Lunchtime Seminar – 29 April – Bayar Dashpurev

Rights of Right Nature(s): Reflections on Mongolia’s State Sacred Mountains (Töriin takhilgatai uuls), Lords of Land (Gazryn ezed), and the ‘Noyon Mountain’ court case

Bayar Dashpurev (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology & MIASU visiting Scholar)

My discussion centers on three primary sources. The first is the Noyon Mountain court case, where the “Let’s Protect Noyon Mountain” movement initiated legal claims demanding the revocation of mining licenses in the vicinity of Noyon Mountain. This movement achieved a significant victory when the Supreme Court of Mongolia nullified these licenses. However, the movement's aspirations extended beyond this legal success; they further sought presidential recognition of the mountain as a state sacred site. Secondly, I explore the evolution of Mongolian legal texts and rules concerning mountains, specifically tracing developments from the Bogd Khaan’s decree on mountain worship ceremony law  until the state sacred mountain consecration ceremony decrees adopted by the President of Mongolia as recent as 2010. The third key source is the literature on “lords of the land” (gazryn ezed), which examines the anthropomorphism of non-human entities and their inclusion in Mongolian socio-political discourses. These texts and literature raise several intriguing questions: Is the relationship between human and non-human entities fundamentally a power dynamic? Is this relationship inherently political? Is environmental protection constitutive of this relationship? By posing these questions, I argue that reducing the human and non-human relationship to positive legal one that promises robust environmental protection constructs nature within legal categories, wherein non-human entities are perceived as either "alive" or "dead," contingent on the outcomes of legal processes.

Bayar Dashpurev is currently a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, where he is involved in the project’ Environmental Rights in Cultural Context’. Prior to joining Max Planck, Bayar served as a law lecturer, teaching environmental law, mining law, and public administrative law at the School of Law, the National University of Mongolia, and the German-Mongolian Institute for Resources and Technology, respectively. His research primarily focuses on the socio-legal aspects of environmental protection and resource extraction, employing a strong interdisciplinary approach that integrates legal and anthropological perspectives. Contact: dashpurev@eth.mpg.de