Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

235 Figures on Cambodia’s suicide rate come from World Health Organization, “Mental health atlas 2011: Cambodia,” Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse, World Health Organization, 2011.

235 Figures on the proportion of mentally ill Cambodians who are permanently restrained, and on the country’s mental health budget, rely on Daniel McLaughlin and Elisabeth Wickeri, “Mental health and human rights in Cambodia,” Leitner Center for International Law and Justice, July 31, 2012.

235 Figures on the number of psychiatrists in Cambodia come from Tanja Schunert et al., “Cambodian mental health survey,” Royal University of Phnom Penh, Department of Psychology, 2012.

235 Proposals to relocate mentally ill citizens to pagodas are described in Radio Free Asia Khmer Service, “Cambodian province plans campaign for monks to care for mentally ill,” Radio Free Asia, April 20, 2015.

The Open Spaces of Mongolia

247 The decline of nomadism in Mongolia is described in World Health Organization, “WHO country cooperation strategy for Mongolia 2010–2015,” World Health Organization, 2010.

247 Figures on the Mongolian economy rely on the World Bank press release “Poverty continued to decline, falling from 27.4 percent in 2012 to 21.6 percent in 2014,” World Bank, July 1, 2015.

247 Riots over purported election fraud in Mongolia were reported in Tania Branigan, “Mongolia declares state of emergency as riots kill five,” Guardian, July 2, 2008; the conviction of former president Nambar Enkhbaya, in Xinhua News Agency, “Former Mongolian president jailed for four years,” CRI English, August 3, 2012.

247 The effects of overgrazing on the environment are analyzed in Sarah Wachter, “Pastoralism unraveling in Mongolia,” New York Times, December 8, 2009; see also Troy Sternberg et al., “Tracking desertification on the Mongolian steppe through NDVI and field-survey data,” International Journal of Digital Earth 4, no. 1 (2011).

247 The decline of many overharvested Mongolian species is discussed in Jeffrey Reeves, “Mongolia’s environmental security,” Asian Survey 51, no. 3 (2011).

247 For more information on the impact of modern technology on daily life in Mongolia, see Jim Yong Kim, “How Mongolia brought nomads TV and mobile phones,” Bloomberg View, October 14, 2013; and Mark Hay, “Nomads on the grid,” Slate, December 5, 2014.

247 UNESCO’s designation of Naadam as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity is documented in “Naadam, Mongolian traditional festival,” United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2010.

247 The repurposing of the former Lenin Museum in Ulaanbaatar is the subject of Tania Branigan, “It’s goodbye Lenin, hello dinosaur as fossils head to Mongolia museum,” Guardian, January 27, 2013.

Inventing the Conversation

250 The suicide rate in Greenland at the time of my original research there had been most recently published in Tine Curtis and Peter Bjerregaard’s Health Research in Greenland (1995), page 31.

255 The descriptions of polar hysteria, mountain wanderer syndrome, and kayak anxiety come from Inge Lynge, “Mental disorders in Greenland,” Man & Society 21 (1997). I must thank John Hart for providing the parallel to “running amok.”

256 Malaurie’s quote (“There is an often dramatic contradiction . . .”) is from Jean Malaurie, The Last Kings of Thule (1982), page 109.

258 The high incidence of suicide in Greenland is explored in Jason George, “The suicide capital of the world,” Slate, October 9, 2009; and Lene Bech Sillesen, “Another word for suicide,” Al Jazeera, November 21, 2015. Sillesen’s report is the source of Greenland’s current suicide rates, and the quote from Astrid Olsen. For a scholarly discussion of the subject, see Peter Bjerregaard and Christina Viskum Lytken Larsen, “Time trend by region of suicides and suicidal thoughts among Greenland Inuit,” International Journal of Circumpolar Health 74 (2015).

259 Greenland’s vote for independence from Denmark is reported in British Broadcasting Corporation, “Self-rule introduced in Greenland,” BBC News, June 21, 2009.

259 Expansion of hydroelectric power in Greenland is discussed in “Greenland powers up fifth hydroelectric plant,” Arctic Journal, September 6, 2013.

259 The dramatic calving of a Manhattan-size chunk from a Greenland glacier is reported in British Broadcasting Corporation, “Greenland’s Jakobshavn Glacier sheds big ice chunk,” BBC News, August 24, 2015.

Naked, Covered in Ram’s Blood, Drinking a Coke, and Feeling Pretty Good

262 For a discussion of the tradition of communicating with spirits among the Senegalese, see William Simmons, Eyes of the Night: Witchcraft among a Senegalese People (1971).