Mapping Mongolia. Situating Mongolia in the world from geologic time to the present / Составление карты Монголии. Положение Монголии в мире с геологических времен по настоящее время

When I first started conducting research in Mongolia, I found that I could make a room full of anthropologists jealous by telling them where I worked. To a discipline whose members pride themselves on working in exotic locations, Mongolia is a glamorous research site, for few Western and even fewer American anthropologists had worked there during the Cold War.1 Young anthropologists started to trickle in during the early 1990s: Norwegian, Danish, and French graduate students; Christopher Kaplonski, Peter Marsh, and Katherine Petrie from the United States; and, of course, the University of Cambridge research group (Mongolian and Inner Asian Studies Unit) headed by Caroline Humphrey and now David Sneath. So anthropology, my discipline, was becoming interested in Mongolia.

But the field of area studies was not showing much interest. The area studies approach groups geographically contiguous nation-states according to a common history and shared set of traits, such as religion or political organization (Appadurai 1996:16). Some nation-states fall through the cracks of these groupings. Since the demise of the Soviet Union, Mongolia became one such country. At the 2003 Association for Asian Studies annual meeting in New York (which was held in conjunction with the Mongolia Society meeting), I spoke with a publications representative of the Institute of East Asian Studies at University of California–Berkeley about possibly publishing my research with them. She looked interested but said they had never considered Mongolian manuscripts before. When the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (AMES) Program at the University of Pennsylvania, which easily accommodated Mongolia, split into the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the East Asian Languages and Civilizations centers, I requested that Mongolia be placed in the East Asian Center. Luckily, I had met G. Cameron Hurst, Director of the latter, before. As he is an historian of Japan and Korea and understands the connection between Korea, Japan, and Mongolia, he agreed. Had he not, Mongolia would have been left out, for Penn has a South Asian Studies Department, but there is no Central Asian or Postsocialist Studies department or center. <...>