mongolia and Tibet in the socialist era that dealt with the role of earlier Chinese dynasties in those areas. Two of the films – Tsogt Taij (1945) and Budala gong mishi (1989) – portray events in Tibet in the seventeenth century and include portrayals of the Fifth Dalai Lama and the Mongolian leader, Gushri Khan. The third film, Mandukhai setsen khatun (1989), deals with fifteenth century history in Mongolia and the effort to maintain national unity. The three films were produced during brief periods of relative relaxation in socialist ideology, and each reflected the considerable influence of local historians and intellectuals in the views they presented of local history, producing epic accounts of nationalist heroes or heroines and of their efforts to defend or build up the nation or nationality against powerful foreign enemies. The films seem to have been understood locally at the time or later as criticising a colonising power or occupier, but in fact the stories of each film focus on internal or neighbouring enemies who from an outside perspective appear less significant. The paper discusses the relative absence of the external enemy from these films and analyses the forms of emotional characterisation used to mark the different ethnic and political groups portrayed in the films. This analysis suggests that views held by subaltern communities towards other dominated groups or minorities, often dismissed as forms of erroneous displacement, deserve serious consideration as reflections of complex, emic understandings of political relations and priorities in colonial-type conditions.
Aitoru Terenguto
Abstract:
Focusing on a thirteenth century ‘Mongolian gravestone’ in Sendai city of Japan, this article reexamines ‘the Mongolian invasions’ twice launched by Khubilai Khan. It is above all an examination of the origin, transformation, and political and religious symbolisms of, and the sharply different attitudes towards the ’Mongolian gravestone’. It studies how Hojo Tokimune, a regent of the Kamakura Shogunate, asked the Chinese Zen master Wuxue Zuyuan to pray for the repose of the souls of the Japanese and Mongol Yuan soldiers killed in the invasions, combining Japanese Shinto traditions with the Buddhist notion of onshin byodo, that is, treating hate and affection alike. It describes the process whereby the Mongolian gravestone was rediscovered and preserved in the eighteenth century, how it gained a dramatic political significance during World War II as it was venerated and enshrined by Prince Demchugdonrob, a descendant of Khubilai Khan, and how it was again commemorated by citizens of Sendai city after the war. The paper aims not just to illuminate the paradoxical Japanese, Mongolian, and Chinese views of life and death but to shed light on the religious background of the contemporary Japanese-Chinese-Korean wrangle over the Yasukuni shrine.
Alan Sanders
Abstract
The process of rehabilitating the victims of Mongolia’s political purges of the 1930s and compensating their children and grandchildren continues, but from time to time more remains of victims are found. The successor of the security organisation that was the instrument of their ‘repression’ is required to assist in the process of their identification and rehabilitation, but has not been able to rid itself of all the bad practices of its past.
Tsetsentsolmon Baatarnaran
Abstract
This paper explores the specific features of musical folklore in Mongolian Shamanic tradition through the four essential features of folk art works, selectivity, existence, continuity, and complexity. Adopting the systematic theory of Mongolian folklore including folk music which was developed by Badara Jamts, Mongolian folklorist, on the basis of Indian philosopher Nagarjuna’s Eightfold Negation, the author examines the chanting ways (formation or improvisation), functions (non- or multifunctional), learning process (transmission), and authorship (collectivity and individuality) of Mongolian Shamanic chanting.
Ninth International Congress of Mongolists: A Personal Account
Alan Sanders
International Symposium on Inner Asian Statecraft (Continuation), Representing Power in Asia: Legitimising, consecrating, contesting (Paris, March 23–25, 2006)
Roberte Hayamon
International Symposium on Socialist Modernisation in Mongolia: A Reappraisal of A. D. Simukov and His Works
Ai Maekawa
Morten Axel Pedersen, Rebecca Empson, Caroline Humphrey
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
Abstract
The ideas sketched out in this paper date back to my work with the Yawalapíti and Araweté in the 1970s and 80s, where, like any ethnographer, I had to confront different indigenous notions about nonhuman agency and personhood. However, the event catalysing them in the here and now was my much more recent reading of a remarkable narrative issuing from another Amazonian culture. This was the exposition given by Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami thinker and political leader, to the anthropologist Bruce Albert apropos the xapiripë, the ‘animal ancestors’ or ‘shamanic spirits’ who interact with the shamans of his people (Kopenawa 2000; Kopenawa & Albert 2003). These texts are part of an ongoing dialogue between Kopenawa and Albert, in which the former presents Whites, in the person of his interlocutor-translator, with a detailed account of the world’s structure and history; a narrative which also doubles as an indignant and proud claim for the Yanomami people’s right to exist. Here I shall transcribe the shorter version of the narrative, published in Portuguese in 2004.
Caroline Humphrey
Abstract
This article explores the implications of the fact that shamans’ mirrors, and mirrors in general, have two quite different sides, one reflecting images and the other a dull blank or imagined as a teeming other world. It is argued that, for shamanists, the far side of the mirror is conceived as the world of the dead, which is populated by spirits. Living people can, in certain circumstances such as divination, see ‘through’ the mirror into that world, and shamans when interacting with spirits in trance place themselves inside it. Two different perspectives, of the living and of the souls/spirits, are thus produced. The article ends with some speculations about the non-symmetrical character of these perspectives and concludes that the Mongols upholding these traditions are not post-moderns.
Grégory Delaplace & Rebecca Empson
ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two versions of a single story collected from Northwest and Northeast Mongolia. The story concerns a daughter-in-law’s relationship with ‘little humans’ (jijig hün) at her in-laws’ house. Although similar in their thematic content, the two stories differ in their endings. In the example from Northwest Mongolia, the daughter-in-law successfully rids her in-laws’ house of a little human allowing them to prosper. In the example from Northeast Mongolia, the daughter-in-law mistakenly throws a little human into the fire, causing her natal family to perish. At first sight, this divergence could be seen as reflective of the kind of perspectival difference established between a predominantly Buddhist ontology in Western Mongolia and a predominantly shamanist ontology in Eastern Mongolia. But the stories resist being viewed as allegorical texts by which to extract information concerning received ontological differences. Regardless of East/West differences, laypeople across all of Mongolia have varied relationships with aspects of the normally invisible world. We argue that, rather than establish ontological species-specific differentiations, such relations point to shifting scales of different ‘kinds’ of people in Mongolia.
Giovanni da Col
ABSTRACT
Similarly to the Amerindian model, in Tibetan cosmology humans and nonhumans share an inner principle under the form of consciousness (rnam shes). Corporeal differences and perspectival access are nevertheless determined by the economy of a ‘field of fortune’. This field may be regarded as a form of ‘clothing’ a being ‘wears’: a ‘body’ that may provide cosmological mobility, a ‘poor man’s way’ to assume nonhumans points of view and transcending ontological domains without having to be a shaman. Nevertheless, the field is unstable and his configuration fragmented and folded. Each ‘perspective’ needs an event in order to be transiently activated and unfolding the configuration of forces composing a body of fortune. The absence of ideas of fortune and karma among Amerindians results in a perspectivism as being predominantly a spatial view from somewhere. Among Tibetans, an economy of merit and fortune produces an evenemental perception, a view from somewhen where perspectives are also points of view on one’s karmic continuum. After discussing notions of fortune, merit and the Tibetan perceptual propensity in relation to other living beings, this paper will examine the ontology of some key Tibetan bodies and their relation with perspectivism: the zombie (ro langs), the mountain god (yul lha), the reckless hunter (rngon pa), the ‘living Buddha’ (sprul sku) and the idiom of ‘emanation’ (sprul pa), commonly known as “incarnation”.
Katherine Swancutt
ABSTRACT
Bodily affects, in Viveiros de Castro’s sense of the term, are not just physical characteristics, such as the comportment, mannerisms or tastes consistently ascribed to a given subject. They are also ‘forces’, ‘energies’ or ‘talents’ which are taught, acquired and refined over time. This article argues that virtuosity and fortune are bodily affects which Mongols hold to varying degrees. Through the Mongolian game called ‘The Stag’, the article shows how players refine their virtuosity affect while receiving sudden influxes of fortune. Virtuosi and novice game players exchange perspectives in the pedagogy of play, travelling along an ‘ontological spiral’ of knowledge which renders the winning moves transparent. Additionally, the article shows that Mongols occasionally conflate bodily affects with their interior spiritual quality. Mongol notions of ownership allow that animals or personal effects can be either (1) subjects unto themselves or (2) the bodily affects of their owners, which propagate their owners’ distributed personhood or spirithood. When playing Stag, Mongols can simultaneously refine their virtuosity (promoting intra-species differences) while adopting animal affects (crossing the interspecies divide). Given this, the article proposes a ‘Mongolian perspectivism’ where people, spirits and animals shift subjectivity at the intra-species and interspecies levels. The theory of perspectivism in anthropology is more responsive to fluctuations in bodily affects and interior spiritual qualities than has been anticipated, making it open to radical refinement.
Lars Højer
ABSTRACT
In the last fifteen years, Mongolians have experienced rapid socio-economic change, and most people have faced a universe of unsettled socio-economic relations. In this article, the cases of two women, who are exploring the new fields of socio-economic relations, are investigated. The cases are discussed with reference to Viveiros de Castro’s ideas on perspectivism, but rather than comparing a Mongolian cosmology with an Amerindian one, perspectivism is critically engaged with as an ontology of social life in the Maussian tradition against which the ethnographic cases are discussed. It is concluded that whereas perspectivism points to a primordial identification with ‘the other’, the present Mongolian context points to the danger of such coming into being through others as well as to precautions taken to avoid it.
Benedikte Møller Kristensen
ABSTRACT
This article examines possible perspectivist phenomena in the ritual practices and ontology of the Duha reindeer herders of Northern Mongolia. My theoretical point of departure is Viveiros de Castro’s recent theories on perspectivism in the Amazon, and Pedersen’s theories about a distinct Inner Asian perspectivism limited to the human realm. Based on my fieldwork amongst the Duhas, I propose that, laypersons’ manipulations of amulets and shamanic rituals are indeed perspectivist phenomena, where humans switch perspective with the ongons (shamanic helper spirits) and vice versa. It will be shown how the fundamental dialectic in Duha perspectivism is one between seniority (mastery) and juniority (submission), and how this dialectic serves to challenge and broaden the mainly hierarchical nature of everyday social life.
Ludek Broz
Abstract
One of the characteristic aspects of Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism is the relative rather than absolute character of subject/object positions. In the Altaian context, animals are not attributed with subjectivity in the way found in Amazonian cosmologies. Still, the subject position is not particular to humans: the landscape is populated by masters of a both human and nonhuman kind. The terminological division of animals into wild (aŋdar-kushtar) and domesticated (mal) in Altaian language is analogical to the human/animal division in Amazonia. Wildness and domesticity thus become relative categories defined with reference to the idiom of the master. What is wild for a human master is domesticated for a nonhuman master. Here, the common denominator is a sort of ‘livestock-morphism’: what for the human hunters looks like a deer is a cow from the point of view the forest masters. If conducted improperly, hunting is thus analogous to livestock theft - morality transcends perspectivism in Altai. Exploring this ‘pastoralist perspectivism’ leads to questions about subjectivity and agency, ethics and ownership. The discussion is finally placed ‘into perspective’ by shwoing that Altaians do not operate with a single idea of the animal and human–animal relationship.
Morten Axel Pedersen
Abstract
What would an animist ontology look like if there were no mythology to prop it up? Based partly on the Darhad hunting lore about badagshin or ‘half-people’, this article argues that myth is not a precondition for perspectivism. It is possible to conceive of an animist cosmos that is thoroughly multiple, but at the same time amythological. Thus the Darhads do not entertain ideas of an original state of undifferentiation, in the sense of a truer form of existence that people (such as shamans) aspire to become a part of. Instead, they operate with a different concept of virtuality, namely the great nomadic void that constitutes a background potentiality, which plays the role of an ontological trampoline making possible the ongoing jumping between different realms, which Darhad social life amounts to. In that sense, the Darhad perspectivist cosmos comprises not one unified whole containing all there is, but many parallel worlds, each containing the totality of relations enacted through a given point of view.
Transcendental Perspectivism: Anonymous Viewpoints from Inner Asia
Martin Holbraad & Rane Willerslev |
