Abstract Anthropological and regional studies have covered in some depth the symbolic and agentive qualities of certain bodily substances, such as bone, blood and flesh. This article reviews some of the contexts and accounts that involve bone marrow in Mongolia. These include its consumption as food, its use as a political metaphor, its role in traditional Mongolian medicine, its significance in patrilineal kinship and biomedical discourses, and its place in health entrepreneurship. The article introduces qualities and capacities of bone marrow in each of these contexts, calling for further attentions to the margins and contextual overlaps that appear as particularly productive sites for making and remaking the substance.

Abstract In this article, I draw upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Mongolia to explore the localisation of environmental rights in rural Mongolia. I focus primarily on herders’ environmental protection groups, which are based on the concept of environmental rights – a subject less studied compared to kin groups and herders’ cooperatives established through donor projects. Through this case study, I examine how the concept of environmental rights has influenced the formation of herders’ groups and their environmental protection activities, as well as how these groups are supported or challenged by others in the local context. I conclude by emphasising that the process of localising environmental rights reveals a hybrid of the legal concept of Baigali orchin (natural environment) and the cultural concept of nutag (homeland), alongside environmental law and customary rules.

Abstract In this paper, I propose a new model of how the Mongol empire connected the various systems used by the subject peoples under their control. I contrast this to modern empires, which used a system of direct standardisation, so that one calendar, one currency, one system of measures, one way of doing history, often even one language (at least for most public purposes) and so on, was imposed on the entire empire. In the Mongol Empire, while a single system was not imposed, new methods of ‘conversion’ – or perhaps we could say ‘conversion formulae’ – appeared, by which disparate cultural practices of the conquered peoples were maintained, but rendered easily ‘convertible’ to each other, using tables and cognate methods. I discus this ‘conversion’ empire – as opposed to the modern ‘integration’ empire – in the fields of the calendar, language, money and historiography.

Abstract Both China and India have an ancient mathematical tradition. From the extant records, the encounter of the two traditions took place in Inner Asia, Southeast Asia and in various cosmopolitan centres along the Silk Roads during the first millennium CE. The encounter was documented almost exclusively from the Chinese side, along with fragmentary evidence from Central Asia and the Sino-Indian peripheries, and almost none from India. In this paper, my focus will be the Chinese reception of Indian zero and large numbers, and to evaluate critically the impact they had, or did not have, on the Chinese mathematical tradition, and what the factors for exchange are.

Abstract Ancestral genealogies convey significance not only for individual life experience but also for the collective memory of an ethnic group. Some Tibetans, who call themselves ‘Prommi’ in Muli and elsewhere in Sichuan, have an inherited text known as the ‘Funeral Genealogy’ relating to the Ldong paternal lineage within their group; it is written in archaic Tibetan and presents the historical memory and culture of the Prommi people. Through a discussion of the funerary text’s locale, oral and archaic writing characteristics, this paper explains the special understanding of the ‘Ldong’ clan ancestors of the Prommi people as well as their views, as found in the Bon religion, on the origin of things, the origin of life (with a ternary view of divinities, humans and demons), life after death, the concept of clans and the family’s historical memory of the father–son connection in the ancestral genealogy. This will provide new historical and cultural data for studying groups sometimes referred to as ‘ancient Qiang’.

Abstract The paper provides a discussion of various aspects of Chechen relation to the war in Ukraine, including oppositional voices as well as discourses and actions of those supporting the Russian position. The article compares and contrasts the war in Ukraine with the two wars Russia waged against Chechnya in 1994 and 1999. Commenting on the war in Ukraine, the author focuses on the phenomenon of the ‘Kadyrovites’ (Chechen auxiliary troops fighting on the Russian side) on the one hand and Chechen units fighting on the Ukrainian side on the other. It is argued that the silence of the international community in the Chechen war afforded Russia a sense of impunity, thus reinforcing its reckless military strategies.