Wittgenstein-Preis | 2000 | Wittgenstein Award

PROJECTS
CENTRAL ASIA

VILLAGE IDENTITY AND STATE INFLUENCE IN BUDDHIST CENTRAL ASIA
(1) Elke Studer | Races for the Gods. Byang thang ’char can rta rgyug.
(2) Hilde Schäffler | Ethnological Knowledge, Objects and Colonial Power.
(3) Guntram Hazod | Historical Maps of Central Tibet.
(4) Walter Probstler | Cultural History of the Buryats in Northeastern Mongolia.
(5) Stephan Kloos | Tibetan Medicine among the Buddhist Dards of Ladakh.

WALTER PROBSTLER | CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE BURYATS IN NORTHEASTERN MONGOLIA

In this project, Walter Probstler examined and edited the manuscript Some remarks about the historical habits, legends and history from the 17th century to the mid- 20th century, as well as early material remains of humans on the upper portion of the Onon River in Mongolia.

The author of this unpublished book manuscript was Ce˙ve˙gijn Dašnjam. He was born in 1903 in the Russian borderlands with Mongolia and was of Buryat descent. In the wake of war-related unrest, he and his family fled to Mongolia in 1920 and settled in the Buryat-Mongolian border region of Chentij-Aimak. The manuscript provides a glimpse into the dynamics of cultural change among the Buryats in the course of three centuries. Dašnjam took great pains to record the distinctiveness of Buryat culture for posterity. In addition, he described the daily life of the population under the pressures inherent in the construction of a new social order.

The text from Ce˙ve˙gijn Dašnjam enabled Walter Probstler to analyze a previously un-researched ethnographic and historical source from which he was able to make new trans-disciplinary connections to Mongolian studies, Cultural and Social Anthropology and modern history, and to point out neglected aspects of research.

	Wittgenstein-Preis 2000 Kommission für Sozialanthropologie Schwindgasse 14/6 A-1040 Wien Tel.: 0043/1/515 81 - 6677 Fax: 0043/1/503 68 73 - 6680 wittgenstein2000@oeaw.ac.at Notice: We want to inform you that the research program will come to an end on the 31st of March 2007. Since that time this homepage will not be updated anymore.