What impact is the Anthropocene—the current geological age of human dominance—having on religion? How are communities where religion has long interacted with ecology responding to the fundamental changes taking place within that ecology? Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko asks these questions in her important book Enlightenment and the Gasping City: Mongolian Buddhism at a Time of Environmental Disarray by delving into religious life in postsocialist Mongolia. Drawing on fieldwork conducted over twenty-two months between 2009 and 2016 in the Buddhist Dharma Centers of the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar, Abrahms-Kavunenko disrupts simplistic representations of Mongolian Buddhist revival by focusing on urban communities, and specifically by exploring the impact of environmental pollution on how Mongolian Buddhists relate to concepts of light and the sky.
According to Abrahms-Kavunenko, in contemporary Mongolia, many Buddhist centers promulgate meditation instructions for purification (Mongolian: ariutgal) practices for lay practitioners that invoke descriptions of bright light and clear skies. These...
