Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko
Biographic Data
| ID | 96595 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko |
| GIVEN NAMES | Saskia |
| FAMILY NAME | Abrahms-Kavunenko |
| SIGNATURE | ABRAHMS-KAVUNENKO S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Copenhagen |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4517-3282 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 48 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 21 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The Revenge of the Cannibal Crabs
Within popular discourse, Buddhist conservation efforts are often believed to be motivated by scriptural principles such as loving-kindness, non-violence and interdependent co-arising. In this article, I point out the limitations of focusing on these as the only motivations for caring for animals. Introducing the concept of ‘bio-retribution’, I will describe how on Christmas Island the ireful and vengeful crabs can be seen as posing a danger to t…
Anthropocene Ouroboros
The ever-increasing abundance and expanding affordances of plastics have come to instantiate modernity through their successes and failures in usage and beyond. Materially, plastics have a capacity to stubbornly endure yet simultaneously to fracture. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork on an Indian Ocean island, this article will explore the heritage of plastic objects in their shattering and dispersal. The novel presence and ubiquity of plastics …
The Cruel Optimism of Plastics
The plastic problem is a complex, multi-faceted issue that requires coordinated global action and systemic change to address. In this article, we investigate how what we call 'promissory technologies' affect people's capacities to understand the systemic changes necessary to significantly reduce global dependencies upon plastics. Engaging with Lauren Berlant's conceptualizations of 'cruel optimism' and 'technologies of patience' we delineate thre…
Time and Plastic Tide
On a remote island in the Indian Ocean, plastics connect people to global supply chains, to one another through communal eating, and to ancestors as elements of shrines and offerings. While the island's human inhabitants depend on plastics, its wildlife is disturbed by the inundation of plastics on beaches that, following major currents, arrive from Southeast Asia. While most of the debris is unidentifiable, some items retain imprints from their …
Shown by the Marron’s Claw
On the wooded hillside of the Origins Centre, a small retreat centre in Western Australia with a strong ethos of active care, the appearance of native animals, especially those that are scarce or sporadic, is interpreted as indicative of spiritual and ecological health. Conversing with human-animal relationships within other Buddhist traditions, this article explores the resonances between the presence of animals and ideas of successful labour, b…
The Contents Are the Vessel
Reflecting on the implications of Dipesh Chakrabarty's "The Climate of History" for a critical Buddhist Studies of/for the Anthropocene, this article introduces a seven-hundred-years-old reflection among Inner Asian Buddhist scholastics about the perspectival tangle of worlds and beings. Rooted in canonical Indian Abhidharma literature and then the Tibetan Pakpa Chökyi Lodrö's didactic compositions meant for the princelings of the 13th century Mo…
Buddhism in the Anthropocene
Introduction to the Special Focus section: Buddhism in the Anthropocene
Toward an anthropology of plastics
Materially plastics are ambivalent. In spite of their often lauded quality of creating seemingly untethered imitations, representations and replacements, they have a materiality that leaks, off-gasses and disintegrates. They are accomplished at mimicry yet frequently unable to be remoulded. They are ostensibly resistant to microbial contamination yet absorb environmental pollutants and leach endocrine disrupting plasticisers. This article argues …
Plastic Asia
This introduction to the special issue of Plastic Asia emphasises the ambiguous and unsettling materiality of plastics. It describes how in Asian contexts, the relationships between plastics, purity and pollution are complex: simultaneously promising purity, quality and hygiene, yet frequently failing to fulfil these promises. It looks at how plastics, for some, have come to signify broader frustrations with modernity and the complexities of plas…
Plastic Purity and Sacred Dairy
By investigating the growing use of plastics within Mongolian dairying, this paper explores emerging microbial/social assemblages as they relate to local and imported ideas of purity and hygiene. Although many Mongolian herders prefer to use dairy equipment made from materials such as wood and hide, these items are increasingly being replaced by plastic ones. As new infrastructure connects northern herders to more extensive markets, it presents c…
Mongolian Buddhism, science and healing
This article looks at how the changing relationship between science and religion from the fin de siècle to the present period continues to influence healing practices in Mongolia. It explores how science and religion, rather than being congenitally antithetical to one another, are frequently co-constitutive. By following a few key historical lineages of spiritualism in their dialogue with the Mongolian cultural region, the article illustrates how…
The wheel-turning king and the lucky lottery
By placing a contemporary pilgrimage of Myanmar Buddhists to Bodh Gaya in India in conversation with early Buddhist doctrine and practice, this article argues that wealth, its redistribution and celebration, have provided, and continue to provide, non-peripheral avenues for advancement within Buddhist societies. Through lavish gift-giving and merry-making, the group of pilgrims that we encountered, led by a weikza-lam practitioner or wizard, bols…
Tenuous blessings
The ritual vases or bumba that are involved in a secretive Buddhist ceremony in Mongolia highlight the theoretical potential of centralizing material objects which instantiate doubt in anthropological theory. The uncertainties around the contents of these ritual vases, depending on their origins, demonstrate how doubt reflects broader uncertainties and can be generative of religious practices and imaginaries. Bumbas are thought to instantiate gre…
Enlightenment and the Gasping City
With air pollution now intimately affecting every resident of Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko seeks to understand how, as a physical constant throughout the winter months, the murky and obscuring nature of air pollution has become an active part of Mongolian religious and ritual life. Enlightenment and the Gasping City identifies air pollution as a boundary between the physical and the immaterial, showing how air po…
The Monastery Rules
Mustering Fortune
Since the end of the socialist period, Mongolia has experienced economic instabilities, growing inequalities, and increasing urbanisation. Prosperity (dallaga) rituals, once predominantly carried out by nomadic herders at specific times of the year, are now also held regularly within Ulaanbaatar's Buddhist temples. In these ceremonies, Buddhist lamas and lay participants attempt to 'call' or 'pull' wealth to the household. In this urban context, …
Buddhism in Mongolian History, Culture, and Society, written by Vesna A. Wallace
Spiritually Enmeshed, Socially Enmeshed
This article examines how shamanic practices can, through the generation of a spiritualized narrative past, relocate individual subjectivities in an extensive web of relationships that include and extend beyond living relatives. The analysis describes the transition from collective to individual responsibility and concurrent feelings of dislocation that occurred in Mongolia at the end of the socialist period. Referring to the biography of a young…
Paying for prayers
Since the end of the socialist period in 1990, Buddhism in Mongolia has been undergoing a resurgence. Temples no longer oversee vast tracts of land and receive income from the activities of bonded nomadic herders as they did in the presocialist period. They must instead fund themselves from the freely given donations of lay Buddhists. Whilst the majority of the Mongolian population self-identify as Buddhist, regular donations to temples are not a…
The Blossoming of Ignorance
Discussions of religious ignorance have arisen contemporaneously with postsocialist frustrations and uncertainties in Ulaanbaatar. My interlocutors responded to discourses of Buddhist ignorance in a number of apparently contradictory ways. Mistrust, religious reverence, ambivalence or fear often coexisted with excitement, exploration and creation. Through frequently describing their own or others' ignorance about Buddhism lay Buddhists indicated …
Religious 'Revival' After Socialism? Eclecticism and Globalisation Amongst Lay Buddhists in Ulaanbaatar
This article questions whether the term 'revival' is apt for describing the reidentification of Mongols with Buddhism in Ulaanbaatar. Religious beliefs and practices of lay Buddhists in Ulaanbaatar tend to be characterised by openness, a lack of dogmatism, and eclecticism, rather than a revival of old religiosities. Due to the styles of and preferences for religious education, religious concepts such as reincarnation, enlightenment and karma are …
Toward an anthropology of plastics
Materially plastics are ambivalent. In spite of their often lauded quality of creating seemingly untethered imitations, representations and replacements, they have a materiality that leaks, off-gasses and disintegrates. They are accomplished at mimicry yet frequently unable to be remoulded. They are ostensibly resistant to microbial contamination yet absorb environmental pollutants and leach endocrine disrupting plasticisers. This article argues …
The Blossoming of Ignorance
Discussions of religious ignorance have arisen contemporaneously with postsocialist frustrations and uncertainties in Ulaanbaatar. My interlocutors responded to discourses of Buddhist ignorance in a number of apparently contradictory ways. Mistrust, religious reverence, ambivalence or fear often coexisted with excitement, exploration and creation. Through frequently describing their own or others' ignorance about Buddhism lay Buddhists indicated …
Enlightenment and the Gasping City
With air pollution now intimately affecting every resident of Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko seeks to understand how, as a physical constant throughout the winter months, the murky and obscuring nature of air pollution has become an active part of Mongolian religious and ritual life. Enlightenment and the Gasping City identifies air pollution as a boundary between the physical and the immaterial, showing how air po…
Mustering Fortune
Since the end of the socialist period, Mongolia has experienced economic instabilities, growing inequalities, and increasing urbanisation. Prosperity (dallaga) rituals, once predominantly carried out by nomadic herders at specific times of the year, are now also held regularly within Ulaanbaatar's Buddhist temples. In these ceremonies, Buddhist lamas and lay participants attempt to 'call' or 'pull' wealth to the household. In this urban context, …
Tenuous blessings
The ritual vases or bumba that are involved in a secretive Buddhist ceremony in Mongolia highlight the theoretical potential of centralizing material objects which instantiate doubt in anthropological theory. The uncertainties around the contents of these ritual vases, depending on their origins, demonstrate how doubt reflects broader uncertainties and can be generative of religious practices and imaginaries. Bumbas are thought to instantiate gre…
Religious 'Revival' After Socialism? Eclecticism and Globalisation Amongst Lay Buddhists in Ulaanbaatar
This article questions whether the term 'revival' is apt for describing the reidentification of Mongols with Buddhism in Ulaanbaatar. Religious beliefs and practices of lay Buddhists in Ulaanbaatar tend to be characterised by openness, a lack of dogmatism, and eclecticism, rather than a revival of old religiosities. Due to the styles of and preferences for religious education, religious concepts such as reincarnation, enlightenment and karma are …
Spiritually Enmeshed, Socially Enmeshed
This article examines how shamanic practices can, through the generation of a spiritualized narrative past, relocate individual subjectivities in an extensive web of relationships that include and extend beyond living relatives. The analysis describes the transition from collective to individual responsibility and concurrent feelings of dislocation that occurred in Mongolia at the end of the socialist period. Referring to the biography of a young…
Paying for prayers
Since the end of the socialist period in 1990, Buddhism in Mongolia has been undergoing a resurgence. Temples no longer oversee vast tracts of land and receive income from the activities of bonded nomadic herders as they did in the presocialist period. They must instead fund themselves from the freely given donations of lay Buddhists. Whilst the majority of the Mongolian population self-identify as Buddhist, regular donations to temples are not a…
Plastic Asia
This introduction to the special issue of Plastic Asia emphasises the ambiguous and unsettling materiality of plastics. It describes how in Asian contexts, the relationships between plastics, purity and pollution are complex: simultaneously promising purity, quality and hygiene, yet frequently failing to fulfil these promises. It looks at how plastics, for some, have come to signify broader frustrations with modernity and the complexities of plas…
Plastic Purity and Sacred Dairy
By investigating the growing use of plastics within Mongolian dairying, this paper explores emerging microbial/social assemblages as they relate to local and imported ideas of purity and hygiene. Although many Mongolian herders prefer to use dairy equipment made from materials such as wood and hide, these items are increasingly being replaced by plastic ones. As new infrastructure connects northern herders to more extensive markets, it presents c…
Religious 'Revival' After Socialism? Eclecticism and Globalisation Amongst Lay Buddhists in Ulaanbaatar
This article questions whether the term 'revival' is apt for describing the reidentification of Mongols with Buddhism in Ulaanbaatar. Religious beliefs and practices of lay Buddhists in Ulaanbaatar tend to be characterised by openness, a lack of dogmatism, and eclecticism, rather than a revival of old religiosities. Due to the styles of and preferences for religious education, religious concepts such as reincarnation, enlightenment and karma are …
Paying for prayers
Since the end of the socialist period in 1990, Buddhism in Mongolia has been undergoing a resurgence. Temples no longer oversee vast tracts of land and receive income from the activities of bonded nomadic herders as they did in the presocialist period. They must instead fund themselves from the freely given donations of lay Buddhists. Whilst the majority of the Mongolian population self-identify as Buddhist, regular donations to temples are not a…
The Blossoming of Ignorance
Discussions of religious ignorance have arisen contemporaneously with postsocialist frustrations and uncertainties in Ulaanbaatar. My interlocutors responded to discourses of Buddhist ignorance in a number of apparently contradictory ways. Mistrust, religious reverence, ambivalence or fear often coexisted with excitement, exploration and creation. Through frequently describing their own or others' ignorance about Buddhism lay Buddhists indicated …
Buddhism in Mongolian History, Culture, and Society, written by Vesna A. Wallace
Spiritually Enmeshed, Socially Enmeshed
This article examines how shamanic practices can, through the generation of a spiritualized narrative past, relocate individual subjectivities in an extensive web of relationships that include and extend beyond living relatives. The analysis describes the transition from collective to individual responsibility and concurrent feelings of dislocation that occurred in Mongolia at the end of the socialist period. Referring to the biography of a young…
Enlightenment and the Gasping City
With air pollution now intimately affecting every resident of Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko seeks to understand how, as a physical constant throughout the winter months, the murky and obscuring nature of air pollution has become an active part of Mongolian religious and ritual life. Enlightenment and the Gasping City identifies air pollution as a boundary between the physical and the immaterial, showing how air po…
The Monastery Rules
Mustering Fortune
Since the end of the socialist period, Mongolia has experienced economic instabilities, growing inequalities, and increasing urbanisation. Prosperity (dallaga) rituals, once predominantly carried out by nomadic herders at specific times of the year, are now also held regularly within Ulaanbaatar's Buddhist temples. In these ceremonies, Buddhist lamas and lay participants attempt to 'call' or 'pull' wealth to the household. In this urban context, …
Tenuous blessings
The ritual vases or bumba that are involved in a secretive Buddhist ceremony in Mongolia highlight the theoretical potential of centralizing material objects which instantiate doubt in anthropological theory. The uncertainties around the contents of these ritual vases, depending on their origins, demonstrate how doubt reflects broader uncertainties and can be generative of religious practices and imaginaries. Bumbas are thought to instantiate gre…
The wheel-turning king and the lucky lottery
By placing a contemporary pilgrimage of Myanmar Buddhists to Bodh Gaya in India in conversation with early Buddhist doctrine and practice, this article argues that wealth, its redistribution and celebration, have provided, and continue to provide, non-peripheral avenues for advancement within Buddhist societies. Through lavish gift-giving and merry-making, the group of pilgrims that we encountered, led by a weikza-lam practitioner or wizard, bols…
Plastic Asia
This introduction to the special issue of Plastic Asia emphasises the ambiguous and unsettling materiality of plastics. It describes how in Asian contexts, the relationships between plastics, purity and pollution are complex: simultaneously promising purity, quality and hygiene, yet frequently failing to fulfil these promises. It looks at how plastics, for some, have come to signify broader frustrations with modernity and the complexities of plas…
Plastic Purity and Sacred Dairy
By investigating the growing use of plastics within Mongolian dairying, this paper explores emerging microbial/social assemblages as they relate to local and imported ideas of purity and hygiene. Although many Mongolian herders prefer to use dairy equipment made from materials such as wood and hide, these items are increasingly being replaced by plastic ones. As new infrastructure connects northern herders to more extensive markets, it presents c…
Mongolian Buddhism, science and healing
This article looks at how the changing relationship between science and religion from the fin de siècle to the present period continues to influence healing practices in Mongolia. It explores how science and religion, rather than being congenitally antithetical to one another, are frequently co-constitutive. By following a few key historical lineages of spiritualism in their dialogue with the Mongolian cultural region, the article illustrates how…
Toward an anthropology of plastics
Materially plastics are ambivalent. In spite of their often lauded quality of creating seemingly untethered imitations, representations and replacements, they have a materiality that leaks, off-gasses and disintegrates. They are accomplished at mimicry yet frequently unable to be remoulded. They are ostensibly resistant to microbial contamination yet absorb environmental pollutants and leach endocrine disrupting plasticisers. This article argues …
Shown by the Marron’s Claw
On the wooded hillside of the Origins Centre, a small retreat centre in Western Australia with a strong ethos of active care, the appearance of native animals, especially those that are scarce or sporadic, is interpreted as indicative of spiritual and ecological health. Conversing with human-animal relationships within other Buddhist traditions, this article explores the resonances between the presence of animals and ideas of successful labour, b…
The Contents Are the Vessel
Reflecting on the implications of Dipesh Chakrabarty's "The Climate of History" for a critical Buddhist Studies of/for the Anthropocene, this article introduces a seven-hundred-years-old reflection among Inner Asian Buddhist scholastics about the perspectival tangle of worlds and beings. Rooted in canonical Indian Abhidharma literature and then the Tibetan Pakpa Chökyi Lodrö's didactic compositions meant for the princelings of the 13th century Mo…
Buddhism in the Anthropocene
Introduction to the Special Focus section: Buddhism in the Anthropocene
Anthropocene Ouroboros
The ever-increasing abundance and expanding affordances of plastics have come to instantiate modernity through their successes and failures in usage and beyond. Materially, plastics have a capacity to stubbornly endure yet simultaneously to fracture. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork on an Indian Ocean island, this article will explore the heritage of plastic objects in their shattering and dispersal. The novel presence and ubiquity of plastics …
The Cruel Optimism of Plastics
The plastic problem is a complex, multi-faceted issue that requires coordinated global action and systemic change to address. In this article, we investigate how what we call 'promissory technologies' affect people's capacities to understand the systemic changes necessary to significantly reduce global dependencies upon plastics. Engaging with Lauren Berlant's conceptualizations of 'cruel optimism' and 'technologies of patience' we delineate thre…
Time and Plastic Tide
On a remote island in the Indian Ocean, plastics connect people to global supply chains, to one another through communal eating, and to ancestors as elements of shrines and offerings. While the island's human inhabitants depend on plastics, its wildlife is disturbed by the inundation of plastics on beaches that, following major currents, arrive from Southeast Asia. While most of the debris is unidentifiable, some items retain imprints from their …
The Revenge of the Cannibal Crabs
Within popular discourse, Buddhist conservation efforts are often believed to be motivated by scriptural principles such as loving-kindness, non-violence and interdependent co-arising. In this article, I point out the limitations of focusing on these as the only motivations for caring for animals. Introducing the concept of ‘bio-retribution’, I will describe how on Christmas Island the ireful and vengeful crabs can be seen as posing a danger to t…
Philosophy (11 works) · Buddhism (10 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · History (7 works) · Indian and Buddhist Studies (6 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (5 works) · Chinese history and philosophy (5 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Aesthetics (4 works)