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Accounts of Mongol mountain sacrifices (ovoo takhilga) variously focus on transactional offerings that elicit benefits from local spirits and on the patron-like position held by spirits towards those who supplicate them. In contrast this article explores how, in such ceremonies, human–spirit relations are shaped through the enactment of emotions: in this context, happiness. Bringing classic literature on sacrifice into dialogue with recent studies of happiness as a social phenomenon, we argue that the generation of happiness (bayarluulakh; bayasgakh) in local spirits is of great importance in mediating the distance between spirits and their human neighbours. This mediation allows for the shaping of optimal post-sacrificial relations between these two categories of being. Our argument is made through an analysis of ethnographic and linguistic data relating to an ovoo takhilga in a Khalkha area of central Mongolia.

In this article, we draw upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Mongolia and China to develop understandings of herd–herder (mal–malchin) relations further. We focus primarily on horse-herding practices and related divisions of labour, and the three concepts of herd intuition (zön), serenity (taa) and fortune (buyan, khishig, zaya), to present additional interpretations of human–animal relations in Mongolia. Through this exploration, we develop the concept of herd agency and examine how it relates to specific horse-herding knowledge and techniques, as well as the cosmological significance of human–animal relations. All three concepts reveal the importance of cosmological agents with herd–herder relations. We conclude by emphasising the changing nature and politics of human–animal relations in these regions.

Pentecostal missionaries arrived in Mongolia as early as 1910 but the socialist government expelled all missionaries in 1924. By the time socialism collapsed in 1990, there were no more than 20 Christians in the whole nation. However, estimates suggest that there are now around 100,000 adherents, most of whom are Pentecostal. While some scholars have analysed the history of Christianity in Mongolia, little research has explored this significant subset. Mongolia Assemblies of God (MAOG—Монголын Бурханы Чуулган) was one of the first and fastest growing Christian denominations. It currently comprises around 2000 adherents, as well as over 200 graduates from its ministry training college. Using MAOG as a case study, this research argues that the rise of Pentecostalism in Mongolia is owing to its ‘ends of the earth’ mission; cultural protest movement; lure of modernity; imagined community; empowerment through transnational mobility; theology of divine ‘calling’; and contribution toward civil society.

It was primarily Russian activities in Mongolia between 1860 and 1921, reflecting its geopolitical interests, that introduced European medical practices to the Mongols. Competing alongside other European powers, the Russian Government capitalised on conditions within Mongolia to increase Mongolia’s dependency on Russia. Thus, the Russian government’s motives for medical intervention, like that of other European groups, were mainly political, economic and cultural. In the context of Buddhist dogmatism and the expansive territorial distances between the Mongols (a term this paper uses to encompass all people of Mongol ethnicity in northern and central Asia), the reluctance of Russian doctors to disseminate European medical knowledge prevented its spread into Mongolia. Medical intervention was primarily a method of colonisation justified through healthcare support. Ultimately the familiarisation of European medicine in Mongolia was the first crucial step towards the amalgamation of traditional Mongolian and European medical practices after the Mongolian People’s Revolution.

This paper examines cases in which traditional musicians in Mongolia bring the perspectives of rural non-human animals into urban music institutions, troubling the colonial nature–culture and urban–rural divisions around which they were designed. In Mongolia, music has played a central role in the socialist modernisation projects of the twentieth century, as well as the protests that led to the country’s transition to parliamentary democracy in 1990. These projects involved the formation of urban-based national conservatories and orchestras designed around a western model that attempts to separate nature from culture. How, then, do multispecies relationships play out in a post-socialist context, where capitalist and socialist modernities have each left their mark? In this paper I argue that Mongolian musicians incorporate non-human animals into musical heritage institutions in ways that both depend on and resist the interplay between socialist and capitalist colonial projects.

This study considers the historical importance of the dowry, or inǰe, in outer Mongolia during the Qing period (1636–1911), focusing on the developments of the legal system towards women’s rights over their dowry using archival legal case documents from the Mongolian archives. Previous studies argue that the dowry system was of little importance among the steppe populations; however, the Mongolian archival documents make it clear that the dowry played a very important role in society for establishing prestige and for acquisition of property for families during the Qing period. They also show that the courts in Mongolia consistently ruled in favour of women, particularly in the case of their ownership and compensation for dowry livestock during divorce cases, including livestock born from dowry livestock, demonstrating that pre-modern Mongol women were considered autonomous social agents with distinct personal rights, and not thought of as property.

For Indigenous Soyot herder-hunters of the Eastern Sayan Mountains in western Buryatia, maintaining a sustainable multispecies encampment is a matter of pacing the individual rhythms of the species belonging to it. Domestication in this context is not a matter of human control but of attuning and influencing life rhythms in other beings. Formerly divided into yak and reindeer herding groups, contemporary Soyots no longer rely on reindeer today. Meanwhile, their Tofa neighbours continue to use trained reindeer in their hunting. This paper explores possible reasons for the gradual abandonment of Soyot reindeer herding in the mid nineteenth century, drawing on irreconcilable rhythms. Four regional strategies for coping with divergent species’ rhythms are explored: abandonment of a species in a rangifer-cattle context; alignment of yak and Mongolian cattle reproductive rhythms for hybrid production; juxtaposition of equine and rangifer rhythms; and inversion of cattle and fish migratory routes. The article concludes with a new theory to help address rhythmical multispecies togetherness in the Eastern Sayan Mountains.

This paper discusses two non-nomadic modes of transport in 1930s–60s Mongolia: the horse relay system and the goods caravan. It suggests that each of these should be seen as a ‘mobility constellation’ involving entanglements of mobility, narrative and practice, and implying different social relations and experience of the environment. It is argued that the relay system in particular involved abstract distance–speed calculation and that this enabled the conception of extensive cross-border geographies. The paper also explains why herders who took part in (fast) relay and (slow) caravan duties greatly preferred the latter.

Using ethnographic materials collected in 2008 and 2009 in a distant and isolated village in East Siberia, this article shows how slow and distorted connections contribute to the development of a specific eco-biopolitical space that can be likened to a spaceship physically disconnected from the mainland. Life in such a ‘bubble’ is dependent on supplies from the mainland, which create rhythms of activities in the community. The lack of access to state services and institutions is compensated by local initiatives to mimic such organisations. The state provides channels of escape from the village, such as emergency flights, but does not invest in infrastructures that would link this settlement to other places. The community ‘bubble’ exists not because of infrastructural absence per se, but because this isolation is asymmetrical. It is easier and faster to get from the village to the centre than it is to return. This imbalance expresses the power relations between the centre and periphery and systematically reproduces conditions in which resources drain from the village. This ‘slow connection’ is the condition for the creation of a specific eco-biopolitical regime, in which a rich place is occupied by people living in poverty.

This article provides an extended case study of an elder’s journey back to his homeland in Hovd Province after years of absence. The hazards of life mingled with lingering resentment have weakened the ties to the homeland and generate distance from his relatives so much that the return proves to be more complicated than expected. The story that the article tells is used to delineate theoretically a very general figure of prominence present in Mongolian social life that the author calls ‘the ruler’, i.e. a person capable of bringing order to the multiple forces that constitute a Mongolian nutag and able to put them all in line with his own agenda.

While Henri Lefebvre used his rhythmanalysis for analysing urban spaces and the effects of those rhythms on the inhabitants of those spaces, I attempt to apply it to a more rural and non-European environment, the comparatively small and familiar space of a Mongolian nutag. Case studies based on oral and written Buryat and Barga Mongols’ accounts demonstrate that entering the spiritually thick atmosphere of the nutag (crossing its borders) requires a certain slowing down and tactical deceleration to adjust to local rhythms. To examine the hierarchy of the various contingent forces that influence people and their movement either in their own or in khari nutag [foreign land], I elaborate host–guest relations into a triangulated arrangement of relations between ezed masters, guests and the locals. To borrow an expression from physics to add to our analytical vocabulary of writing on slowness and deceleration, each nutag appears to be a sort of a ‘viscous medium’ with different rhythms and fluids creating more drag on objects (people) moving through it.

This paper draws on primary Oyirod and Mongol sources concerning the rise of the seventeenth-century Jöüngars. It relies on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mongolian historical texts to identify the 1638 creation of an Oyirod Jöüngar [Left Wing] and Baroun Gar [Right Wing]. This origin of the Jöüngars differs substantially from historical accounts that project existence of a Jöüngar to an earlier time. From Sarayin Gerel [Moon Light] and other sources we learn that the creation of the Jöüngar Khanate was sudden and even unlikely after the division of Baatar Khong Tayiji’s people among his sons. The Jöüngars were so weakened by this division that the Dalai Lama gave the title of Chechen Khaan to the Khoshoud Ochirtu Tayiji in 1666. The Yeke Caaji [Great Code] describes Oyirod political organisation in 1640. Sarayin Gerel also provides details of the reign of Galdan Boshugtu from 1672 until 1692.

This paper is an attempt to understand dwelling in Mongolia as the cultivated balancing of three interconnected virtues, prominently exhibited by some particular characters and exemplary people, yet actually to varying degrees expected from anybody else. These virtues are skilfulness (being mergen), force (hiimor’) and power or diplomacy (erh); they are best embodied by archers, wrestlers and rulers, respectively. Drawing on three ethnographic vignettes featuring a troubled diviner, an unlucky young man and a confused anthropologist, this paper highlights how different kinds of people strive to dwell well in post-socialist Mongolia, associating elements that compose the world they live in and checking the conditions in which they might impose themselves in it.

The paper focuses on one of the most sacred mountains of Tibet, A-myes-rma-chen, located in east Tibet (contemporary mGo-log Prefecture, Qinghai Province, People’s Republic of China). It deals mainly with two topics: the ongoing vivid revitalisation of the cult of the mountain and its deity since the Cultural Revolution, and how this interacts with the current changes at the site due to state-planned modernisation and development within the ‘Great Development of the West’ (Xibu da kaifa) strategy extensively implemented since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Particular attention is paid to the recent great circumambulation pilgrimage to A-myes-rma-chen, performed once every 12 years in a Horse Year, which took place in 2014/15, in the Horse Year 2143 of the Tibetan calendar. The article shows the present form of the pilgrimage, its reflection of and accustomisation to these changes, and the resulting quick transformation of the institution of pilgrimage. Pilgrims’ and local people’s understandings and views, alterations and modifications of their behaviour and pilgrimage practice, as well as actual reactions, are discussed. The article argues that the site of A-myes-rma-chen is currently being reinterpreted by the state in a secularised, commodifying and territorialising discourse in order to incorporate the area more closely, both politically and culturally. A-myes-rma-chen thus represents a space contested by different cultural and interest groups.

In contemporary Mongolia—a country with 29 years’ history of international development policy—the conventional interpretation regarding the oppression of and liberation from the Soviet regime is no longer valid for understanding its politics of cultural heritage. Today, development projects and associated environmental, social and cultural assessments play a central role in safeguarding cultural heritage. Therefore, alternative interpretations are necessary to comprehend current and further processes of cultural heritage politics. This paper introduces two case studies of new cultural heritage politics involving Mongolia’s two ‘megaprojects’: Oyu Tolgoi gold and copper mining, and River Eg hydroelectric station.

Before 2006, otter pelts, the skins of carnivorous mammals from the Lutrinae family, were considered to be among the most precious and sought-after commodities in Tibet, being used for clothing, hats, and cushions. The animal’s flesh and body parts were used as ingredients in Tibetan medicine. However, after the Dalai Lama criticised the use of wild animal furs in 2006 in response to requests from international conservation organisations, most Tibetans not only stopped wearing otter fur, but a significant number of people also set fire to pelts worth thousands of yuan. In this article, by exploring a number of Tibetan religious and historical texts, I discuss the history of otter fur in its broadest context and the change in social values indicated by the cessation of this practice and outline the history of otter fur usage in Tibet, as well as the rise and fall of the material’s trade in the country.

This article offers a new explanatory framework for studies of the return of the tsar’s Kalmyk subjects to their ancestors’ lands in Jungaria in 1771, a unique episode of Russian imperial history that illustrates the complex power dynamics of the Inner Asian frontier. By highlighting structural similarities between Russian and Qing approaches to their nomadic counterparts, the article challenges earlier characterisations of the Russian/Kalmyk relationship as one of domination and subjugation, demonstrating instead that Russian imperial authorities continued to adhere to established steppe political practices in their interactions with the Kalmyks until at least the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Tibetans in twenty-first-century China have engaged in an increasingly high-profile campaign to promote language purity. In this purity campaign, Tibetan comedians and rappers have encouraged their audiences to speak pure Tibetan, and a host of neologisms have been coined to help people speak Tibetan even in modern contexts. Although coining new terms involves tremendous innovation, Tibetans almost uniformly view purism in this fashion as promoting traditional knowledge and practices considered to be under threat. This paper examines Tibetan media discourses on language purity to understand the development of new metadiscursive regimes in Tibet that link otherwise contemporary values like language purity with the preservation of Tibetan traditions.

This paper explores the Buryat Bolsheviks’ efforts to replace the religious identity of fellow Buryats with a Soviet identity in the wake of the Russian Revolution, and analyses the ways in which the Buddhist community attempted to adapt to totalitarian rule. In addition to fostering a general atmosphere of intolerance to religion, considered an antagonistic worldview, the Bolsheviks set out to promote the cultural assimilation of this non-Russian population within the Russian ethnic majority. This entailed a programme of education in the spirit of Soviet patriotism and loyalty, designed to ensure the ideological unity of the nation. Over a short historical period from the early 1920s to the early 1930s, the attitude of the Soviet authorities towards Buddhist religion, clergy and believers shifted radically, from tolerance towards the religion of the ‘oppressed non-Russian masses’ to uncompromising antagonism and the targeting of religion as a class enemy that must be annihilated in the name of creating ‘a new man’.

This article discusses the political and cultural importance of the Qing sable tribute for the expression and maintenance of imperial authority by focusing on the Solon, the largest sable-hunting group of the Qing dynasty in Heilongjiang. The political use of fur tribute items at the Qing centre reveals how the privilege of wearing fur defined the boundaries of the ruling hierarchy and, therefore, why sable tribute throughout the dynasty was a mechanism for maintaining relations between the Manchu court and the hunting population. The high demand for sable and other furs by the Qing emperor and other members of the political elite explains why the Qing empire needed the hunting population and their native places in the borderlands.

In the Mongolian tradition, hunting and war have had strong connections with each other. During the Qing Empire, Mongolian hunts were not only local practices, but were also involved in the Qing empire-building project. On the other hand, the collective hunt itself was by nature a dangerous activity that contained potential physical risks from wild animal attacks as well as human errors. It is conventionally understood that the hunt therefore must have been well organised in order to secure success and security. But how a hunt was organised and operated in reality has not yet been well examined. This study explores the organisational structure and regulations of a military hunt in Qing Inner Mongolia, a geographically important zone where both the Manchus and Mongols actively held hunts. The primary focus of this article is the nineteenth-century Alasha Banner grand hunt, a well-organised and documented Mongolian military hunt from the Qing period.

This paper is about folk healers in Kalmykia, southwest Russia, locally referred to as medlegchi, and their eclectic healing methods that combine elements of the earlier religions of Buddhism, shamanism and folk beliefs with modern theologies, ideas and concepts. Although the paper focuses upon the contemporary situation of folk healers, the author also briefly describes the development of Kalmyk folk healing in order to explain its varied and de-centralised contemporary nature. Alleging to receive their healing knowledge directly from their guardian deities (the majority of whom are Buddhist gods), all Kalmyk folk healers are eclectic in their methods, some more so than others. For example, those who are members of the community Vozrozhdenie [Revival], discussed in the paper, differ from many others by the speed with which they absorb ultra-new ideas and anxieties into their healing practices, which today include UFOs, a cosmic god and aliens, among other things.

Drawing on oral and written Chinese and Tibetan accounts, this paper aims to provide a preliminary discussion of the role of Khampa women in political life by examining the lives of three notable women chieftains in the first half of the twentieth century. The case studies demonstrate that there were different paths or avenues for women to rise to power, since due to traditional biases against female political leaders, limitations and obstacles hindered their ability to access and exercise power. These accounts show that at the key juncture when a family was faced with crisis in the turbulent late Qing and Republican periods, it was often the female ruler who exercised power and authority and saved the family. Their assumption of power was possible because, in situations involving the absence of male heirs, both traditional customary law in Kham and the laws of the late Qing and Republican periods allowed women to inherit titles and positions. These women were caught up in power struggles between multiple forces, notably male leaders within their lineages, competing males from other lineages, sub-state agents like provincial warlords, the Chinese state and sometimes the Tibetan government. These examples demonstrate how the fragmentary, decentralised nature of interstitial polities opened up additional spaces for local leadership and particularly for female leadership.

This article explores Evenki adolescents’ response to Russian representations of indigeneity in Buryatia (Russia) to gain an understanding of how Indigenous adolescents negotiate their space and identity in the context of local representations of Evenkiness. I position indigenous identity within social interactions. In Russia, these relations are not only political in nature, but also are located within a set of institutionally sanctioned dominant discourses and stereotypes based on them. The results show that Evenki adolescents in Nizhneangarsk often employ a strategy of managing ethnic identities, which could be viewed as a product of cultural-political context, formed during the Soviet Union and reinforced by modern Russian politics. It is a product of marginalisation and manifestation of assimilation of the Evenkis.

In the past 10 years, geneticists have investigated the genetic variation of modern Turkic populations as well as ancientdnaof the Xiongnu and others. The accumulated findings of these surveys, however, have not been adequately noted by specialists in Inner Asian history. In order to fill this gap, we conducted a comparative analysis of textual information and genetic survey data on the early and medieval Turkic peoples. First, we examined the information on the origins, identity, and physiognomy of the early and medieval Turkic peoples contained in the Chinese Standard Histories (zhengshi正史). We then discussed how the findings of genetic surveys complement the textual information. Both Chinese histories and moderndnastudies indicate that the early and medieval Turkic peoples were made up of heterogeneous populations. The Turkicisation of central and western Eurasia was not the product of migrations involving a homogeneous entity, but that of language diffusion.

Buddhism endorses a set of rules and standards of conduct set out in the religion’s canonical texts. The text of the 1640 Steppe Code, both a peace treaty among the Mongols and an attempt at alliance building vis-à-vis the Manchus, also reflects the adaptation of the ethical norms of Buddhism to secular law and political relations. Secular law among the Kalmyks further evolved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Toktols issued by Khan Donduk-Dashi in the eighteenth century addressed a wide range of religious and secular elements in Kalmyk life, while also serving to strengthen the moral authority of the Buddhist clergy. Further revisions to Kalmyk law and the position of Buddhism within the secular system were promulgated at the Jinjil assembly in 1822. The Kalmyks’ inclusion of religious provisions in secular law helped to strengthen the connection between Buddhism and Kalmyk society, consolidating the normative role of religion as the basis for secular conduct and action.

The long record of imperial China’s Inner Asian borderland relations is not simply multi-ethnic, but ‘multi-environmental’. Human dependencies on livestock, wild animals and cereal cultivars were the prerequisite environmental relations for borderland incorporation. This paper examines such dependencies during the Qing Dynasty’s (1644–1912) establishment of the Manchurian garrison of Hulun Buir near the Qing border with Russia. Garrison logistics proved challenging because provisioning involved several indigenous groups—Solon-Ewenki, Bargut and Dagur (Daur)—who did not uniformly subsist on livestock, game or grain, but instead exhibited several, sometimes overlapping, practices not always confined within a single ethnicity. Ensuing deliberations reveal official convictions, some of which can be traced back to the preceding Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), regarding the variable effects of these practices on the formation of Inner Asian military identities. Such issues were distinctive of Qing borderland dynamics that constructed ‘Chinese’ empire not only in more diverse human society, but also in more diverse ecological spheres.

While Mongolian citizens have a ‘right’ (erh) to receive a plot of urban land from their government, accessing and keeping land in Ulaanbaatar is not necessarily a clear-cut process. Situated in the confluence between the two main property regimes of temporary possession (ezemshil) as well as ownership (ömchlöl), this paper traces the slippages that occur as people attempt to make and hold onto land plots. It does this by ethnographically charting one person’s quest to secure legal ownership of their land. Here, the importance of cadastral mapping emerges as an essential but fraught practice that can either build or break the bridge between socially acquired land and the formation of its bureaucratic legitimacy. Securing the right map of this land forced a number of social, economic and bureaucratic issues into view, revealing how people negotiate uncertain bureaucratic processes, difficult physical terrain and fluctuating value in Ulaanbaatar’s commercialised land market.

In post-Soviet Kazakhstan, mobile pastoralism is now a task managed not by collective farms but by individual households: extended networks of kin band together to create flocks, and poor families trade labour for sustenance and a share of the flock’s live offspring. The success of these sheep-herding camps turns on their integrity as domestic units: the camp cannot function without the tasks customarily performed by women, yet relations of blood or marriage remain the only social institutions capable of mediating the exchange of domestic labour. This paper contrasts elaborate marriage ceremonies with more informal unions in which the primary desire is the presence of a woman’s labour. These marriages—unregistered, undertaken from necessity and celebrated by little more than a meal and perhaps a bottle of vodka for drinking toasts—index the conflicts and contradictions implicit in domestic labour being simultaneously fundamental to the household’s economic life and yet treated as a form of labour not to be honourably alienated from the family.

Civil society and environmentalngos in Russia and China have been facing gradual crackdowns from their governments for the past decade and have been accused of being connected to foreign governments. Due to the changes in political and legal environments and the rise of a new generation of activists, the civil society landscape has been transformed in both countries. Drawing on 14 months of fieldwork, this paper aims to provide an updated account of environmental activism in Russia and China—the post-foreign-funding civil society. It focuses on grass-rootsngos and their relationships with their foreign donors and the consequences of foreign grant withdrawal. The paper aims to understand how foreign support has shaped the image of environmental activism for the generation born shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the crackdown on the students’ protests in Tiananmen Square. It argues that young activists in Russia and China see environmentalism as something ‘foreign’, which also makes it attractive to take part in. The paper suggests that, while in some cases foreign funding and international linkages may have endangered existingngos in Russia and China, the opportunity to meet foreigners attracts the younger generation to environmental movements.

The article aims to broaden the understanding of Soviet politics as a form of colonialism and to deploy the same conceptual tools used in post-colonial critiques that have been typically reserved for critiquing European control of ‘distant’ lands, both in temporal and spatial dimensions. Closely examining Soviet politics in Mongolia, the article conceptualises the Soviet policies across the vast Soviet-sphere with the post-colonial theoretical framework. Conceptually, the article juxtaposes the post-colonial treatment of the Soviet politics with high modernism. Under Soviet direction and control, Mongolia was profoundly transformed over seven decades from an impoverished pastoral society at the beginning of the twentieth century to a highly ordered and structured society. This social, spatial, administrative transformation was more vivid and radical than in many former Soviet-sphere countries, especially those countries that had long been settled and urbanised.