Dotno Pount

Home institution

University of Pennsylvania

Research project

Shifting Gender Roles at the Cult of Chinggis Khan in Qing Mongolia

Prior to the seventeenth-century, royal wives performed the rituals at the Cult of Chinggis Khan in Mongolia, yet the surviving tradition forbids their presence.  Thus the investigation of gender constitutes an important window into the social history of Mongolia. This project traces the declining status of women in Mongolia between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries based on textual sources in Mongolian, Chinese, and Manchu.

Profile

Dotno Pount is a Lecturer on East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania.  Her research and teaching focus on Mongolian and Chinese history. She is particularly interested in the Cult of Chinggis Khan. Her dissertation studied this institution in the period before 1636, when the Dayan Khanid princes ruled Mongolia under the aegis of the Great Khan, whose kingship was conceptualized as a direct continuation from that of the Mongol Empire. She has transcribed and translated a large body of liturgical texts of the Cult, and is currently preparing to publish a critical edition of this material. The texts are of importance because they contain the only written material from Mongolia from a period from which no other texts have survived – from the late 15th to early 16th centuries. In the coming years, Dr. Pount plans to produce a monograph on the history of the Cult to the present.