Beyond Great Walls: Environment, Identity, and Development on the Chinese Grasslands of Inner Mongolia
Beyond Great Walls: Environment, Identity, and Development on the Chinese Grasslands of Inner Mongolia
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DOI：
10.5860/choice.40-1005
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发表时间：
2002
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Dee Mack Williams
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Dee Mack Williams
这是一个蒙古牧民社区的民族志研究，他们自1980年以来经历了戏剧性的环境和社会变革。它提供了一个难得的窗口，让我们得以观察到一个迷人而重要的现代中国地区，尽管这个地区遥远且研究相对不足，并记录了一些非集体化和经济发展带来的意想不到的有害后果。最初，本书提出了一个土地退化的案例研究，并展示了在地方、国家和国际层面上相互竞争的社会和文化力量如何积极地塑造了这一过程。更广泛地说，它关注现代化的本地经验，以及边缘化人群创造性地利用外来技术来服务于他们自己的种族认同和文化更新的方式。这本书旨在通过探索中国/蒙古、农民/牧民、私人/集体、发展/保护、西方/亚洲、科学/土著等象征性二分法之间的重大紧张关系，加深我们对环境变化作为一个社会过程的理解。本文认为，地方景观的重建离不开经济不安全和政治恐惧的社会背景，也离不开群体认同和环境象征主义的文化背景。事实证明，对土地的意识形态认知在国际发展议程、国家草原政策和当地生产的日常实践的形成和竞争中都具有高度相关性。在展示中国草原上的各种物质和象征利害关系时，这本书表明，人类与土地的相互作用涉及全球范围内的社会层面，其复杂性被广泛低估了。自始至终，作者从他广泛的田野调查中汲取灵感，用尖锐的（有时是幽默的）轶事和传记小品来丰富他的研究。
This is an ethnographic study of a community of Mongolian herders who have been undergoing dramatic environmental and social transformations since 1980. It provides a rare window of observation into a fascinating and important, though remote and relatively understudied, region of modern China, and documents some of the unintended harmful consequences of decollectivization and economic development.Initially, the book presents a case study of land degradation and shows how competing social and cultural forces at the local, national, and international level actively shape that process. More broadly, it focuses on local experiences of modernization and the ways that marginalized people creatively appropriate alien technologies to serve their own ethnic identity and cultural renewal.The book aims to deepen our understanding of environmental change as a social process by exploring significant tensions between such symbolic dichotomies as Chinese/Mongol, farmer/herder, private/collective, development/conservation, Western/Asian, and scientific/indigenous. It argues that the reconstruction of local landscape cannot be separated from the social context of economic insecurity and political fear, nor from the cultural context of group identity and environmental symbolism. Ideologically informed perceptions of the land prove to be highly relevant in both shaping and contesting international development agendas, national grassland policies, and the daily practices of local production.In presenting the full range of material and symbolic stakes now in play on the Chinese grasslands, the book demonstrates that human-land interactions involve social dimensions on a global scale of widely underestimated complexity. Throughout, the author draws from his extensive fieldwork to enrich his study with poignant (and sometimes humorous) anecdotes and biographical sketches.