Department of social anthropology seminar with Morten A. Pedersen

The Department of Social Anthropology has the pleasure to invite you to a seminar with Morten A. Pedersen from the Department Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. He will present the following paper:


"Detaching the Spirits in Mongolia: A Post-relational Analysis"

Abstract
For many people in Mongolia, spiritual detachment has become an end in itself by which one deals, or tries to deal, with the uncertainties of postsocialist transition. In this paper, I explore two such methods of detachment identified during long-term fieldwork in both Northern Mongolia and the capital of Ulaanbaatar. The first involves shamanic ideas, practices, and artefacts among Northern Mongolia’s Darhad people, where the gowns worn by shamans while possessed curtail the spirits' capacity for influencing shamans and clients outside ritual contexts. The second method of detachment involves a widespread form of belief (idgeh) and its lack (idgehgüi) to which people in the capital Ulaanbaatar subscribe to prevent harmful spirits and persons from interfering with their lives, notably in conjunction with Christian conversion. Indeed, conversion is a distinct method of detachment that keeps relational complexity intact over time, but irreversibly alters its nature by causing believers’ interior selves to swell up at the expense of a severed exterior multitude of spiritual and social relations. Thus, detachments are not less relational than connections, but rather differently relational. Far from being a way of making the world into a simpler place, detachment is a creative act that makes the world complex, or relational, in new ways.

Bionote
Morten Axel Pedersen is associate professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. He is author of Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia (Cornell University Press 2011), and co-editor of Inner Asian Perspectivism (special issue of the journal Inner Asia, 2007), Technologies of the Imagination (special issue of the journal Ethnos, 2009), Comparative Relatvism (special issue of the journal Common Knowledge, 2011), and Times of Security: Ethnographies of Fear, Protest, and the Future (forthcoming with Routledge).

All interested are welcome!

Best regards
BSAS Comittee