Thomas White

China's Camel Country (eBook, ePUB)

Livestock and Nation-Building at a Pastoral Frontier

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

How animal conservation became a defense against cultural erasure

China today positions itself as a model of state-led environmentalism. On the country's arid rangelands, grassland conservation policies have targeted pastoralists and their animals, blamed for causing desertification. State environmentalismin the form of grazing bans, enclosure, and resettlementhas transformed the lives of many ethnic minority herders in China's western borderlands.

However, this book shows how such policies have been contested and negotiated on the ground, in the context of the state's intensifying nation-building project. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Alasha, in the far west of China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Thomas White describes how ethnic Mongols have foregrounded the local breed of Bactrian camel, mobilizing ideas of heritage and resource conservation to defend pastoralism.

In exploring how the greening of the Chinese state affects the entangled lives of humans and animals at the margins of the nation-state, this study is both a political biography of the Bactrian camel and an innovative work of political ecology addressing critical questions of rural livelihoods, conservation, and state power.

---

Dieser Download kann aus rechtlichen Gründen nur mit Rechnungsadresse in A, D ausgeliefert werden.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: University of Washington Press
• Seitenzahl: 264
• Erscheinungstermin: 27. August 2024
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780295752440
• Artikelnr.: 72270147

Autorenporträt

Thomas White is lecturer in China and sustainable development at King's College London. He earned his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2016. This is his first book.