Looking back over more than twenty years of work, I can see that CP in Mongolia has become not only a place to gather my research, translations, music, images, and field memories, but also a way of continuing to learn from them.

In scholarly terms, the project’s contribution can be understood through several interrelated forms of ethnographic, translational, visual, musical, and public-facing research practice.

To be clear, I am not offering this list as a boast, but as a moment of taking stock: to recognise the shape the work has been taking, the responsibilities it carries, and the directions in which it may still continue to grow.

• Since 2004, I have come to understand this work as my long-form contribution to Mongolian studies, shaped through fieldwork, writing, translation, music, visual culture, and digital practice.
• Over time, CPinMongolia.com has become an open-access archive of Mongolian cultural life, organised for public, scholarly, and educational use.
• At its centre is an ongoing concern with Mongolian Buddhist cultural renewal, especially Mongolian Gelugpa Buddhist revitalisation and post-socialist cultural reconstruction as lived through communities, women’s stories, teaching, ritual, and everyday practice.
• The research has been grounded in qualitative ethnographic methods: participant observation, key informant interviews, longitudinal attention, situated interpretation, and reflective scholarship.
• Much of this work has taught me to see Buddhist women in Mongolia not as marginal figures, but as practitioners, organisers, artists, teachers, hosts, supporters, and transmitters of cultural life.
• Alongside the ethnographic work, translation has become a central practice, especially through the contemporary doha of Zava Damdin (b.1976), where lineation, register, Mongolian concepts, translator’s notes, and later revision all matter.
• This translation work has also deepened my attention to words such as setgel, nutag, avral, and other Mongolian-language concepts that resist simple English equivalence.
• The visual and material culture archive has grown from the same attention: to objects, ritual forms, temple spaces, images, domestic details, and everyday things as carriers of memory, practice, and meaning.
• Music has opened another path through the project, bringing piano, soundscape, music video, intermedia practice, AI-assisted music, visual storytelling, and digital publication into conversation with scholarship.
• Teaching and learning have remained central to the work throughout, through accessible explanations, visual piano tutorials, keyword pathways, site indexes, and structured public resources.
• In this sense, the website has become a form of reflective digital pedagogy: not a static publication list, but a living learning environment.
• It also works as a bridge between academic research and public cultural education, making Mongolian cultural knowledge available to readers, listeners, students, musicians, and general audiences.
• Practice-led research has become increasingly important, as piano performance, arrangement, sound, image, and translation have become part of the research process itself.
• More recently, I have begun to understand the site as a curated semantic archive, where categories, tags, internal links, metadata, and structured pathways help make relationships between people, places, practices, texts, images, and sounds more visible.
• Taken together, these strands form a kind of cultural memory work, connecting field encounters, women’s voices, Mongolian Buddhist practice, landscape, music, translation, and visual media across more than two decades.
• They also reflect an ongoing practice of returning: to people, places, texts, images, sounds, and earlier field encounters, so that the archive remains responsive rather than closed.
• The project contributes to cross-cultural understanding in a way that is neither purely academic nor purely artistic, but cumulative, situated, educational, and open-ended.

In relation to adjacent work in Mongolian studies, Buddhist studies, anthropology, visual/material culture, music, and translation — including that of C. Humphrey, C. Pegg, C. Teleki, R. Empson, I. Charleux, C. Atwood, V. Wallace, M. King, and M. Buyandelger — this body of research is distinctive for its cumulative cross-media method, bringing long-term ethnography of Mongolian Buddhist cultural renewal into dialogue with translation, women’s stories, material and visual culture, music, soundscape, intermedia practice, and open-access digital scholarship. It is my hope that the value of CP in Mongolia is in the connections it makes across ways of knowing and knowledge too often kept apart.

• Finally, the arc of the work has been shaped by reciprocity: by gratitude to the people, teachers, friends, families, artists, practitioners, and communities who have shared knowledge, time, hospitality, and trust, and by my responsibility to give something back through careful public work.

It is worth pausing to do this kind of thinking from time to time, not to fix the work too neatly in place, but to recognise the shape it has taken, the responsibilities it carries, and the directions in which it may still continue to grow.

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Footnote

Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures, first published in 1973, was a formative influence on the way I came to understand research itself. His account of culture as layered meaning, and his practice of “thick description,” offered a way to step away from purely quantitative methodologies toward a more interpretive attentiveness: to people, relationships, objects, rituals, texts, landscapes, sounds, and gestures in their particular contexts. The above list of contributions should therefore be read not simply as a set of outputs or achievements, but as evidence of a long practice of attending. In this sense, CP in Mongolia can be understood as an ongoing interpretive archive, where fieldwork, translation, music, image, and memory become different ways of tracing the webs of meaning through which Mongolian cultural life is lived, taught, remembered, and shared.

Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973).