Religions and Changing Knowledge in Inner Asia

The program “Religions and Changing Knowledge” examines past and present dynamics that shape knowledge, religious facts, practices, ways of thinking and collective attachments among Mongol peoples, understood in the broadest sense (including cross-border perspectives, diasporas, individuals in migration, etc.). It aims to consider these questions in light of contemporary paradigms in the humanities and social sciences and to maintain comparative perspectives beyond the Mongol peoples. Deliberately inter- and transdisciplinary, thinking in both a situated and comparative manner, it articulates ethnographic and archival approaches, epistemological reflections, and anthropological, historical, archaeological, museographic and geographical perspectives around these shared objects and questions. Its members focus in particular on the religious, historical and contemporary dynamics at work in the Mongol worlds and on the ways in which attachments, practices and knowledge related to the construction of collective identity are developed, particularly in their reference to what Caroline Humphrey calls “the moral authority of the past”, but also in relation to transformative dynamics such as commodification, tourism and the rise of new technologies.

It is divided into two sub-programs:

1/ “Buddhism, Shamanism and Spiritual Renewal” focuses on historical and contemporary religious dynamics in the Mongol cultural sphere, concentrating on “lived religion” rather than dogma. In particular, it addresses issues of religious conversions, recompositions and innovations, borrowings from transnational religions, pilgrimages, Buddhism(s), shamanism and emerging religious movements (neo-shamanism, evangelical movements, new spiritualities, etc.). It also focuses on the interactions between religion(s), politics and society at different historical periods, particularly the phenomena of ritualised attachment to the homeland (the Mongol nutag), relationships with invisible entities, and the processes of rediscovery, circulation, reinterpretation or concealment of artefacts, thought modes and religious practices. This sub-program lends itself to dialogue and comparisons with religions in the cultural areas studied by the other CRCAO teams.

2/ “Legacies in the Present: Nationalism, Local Identities, and Uses of the Past” analyses the different ways in which Mongol peoples, in varied socio-political configurations, construct their collective attachments (familial, national, ethnic, transnational, etc.) by mobilizing “the moral authority of the past”. The sub-program focuses in particular, but not exclusively, on contemporary identity configurations, notably the processes of national reinvention and the writing of history in socialist and post-socialist Mongolia and in the Mongolian-speaking border areas, which draw on reconfigurations of heritage cultural elements, such as the “deep past” identified by C. Humphrey, to construct values, emotions, and attachments linked to economic, demographic, environmental, and societal developments. Through the lens of multiple disciplines, it includes objects such as cultural policies, cultural heritage and the phenomena of heritage-making, local epistemologies (anthropology, archaeology, ethnogenesis, history, etc.), modes of commemoration and the “making of memory”, museums and the processes of museification, local knowledge and its uses (games, sports, expressive performances, rituals, environmental knowledge, verbal and linguistic arts, etc.), and the commodification of the past. As such, this sub-program includes an epistemological dimension in the analysis of scientific knowledge in the making and can be linked to the École Pratique des Hautes Études project on “The Making of Antiquity” (“Les Fabriques de l’antique” – Fan, https://www.ephe.psl.eu/construire-et-representer-les-temps-anciens). It takes into account the plurality of perspectives and scales of attachment, and considers the affective and social dimensions as well as the technological and epistemic dimensions of the knowledge and skills that underpin these dynamics, whether informal or institutionalized.

Activities

— October 15, 2026: International workshop: “New Religious Trends and Eschalology in the Inner Asia World”, Campus Condorcet (organized by Isabelle Charleux and Aurore Dumont).

— Bi-monthly seminar on Mongol studies, organized by Isabelle Charleux, Anna Dupuy, and Isaline Saunier (all disciplinary approaches combined). The seminar is held in person at Campus Condorcet and online, and represents the activities of the three programs: https://etudesmongolesetsiberiennes.fr/seminaires/.