Overview

With air pollution now intimately affecting every resident of Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko seeks to understand how, as a physical constant throughout the winter months, the murky and obscuring nature of air pollution has become an active part of Mongolian religious and ritual life. Enlightenment and the Gasping City identifies air pollution as a boundary between the physical and the immaterial, showing how air pollution impresses itself on the urban environment as stagnation and blur. She explores how air pollution and related phenomena exist in dynamic tension with Buddhist ideas and practices concerning purification, revitalisation and enlightenment. By focusing on light, its intersections and its oppositions, she illuminates Buddhist practices and beliefs as they interact with the pressing urban issues of air pollution, post-socialist economic vacillations, urban development, nationalism, and climate change.

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9781501737640

Table of Contents

Reviews

This illuminating book will appeal mostly to professional scholars and graduate students in Mongolian and Buddhist studies. * Choice * Author Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko follows lay Mongolian Buddhists and invites us to reflect both on their discourses of light, which are explicitly linked to purification and religious. * Lion's Roar: Buddhist Wisdom for Our Time *

This illuminating book will appeal mostly to professional scholars and graduate students in Mongolian and Buddhist studies. * Choice * Author Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko follows lay Mongolian Buddhists and invites us to reflect both on their discourses of ""light,"" which are explicitly linked to purification and religious. * Lion's Roar: Buddhist Wisdom for Our Time * The pages of this book bring to life vivid scenes of the functioning of Mongolian society, culture, customs, day-to-day life, and the environmental landscape of Ulaanbaatar in such a way that the lonely capital city of Mongolia dances to life in front of the reader's eyes. * Journal of the American Academy of Religion *

Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko successfully captures core aspects of religious life in Mongolia at a key stage in its post-communist transition. --Martin Mills, University of Aberdeen, and author of Identity, Ritual and State in Tibetan Buddhism Enlightenment and the Gasping City is the best book I have read on the revival of Buddhism--or even more broadly--of religion in contemporary Mongolia. --Johan Elverskog, Johan Elverskog, Southern Methodist University, and author of Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road

Author Information

Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko is a Teaching Fellow at New York University, Shanghai, and an Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.

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