The Politics of Ritual Form(ation) in Contemporary Mongolia

in Social Analysis
Author:
Elizabeth Turk Lecturer, Columbia University, USA eht24@cam.ac.uk

Search for other papers by Elizabeth Turk in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Close
Restricted access

Abstract

Engaging Humphrey and Laidlaw's ‘archetypal actions of ritual’, this article explores the thing-like and seemingly externally derived quality of ritualized action in ‘alternative’ medical settings in Mongolia. The cultural rupture of the Soviet era presents a case study in which the continuity of ritualized action cannot be assumed in ritual making during the post-1990 (re)construction of national culture. Elements derived from shared public knowledge have become constituted in ritual more recently and frequently than can be accounted for by an aperture-like model, where previously external elements gradually filtered in. Building on regional literature concerning loss of ritual form and recent syncretic innovation, I suggest that the affordances of form—mobility, iterability, and malleability—capture the politics inherent in the reordering of associations in the making of ritual.

Contributor Notes

Elizabeth Turk is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar and Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. She received her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 2018. Her research focuses on nature-based and ‘alternative’ medicine in contemporary Mongolia, exploring themes in both medical and environmental anthropology. She is in the process of preparing her first manuscript, which explores the articulation of healing practices with political economy and social progressivist discourses. In 2020, she will begin post-doctoral research at Cambridge on a project entitled “Mongolian Cosmopolitical Heritage: Tracing Divergent Healing Practices across the Chinese-Mongolian Border,” funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council. E-mail: eht24@cam.ac.uk

  • Collapse
  • Expand

Social Analysis

The International Journal of Anthropology

  • Abrahms-Kavunenko, Saskia. 2012. “Religious ‘Revival’ after Socialism? Eclecticism and Globalisation amongst Lay Buddhist in Ulaanbaatar.” Inner Asia 14 (2): 279297.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Abrahms-Kavunenko, Saskia. 2015. “The Blossoming of Ignorance: Uncertainty, Power and Syncretism amongst Mongolian Buddhists.” Ethnos 80 (3): 346363.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Abramson, Allen, and Martin Holbraad, eds. 2014. Framing Cosmologies: The Anthropology of Worlds. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Atwood, Christopher P. 1996. “Buddhism and Popular Ritual in Mongolian Religion: A Reexamination of the Fire Cult.” History of Religions 36 (2): 112139.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Bloch, Maurice. 1989. Ritual, History and Power: Selected Papers in Anthropology. London: Athlone.

  • Brubaker, Rogers. 1996. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Bulag, Uradyn E. 1998. Nationalism and Hybridity in Mongolia. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

  • Bumochir, Dulam. 2014. “Institutionalization of Mongolian Shamanism: From Primitivism to Civilization.” Asian Ethnicity 15 (4): 473491.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Buyandelger, Manduhai. 2013. Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Memory, and Gender in Contemporary Mongolia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Buyandelgeriyn, Manduhai. 2007. “Dealing with Uncertainty: Shamans, Marginal Capitalism, and the Remaking of History in Postsocialist Mongolia.” American Ethnologist 34 (1): 127147.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Empson, Rebecca. 2019. “Claiming Resources, Honouring Debts: The Cosmoeconomics of Mongolia's Mineral Economy.” Ethnos 84 (2): 263282.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.

  • Good, Mary-Jo Delvecchio. 2007. “The Medical Imaginary and the Biotechnical Embrace: Subjective Experiences of Clinical Scientists and Patients.” In Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, ed. João Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman, 362380. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Hangartner, Judith. 2011. The Constitution and Contestation of Darhad Shamans’ Power in Contemporary Mongolia. Folkestone: Global Orient.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • High, Mette M. 2017. Fear and Fortune: Spirit Worlds and Emerging Economies in the Mongolian Gold Rush. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Højer, Lars. 2009. “Absent Powers: Magic and Loss in Post-Socialist Mongolia.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (3): 575591.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Humphrey, Caroline. 1992. “The Moral Authority of the Past in Post-Socialist Mongolia.” Religion, State and Society 20 (3–4): 375389.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Humphrey, Caroline, and James Laidlaw. 1994. The Archetypal Actions of Ritual. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

  • Janes, Craig R., and Casey Hilliard. 2008. “Inventing Tradition: Tibetan Medicine in the Post-socialist contexts of China and Mongolia.” In Tibetan Medicine in the Contemporary World: Global Politics of Medical Knowledge and Practice, ed. Laurent Pordié, 3561. London: Routledge.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Kapferer, Bruce. 1988. Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Kaufman, Sharon R. 2015. Ordinary Medicine: Extraordinary Treatments, Longer Lives, and Where to Draw the Line. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Kreinath, Jens, Jan Snoek, and Michael Stausberg, eds. 2006. Theorizing Rituals. Vol. 1: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts. Leiden: Brill.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Laidlaw, James, and Caroline Humphrey. 2006. “Action.” In Kreinath et al. 2006, 265283.

  • Lawson, E. Thomas, and Robert N. McCauley. 1990. Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Levine, Caroline. 2015. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

  • Lukács, Georg. (1923) 1968. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Trans. Rodney Livingston. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Martin, Terry. 2001. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Merli, Laetitia, dir. 2000. Call for Grace. Documentary film, 30 min. Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Ortner, Sherry B. 2006. Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

  • Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2011. Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Purev, Otgoni. 1998. Mongol Böögiin Shashin [Mongolian shamanic religion]. Ulaanbaatar: Admon Press.

  • Rappaport, Roy A. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Rosenthal, Bernice G. 1997a. “Introduction.” In Rosenthal 1997b, 131.

  • Rosenthal, Bernice G., ed. 1997b. The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

  • Sahlins, Marshall. 1985. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  • Sahlins, Marshall. 1999. “Two or Three Things That I Know about Culture.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5 (3): 399421.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Seligman, Adam B., Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett, and Bennet Simon. 2008. Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Smith, Graham, Vivien Law, Andrew Wilson, Annette Bohr, and Edward Allworth. 1998. Nation-building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands: The Politics of National Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Sneath, David. 2010. “Political Mobilization and the Construction of Collective Identity in Mongolia.” Central Asian Survey 29 (3): 251267.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Sneath, David. 2014. “Nationalising Civilisational Resources: Sacred Mountains and Cosmopolitical Ritual in Mongolia.” Asian Ethnicity 15 (4): 458472.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Sneath, David. 2018. Mongolia Remade: Post-socialist National Culture, Political Economy, and Cosmopolitics. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Staal, Frits. 1979. “The Meaninglessness of Ritual.” Numen 26 (1): 222.

  • Staal, Frits. 1989. Rules without Meaning: Ritual, Mantras and the Human Sciences. New York: Peter Lang.

  • Staal, Frits. 1991. “Within Ritual, about Ritual and Beyond.” Religion 21 (3): 227234.

  • Stasch, Rupert. 2011. “Ritual and Oratory Revisited: The Semiotics of Effective Action.” Annual Review of Anthropology 40: 159174.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Stephens, Holly D. 1997. “The Occult in Russia Today.” In Rosenthal 1997b, 357378.

  • Swancutt, Katherine. 2012. Fortune and the Cursed: The Sliding Scale of Time in Mongolian Divination. New York: Berghahn Books.

  • Terbish, Baasanjav. 2018. “‘I Have My Own Spaceship’: Folk Healers in Kalmykia, Russia.” Inner Asia 20 (1): 132158.

  • Tsetsentsolmon, Baatarnarany. 2014. “The ‘Gong Beat’ against the ‘Uncultured’: Contested Notions of Culture and Civilization in Mongolia.” Asian Ethnicity 15 (4): 422438.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Turner, Terence. 2006. “Structure, Process, Form.” In Kreinath et al. 2006, 207246.

  • Verdery, Katherine. 1991. National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceauşescu's Romania. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Verdery, Katherine. 1993. “Whither ‘Nation’ and ‘Nationalism’?Daedalus 122 (3): 3746.

  • Wagner, Roy. (1975) 2016. The Invention of Culture. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Metrics

All Time Past Year Past 30 Days
Abstract Views 1071 587 28
Full Text Views 81 5 0
PDF Downloads 122 8 0