MIASU

Mond Building Seminar Room 4.30 – 6.00

Tuesday 21 May

Riamsara Kuyakanon Knapp

Department of Geography, University of Cambridge

Processes of knowing: a political ecology of mountain closure in Eastern Bhutan
In this paper I detail the practice of mountain closure in Mongar, Eastern Bhutan. Drawing on field observations, ethnographic description, oral histories and interview data I describe the landscape and the people of Senekhar. I discuss the bamboo economy and the herding economy of the area and consider them as practices that are temporally and spatially defined and subject to shifting and overlapping management regimes. I examine how access to some resources becomes restricted during the mountain closure period, and how restrictions are upheld and negotiated. The coexistence of these traditional sanctions with more recent management regimes and how the villagers navigate between overlapping regimes is also considered. I conclude with reflections on what mountain closure practice illuminates about the relationship between Bhutan’s Buddhist environmental discourse and nature conservation within a context of social change and modernisation.

Mond Building Seminar Room – 4.30–6.00

Tuesday 7 May

Maria Repnikova

University of Oxford

Political Boundaries: Watchdog Media and the State in China and Russia

Abstract
While the boundaries for watchdog journalism are wider in Russia, its effects on policy-making seem more notable in China. This is largely due to the collaborative relationship between the central state and outspoken journalists in China, as opposed to a more confrontational and disjointed relationship in Russia. The Chinese party-state encourages the media to serve as one of the accountability mechanisms and generally responds to media investigations, so long as they don’t challenge societal stability and the political system. Moreover, politically engaged netizens in China lay pressure on authorities to live up to their promises. The talk discusses these dynamics, drawing contrasts to Russia. It concludes by highlighting mutual perceptions of Chinese and Russian journalists.

A lunchtime seminar will be held on 30 April in the Mond Building Seminar Room, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF

Bayarjargal Garamtseren,

PhD candidate (in Hebrew studies), University of Cambridge

Abstract

The presentation will give an overview of the history of Bible translation in Mongolian languages, including Buryat and Kalmyk. This interesting history goes back to the time of Khubilai Khan and continues right up to the present time with active endeavours in Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, Buryatia and Kalmykia. The first and most significant translation of the whole Bible (both the Old and New Testament) was completed in the 1840s in Buryatia and this Mongol script version enjoyed a long legacy in the following decades and century with multiple revisions. Following the transition to Cyrillic script in Buryatia, Kalmykia and Mongolia in the 20th century, new efforts had to be made in Bible translation and continues to meet the needs today. The obvious background for these Bible translation efforts is the spread of Christian faith amongst Mongols, starting with the Eastern (Nestorian) form of Christianity before and during the Mongol Empire, and the Catholic and Protestant missions since the 13th century. An interesting link between Christianity and the Mongols is the traditional Mongol script which ultimately originated from the Syriac script through the travelling Eastern Christans who carried their Bibles in Syriac.

Mond Building Seminar Room 4.30–6.00

Tuesday 23^rd April

Sayana Namsaraeva

MIASU

Fieldwork between Folders: fragments of the Russian ‘amateur’ colonial anthropology in the China-Russia border town archives

Abstract

This presentation looks at the imperial period engagement of the Russian frontier town Kyakhta and its residents with Mongolia and China. Exploring the role of the local ‘amateur’ ethnographers who established in Kyakhta their own ‘Anthropological Society’ under the umbrella of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society (IRGO), and taking a close look at their underappreciated research of the border region and particularly ‘native life’ in Chinese Maimaicheng – trade outpost on the other side of the border, I demonstrate that this unique local school of Oriental studies was borne out of conflicting ideas and sentiment about Russia’s colonizing ‘mission’ in Asia, statehood, and ‘the bitter destiny’ of colonial officials (in their opinion) who were sent from Moscow and Saint Petersburg to serve the remote Asian border. As a conclusion, I link the intellectual work of the diverse Kyakhta society, which comprised of various civil and military border officials, penal intellectuals, housewives with university diplomas, half-literate caravan trade merchants and western ‘expats’, and their contradictive academic contribution which is fragmentary preserved in local archives, with what became known in the late nineteenth-century as Russian Orientalism.

Easter Term seminars at the Mongolia & Inner Asia Studies Unit,

Mond Building Seminar Room 4.30–6.00

Tuesday 23^rd April

Sayana Namsaraeva

MIASU

Fieldwork between Folders: fragments of the Russian ‘amateur’ colonial anthropology in the China-Russia border town archives

Tuesday 7 May

Maria Repnikova

University of Oxford

Political Boundaries: Watchdog Media and the State in China and Russia

Tuesday 21 May

Riamsara Kuyakanon Knapp

Department of Geography, University of Cambridge

Processes of knowing: a political ecology of mountain closure in Eastern Bhutan

Tuesday 4 June

Wei-fang Wang

Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission, Taiwan

The Issues of Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission and the Organizational Reform in the Future

Trans-Continental Neighbours Edited by: B. Altangerel, U.E. Bulag, S. Chuluun & D. Shurkhuu, was published on 19 March to coincide with the a conference with a special panel to celebrate 50 years of Mongolia–UK diplomatic relations.

In 1963 Mongolia and the United Kingdom established diplomatic relations, a monumental event in the long history of the two countries dating back to 1287 when an envoy sent by Arghun Khan, the ruler of the Mongol Empire’s Ilkhanate, met King Edward I of England. While the Mongol impact in Europe has long been felt, almost nothing happened between the Mongols and the English until the late 19th century when British power reached Mongolia through its rivalry with China and Russia. Looking to Britain favourably, in 1912 the government of the newly established independent Mongolia despatched a letter to nine world powers requesting their recognition. The Yalta agreement signed by the British Prime  Minister Winston Churchill together with the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the US President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945 ultimately paved the way for international recognition of Mongolia’s independence.
In 1963 Britain became the first Western democracy to establish diplomatic relations with Mongolia. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Britain has become Europe’s biggest business partner with Mongolia. With important historical texts documenting the key developments ranging from diplomacy to academic exchanges and business agreements from 1899 to 2012, this book is dedicated to the 50th anniversary of Mongolia-UK diplomatic relations.

for further information please contact admin@innerasiaresarch.org

A two day international symposium on the geopolitics and geoeconomics of Mongolia’s natural resource strategy was held at Selwyn College, Cambridge, on 19-20 March, 2013. Ogranised by the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit (MIASU), the symposium also co-hosted with the Mongolian Embassy in the UK a special panel and gala reception to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of Mongolia-UK relations. As the first western nation to establish diplomatic relations with Mongolia on 23 January 1963, the UK holds a special place in Mongolia’s international diplomacy and it is now Europe’s biggest business partner with Mongolia. The symposium featured such distinguished speakers as His Honourable Mr Amarjargal, former Prime Minister of Mongolia; Prof. Enkhtuvshin, president of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences; Sir Paul Judge, key benefactor of Cambridge Judge Business School; Robert Court, Global Head of External Affairs, Rio Tinto; and Ann Puntis, Chief Executive of University of Cambridge International Examinations.

Conceived within the framework of HEIF 5 funding, the symposium provided a forum for closely examining the cultural, social, political, and above all geopolitical and geoeconomic factors that may propel or hamper Mongolia’s transformation from a pastoral economy to a mineral resource-based industrial society. Leading experts from Mongolia proper, its two territorial neighbours – China and Russia, and its ‘third neighbours’ – Japan, UK and continental Europe, spent two days scrutinising a variety of topics ranging from the mineral trade to transnational traffic, from practices of financing mineral industry to infrastructural development, from natural resource depletion to human resource flight. Combining insights from front-line businessmen and politicians, and in-depth academic analysis, this symposium navigated competing international interests in exploiting Mongolia’s natural resources, and to provide different perspectives on Mongolia’s strategic culture in business and politics.

The symposium was presented a book entitled Trans-Continental Neighbours: A Documentary History of UK-Mongolia Relations, edited by Cambridge University’s Dr Uradyn Bulag together with Professor Altangerel the former Mongolian Ambassador to the UK, and Dr Chuluun and Dr Shurkhuu from the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. The proceedings of the symposium will be published by MIASU soon.

A new consensus emerged that Mongolia’s natural resource and infrastructure development require urgent and in-depth research. MIASU is eager to institutionalise this consensus by providing academic platform to study a Mongolia in the process of rapid transformation, and a public forum for dialogues between academics and Mongolian and international business and political leaders and local communities.

Programme

John Man,  historian and travel writer, was guest speaker at the launch event on 5 March for the database of the project The Oral History of Twentieth-Century Mongolia. David Sneath & Christopher Kaplonski gave introductions to the history of Mongolia in the twentieth century and to the actual collection of the 600+ oral accounts.

An online database launched today, 5 March, provides an oral history of Mongolia as told by 600 Mongolian citizens who look back over their lives during the nation’s turbulent recent history and describe their memories and experiences as the country moved from being a part of the Qing Empire, to an aristocratic government, to Soviet-style socialism and, finally, to democracy.

The website has been developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit and is now available:

‘Oral History of Twentieth Century Mongolia’

Friday 22 February 2013, at 11.30 – 13.00

The Mond Bulding Seminar Room, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB3 2RF

The Lineage of the Arjia Rinpoches

Arjia Rinpoche