Bulag's brilliant new book examines China's 'culture of intimacy,' in which minorities like the Mongolians and Tibetans are embraced in a suffocating hug. In a theoretical tour-de-force, Bulag overturns old conceptions of majority-minority relations, replacing them with a notion of society as a triadic space of possibilities. This is an essential book for understanding China, seeing it not as a unity but as a field of collaboration and contention. -- Caroline Humphrey, University of Cambridge Uradyn Bulag, a distinguished ethnographer of Mongolia, explores emotional and political ties between Mongols and Chinese in this intriguing new book. Mongolia, as a former great empire that divided into an independent nation and a subordinated ethnic group within China, offers an unusual and fascinating case study that will interest students of nationalism and of Chinese history, as well as theorists of contemporary identities in the age of globalization. -- Peter Perdue, Yale University Bulag has succeeded in capturing-or recapturing-the significance of Inner Mongolia to the geopolitics of East Asia. In showing how virtually all twentieth-century regimes in Northeast Asia competed to appropriate the world-conquering symbolism of Chinggis Khan, and, paradoxically, the spiritual power of Lamaism, Collaborative Nationalism makes a case for Mongol agency in this exemplary study of the 'new' political history. -- Prasenjit Duara, National University of Singapore
