MIASU Event

National Extinction, Planetary Survival: Mongolian Avant-Garde Poetry on a Dying Planet In this paper, drawing from the work of Peter Sloterdijk and Donna Haraway, I define the nation-state as an immune system, which is no longer able to guarantee immune protections for its residents. The nation-state form structurally...

Memory and Subjectivity in Russia’s Islamic Pompeii At this Research Seminar, I wish to present and discuss my still-in-progress, Le-Goffian examination of the archaeological complex of Shahri Bolghar in Tatarstan, Russia. Bolghar is one of the most (if not the most) iconic Islamic heritage sites in the Russian Federation...

Siberian tea for Vladimir Putin and Moral Economies of the Russia-China Borderlands “Back to animals ! Back to mushrooms ! And now back to plants !...” (Bruno Latour, 2018) When Russian president Vladimir Putin has recently declared that he is drinking tea made only with wild herbs collected in Siberia, public attention...

MIASU Seminar - Hosung Shim (Visiting Scholar) The Dörböd Aristocracy, Four Oirad Confederation, and Zunghar Empire in the Early Modern Central Asian Steppe This talk discusses how the state ruling system transformed in the early modern Central Asian steppe by scrutinizing the political history of the Dörböds in the...

MIASU Seminar - Emily Yeh (University of Colorado Boulder) New Tibetan Entrepreneurship in the contemporary PRC: Valorization and the question of neoliberalism In the first decade of the new millennium, many educated and ambitious young Tibetans in China aspired to work in non-governmental organizations to promote...

MIASU Seminar - James Meador (University of Michigan) Orthodox Christianity in Chinese-Russian Contact For more than three centuries, Orthodox Christianity has mediated connections between China and Russia. From language school to emigre enclave, colonial mission to cultural diplomacy, Orthodoxy has served in many guises...

MIASU Seminar - Piers Vitebsky (University of Cambridge) & Rosa Laptander (University of Hamburg) Trust Versus Paranoia: Can the Siberian fire spirit explain the spectacular failure of the UK Covid track and trace app? Please email miasu-admin@socanth.cam.ac.uk to book a space.

MIASU Seminar - Yana Bezirganova (Birmingham City University & University of Kent) Writing Buryatia: the Future of Mongolian Script This paper is part of a wider ethnographic project concerned with the revival of Buryad-Mongolian culture in the capital of the Republic of Buryatia, Ulan-Ude. It is based on a year-long...

MIASU Seminar - Kenneth Linden (Indiana University) Veterinary Science, Zud, and Wolves: Environmental and Animal History of Collectivization in Mongolia The Mongolian People’s Republic, the second socialist country in the world, embarked on its second and ultimately successful collectivization campaign from 1956 to 1960...

MIASU Seminar - Christopher Atwood (University of Pennsylvania) Why the Mongol Conquests? Sources and Explanations of the 1211 Campaigns against North China The Mongol conquest of North China was the beginning of the Mongol Empire. Its success laid the foundation of the empire; its failure would have made Chinggis (“...