skip to content

Department of Social Anthropology

 

Research Exploring Nature-Based and Alternative Medicine in Mongolia

Over the past 8 years, Dr Elizabeth Turk, MIASU Research Associate, Department of Social Anthropology, has been exploring 

Alternative Medicine in Mongolia the increased popularity of nature-based and ‘alternative’ medicine in post-Soviet Mongolia. During a time described as 'disorganised’ (_zambaraagui_), marked by mineral mining and the ‘emptying out’ of rural homelands as people re-locate to the capital city, many expressed the importance of human relationship with the natural environment. In conversation and practice, Nature was often inflected with national territory, lending the concept-place ethnonational weight. Dr Turk’s work traces the historically-contingent ways in which the natural world – a National Nature – is both imagined and recruited in the amelioration of illness.

The University of Cambridge have featured some of Dr Turk's research experiences on their website here.