Availability: In Stock

China’s Camel Country Livestock and Nation-Building at a Pastoral Frontier

SKU: 9780295752440

Original price was: $35.00.Current price is: $10.50.

Access China’s Camel Country Livestock and Nation-Building at a Pastoral Frontier Now. Discount up to 90%

Categories: ,

Additional information

Full Title

China\'s Camel Country Livestock and Nation-Building at a Pastoral Frontier

Author(s)

Thomas White

Edition
ISBN

9780295752440, 9780295752426

Publisher

University of Washington Press

Format

PDF and EPUB

Description

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 environmentalism—in the form of grazing bans, enclosure, and resettlement—has 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.