Mongolian Cosmopolitical Heritage: Tracing Divergent Healing Practices Across the Mongolian-Chinese Border

Recent years have witnessed a growing world-wide interest in the role of the arts and cultural heritage in cultivating health and wellbeing. In the UK, for instance, the All Party Parliamentary Group for the Arts, Health and Wellbeing published a comprehensive report in July 2017 on the lifetime benefits of arts in health, making key recommendations to political leaders and healthcare professionals. In international discourse, Tibetan medicinal bathing, an aspect of Tibetan Medicine (or Sowa Rigpa), has been entangled in a geopolitical rivalry between China and India, as the former applied to UNESCO in 2016 to register medicinal bathing as part of the nation's intangible cultural heritage, while India has sought to register the entire Sowa Rigpa tradition.

This project seeks to ethnographically explore the politics of linking health and cultural heritage. More specifically, it aims to understand how the politics of culture affect health-related practices by asking: In what ways do geopolitical forces and national constructions of culture shape practices that influence health and wellbeing?

Mongolia and China's Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region (IMAR) represent an ideal comparative case study to explore the impact of political, economic and historical forces on the shaping of healing practices. In each of these areas, disparate 20th and 21st century contexts influenced divergent re-appropriations of a common Mongolian cosmological heritage. This project will explore how shamanism and other 'alternative' healing practices, are cast as, and have come to be seen as, legitimate by practitioners, patients and the state. It offers the term 'cosmopolitical' to refer to the political principles of odering along which worlds are imagined and engaged.

The project will explore the ways in which people navigate the multiple authorities on health and wellbeing that have become increasingly popular following the dismantling of state healthcare systems in both contexts, during a time typified by increasing difficulty in assessing medical treatment and widespread mistrust in medical professionals (see Turk 2018).

The research will revolve around integrated, comparative analysis of healing practices at two key field sites within the Mongolian cultural region, selected for their divergent politico-economic contexts that impact healing practices: Tongliao municipality in China's IMAR and Mongolia, with a focus on Ulaanbaatar. The localized nuances in healing practices and everyday perceptions of them require sustained, long-term research afforded by ethnography. Fieldwork will include participant observation, semi-structured interview and patient/client survey, targeting patients, practitioners, healing techniques and inter-organizational and institutional relations among practitioner groups, clinics, and governmental institutions such as the Ministry of Public Health and local cadres. Photographic and film documentation will focus on healing techniques with a comparative aim set in historical context.

Museums will provide crucial resources and insights for this project, especially given their increased mobilization in the fostering of health and wellbeing in the UK and elsewhere. Cambridge's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology will provide an important resource to trace the role of national context in divergent re-appropriations of healing practices, as their collections predate the foundation of the modern Mongolian and Chinese nation-states. A publicly-available database of film and photography will be created from which to compare healing techniques set in historical context from resources from the MAA, and key museums and archives in Mongolia and Tongliao, IMAR.

The role of the arts and cultural heritage in cultivating health and wellbeing has gained increasing purchase in general consciousness world-wide in recent years. In the UK, for example, wellbeing has been declared a national priority and increasingly considered in health policy. A National Alliance and All Party Parliamentary Group have been formulated to advocate for the arts as especially effective and cost efficient in healthcare. Increasingly, the arts and cultural heritage associated with museums have been recruited in this shift in public health discourse, as approximately 600 of the 2,500 museums and galleries in the UK were reported to have programmes that target health and wellbeing in 2017 (AAPG 2017). Given the recent importance afforded to museums in arts-focused health programmes, this research is both timely and ideally situated to engage multiple publics.

Knowledge exchange among academics, policy-makers, practitioners of Complimentary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) and wider public circles is fundamental to the type of conceptual change this project seeks to enact: namely, that cultural heritage is not something that sits static in a museum ever attached to 'a people', but that it is deeply embedded in and takes on localized meaning from the political economy and aspects of public culture.

Professional CAM practitioners and third sector organizations that promote the therapeutic effects of the arts and cultural heritage represent crucial communities to engage in understanding how the healing arts are deployed in everyday life. Engaging these communities will also help elucidate the ways in which healing practices engender meaning locally and how they come to be considered legitimate.

In our project, these communities will especially be engaged through the Project Advisory Group (PAG) and the Cultural Heritage and Wellbeing Workshop (see Events A & B in 'Pathways to Impact' document). The PAG will be comprised of approximately 10 members from the following non-academic communities: local practitioners of CAM (e.g. practitioners of Traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine); stakeholders that engage the therapeutic aspects of the arts, such as Arts & Minds Cambridgeshire, The National Alliance for Arts, Health & Wellbeing's East Anglia regional organization, Arts and Health East; and related policy-makers, such as key members of the All Party Parliamentary Group for the Arts, Health and Wellbeing (APPGAHW). The PAG will work in close consultation with the research team throughout the lifespan of the project, making important contributions at the Initial Workshop and Cultural Heritage and Wellbeing Workshop (see 'Pathways to Impact' for more detail).

Another crucial community with which to engage will be museum stakeholders such as visitors and exhibition curators. This engagement will take place in few different ways. First, the project will make tangible artifacts widely accessible by categorizing and digitizing the Mongolian and Inner Mongolian Collections at Cambridge's Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology (MAA). This will allow historical images from the Lindgren Collections depicting health- and wellbeing- related practices to be available in Mongolia for the first time, raising awareness of important aspects of a shared Mongolian cultural region. The project includes the role of ongoing consultation with local Mongolian communities and a visiting scholar from Mongolia in the process of incorporating Mongolians' conceptions of cultural heritage into the knowledge base at the MAA. Additionally, the project involves capacity building for third sector professionals such as museum curators, organizations such as Arts & Minds Cambridgeshire, and professionals at the National Museum of Mongolia and Horchin Museum in Tongliao, IMAR.