Risk and Politics of Knowledge in Mongolian Therapeutic Environments

Join us in the Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health for an interesting talk delivered by Dr Elizabeth Turk from Newcastle University.

The seminar will begin at 1.00pm both in the Centre and online. For those who join us in-person there will be the opportunity for a chat afterwards with tea and coffee provided.

Seminar Abstract:

In Mongolian public thought, nature (baigal) is generally considered therapeutic, and some natural landmarks – particular mountains, homelands and mineral springs (rashaan) – especially so. However, moral and ethical concerns underpin this understanding: therapeutic environments – inclusive of their non- and more-than-human constituents – are also potentially dangerous (read through the emic lens of ‘poison’ (khor)) if approached in the wrong way.

Who is able to ‘read’ therapeutic blue- and green-scapes to know for or know about them? How do lay Mongolians and specialist knowledge holders sense risk in potentially dangerous natural environments? In this paper, I explore these questions through concepts of ‘going carefully’ (bolgomjtoi yavakh) and the importance of being cultured (soyoltoi) and orderly (zambraatai) at cosmologically ‘dense’ sites, themselves normative, value-laden and historically contingent assertions.

Here I approach risk not in a structuralist sense – not in the way Mary Douglas (1966) for instance understood danger and ‘matter out of place’ as deleterious to social relations – but rather as a phenomenological concern. While bodily perception is in many ways idiosyncratic, what is perceptible to whom, and which perceptions are considered legitimate, ‘real’, and/or actionable, are inherently political, ethical, and self-reflexive questions along which boundaries of belonging and exclusion are drawn (Rancière 2006[2000]). In this way, sensing is a particularly apt way to approach the structure-agency dialectic following the post-human turn.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health