Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the articulation of contested notions of Mongol-ness in discourses of spiritual healing, practices informed by cosmologies of modernity. In what ways do Soviet-era narratives of societal transformation through scientific advancements inform the search for national identity today?

Paper long abstract:

Over the past 15 years, a burgeoning community of non-biomedical practitioners, ranging from energy healers to shamans, fortunetellers to Buddhist healers tend to wellbeing in Mongolia. Practitioners and patients often prioritize such treatments for their reported authentic Mongol-ness, the definition of which remaining highly contested.

Scientific aesthetics shape healing cosmologies as, for instance, shamanic practices that imagine the human body as a battery with positive and negative charges mirroring geo-magnetic forces of the planet, or the cognitive therapy of an enlightened Buddhist lama (huvilgaan) that 'energetically adds to [his patient's] immunity.' Scientific aesthetics also shape the mechanisms of spiritual and 'natural' healing practices, as patients use glucometers to check the efficacy of an arshaan (mineral spring) that treats diabetes by its 'miraculous' water, and an energy healer targets the nervous system, typically the spine, wearing a white physician's coat and a stethoscope around his neck, the x-ray machine on his desk used to quantify his patient's improvement.

This paper suggests that the mechanisms of contemporary spiritual healing practices are deeply informed by modernist projects of scientific and technological advancement that were central to Soviet-era discourses of societal transformation. It explores the ways in which cosmologies of modernity are re-imagined and re-ployed in healing settings as a means to articulate contested notions of national identity. In what ways do aesthetics of scientific, technological and rational thought that were essential to the ushering in of a new Mongolian man and woman inform the invisible transformation inherent to healing the body?