Cornell University Press

The Effects of Air Pollution on Buddhism in Mongolia

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With air pollution now intimately affecting every resident of Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, Enlightenment and the Gasping City examines air pollution as a boundary between the physical and the immaterial, showing how it impresses itself on the urban environment as stagnation and blur, existing in dynamic tension with Buddhist ideas and practices. Author Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko discusses how her experiences in Ulaanbaatar helped to inspire this book in this Q&A.

1. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

Throughout my research I’ve been interested in the interplay between pollution and purification practices. On visiting a monastery to the north of Ulaanbaatar my husband and I participated in a rebirthing practice which involved crawling inside a small metal stupa and turning around three times. I had no problem fitting in the tiny space, thereby saying goodbye to all my bad karma accrued over countless lifetimes. My husband is over six foot and was a little perturbed at the idea of folding himself inside, and more importantly, of getting out again. He tried once and backed out. The face of our friend and driver told him that he’d probably better try again; only the worst of the worst wouldn’t fit. The tallest Mongolian had been inside, no problem. He steeled his nerves and somehow managed it.

Relieved and reborn our companion pronounced that we were purified, as clean as new born babies. 

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book, that you know now?

When I first started carrying out my research I did not know that global warming was partially responsible for some of the push factors that caused rural-urban migration and how this migration was a big cause of the capital city’s air pollution. I had no idea how the pollution would influence my everyday life or how bad it really was, what it was like to take it into my body, to wake up from dreams of choking or drowning. Whilst Ulaanbaatar’s air pollution obscures vision and is difficult to see, it interjects itself into human and non-human bodies, insinuating itself into our experiences of the world.

3. How do you wish you could change the field of Anthropology?

I’m interested in bringing the deep ambiguities of our experiences of the world into focus. I would like anthropology to engage more openly with the indeterminable, unbounded nature of materials, entities and things, with an eye to the influence of doubt and instability. In Mongolia I have found that rather than being seen as stable things, human-made artefacts and materials, present themselves as incomplete or partial. Following from recent anthropological theory that foregrounds doubt and resists resolving uncertainties in the Anthropocene, I hope to question neat symbolic orders and in doing so generate, of necessity, partial yet effective representations of the incredibly complex worlds we inhabit. 

*Featured photo by Yaroslav Boshnakov.


Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko is a Teaching Fellow at New York University, Shanghai, and an Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.

See all books by this author.

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