Associate Professor of Anthropology
Room E53-335-S · 617-324-5510
Manduhai Buyandelger received her B.A. and M.A. in Literature and Linguistics from Mongolian National University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard University (2004). Prior to joining Anthropology at MIT she was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and taught at the Harvard Anthropology Department. Her book Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Gender, and Memory in Contemporary Mongolia (University of Chicago Press, 2013) tells a story of the collapse of the socialist state and the responses of marginalized rural nomads to the devastating changes through the revival of their previously suppressed shamanic practices. In her next project "Technologies of Election: Gender, Media, and Neoliberal State Formation in Mongolia ," she focuses on the transformation of the former socialist state into a neoliberal one by looking at women's participation in parliamentary elections. She is a member of the project "Oral History of Twentieth Century Mongolia" (2007-2012) at the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit of the University of Cambridge University in the UK.
Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Gender, and Memory in Contemporary Mongolia (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
|Review of Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia, by Morten Axel Pedersen. American Anthropologist (submitted)|
|2009||Mongolian Shamanism: The Mosaic of Performed Memory In Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire. Fitzhugh and all eds., Smithsonian Institution|
|2008||Post-Post-Transition Theories: Walking on Multiple Paths. Annual Review of Anthropology. 37:235-50. 2007|
|2007||Dealing with uncertainty: Shamans, marginal capitalism, and the remaking of history in postsocialist Mongolia. In American Ethnologist Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 127-147|
|To see a full publication list with links to downloadable PDFs, please click here.|
How Culture Works
Introduces diverse meanings and uses of the concept of culture with historical and contemporary examples from scholarship and popular media around the globe. Includes first-hand observations, synthesized histories and ethnographies, quantitative representations, and visual and fictionalized accounts of human experiences. Students conduct empirical research on cultural differences through the systematic observation of human interaction, employ methods of interpretative analysis, and practice convincing others of the accuracy of their findings.
Cultures of East Asia
Explores diverse cultures, everyday experiences, and political economies in East Asian countries, such as China, Japan, Korea, and Singapore, with additional examples from the surrounding regions. Examines the different ways people in these regions experience and understand globalization, as well as the changing structures of kinship and family, work and organizational culture, media, consumption, and the role of government. Readings cover ethnographic studies of the world's largest seafood market in Tokyo, the effect of the Asian financial crisis on South Korea, the role of science in formulating China's one child policy and its economic and social implications, and the state and ethnic diversity in Singapore.
Explores recent scholarly accounts, advocacy, media and other representations of human trafficking for the purpose of forced labor and sexual slavery. Ethnographic and fictional readings along with media analysis help to develop a contextualized and comparative understanding of the phenomena in both past and present contexts. Examines the wide range of factors and agents that enable these practices, such as technology, cultural practices, social and economic conditions, and the role of governments and international organizations. Discusses the analytical, moral and methodological questions of researching, writing, and representing trafficking and slavery.
Memory, Culture, and Forgetting
Introduces scholarly debates about the sociocultural practices through which individuals and societies create, sustain, recall, and erase memories. Emphasis is given to the history of knowledge, construction of memory, the role of authorities in shaping memory, and how societies decide on whose versions of memory are more "truthful" and "real." Other topics include how memory works in the human brain, memory and trauma, amnesia, memory practices in the sciences, false memory, sites of memory, and the commodification of memory. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments.
21A.141J / WGS.274J
Images of Asian Women: Dragon Ladies and Lotus Blossoms
Explores some of the forces and mechanisms through which stereotypes are built and perpetuated. In particular, examines stereotypes associated with Asian women in colonial, nationalist, state-authoritarian, and global/diasporic narratives about gender and power. Students read ethnography, fiction, and history, and view films to examine the politics and circumstances that create and perpetuate the representation of Asian women as dragon ladies, lotus blossoms, despotic tyrants, desexualized servants, and docile subordinates. Students are introduced to debates about Orientalism, gender, and power.
|2014||Hsu Book Prize, Society for East Asian Anthropology, for Tragic Spirits|
|2013||James A. and Ruth Levitan Prize in the Humanities, MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences|
|2012||MIT SHASS Research Fund|
|2008||National Science Foundation (Gender and Technologies of Election in Mongolia)|
|2008||Wenner-Gren Foundation Post-doctoral Grant|
|2006-2007||William Milton Fund of Harvard University|