Suchergebnisse

AbstractEDUCATION IN TIBET Catriona Bass Education in Tibet: Policy and Practice since 1950 London: Zed Books, in association with Tibet Information Network, 1998. ISBN 1-85649673-2 (HB) £45.00, 1-85649674-0 (PB) £15.95

Almost 10 years ago the mineral-rich country of Mongolia experienced very rapid economic growth, fuelled by China's need for coal and copper. New subjects, buildings, and businesses flourished, and future dreams were imagined and hoped for. This period of growth is, however, now over. Mongolia is instead facing high levels of public and private debt, conflicts over land and sovereignty, and a changed political climate that threatens its fragile democratic institutions. Subjective Lives and Economic Transformations in Mongolia details this complex story through the intimate lives of five women. Building on long-term friendships, which span over 20 years, Rebecca documents their personal journeys in an ever-shifting landscape. She reveals how these women use experiences of living a 'life in the gap' to survive the hard reality between desired outcomes and their actual daily lives. In doing so, she offers a completely different picture from that presented by economists and statisticians of what it is like to live in this fluctuating extractive economy.

This paper looks at the roles and interests that motivate different kinds of 'trusting partnerships' in Mongolia. Such partnerships are not only in marketing slogans that herald new private investment agreements, they also underlie the relationship between the Mongolian government and other governments (in the form of 'strategic partnerships') and even between the Mongolian State and its people. The concept serves as a framework for partners to achieve mutual ambitions, but is ambiguous and its content evolves through negotiation and cumulative articulation. We offer certain observations about the form of relationship between the Mongolian State and its people, drawing from fieldwork in 2012 on how loans are used and perceived, and suggest that this relationship is a fruitful lens through which we can observe vernacular attitudes to the economy and the State, and to the different kinds of relationships the Mongolian State maintains with outsiders. We conclude with an observation on the inter-related and at times conflicting 'trusting partnerships' to which the Mongolia government is party.

AbstractThis article examines Mongolian perspectives on the Buriad through the vector of a poem called 'Buriad', written by the dissident Mongolian poet and writer Choinom Renchin during the socialist era. In the first part, we give a short biography of Choinom, along with an analysis of his poem. We suggest that the poem may be viewed as a critique of dominant Halh perspectives on the Buriad, while raising more general issues to do with historicity, political repression, youth, love, and Mongolian poetry. In the second part, we present the first-ever English translation of Choinom's poem, along with a Mongolian Cyrillic version. This is to add to the slender volume of literature on Mongolian poetry available in English.

AbstractThis chapter focuses on two versions of a single story collected from North-west and North-east Mongolia. The story concerns a daughter-in-law's relationship with 'little humans' (jijig hün) at her in-laws' house. Although similar in their thematic content, the two stories differ in their endings. In the example from North-west Mongolia, the daughter-in-law successfully rids her in-laws 'house of a little human allowing them to prosper. In the example from North-east Mongolia, the daughter-in-law mistakenly throws a little human into the fire, causing her natal family to perish. At first sight, this divergence could be seen as reflective of the kind of perspectival difference established between a predominantly Buddhist ontology in Western Mongolia and a predominantly shamanist ontology in Eastern Mongolia. But the stories resist being viewed as allegorical texts by which to extract information concerning received ontological differences. Regardless of East/West differences, laypeople across all of Mongolia have varied relationships with aspects of the normally invisible world. We argue that, rather than establish ontological species-specific differentiations, such relations point to shifting scales of different 'kinds' of people in Mongolia.

As bio-capital in the form of medical knowledge, skills and investments moves with greater frequency from its origin in First World industrialized settings to resource-poor communities with weak or little infrastructure, countries with emerging economies are starting to expand new indigenous science bases of their own. The case studies here, from the UK, West Africa, Sri Lanka, Papua New Guinea, Latin America and elsewhere, explore the forms of collaborative knowledge relations in play and the effects of ethics review and legal systems on local communities, and also demonstrate how anthropologically-informed insights may hope to influence key policy debates. Questions of governance in science and technology, as well as ethical issues related to bio-innovation, are increasingly being featured as topics of complex resourcing and international debate, and this volume is a much-needed resource for interdisciplinary practitioners and specialists in medical anthropology, social theory, corporate ethics, science and technology studies