Mobility and Immobility of Values Understanding Knowledge as Salvation
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Abstract
“Mobility and Immobility of Values: Understanding Knowledge as Salvation” explores how the value of salvific knowledge traverses and shifts between different constellations of narrative time, space, political/religious agenda and a variety of human (political) relations. The author starts out with her interlocutors’ descriptions of knowledge as transformative in a moral and economic sense and links these to the more recent popularity of Mongolian self-help literature. In Mongolia, this genre draws on a framework of compassion, self-love and salvific knowledge. The article discusses the entanglement of self-help ideas of a US-Christian origin with historically localized Mongolian Buddhist narratives of self-cultivation and of becoming a bodhisattva. The controversy over moral guidance through conceptions of the future versus the past has had to be navigated carefully by different political agendas throughout time, for specific political projects and has had to be aligned with pre-existing ideological frameworks. These shifts in perspectives on knowledge are mirrored in viewing them as mobile or immobile.
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