Write 6-8 pages, double-spaced, on one of the following topics
A) It is a commonplace among environmental anthropologists, and increasingly among progressive environmentalists, that "indigenous peoples," usually meaning tribal and village peoples who are not part of a large-scale agrarian or industrial civilization, are better to their environment than are peoples who have developed large-scale states and markets. This is usually thought to be the case because "indigenous peoples" have millennia of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and because they do not have a state imperative or a capitalist imperative to increase production at the cost of environmental resilience and sustainability. According to this typology, the nomadic herders and the upland mixed agricultural peoples we have read about in this unit would be classified as "indigenous," and the Han not (leaving aside the fact that they are, in the strict sense of the word, indigenous to China).
When we compare Han village ecological knowledge and practices with the ecological knowledge and practices of Mongols, Kazaks, Akha, or Nuosu, does this contrast hold? Are Han practices less sustainable at the village level? Why or why not? Did the existence of the extractive state turn Han villagers into degraders of their environment?
B) Dee Williams and others have commented that states distrust pastoralists and shifting cultivators. This may have something to do with what James Scott observes to be states' needs to be able to observe, record, and classify people and the places that they live in. Since late pre-Imperial times, Chinese agrarian states have not only distrusted shifting cultivators and nomadic pastoralists, they have accused them of wasting or destroying the lands they inhabit, and of being closer to animals than to cultured people, who live in and are attached to a particular place.
This state-based idea that mobile people waste the earth or use it inefficiently is contradicted by the ethnographic studies of both Williams and Sturgeon. At the same time, we must recognize that pastoral and shifting agricultural regimes operate at very low population densities, whereas Han-style agriculture managed to support dense populations over a long time scale. Given the severe limitations on the population that can be supported by either the shifting agricultural or the pastoral regime, and given the negative long-term effects of the intensive regime, was there a way that China could have ended up with a less fragile environment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? Make sure to consider both local-scale and larger-scale perspectives, as well as cross-scale interactions, when addressing this question.