Frontier Encounters: Knowledge and Practice at the Russian, Chinese and Mongolian Border

—Laura Siragusa, Sibirica, 12/3 (Winter 2013), pp. 90-92.

 

Frontier Encounters presents a wide range of views on how the borders between these unique countries are enacted, produced, and crossed. It sheds light on global uncertainties: China’s search for energy resources and the employment of its huge population, Russia’s fear of Chinese migration, and the precarious economic independence of Mongolia as its neighbours negotiate to extract its plentiful resources.

DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0026.03

Grégory Delaplace is a social anthropologist, working as a lecturer at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre. His most recent research concerned the political dimension of the invisible in Mongolia today (or the invisible dimension of politics), whereby ghosts, or spirits, are led to play a role in the postsocialist nation building process. His publications include L’invention des morts. Sépultures, fantômes et photographie en Mongolie contemporaine (2009), and Parasitic Chinese, Vengeful Russians: Strangers, Ghosts and Reciprocity in Mongolia (2012). He can be contacted at gregory.delaplace@mae.u-paris10.fr.

Caroline Humphrey is an anthropologist based at the University of Cambridge who has worked in Russia, Mongolia, China, India, Nepal and Ukraine. She has researched a wide range of themes including Soviet and post-Soviet provincial economy and society; Buryat and Daur shamanism; Jain religion and ritual; trade and barter in Nepal; environment and the pastoral economy in Mongolia; and the history and contemporary situation of Buddhism, especially in Inner Mongolia. In 2010, she completed the manuscript of a monograph, jointly authored with Hurelbaatar Ujeed, entitled A Monastery in Time: the Making of Mongolian Buddhism. Her recent research has concerned urban transformations in post-Socialist cities. She can be contacted at ch10001@hermes.cam.ac.uk.

Version 1.1. Minor edits made, July 2013.

This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:

Frontier Encounters is the outcome of a network project funded by the ESRC (RES-075-25_0022) entitled "Where Empires Meet: The Border Economies of Russia, China and Mongolia”. The project, based at the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit (University of Cambridge), ran from 28 January 2010 to 27 January 2011. That project formed the foundation for a new and ongoing research project entitled "The life of borders: where China and Russia meet" which commenced in October 2012 and looks particularly at the experiences of the Buriad ethnic group - a semi-nomadic people from a region that extends across Mongolia, Russia and China. 

More information about both projects and Frontier Encounters is available here.