Description
Book SynopsisThis book explores the historical and contemporary processes that have made and remade Mongolia as it is today: the construction of ethnic and national cultures, the transformations of political economy and a ‘nomadic’ pastoralism, and the revitalization of a religious and cosmological heritage that has led to new forms of post-socialist politics. Widely published as an expert in the field, David Sneath offers a fresh perspective into a region often seen as mysterious to the West.
Trade Review"Indeed, Sneath's unique contribution to the research on Mongolia comes from — although by no means exclusively — his exceptionally fluent and dynamic knowledge of the histories of the Mongols, not just the current and recent socialist, but also the ancient." - Manduhai Buyandelger,
The Journal of Asian Studies, 2020
Table of ContentsContents Chapter 1. Introduction Part I: The Making and Remaking of Mongolia Part II: Masters of the Steppe: Peoples of Mongolia (First published in Fitzhugh, Rossabi & Honeychurch (eds.) 2009. Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire, Washington: Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center). Part III: The Ending of the Old Order Part IV: Making Mongolia Modern Chapter 2. Mapping and the Headless State: Rethinking national populist concepts of Mongolia (first published in Sabloff, P. (ed.) 2011. Mapping Mongolia: Situating Mongolia in the World from Geologic Time to the Present, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). Chapter 3. The Rural and the Urban in Pastoral Mongolia (first published in in Bruun, O. and Narangoa, L., (eds.) 2005. Mongolians from Country to City: Floating Boundaries, Pastoralism and City Life in the Mongol Lands, Copenhagen: NIAS Press). Chapter 4. Proprietary Regimes and Sociotechnical Systems: Rights over Land in Mongolia's 'age of the market' (first published in Verdery, K., and Humphrey C., (eds.) 2004. Property in Question: Value Transformation in the Global Economy, Oxford: Berg). Chapter 5 Political Mobilization and the Construction of Collective Identity in Mongolia (first published in Central Asia Survey 29(3), 2010). Chapter 6 The Age of the Market and the Regime of Debt: The role of credit in the transformation of pastoral Mongolia (first published in Social Anthropology/ Anthropologie Sociale 20(4), 2012). Chapter 7 Reading the Signs by Lenin's Light: Development, divination and metonymic fields in Mongolia (first published in Ethnos 74(1), 2009). Chapter 8 Ritual Idioms and Spatial Orders: Comparing the rites for Mongolian and Tibetan 'local deities' (first published in in Bulag, U., and Diemberger, H., (eds.) 2007. The Mongol-Tibet Interface: Opening new research terrains in Inner Asia, Leiden: Brill). Chapter 9 Nationalizing Civilizational Resources: Sacred mountains and cosmopolitical ritual in Mongolia (first published in Asian Ethnicity 15(4), 2014). Chapter 10 Mongolian Capitalism.
