Female Mongolian author selected for ICAS Book Prize | The UB Post
▻http://ubpost.mongolnews.mn/?p=13970
Long listed nominees for the International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize have been selected, and “Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Memory, and Gender in Contemporary Mongolia”, written by B.Mandukhai, has been included in the social sciences category.
Of 175 submitted books, 10 were long listed in both the social sciences and humanities categories. Winners will be announced on June 16, 2015.
B.Mandukhai is an associate professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard University in 2004. Prior to joining the anthropology program at MIT, she was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and taught in the Harvard Anthropology Department.
Her book “Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Gender, and Memory in Contemporary Mongolia” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) tells the story of the collapse of the socialist state and the responses of marginalized rural nomads to the devastating changes through the revival of their previously suppressed shamanic practices.
Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Memory and Gender in Contemporary Mongolia, Manduhai Buyandelger, 2013
▻http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo14941659.html
The collapse of socialism at the end of the twentieth century brought devastating changes to Mongolia. Economic shock therapy—an immediate liberalization of trade and privatization of publicly owned assets—quickly led to impoverishment, especially in rural parts of the country, where Tragic Spirits takes place. Following the travels of the nomadic Buryats, Manduhai Buyandelger tells a story not only of economic devastation but also a remarkable Buryat response to it—the revival of shamanic practices after decades of socialist suppression.
Attributing their current misfortunes to returning ancestral spirits who are vengeful over being abandoned under socialism, the Buryats are now at once trying to appease their ancestors and recover the history of their people through shamanic practice. Thoroughly documenting this process, Buyandelger situates it as part of a global phenomenon, comparing the rise of shamanism in liberalized Mongolia to its similar rise in Africa and Indonesia. In doing so, she offers a sophisticated analysis of the way economics, politics, gender, and other factors influence the spirit world and the crucial workings of cultural memory.
