Landa, Ishayahu. Marriage and Power in Mongol Eurasia. A History of the Chinggisid Sons-in-law.
«Since the beginning of his rise to power, Chinggis Khan used matrimonial relations between the members of his family and his allies in order to strengthen his support base and to expand the potential of his army. Whereas research has discussed in detail the history of the Chinggisid women, the role of their male non-Chinggisid counterparts – the imperial sons-in-law (Mon. güregen, Ch. fuma 駙馬), mostly the powerful military commanders – is still an under-researched topic.
In his monograph, Ishayahu Landa for the first time provides a comprehensive and detailed discussion of the Chinggisid in-laws, approaching them as a separate political institution with its own status, privileges, and ambitions, which played a crucial role in underpinning the Mongol rule across the continent. The monograph is unique in its combined usage of Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Latin and Old Slavonic primary sources as well as its temporal scope, ranging from the early thirteenth century to the period of the Chinggisid Crisis and beyond. The monograph will be of interest for specialists in Mongol, Chinese, Islamic, Russian, and global histories, as well as in the field of Gender Studies, and nomadic history and ethnography. At the same time, it covers an important aspect of the power structure behind the Chinggisid expansion, its maintenance of power from Korea to the Black Sea, as well as its decline.»
[ book ] Marriage and Power in Mongol Eurasia
[ book ] Codes of Modernity
Uluğ Kuzuoğlu. Codes of Modernity. Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age. Columbia University Press.
«In the late nineteenth century, Chinese reformers and revolutionaries believed that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Chinese writing system. The Chinese characters, they argued, were too cumbersome to learn, blocking the channels of communication, obstructing mass literacy, and impeding scientific progress. What had sustained a civilization for more than two millennia was suddenly recast as the root cause of an ongoing cultural suicide. China needed a new script to survive in the modern world.
Codes of Modernity explores the global history of Chinese script reforms—efforts to alphabetize or simplify the writing system—from the 1890s to the 1980s. Examining the material conditions and political economy underlying attempts to modernize scripts, Uluğ Kuzuoğlu argues that these reforms were at the forefront of an emergent information age. Faced with new communications technologies and infrastructures as well as industrial, educational, and bureaucratic pressures for information management, reformers engineered scripts as tools to increase labor efficiency and create alternate political futures.
Kuzuoğlu considers dozens of proposed scripts, including phonetic alphabets, syllabaries, character simplification schemes, latinization, and pinyin. Situating them in a transnational framework, he stretches the geographical boundaries of Chinese script reforms to include American behavioral psychologists, Soviet revolutionaries, and Central Asian typographers, who were all devising new scripts in pursuit of informational efficiency. Codes of Modernity brings these experiments together to offer new ways to understand scripts and rethink the shared experiences of a global information age.»
[ books ] Buddhism in Central Asia III
Buddhism in Central Asia III. Impacts of Non-Buddhist Influences, Doctrines
«The BuddhistRoad project has been creating a new framework to understand the dynamics of cultural encounter and religious transfer across premodern Eastern Central Asia. This framework includes a new focus on the complex interactions between Buddhism and non-Buddhist traditions and a deepening of the traditional focus on Buddhist doctrines between the 6th and 14th centuries, as Buddhism continued to spread along an ancient, local political-economic-cultural system of exchange, often referred to as the Silk Roads. This volume brings together world renowned experts to discuss these issues including Buddhism and Christianity, Islam, Daoism, Manichaeism, local indigenous traditions, Tantra etc.
Contributors include: Daniel Berounský, Michal Biran, Max Deeg, Lewis Doney, Mélodie Doumy, Meghan Howard Masang, Yukiyo Kasai, Diego Loukota†, Carmen Meinert, Sam van Schaik, Henrik H. Sørensen, and Jens Wilkens».
[ books ] A Chinese Rebel beyond the Great Wall
TJ Cheng, Uradyn E. Bulag, Mark Selden. A Chinese Rebel beyond the Great Wall. The Cultural Revolution and Ethnic Pogrom in Inner Mongolia
«A striking first-person account of the Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia, embedded in a close examination of the historical evidence on China’s minority nationality policies to the present.
During the Great Leap Forward, as hundreds of thousands of Chinese famine refugees headed to Inner Mongolia, Cheng Tiejun arrived in 1959 as a middle school student. In 1966, when the PRC plunged into the Cultural Revolution, he joined the Red Guards just as Inner Mongolia’s longtime leader, Ulanhu, was purged. With the military in control, and with deepening conflict with the Soviet Union and its ally Mongolia on the border, Mongols were accused of being nationalists and traitors. A pogrom followed, taking more than 16,000 Mongol lives, the heaviest toll anywhere in China.
At the heart of this book are Cheng’s first-person recollections of his experiences as a rebel. These are complemented by a close examination of the documentary record of the era from the three coauthors. The final chapter offers a theoretical framework for Inner Mongolia’s repression. The repression’s goal, the authors show, was not to destroy the Mongols as a people or as a culture—it was not a genocide. It was, however, a “politicide,” an attempt to break the will of a nationality to exercise leadership of their autonomous region. This unusual narrative provides urgently needed primary source material to understand the events of the Cultural Revolution, while also offering a novel explanation of contemporary Chinese minority politics involving the Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Mongols.»
[ book ] A Magpie’s Tale
Anna Odland Portisch. A Magpie’s Tale. Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives on the Kazakh of Western Mongolia.
«Telling the story of the author’s time living with a Kazakh family in a small village in western Mongolia, this book contextualizes the family’s personal stories within the broader history of the region. It looks at the position of the Kazakh over time in relation to Tsarist Russian, Soviet, Chinese and Mongolian rule and influence. These are stories of migration across generations, bride kidnappings and marriage, domestic violence and alcoholism, adoption and family, and how people have coped in the face of political and economic crisis, poverty and loss, and, perhaps most enduringly, how love and family persist through all of this.»
[ book ] Drones, Tones, and Timbres
Carole Pegg. Drones, Tones, and Timbres. Sounding Place among Nomads of the Inner Asian Mountain-Steppes.
«Based on more than twenty years of collaborative research, Carole Pegg’s long-awaited participatory ethnography explores how Indigenous nomadic peoples of Russia’s southern Siberian republics (Altai, Khakassia, Tyva) sound multiphonies of place in a post-Soviet global world. Inspired by the mountain-steppe ecology and pathways of nomadism, soundscapes created in performative ritual events cross political and multiple-world boundaries in a shamanic-animist universe, enabling human and spirit actor interactions in a series of sensuous worlds. As with the “throat-singing” for which Indigenous Altai-Sayan peoples are famous, senses of place involve sonic relations, rootedness, movement, and plurality. Pegg echoes their drone-partials musical and ontological models in an innovative theoretical entwinement. Three strands form the book’s multivocal drone, the partials of which sound in each chapter: ontological sonicality and musicality that enables emplacement and movement; the importance of shamanism-animism—at the core of Indigenous spiritual practices—for personhood and community; and the agency of sonic performances. Sounding place, Pegg demonstrates, is essential to the identities, ways of life, and very senses of being of Indigenous Altai-Sayan peoples.»
[ подборка ] Визит Папы в Монголию 2023
- Pope heads to Mongolia to minister to its few Catholics and complete centuries-old East-West mission
- Cardinal says the pope’s visit to Mongolia’s tiny Catholic community will show his dedication
- Papal visit to Mongolia sets course for the Church in the region
- Pope recounts the joy, goodness, humility he saw in Mongolia
- Pope inaugurates ‘House of Mercy’ in Mongolia, emphasises selfless love
- Praying for peace together in Mongolia on the Day of the Lord
- Pope Francis Quotes the Buddha and Praises Interfaith Dialogue in Mongolia Visit
- President Khurelsukh Ukhnaa Welcomes Pope Francis
- The ripening fruit of God’s love in Mongolia
- ‘Lively in faith’: Pope Francis heads to Mongolia with eye on diplomacy
- While visiting Mongolia, the pope sought to earn China’s trust
- Pope gives ‘noble’ Chinese people a shoutout at Mass in Mongolia in bid to warm ties
- Pope to Mongolians: ‘You are in my heart’
- Pope Francis urges Chinese Catholics to be ‘good citizens’
- Pope at Mass in Mongolia: Christian faith is answer to thirst for love
[ book ] The Mongol Empire in Global History and Art History
The Mongol Empire in Global History and Art History. Edited by Anne Dunlop.
«With the rise of projects to create global histories and art histories, the Mongol Empire is now widely taken as a fundamental watershed. In the later thirteenth century, the Mongol states reconfigured the basic zones of Eurasian trade and contact. For those they conquered, and for those who later overthrew them, new histories and narratives were needed to account for the Mongol rise. And as people, ideas, and commodities circulated in these vast and interconnected spaces, new types of objects and new visual languages were created, shifting older patterns of artistic production. The Mongol rise is now routinely cast as the first glimmering of an early modernity, defined as an ever-increasing acceleration in systems of contact, exchange, and cultural collision.
Yet what is at stake in framing the so-called Pax Mongolica in this way? What was changed by the Mongol rise, and what were its lasting legacies? It is the goal of essays in this book to address these and other questions about the Mongol impact and their modern role, and to make these debates more widely available. Contributors include specialists of Mongol history and historiography as well as Islamic, East Asian, and European art, writing on topics from historical chronicles to contemporary historiography, and case studies from textile production to mapmaking and historical linguistics».
[ book ] A Chinese Rebel beyond the Great Wall: The Cultural Revolution and Ethnic Pogrom in Inner Mongolia
A Chinese Rebel beyond the Great Wall: The Cultural Revolution and Ethnic Pogrom in Inner Mongolia
«A striking first-person account of the Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia, embedded in a close examination of the historical evidence on China’s minority nationality policies to the present.
During the Great Leap Forward, as hundreds of thousands of Chinese famine refugees headed to Inner Mongolia, Cheng Tiejun arrived in 1959 as a middle school student. In 1966, when the PRC plunged into the Cultural Revolution, he joined the Red Guards just as Inner Mongolia’s longtime leader, Ulanhu, was purged. With the military in control, and with deepening conflict with the Soviet Union and its ally Mongolia on the border, Mongols were accused of being nationalists and traitors. A pogrom followed, taking more than 16,000 Mongol lives, the heaviest toll anywhere in China.
At the heart of this book are Cheng’s first-person recollections of his experiences as a rebel. These are complemented by a close examination of the documentary record of the era from the three coauthors. The final chapter offers a theoretical framework for Inner Mongolia’s repression. The repression’s goal, the authors show, was not to destroy the Mongols as a people or as a culture—it was not a genocide. It was, however, a “politicide,” an attempt to break the will of a nationality to exercise leadership of their autonomous region. This unusual narrative provides urgently needed primary source material to understand the events of the Cultural Revolution, while also offering a novel explanation of contemporary Chinese minority politics involving the Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Mongols.
Authored by: TJ Cheng, Uradyn E. Bulag, and Mark Selden»
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