Biography
Joe Ellis is the Sigrid Rausing Postdoctoral Fellow in the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit and an Affiliated Lecturer in the department of Social Anthropology.
Research
My research is founded upon long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Mongolia, particularly in the ger districts of Ulaanbaatar and the more remote Khovd province in the far west of the country. The overarching theme of my research interests is the manner in which cosmological, political and moral concepts come to impinge upon social life in Mongolia. This has led me to work on a range of topics, including: the dynamics of violence, shamanism, and alcoholism within intimate relations; the role of mythic-historical exemplars in generating ideas of ‘ethnic’ difference; the impact of religious practices on the economic sphere; the cultivation of gendered mobilities within kinship ideologies; practices of deception and spheres of complicity; and the political salience of perceptions of environmental change.
