British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

BA PDF Symposium 2006

26 April 2006

Abstracts

ABOUT THIS EVENT | PROGRAMME 

Dr Rebecca Empson

Separating and Containing People and Things in Mongolia

Studies of Mongolian sociality have tended to privilege the idea of agnatic relations that centre on the continuity of clans and lineages. This presentation attempts to turn this idea on its head and suggests instead that Mongolian kin relations rely on separation, rupture and difference in order for sameness, or consanguinity, to continue. Thinking through items kept inside and displayed on top of the Mongolian household chest, new insights into Mongolian forms of sociality can be observed. While agnatic and inherited connections are visible in photographic montages displayed on top of chests, other kinds of relations that are the products of the separation and movement of people across time and space are hidden from view and carefully contained inside the chest. I will analyse the visible and hidden components of the household chest as interdependent kinship perspectives that produce different forms of sociality. Focus on the display of these items brings to the fore some of the ways in which objects and relations are mutually constituted by processes of objectification. With the seasonal movement of both people and place, I suggest that viewing the household chest as a container or site is necessary for the imagining and creating of Mongolian kinship.

Dr Rebecca Empson is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge. Rebecca studied anthropology at the L.S.E. and went on to do a PhD at Cambridge. Her PhD focused on concepts of Mongolian personhood in relation to ideas about reincarnation and affinity. During her Fellowship, Rebecca has published a book that explores the role of prophecy in the political imagination of the Mongolian cultural region. She has also conducted fieldwork on the Mongolian-Russian border on ideas about landscape and has been preparing a manuscript concerned with memory and materiality in relation to different forms of sociality in Mongolia.