Mongolian Cosmopolitical Heritage: Tracing Divergent Healing Practices Across the Mongolian-Chinese Border

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Recent years have witnessed a growing world-wide interest in the role of the arts and cultural heritage in cultivating health and wellbeing. In the UK, for instance, the All Party Parliamentary Group for the Arts, Health and Wellbeing published a comprehensive report in July 2017 on the lifetime benefits of arts in health, making key recommendations to political leaders and healthcare professionals. In international discourse, Tibetan medicinal bathing, an aspect of Tibetan Medicine (or Sowa Rigpa), has been entangled in a geopolitical rivalry between China and India, as the former applied to UNESCO in 2016 to register medicinal bathing as part of the nation's intangible cultural heritage, while India has sought to register the entire Sowa Rigpa tradition. This project seeks to ethnographically explore the politics of linking health and cultural heritage. More specifically, it aims to understand how the politics of culture affect health-related practices by asking: In what ways do geopolitical forces and national constructions of culture shape practices that influence health and wellbeing? Mongolia and China's Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region (IMAR) represent an ideal comparative case study to explore the impact of political, economic and historical forces on the shaping of healing practices. In each of these areas, disparate 20th and 21st century contexts influenced divergent re-appropriations of a common Mongolian cosmological heritage. This project will explore how shamanism and other 'alternative' healing practices, are cast as, and have come to be seen as, legitimate by practitioners, patients and the state. It offers the term 'cosmopolitical' to refer to the political principles of odering along which worlds are imagined and engaged. The project will explore the ways in which people navigate the multiple authorities on health and wellbeing that have become increasingly popular following the dismantling of state healthcare systems in both contexts, during a time typified by increasing difficulty in assessing medical treatment and widespread mistrust in medical professionals (see Turk 2018). The research will revolve around integrated, comparative analysis of healing practices at two key field sites within the Mongolian cultural region, selected for their divergent politico-economic contexts that impact healing practices: Tongliao municipality in China's IMAR and Mongolia, with a focus on Ulaanbaatar. The localized nuances in healing practices and everyday perceptions of them require sustained, long-term research afforded by ethnography. Fieldwork will include participant observation, semi-structured interview and patient/client survey, targeting patients, practitioners, healing techniques and inter-organizational and institutional relations among practitioner groups, clinics, and governmental institutions such as the Ministry of Public Health and local cadres. Photographic and film documentation will focus on healing techniques with a comparative aim set in historical context. Museums will provide crucial resources and insights for this project, especially given their increased mobilization in the fostering of health and wellbeing in the UK and elsewhere. Cambridge's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology will provide an important resource to trace the role of national context in divergent re-appropriations of healing practices, as their collections predate the foundation of the modern Mongolian and Chinese nation-states. A publicly-available database of film and photography will be created from which to compare healing techniques set in historical context from resources from the MAA, and key museums and archives in Mongolia and Tongliao, IMAR.