Organizers: Uradyn E. BULAG & Yuki KONAGAYA
Venue: Seminar Room #4, National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan
Date and Time: June 19, 2005, Sunday, 9:15 am - 5:30 pm
Languages: English and Japanese (with simultaneous translation)

The great debates about "modernity" have bypassed the Mongols, not least because Mongolia and the Mongols are imagined even now to be living a carefree life roaming vast open grasslands. It is an image that has been taken up by an international tourism eager for signs of the exotic in a world of untrammeled nature. This symposium aims to examine modernity in Inner Mongolia, a landlocked frontier and a crossroads where major political powers in twentieth century Inner Asia- Russia, Mongolia, Japan, and China- repeatedly clashed. Challenging the lineal Sinicization model of modernity, which is supposed to have traveled from the West to China to the frontier, this symposium will explore alternative ways to account for Mongolian embrace of and resistance to particular aspects of modernity, and multifarious and unexpected manifestations of the modern in the frontier. Specifically, we will examine two major dimensions of the Inner Mongolian project of modernity in the twentieth century: defining the Inner Mongolian boundary vis-a-vis both the independent state of Mongolia and minority areas in China; and successive cognitive and material transformations in the fields of agriculture, pastoralism, and industrialization, informed by universal ideas of progress, equality, friendship, secularization, and scientific imaginaries.

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