CLASS HOME PAGE
CLASS SCHEDULE
PAPER ASSIGNMENT
|
Readings for Unit 3: The Ecology of Local Communities
For this unit, we take a version of Joseph Whitney's division of China's traditional agriculture into three zones: peasant "gardening," dry-zone pastoralism, and upland minority mixed shifting and fixed cultivation, and examine case studies of each with a view to the their long-term sustainability and resilience or lack of same.
Tuesday, January 29: Han Chinese Farmers
Today we will return to the topic of ecological sustainability and resilience as it is shown in the interaction between local village ecologies of Han Chinese farmers and the regional agro-urban economies of which they were a part. To prepare for this, you should read descriptions of the agricultural ecology of two villages, both by anthropologists writing about the situation in the early 20th century:
- In the rice-growing south, Fei Xiaotong (Fei Hsiao-t'ung), Peasant Life in China, describes land and agriculture in the village of Kaixiangong (Kai-hsien Kung) in his native Wujiang (Wukiang) county in Jiangsu.
- In the dry-grain growing north, Yang Maochun (Martin M.C. Yang), A Chinese Village describes land and agriculture in his own native village, Taitou, near the city of Qingdao (Tsing-tao, yes, that's where they make beer) on the coast of Shandong.
For today, we will apply ecosystem thinking to analysis of these two village agricultural systems. Think about the ways in which the local ecology was or was not resilient at the time these descriptions were written. Be sure to keep in mind the ways in which the local communities were also parts of larger, regional systems.
Thursday, January 31: Pastoralists of Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang
Chinese macro-history has been, in some sense, a story of the ecological and cultural frontier between the agricultural and pastoral zones. For today, we both examine the nature of the boundary itself, along with its historical influence, and cross the boundary and look at ecology from a pastoralist perspective.
For the boundary, read The Steppes of Mongolia from Owen Lattimore's classic Inner Asian Frontiers of China
For the pastoralist perspective in Mongolia explicitly contrasted to the settled, agricultural perspective, read Dee Mack Williams's The Land in Cultural Context from his Beyond Great Walls; for the pastroalist perspective in Xinjiang, read Ingvar Svanberg's The Nomadism of the Orta 3Ÿz Kazaks in Xinjiang, 1911-1949, with particular attention to pages 121-140. For Tibet, read the description of ecology on the Tibetan Plateau from Melvyn Goldstein and Cynthia Beall's Nomads of Western Tibet. In class, we will look for common characteristics and the contrast to Chinese intensive agriculture.
I will be leaving class at 2:40 or so today, having given you the Quiz on what you need to know to approach the subject of this class intelligently.
Tuesday, Feburary 5: Upland minority mixed farmers
We will be approaching this third variety of local ecology through two resources, Janet Sturgeon's work among the Akha in China--in this case on the Yunnan-Burma border, and in Thailand, as described in your required text Border Landscapes, and my own work among the Nuosu of the Liangshan region of southwestern Sichuan. We will concentrate both on the ecology and especially on the ethno-ecology, or the ways that local people see and understand their own environment.
For the Akha case, read pages 1-72 of Border Landscapes or, if you want, read the whole thing for today; the rest of the book will be assigned for February 19. For the Nuosu case, which I will present in detail in a PowerPoint lecture today, I will also prepare a short summary of Nuosu Ethnoecology and Ecohistory which will cover much of the same material.
CLASS HOME PAGE
CLASS SCHEDULE
|
