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What are the big questions that motivate you and drive your work?

I am motivated by a central, albeit productive, problem in the social sciences and humanities, which revolves around similarity and alterity. Are humans fundamentally the same, or different? Social anthropologists typically take difference seriously. Leaving ontological debates to one side, what then are the shaping forces that contribute to social and cultural differences? 

It is worth mentioning too that I am inspired by my discipline’s methodology, ethnography, which begins from the basic premise that we can learn a lot from each other through conversation and spending time together.

What's your research?

My research explores health-related practices and strategies in Mongolia, with particular focus on ‘alternative’ and nature-based therapies. My doctoral dissertation traced entanglements of body, natural environment, and national identity as Mongolians find renewed interest in therapeutic heritage once denigrated as ‘superstition’ by the state. It looks at how Mongolians navigate the multiple authorities on health and wellbeing during a time of ageing Soviet medical infrastructure.

My current work builds on the doctoral research, as part of a project in the Department of Social Anthropology, entitled ‘Mongolian Cosmopolitical Heritage: Tracing Divergent Healing Practices Across the Mongolian-Chinese Border’, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. While the project ethnographically explores the politics of linking health and cultural heritage, my research scope has shifted slightly in the wake of the pandemic, to focus on how healing practices – ‘traditional’, bio-medical and the many intersections in between – are mobilized to prevent and treat of COVID-19 in both Mongolia and the Inner Mongolian semi-Autonomous Region. Ultimately, this research will illuminate the ways in which public administration and national constructions of culture shape practices that influence health and wellbeing.

I am on a six-month fieldwork stint presently, so it is difficult to draw firm conclusions just yet. But I am noticing how COVID-19 offers an opportunity to see how healing practices and rituals change. With a new illness comes innovation, but not as a kind of ‘clean praxic slate’ insinuated by Evan-Pritchard’s famous quote, ‘New situations demand new magic’. While rituals to combat COVID-19 are ‘made’ in real time, familiar materials and practices mobilized to do so, especially those that read as valuable, for example, in their Mongol-ness. Here, examples of Mongolian meat, fermented mare’s milk, and incense from dried horse dung burned to protect against infection come to mind. Another genre of materials and practices read as valuable in their ability to purify, such juniper and thyme incense, used in the prevention of infection; and massage, blood-letting, moxibustion and so on in the treatment of COVID-19. Here we see how such treatments that already exist in shared public knowledge integrate into new rituals.

What contributions do you hope to make with your work?

Studying alternative approaches to the body and health lends important tools to think about power and hegemony more generally. Epistemologies and practices alternative to the dominant shed light on what the main system does well, and what it doesn’t do so well; no less than suggesting different possibilities. Biomedicine, global capitalism, or whatever the dominant system, are not inevitabilities.

My research aims to account for cultural change, and to model the mechanisms by which this happens. While we have models such as those based on hybridity, bricolage, syncretism, ‘glocal’ and so on, oftentimes they naturalize the pairing together of two or more different social forms, failing to account for the unequal power relations that lead to the pairing in the first place.

I am interested in bringing political economy into the mix in thinking about the relationship between formal and informal institutions in power, and the general public. The messages that we receive about the valuable and the good, how we should live our lives, the resources that are available to us (both material and conceptual), and so on, are heavily shaped by institutions in power. Of course free will, choice, and localized innovation, and so on, are important, and have been well-theorized. We need to consider other forces too.

Accounting for cultural and social change has wide-spread implications. For one, the legacy of social evolutionism is still with us today. A whole development and foreign aid industry has been built around the idea that some contemporary societies are more advanced than others. On whose terms is development considered? In a myriad of contexts, such ‘help’ has done more harm than good. We can see this in implementation of ‘shock therapy’ in Mongolia in the early 1990s that caused severe deterioration of quality of life, and also more recently in the small loans offered to herders by the Asian Development Bank that could never be paid back in time.

By situating people as inside history we can confront orientalist and exoticist stereotypes of people stuck in the past or, in the case of my research context, Mongolians as backwards and ‘simple’ nomads, somehow fundamentally closer to nature. I think we can confront these stereotypes by having better models by which to understand changing cultural and social forms that take power relations into consideration.

How did you get here? What was your journey to Cambridge? 

I first came to Cambridge as a PhD student in the Department of Social Anthropology (Selwyn College) in 2013. Apart from a one-year teaching postdoc at Columbia University in 2019-2020, I have been at Cambridge since then.

My educational journey didn’t begin with Social/Socio-cultural Anthropology. My undergraduate degrees were in Women’s Studies and General Biology, and I had taken the MCAT – the entrance exam for medical school in the US – my senior year at the University of Michigan. Around the time of graduation, I decided to delay medical school for a few years, because I felt that there was more of the world to experience and other things to learn from besides those inside a text book, before embarking in a very long and intensive postgraduate educational course in medicine.

This lead me to enroll in the US Peace Corps, and I ended up as an Environmental Education volunteer in Romania. While I lived for a while on the Danube delta in a city called Tulcea, the majority of my time there was spent working for Gradistea Muncelului-Cioclovina Natural Park in Hunedoara county. While living in Deva, I was moved by how knowledgeable people were about local medicinal plants. For many of the Romanians I met, the biomedical clinic was not necessarily the first point of healthcare intervention, although an important resource. I was really struck by this relationship with the natural surroundings, in a therapeutic sense.

This new interest led to me consider changing my professional path, and a successfully funded Fulbright research project in Mongolia helped solidify this decision. My research project as a 2010-2011 Fulbright scholar was exploring the relationship between illness in shamanic discourse and, at the time, the impending mining boom. I began a Master’s degree in socio-cultural anthropology at Columbia University the following year. The decision to apply to Cambridge for my PhD was an easy one. While Cambridge’s Department of Social Anthropology is an incredible place to earn a degree, it was the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit (nested within the Department) that I was especially excited to join.

Who were the women who inspired you along your journey?

Many women have inspired me along the way, and continue to do so. I was raised in a family of strong and compassionate women. My maternal grandmother Pauline Jontz Lennon was a passionate and influential museologist in the US, especially the state of Indiana, which she deeply loved. She was a caring grandmother with a professional vision based around making the world a better place through education. I feel incredibly fortunate to have Mary Lee Turk as my mother. While as a child I was inspired by her professional resiliency against discrimination as a woman lawyer, it is her enduring compassion and support that continue to influence me. Two of my closest friends, my sisters Katie and Emily, are incredible educators and mothers.

Playing team sports growing up made a big difference in my life: a group of women working together toward a common goal, relying on good communication, trust and empathy for one another. I think it was the contradiction of feeling empowered in some settings and not in others, based on normative expectations – and seeing similar trends for girls and women around me – that encouraged me very early on to associate with feminist values.

I found a supportive environment at the Department of Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, and my thesis supervisor, Carol J Boyd, encouraged me to develop my research ideas on my own terms. I felt fortunate to be a part of a cohort of incredible women also writing their honors theses in the Department. Among influential women during that time was Cassandra Voss, whom I met on a study abroad trip to London in summer of 2006. Equal parts invested in gender equality and the creative arts, Cassandra had this incredible ability to empower and lift up the people around her, just by being herself. Cassandra’s vision and spirit live on at an educational center, eponymously named, at St. Norbert’s College in De Pere Wisconsin, U.S.

Finally, I take inspiration from the Mongolian women I have met during my several years of fieldwork here. Among exemplars, Tsermaa Tömörbaatar’s passion as a Mongolian language teacher, a scholar, a mother continue to inspire me. While I’ve been incredibly lucky to learn from her as my teacher (bagsh), I also greatly value the bond of friendship we have developed over the years, as she is one of the kindest people I know.