16 OCTOBER! Asia Talk Series: The Steppe on Paper: Mongol Manuscript Maps of the Qing (18th-19th Century), by Dr. Anne-Sophie Pratte
Dear all,
You are cordially invited to the upcoming Asia Talk Series titled "The Steppe on Paper: Mongol Manuscript Maps of the Qing (18th-19th Century)." by Dr. Anne-Sophie Pratte.
The talk will take place in Kriton Curi Room at Albert Long Hall, Boğaziçi University South Campus on October 16 at 17:00 (Istanbul time, GMT+3). The participants who are not BU students or staff need to register via mail to:
kamil.gadirli@std.bogazici.edu
The lecture will be held in English.
Bio
Anne-Sophie Pratte is an assistant professor of history at Georgetown University
in Qatar. She completed her PhD in Inner Asian and Altaic Studies at Harvard
University and her M.A. in East Asian Studies at McGill University. Her work
was published in Late Imperial China and Etudes Mongoles et Siberiennes.
In partnership with the Maclean Collection, she directed the making of an
interactive Manchu historical map for the Norman B. Leventhal Map &
Education Center at the Boston Public Library email: ap1897@georgetown.edu
Abstract
As the Chinese-Manchu Qing state consolidated its power over the steppe regions from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, it instructed local Mongols to produce maps of newly created administrative units. Local mapmakers thus created hundreds of maps, becoming the architects of successive mapping systems and making and remaking the geography of the Mongol steppe. Though scholars often assume that nomadic groups produced few written records, this book demonstrates that pastoralists Mongols not only created hundreds of local maps but shaped the imperial geography of early modern China and Inner Asia with their distinctive aesthetic, which conveyed localized understandings of mapping and territoriality. These cartographic illustrations revealed indigenous practices of land use and pastoral migrations that differed from the ideal categories set at the metropole level.
