MIASU Event

Onon Prize lecture with Professor Manduhai Buyandelger (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Crisis in Animal Rescue: Rethinking Urbanization in a Multispecies World All animals are sentient beings, Mongolian Buddhism teaches, and humans are believed to have been dogs in their past lives. Yet the unregulated breeding...

Angel Naydenov (MIASU, University of Cambridge) Homo Rhythmicus: Searching for a Sense of Existence in Sichuan, China This paper demonstrates that the symbolic affirmation of existence takes a rhythmic form. Whether set in motion through abstract comparison and its progressive linearity or through the immediacy of play and...

Karénina Kollmar-Paulenz (University of Bern) Essentializing the Other: The encounter of Tibetan Buddhists with böge and udaγan in 17th and 18th century Mongolia Please note this talk is online only. Please email miasu-admin@socanth.cam.ac.uk for the zoom link The implementation of Tibetan Buddhism in the Mongolian regions...

Morris Rossabi (Columbia University & Visiting Fellow, Wolfson College, University of Cambridge) Post-Communist Transition in Mongolia Almost thirty-five years have elapsed since what some advocates have labeled the "Transition" in Mongolia. They imply that the problems the country has faced will wither away once the "...

From Lamaism to Buddhism: The Rise of Modernity in the Mongolian Sangha of Russia, late 19th – early 20th c. It is generally accepted that the early history of Buddhist modernism is largely connected with the regions of Asia that experienced prolonged European colonization (Ceylon) or earlier than others embarked on the...

‘Caring like a state:’ the politics of Russia’s population problems Identified as the most acute problem facing the country, the ‘demographic crisis’ has been a popular and continuous topic of both mundane conversations and televised political debates in contemporary Russia. Based on a long-term ethnographic study that...

Charles Ramble EPHE – PSL University, CRCAO, Paris Deferring Environmental Responsibility? The Evolution of Tibetan Serpent-Spirits in a Buddhist Climate Tibetan-speaking communities in the Himalaya are acutely aware of the fragility of their natural environment. In a terrain that is susceptible to drought and flash floods...

Martin Saxer, Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich Places in Knots: Remoteness and Connectivity in the Himalayas and Beyond In this talk I trace the experiences of mobile Himalayan communities and their ambitions and ventures across the globe. Based on long-term research in northern Nepal, I challenge assumptions of...

The Feminine in the Secret History of the Mongols Professor Christopher Atwood (University of Pennsylvania Warlike masculinity has been central to outsiders’ conception of the Central Eurasian nomads, to the genre of epic with which the Secret History is often associated, and to the idea of Mongol nationalism for which the...

Traders, informal trade and markets between the Caucasus and China Susanne Fehlings conducted ethnographic fieldwork on local bazaars in the Caucasus and in China. In her talk she will present her findings and talk about bazaar traders and businesspeople, who trade between Tbilisi in Georgia and Beijing in the PRC. She...