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Pastoralism after culture: environmental governance and human‐animal estrangement at China's ecological frontier

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

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Type

Article

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Authors

White, Thomas 

Abstract

jats:titleAbstract</jats:title>jats:pIn the name of ‘ecological civilization’, the Chinese state has sought to adjust the ecologies of its degraded northern grasslands, using market instruments, such as payments for ecosystem services, to induce ethnic minority pastoralists to pursue non‐herding livelihoods. In the far west of Inner Mongolia, the resultant decline in the availability of rural labour has meant that most domestic camels that remain on the rangelands are now left largely unmanaged throughout the year. Local Mongol officials and intellectuals have long regarded extensive animal husbandry as a bulwark against Mongol dispossession through Chinese agricultural expansion. This article shows how they now make use of dominant ecological and market rationalities to articulate their defence of this form of land use, by figuring these ‘semi‐wild’ camels as providers of ecosystem services. In doing so, however, their proposals bypass the figure of the culture‐possessing rural minority subject, which in this region is associated with training and working with camels, and which has been fostered by the cultural heritage policies of the reform era. Divergent understandings of the ‘wildness’ of nonhumans thus reveal tensions between ecological and cultural politics at China's margins, and anxieties surrounding the rural minority subject in the context of new modes of environmental governance.</jats:p>

Description

Keywords

4301 Archaeology, 4401 Anthropology, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, 44 Human Society

Journal Title

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1359-0987
1467-9655

Volume Title

27

Publisher

Wiley

Rights

All rights reserved