Hello old friend!
Fall break came and went, far more quickly than I think any of us intended! The day I got back on campus I holed myself up my room, picked up the books I’d left in piles on my desk, and proceeded to get really excited about our project!
We met with Eric the day before break began, and he suggested that we funnel our new direction into an even more specific area: the internationalization of silk road performative traditions and their relationship with authenticity. More colloquially, we are describing what is happening now by relating it to what it once was. This change is going to make our final map product look a whole lot cooler because the topic has the potential to span more geographical regions than our original idea did. For instance, Jilly has shown some interest in dance. Performances of traditional Mongolian dance are actually occurring across the globe now, and we could very feasibly plot a point for our project in New York City. This sense of a geographical journey will lend really well to the narrative that Eric and Zhihong are looking for.
This honestly doesn’t change my research too drastically, but it does give everything a clearer shape for me. My most recent research has involved the age of current Shamans in the regions of Mongolia. I have found that the majority of current Shamans in the Autonomous Region of Inner Mongolia are over the age of seventy–they took up Shamanizing in their youth, thus narrowly escaping the attempts to eradicate Shamanism during the cultural revolution.
Our most recent readings for class also filled in some gaps I’ve had in my brain about Shamanic practices and their intersections with musical traditions: I learned about the way that the shamanic drum is actually traditionally played in a dissonant manner. This style of drumming is rhythmically asymmetric in an attempt to imitate the sounds of the natural world, such as whistling winds or the thumping of horses’ hooves, which I think is extraordinarily beautiful.
I think that we are going to be having a lot of really fascinating conversations about what this “authenticity” in our new topic really means; I know that in my research I have already run into a lot of seemingly silly new-agey approaches to Shamanism that seem appropriative to me. I am very interested in concepts of performativity and what necessarily makes one spiritual practice more authentic than another, so I am excited to connect my research to these new more philosophical ideas.