Unit 4 Readings

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READING
Here's a state of things
How did it get this way?
Local Communities
Dev Rev Modernity
Environmental Problems
The Future

WRITING
How did it get this way?
Local Communities
Dev Rev Modernity
Environmental Problems
The Future

Readings for Unit 4: MODERNITY, DEVELOPMENT, REVOLUTION

If there was an uneasy conflict between, on the one side, sustainability and resilience as embodied however imperfectly in the ethnoecology of traditional local communities, and on the other side the aims of the imperial state, the conflict became much sharper and unequal, and the interval of sustainability much less, when the Communists took over. This section first looks at the ideals of the Communist Party-State and then shows the effects on local communities of policies derived from these ideals.

Wednesday, November 2: Socialism, Modernity, and Environmental Havoc

Whatever the Chinese Communists were thinking, they were, in James Scott's words, "Seeing Like a State." So start out reading his chapter from that book on Authoritarian High Modernism, and then, with this in mind, start reading your required text, Judith Shapiro's Mao's War Against Nature as an example of high modernism. Read as much as you can for today, but finish the book before you start on the paper for this unit.

In class, we will discuss the relationship of socialism to other types of High Modernism, and try to figure out if what happened in China is significantly different from what happened in capitalist countries when they trashed their own environments as they industrialized.

Monday, November 7: Han Chinese Farmers Now

As soon as the Communists took over China in 1949, they began trying various top-down ways of increasing food supply, particularly grain production. Here we will look at the effects on, and reaction by, local communities.

We can begin with a local account of the Great Leap Forward and ensuing famine that you have been reading about in Shapiro's book: A Life and Death Struggle from Edward Friedman, Mark Selden, and Paul Pickowicz's Chinese Village, Socialist State.
Then, for an experiential picture of what rice farming was like with a few major changes in the first part of the 21st century, read What does the material village world look like? from Goncalo Duro dos Santos's dissertation about a north Guangdong village.
Then look at an outstanding (though it's incomplete, as are all web pages produced by amateurs and academics) web-based ethnography of a village in Sichuan, compiled by Pamela Leonard and John Flower.
Finally, have a look at a presentation on how the state is trying to turn farmers into scientists, by Huang Yu.

On the basis of this and other material, we will talk about many facets of the changes in the ecology of Chinese rural communities, including the role of scientific management and how it harks back to our discussions of the pastoralists.

Wedensday, November 9: Upland Minorities Now

Back to the Akha and the Nuosu. Read the rest of Border Landscapes, and listen to me talk about the Ecohistory of the Baiwu Valley in terms relating explicitly to sustainability and resilience. I will also talk about opportunities for cooperative research in Sichuan.

Monday, November 16: Pastoralists Now

There seems to be a particularly sharp conflict, as James Scott would predict, between pastoralism, with its fluid movements of people and animals across the landscape, and the High Modernist projects of classifying and boxing in. Dee Williams has written provocatively about this conflict in Inner Mongolia; read his Representations of Nature on the Mongolian Steppe.

More recently, Astrid Cerny received her Ph.D. in geography from the UW, for a study of Kazak nomadic pastoralists in Xinjiang as they face various aspects of modernization, globalization, etc. Read a chapter from her dissertation, One Family's Decisions in the Face of Change, and also have a look at The Grassland Law of the PRC.

Finally, no discussion of pastoralism in China would be complete without reference to Tibet. Read about the blame game in R.B. Harris's Rangeland degradation on the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau.

You will notice a certain consistency in these articles. We can talk in class about whether the "blame the government and its pseudo-science" is as facile an explanation as "blame the greedy, ignorant herders."