Altan-Dari Ovoo, Dariganga, Mongolia / Алтан-Дарь Овоо, Дарьганга, Монгол Улс
Jessica Madison Pískatá is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Anthropology at Oberlin College. She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California at Santa Cruz, an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the New School, and a Bachelor’s in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. She also served as a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) volunteer with the United States Peace Corps in Mongolia from 2011-2013.
Her dissertation project looked at the intersection of poetic practice and geological sociality on the Dariganga Volcanic Field in eastern Mongolia. By working with poets, professional poetry readers, local scholars of literature, and lay poetry enthusiasts, her research considers poetics to be a tool that enables subversion of epistemic categories that divide the material and immaterial world and its living and non-living beings.
A key aspect of this research explores how people use poetry to create enlivened and mutually collaborative relationships with non-living mineral landscapes, particularly in the context of heightened material extraction across Mongolia. This work looks at poetry as a mediator for relations between humans and geological bodies revealing the central role that sacred mountains, precious stones, magnetic fields, and pit mines play in the social life, politics, and cultural production of the region.
She has also published Mongolian to English translations of Dariganga Mongolian poet O. Dashbalbar’s Grass Trilogy and is working on an experimental ethnographic memoir about Czech uranium mining.
Education
Ph.D. Anthropology, University of California at Santa Cruz, 2021
M.A. Anthropology, University of California at Santa Cruz, 2015
M.F.A. Creative Writing (Poetry), The New School, 2010
B.A. Creative Writing, University of Southern California, 2007
Awards and Honors
2020 Chancellor’s Dissertation Fellowship, UC Santa Cruz
2019 Margaret Mead Journalism Fellowship to Attend LARB Publishing Workshop
2017 Field Research Fellowship, American Center for Mongolian Studies
2016 Research Grant, China and Inner Asia Council, Association for Asian Studies
2015 Language Fellowship, American Center for Mongolian Studies
2008 Creative Writing Fellowship, The New School
Publications
“Golden Mountain, Iron Heap: A Poetic Ethnography of Extraction in Eastern Mongolia.” In A Non-secular Anthropocene: Spirits, Specters and Other Nonhumans in a Time of Environmental Change. More-than-Human. AURA Working Papers Volume 3, 2018. N. Bubandt, ed. (published as Jessica Madison)