Christopher Kaplonski. The Lama Question

The Lama Question: Violence, Sovereignty, and Exception in Early Socialist Mongolia sheds fresh light on the most tragic page in Mongolia’s recent history: the socialist regime’s mass killing of the Buddhist lamas in the 1930s. Rather than focusing on the years from 1937 to 1939—the climax of purges and repressions in Mongolia—Christopher Kaplonski takes a broader view, tracing the socialists’ approach to the “lama question” back to the Mongolian revolution of 1921. This commendable approach allows Kaplonski to discuss the state’s struggle with the lamas as a step-by-step process rather than a singularity. One of his key arguments, in fact, is that the killing spree—the state of exception—was a last resort of a kind, that it was preceded by years of efforts to deal with the lamas in other ways, short of mass murder. Kaplonski thus shows that the state of exception (in effect, suspension of legality) remained “truly exceptional” (230) even in Stalinist Mongolia.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Buddhism · Economic history · Geography · Martial law · Political economy · Political science · Principle of legality · Sociology · Sovereignty · State (computer science) · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies