MANDUHAI BUYANDELGER
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Room E53-335S


manduhai@mit.edu

Manduhai Buyandelger received her B.A. and M.A. in Literature and Linguistics from Mongolian National University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard University (2004). Prior to joining Anthropology at MIT she was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and taught at the Harvard Anthropology Department. She is interested in the transformation of subjectivities from socialist to neoliberal by exploring how ordinary people deal with the diverse ways in which socialism and neoliberal capitalism structure gender inequality, economic incentives, and influence memory, knowledge, and beliefs. Based on eighteen months of dissertation research (1999-2000) her book Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Socialism, and the State of Neoliberalism in Mongolia (forthcoming University of Chicago Press) tells a story of the collapse of the socialist state and the responses of marginalized rural nomads to the devastating changes through the revival of their previously suppressed shamanic practices. Her next project "Technologies of Election: Gender, Media, and Neoliberal State Formation in Mongolia ," explores the metamorphosis of the former socialist state into a neoliberal one by looking at women's participation in parliamentary elections. The research is supported by grants from the NSF and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. As a collaborator in the project "Oral History of Twentieth Century Mongolia" (2007-2012) at the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit of the University of Cambridge University in the UK, she is exploring the subjectivities of impropriety under socialism by studying practices that were prohibited by the state, but prevalent in everyday life, such as popular religion, discourses of sexuality, and people's relationship with the international world.