Religion & Ethnicity in Inner Asia

Catalog description

"Religion and Ethnicity in Inner Asia" will examine these two phenomena and their interaction in Inner Asia from earliest times to the present. The class will cover Mongolia, Tibet, Kazakhstan, and Turkic and Mongolian peoples of Russia and China. Religions addressed primarily include Buddhism, Islam, shamanism, and secularism. Why "ethnicity and religion"? In practice the scholarly research and literature on these two topics in Inner Asia have been closely related. In addition to theoretical works on ethnicity, nationalism, religion and identity, the class will focus on issues such as ethnicity and religious conversions, place-based ethnic and religious identities, ethnicity and the Chinese and Russian states, nationalism, nationality policy, reformist and atheist secularisms, revivalist and apocalyptic movements, and the intersection of ethnicity, race, sexuality, and international networks.