This article traces the intellectual path of a young Mongolian aristocrat, Gombojab Mergen, who rejected his heritage and embraced socialism in the early 1920s. Sent to study linguistics in Leningrad and Paris, he both learned from... more
This article traces the intellectual path of a young Mongolian aristocrat, Gombojab Mergen, who rejected his heritage and embraced socialism in the early 1920s. Sent to study linguistics in Leningrad and Paris, he both learned from professors in Oriental Studies and contributed to their work. The chapter aims to contribute to understanding of the early ‘socialist ecumene’ by showing how ethnic subjects were incorporated but also pushed into incessant travel assignments, and in Gombojab’s case, silenced and eventually destroyed, by the evolving state and Party structures of the USSR and Mongolia.
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This article examines the role of smiling as a performative gesture at the northeast border between Russia and China. It argues that the border is a place where 'myth' in the sense proposed by Roland Barthes is manifest in the comportment... more
This article examines the role of smiling as a performative gesture at the northeast border between Russia and China. It argues that the border is a place where 'myth' in the sense proposed by Roland Barthes is manifest in the comportment of people when they see themselves as representing the civilization of one side or the other. In this situation, smiling and not smiling are elements of particular communicative registers that enact political myths in life. Highly gendered, these agentive-performative gestures exist amid other functional and affective registers, which can override them. The article also discusses the 'helpers' who mediate in cross-border trade, whose image is also sometimes subject to mythic imagination.
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This paper analyses the omen as a particular technique by which human subjects attempt to understand the uncertainties and misfortunes of their lives by way of receiving signs from the world. This method folds a singular event into a... more
This paper analyses the omen as a particular technique by which human subjects attempt to understand the uncertainties and misfortunes of their lives by way of receiving signs from the world. This method folds a singular event into a social form, a stabilized way of perceiving and responding to intimations of something about to change in the future. It is argued that perceiving omens is a practice of cosmological engagement and hence that its character is different in monotheist environments from those in which the world is conceived to be composed of disparate and separate elements, such as in in Mongolian regions. In the latter, the things and beings in the world that produce, or 'offer', omens are equivalent agents to the people who receive them. Both agents come with temporal and spatial attributes that collide in the event of the omen.
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... For a religious person it is one of 'three eternal truths' (gurban mönx ünen). ... There are many stories of the bereaved recognising the dead person in dreams during this period, and this always indicates... more
... For a religious person it is one of 'three eternal truths' (gurban mönx ünen). ... There are many stories of the bereaved recognising the dead person in dreams during this period, and this always indicates that the dead one requires merit be made (buyan xii-) to help his soul to a ...
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Research Interests: Anthropology and Video
At a dinner-party last year a Rumanian dealer in primitive art, based in Paris, described his delightful trip to the depths of the Celebes.'I often have to trade', he said.'Just a month ago, for example, I discovered a... more
At a dinner-party last year a Rumanian dealer in primitive art, based in Paris, described his delightful trip to the depths of the Celebes.'I often have to trade', he said.'Just a month ago, for example, I discovered a wonderful carving of a god but the owner wouldn't sell it to me. ...
Research Interests: Economics, Values, Consumption, Relationships, Socialism, and 21 moreMoney, Economy, TIME, FISH, Organisation, Capital, Value, Barter, Systems, Total, Taxes, Debt, Negative Reciprocity, Currency, Marginal utility, Reciprocity, Equilibrium, True, Use Value, Reproductive, and Time
Research Interests: Anthropology and Africa
ABSTRACT This paper concerns the formation of detachable political groups among the Mongols in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the process of their reattachment to larger polities within the Russian and Qing empires. It... more
ABSTRACT This paper concerns the formation of detachable political groups among the Mongols in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the process of their reattachment to larger polities within the Russian and Qing empires. It traces the case of Okin Taisha, who split off from the Abaga Mongols in present-day Inner Mongolia, became a subject of the Russians, then of a Khalkha Mongolian noble, and finally returned to Russia. The paper argues that kinship relations were a crucial means for conceptualising these attachments and detachments. Kinship should not be assumed invariably to imply solidarity, but rather also encodes division, inequality of status, and uncertainty in personal relations. The paper also aims to contribute to understanding of the internal composition of such split-away polities, which were not initially based on kinship, even though their aristocratic leaders expressed their relations with other leaders in kin terms.
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Cm 4262. 1999. The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry. London: The Stationery Office. One America in the 21st Century: Forging a New Future. The Advisory Board's Report to the President. Washington: US Government Printing Office. Banton,... more
Cm 4262. 1999. The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry. London: The Stationery Office. One America in the 21st Century: Forging a New Future. The Advisory Board's Report to the President. Washington: US Government Printing Office. Banton, Michael. 1964. The Policeman in ...
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This article explores the revolution which has taken place in social work education in the UK. There is a new Degree in Social Work structured around a core compulsory curriculum; a set of National Occupational Standards which constitutes... more
This article explores the revolution which has taken place in social work education in the UK. There is a new Degree in Social Work structured around a core compulsory curriculum; a set of National Occupational Standards which constitutes the first official job description for ...
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The article discusses Soviet sailors' experiences away from home and seaborne social relations—the particular sociality brought to the Black Sea region by ships and sailors. The officers and sailors employed by the Black Sea Fleet had... more
The article discusses Soviet sailors' experiences away from home and seaborne social relations—the particular sociality brought to the Black Sea region by ships and sailors. The officers and sailors employed by the Black Sea Fleet had much wider horizons than ordinary Soviet citizens—and the small temporary society of the ship interpenetrated with the varied Black Sea inhabitants in limited but significant ways. They contrasted “high seas” of the world's great oceans, the setting for dangerous, daring and profitable exploits, with the enclosed drudgery of the Black Sea routes. The article shows how the Cold War inflected the imaginaries and practices of seamen and others. It argues that an anthropology of the sea can develop an analysis that combines regional specificities with visions that extend beyond the local and national.
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SOME RITUAL TECHNIQUES IN THE BULL-CULT OF THE BURIAT-MONGOLS The Curl Lecture 1973 Caroline Humphrey University of Cambridge In the marriage ritual of the Western Buriat a young birch-tree is planted in the courtyard and a painting on... more
SOME RITUAL TECHNIQUES IN THE BULL-CULT OF THE BURIAT-MONGOLS The Curl Lecture 1973 Caroline Humphrey University of Cambridge In the marriage ritual of the Western Buriat a young birch-tree is planted in the courtyard and a painting on dark-blue cloth is hung ...
Contemporary spirituality discourses tend to assume that a canopy of light and love overarches all spiritual pathways. Unfortunately, the dark side of humanity cannot be spirited away so easily, and aberrations of personal spiritual... more
Contemporary spirituality discourses tend to assume that a canopy of light and love overarches all spiritual pathways. Unfortunately, the dark side of humanity cannot be spirited away so easily, and aberrations of personal spiritual development, interpersonal spiritual relationships and new spiritual movements can often be traced to the denial, repression and return of our dark side. Transpersonal psychology offers a way of approaching, reframing and redeeming the unconscious depths of our psyche, with its metaphors of shadows and daimons on the one hand, and its therapeutic practices for symbolically containing and transcending polarities on the other. In its absence, any spirituality which eulogises holistic growth is likely to engender the reverse effect.
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... Humphrey, C. 2006. ... This would entail severing the strings which bind them to their other roles as practitioners, managers and teachers, and stilling their own minds and bodies so that they can be fully attentive to what is... more
... Humphrey, C. 2006. ... This would entail severing the strings which bind them to their other roles as practitioners, managers and teachers, and stilling their own minds and bodies so that they can be fully attentive to what is unfolding around them without intruding upon it. ...
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ABSTRACT This introduction illustrates the modalities in which different societies imagine the tension between the impersonal and individual- ized aspects of fortune and fate. After briefly discussing the role of contingency, fortune, and... more
ABSTRACT This introduction illustrates the modalities in which different societies imagine the tension between the impersonal and individual- ized aspects of fortune and fate. After briefly discussing the role of contingency, fortune, and gambling in the formation of subjectivities, we outline how different societies confront the moral conundrums arising from fortune's unequal distribution in the world. We highlight how luck orientations presentify the future by the deployment of what we name 'technologies of anticipation'. Luck and fortune can be seen as conceptual techniques for short-circuiting temporal subjectivities by creating a crack in time—a space of 'compossibility'—where events deemed to be fatal and inevitable become negotiable. We conclude with a reflection on dice, randomness, and acts of gambling in which not merely subjectivities but the fate or fortune of larger social aggrega- tions—including the cosmos—is deemed at stake.
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ABSTRACT For Mongols, fortune is not just acquired or lost accidentally. Rituals are held to create an upsurge of fortune, to beckon, absorb, contain, and act upon it. This article focuses on two kinds of fortune—sülde (potency) and... more
ABSTRACT For Mongols, fortune is not just acquired or lost accidentally. Rituals are held to create an upsurge of fortune, to beckon, absorb, contain, and act upon it. This article focuses on two kinds of fortune—sülde (potency) and hiimori (vitality)—and the ritualized means to restore these qualities that otherwise become depleted of their own accord. It is argued that these ideas of fortune are ways of linking subjects to cosmological forces 'out there'. The paradox is that, by binding fortune into their bodies in an attempt to garner invincibility, bravery, and energy, people resonate to pulses that glide among, and fly beyond, their other constitutive physical bodily elements. Such occasions when sülde and hiimori are in play call into being a certain kind of person who seems to be rendered, at least for a moment, at one with the void.
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There are likely to be some peculiar problems when people look for moral authority in the distant past. What happens when one's own recent past and the times of one's parents and grandparents aregenerally seen asbankrupt and... more
There are likely to be some peculiar problems when people look for moral authority in the distant past. What happens when one's own recent past and the times of one's parents and grandparents aregenerally seen asbankrupt and permeated with injustice and cruelty? Many, perhaps ...
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David Dean Shulman, Tamil temple myths: Sacrifice and divine marriage in the South Indian Saiva tradition, Princeton University Press 1980. 472 pp. £16.70Hubert Bucher, Spirits and power, an analysis of shona cosmology, Cape Town, Oxford... more
David Dean Shulman, Tamil temple myths: Sacrifice and divine marriage in the South Indian Saiva tradition, Princeton University Press 1980. 472 pp. £16.70Hubert Bucher, Spirits and power, an analysis of shona cosmology, Cape Town, Oxford University Press 1981. 231pp. £8.75H. Heissig, The religions of Mongolia, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul 1980. £7.50Roy C. Amore and Larry D. Shinn, Lustful maidens