CAREER: Culture and Conservation: Transnational Environmentalism, Sacred Lands, and Community Organizations in Tibet

职业：文化与保护：西藏的跨国环保主义、圣地和社区组织

• 批准号: 0847722
• 负责人: Emily Yeh
• 金额: $ 49.08万
• 依托单位: University of Colorado at Boulder
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2009-07-01 至 2015-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0847722&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Culture; Conservation; Transnational; Environmentalism

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Under what conditions do people become environmentalists? What causes translocal and transnational efforts to protect biodiversity to be adopted and connected with local interests? What are the implications of trends in global conservation practice toward both scaling-up and relying on community and non-governmental organizations? This Faculty Career Early-Development (CAREER) award will support basic research and educational activities that address these questions. The research to be pursued will advance basic understanding of the emergence of environmentalism and the encounter between transnational conservation projects and locally situated actors through a systematic examination of the recent proliferation of community environmental organizations and articulations of environmental identities on the Tibetan Plateau in the context of new transnational biodiversity conservation efforts and a growing Chinese environmental movement. More specifically, the investigator will examine the interplay of translocal and transnational efforts to save China's biodiversity through the declaration of biodiversity hotspots, community-based conservation initiatives, and mobilization of elements of Tibetan traditional culture and religion, particularly sacred lands. Using ethnographic and other qualitative methods, including textual analysis and interviews and participant observation with Chinese environmentalists, conservation staff, and grassroots Tibetan community organizations across four provinces over a period of five years, the investigator will examine the cultural and political implications of promoting culture as conservation, thereby contributing to knowledge about globalization by tracing the ways in which environmental ideas travel and are adopted and articulated with local interests in particular times and places. As both biodiversity loss and global efforts to prevent it intensify, the theoretical implications of the study will be useful for a wide variety of settings. The research will contribute to the interdisciplinary field of political ecology by improving basic understanding of transnational biodiversity conservation efforts, environmental identities, and the relationship between sacred landscapes, indigenous identities, and environmental protection. It will be the first study of China's environmental movement that goes in depth beyond a handful of NGOs and activists based in Beijing and Yunnan and that examines the key role of Tibetan culture and nature in its formation. Furthermore, it should provide a new way of analyzing the environmental movement and globalization in China beyond standard framings of civil society and democratization on the one hand and neoliberalism on the other. In addition, the project has a significant educational component, including a new undergraduate class that will enhance students' knowledge about theories and debates in human and nature-society geography through learning about Tibet. The award also will provide learning and research opportunities for four undergraduates, including underrepresented minorities, who will participate in summer research with environmental activists in China. The project also will produce an ethnographic film about grassroots environmentalism in Tibet, which will be suitable for use in geography and anthropology classes for teaching about cultures of nature and issues of representation of the nature-society relationship. Two doctoral students will be educated and trained, and project results will be disseminated to scholarly audiences as well as to educators and conservation organizations in both the U.S. and China.

该奖项根据 2009 年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法 111-5）提供资金。人们在什么条件下成为环保主义者？ 是什么导致跨地方和跨国的生物多样性保护努力被采纳并与地方利益联系起来？ 全球保护实践的趋势对扩大规模和依赖社区和非政府组织有何影响？ 该教师职业早期发展（CAREER）奖将支持解决这些问题的基础研究和教育活动。 即将开展的研究将在新的跨国生物多样性保护努力和不断发展的中国环境运动的背景下，通过对最近社区环境组织的扩散和青藏高原环境特征的阐述进行系统研究，增进对环保主义的出现以及跨国保护项目与当地参与者之间的相遇的基本理解。 更具体地说，调查人员将通过宣布生物多样性热点、基于社区的保护举措以及动员西藏传统文化和宗教元素（特别是圣地）来研究跨地方和跨国努力拯救中国生物多样性的相互作用。 研究者将利用民族志和其他定性方法，包括文本分析、访谈以及对四个省份的中国环保人士、保护工作人员和基层藏族社区组织在五年内的参与观察，研究促进文化保护的文化和政治影响，从而通过追踪环境思想在特定时间和地点传播、被采纳和与当地利益相结合的方式，为全球化知识做出贡献。随着生物多样性丧失和全球防止生物多样性丧失的努力不断加强，这项研究的理论意义将适用于各种环境。 该研究将通过提高对跨国生物多样性保护工作、环境特征以及神圣景观、土著特征和环境保护之间关系的基本了解，为政治生态学的跨学科领域做出贡献。 这将是对中国环境运动的首次研究，其深度超出了北京和云南的少数非政府组织和活动人士的范围，并探讨了西藏文化和自然在其形成过程中的关键作用。此外，它应该提供一种新的方式来分析中国的环境运动和全球化，一方面超越公民社会和民主化的标准框架，另一方面超越新自由主义的标准框架。 此外，该项目还具有重要的教育成分，包括一个新的本科课程，该课程将通过了解西藏来增强学生对人类和自然社会地理学的理论和辩论的了解。 该奖项还将为四名本科生提供学习和研究机会，其中包括代表性不足的少数族裔，他们将与中国的环保活动人士一起参加夏季研究。 该项目还将制作一部关于西藏草根环保主义的民族志电影，该电影适合在地理和人类学课程中使用，用于教授自然文化和自然与社会关系的表征问题。 两名博士生将接受教育和培训，项目成果将向美国和中国的学术受众以及教育工作者和保护组织传播。