Gaëlle Lacaze

‘Run after time’: the roads of suitcase traders

Since the 1990s, the development of informal trade in trans-frontier places bordering Mongolia has offered opportunities for Mongolian people to develop new trade links with China, Kazakhstan, and Russia. These ‘businessmen of the transition’ or informal ‘suitcase traders’ go abroad along roads opened to and through Russia and China. My article analyses the ‘circulatory roads’ opened by suitcase traders. I take two examples of this activity: Mongolian Kazakh traders who go to Russia and Mongolian traders who go to China. The trans-frontier places reveal the particular ways of being and skills of drivers, retailers and wholesalers.

Representations and Techniques of the Body among the Mongols

The article provides an analysis of techniques of the body in childhood, adulthood and old age among a range of Mongolian cultures. Using Marcel Mausss well-known observations on techniques of the body as a starting point, the paper develops his ideas (along lines suggested by the work of Roberte Hamayon) to include issues of classification, spatiality and symbolisation. In the context of Buddhist and shamanist cultures, Mongolian concepts of ‘soul’ and ‘vital energy’ are central for an understanding of techniques of the body. Analysing the life-cycle and indigenous notions of cyclicity, it is argued that the process of humanisation during the training of the child is for the Mongols the opposite of the process of dehumanisation of the elders. In both situations, a certain distance from full social presence is evident. Adulthood, on the other hand, is a period of social integration marked by a mode of mastery of the body and restraint in physical behaviour. Using both synchronic and diachronic modes of analysis, Lacaze concludes that while collective public pressures to conform to conventional norms are strong, there also exist a variety of more natural (‘wild’) behaviours that are allowed to certain social categories, this being related to concepts of animality.

Un document mongol sur l'intronisation du IXe Dalai lama

Un rouleau mongol insolite est conserve a la bibliotheque de l¹Institut des Hautes Etudes Chinoises a Paris. Compose d¹un texte manuscrit date de 1809 et de douze illustrations, ce document relate la mission a Lhasa en 1808 du prince de la banniere droite des Qaracin en Mongolie-Interieure, envoye par l¹empereur mandchou superviser l¹intronisation du IXe Dalai lama. Le rouleau, probablement destine aux archives personnelles du prince mongol, nous donne un recit des evenements conforme a la version imperiale. S¹appuyant sur la comparaison avec d¹autres sources, l¹article propose une analyse du texte, une identification des differents protagonistes, une reconstitution du voyage de l¹ambassade et de l¹intronisation, enfin une traduction et une translitteration du texte. L¹interpretation des illustrations paraitra separement dans Arts Asiatiques (n°59, 2004).