Fortune and the Cursed ─ The Sliding Scale of Time in Mongolian Divination

Drawing on her 16 months of fieldwork among two rural districts of Buryats, in Mongolia and China, Swancutt (social anthropology, U. of Oxford) presents an extended case study from Bayandun showing that innovation in magical remedies is a common Muryat strategy for addressing crisis situations. She discusses Mongolian fortune and the anthropology of magic; Buryat cosmology and the timescales of religious practice; fortune, the soul, and spiraling returns; curses khel am, and the omnipresence of witchcraft; divination and the inextensive distance to cursing rivals; and an unconventional timescale: the immediate rise of fortune. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Katherine Swancutt is a Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford. She has carried out fieldwork on shamanic religion across Inner Asia, working among Buryats in northeast Mongolia and China since 1999, and among the Nuosu of Southwest China since 2007.