Orkhon Waterfall. 2010. Övörkhangai Province Mongolia. KG Hutchins.
Points of Transition: Ovoo and the Ritual Remaking of Religious, Ecological, and Historical Politics in Inner Asia. Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. February 20-22, 2019.
As environmentally-sourced border markers that grow in size with each interaction with humans, Mongolian ritual stone cairns known as “ovoo” delineate both space and time in ecologically and politically charged ways. Their presence and power as both spiritual beings and historical markers is derived from and enacted upon the ecological and social landscapes which they oversee. This paper explores how ovoo instigate, mediate, and commemorate conflict in ways that entangle environmental and cultural heritage. As growing structures spiritually associated with moral landscapes and healthy ecosystems, ovoo are central to discourses on both environmental and cultural heritage. Bearing the marks of history, they also stand as heritage of conflicts unresolved.
This paper presents three ethnographic vignettes in which ovoo play central roles in both conflict and heritage. First, I explore a case in which contestation on how best to maintain an ovoo in an environmentally and spiritually sustainable way opens up a space for negotiations of post-socialist Mongolian environmentalisms and ecological spiritualities. Then I detail how an ovoo mediates urban disasters for musicians involved in the heritage industry in Ulaanbaatar, and how that protection is at odds with Western structures, and consumers, of cultural heritage. Finally, this paper examines how ovoo spring up simultaneously as memorials of violence and caretakers of nonhumans in the form of ghosts and birds in a former monastery brought to ruin. Each case presents its own context of ovoo at the heart of a conflict which involves a commingling of cultural and natural heritage. Taken as a whole, these stories do not form a unified, linear narrative based on a Western teleology of progressive environmentalism or forward-marching history. Rather, they come together as something of a rhetorical ovoo, an assemblage of overlapping acts of eco-spiritual resilience.