Livestock, Heritage, and Nation-Building in Inner Mongolia

China today positions itself as a model of state-led environmentalism. On the country’s arid rangelands, grassland conservation policies have targeted pastoralists and their animals, blamed for causing desertification. State environmentalism — in the form of grazing bans, enclosure, and resettlement — has transformed the lives of many ethnic minority herders in China’s western borderlands. This talk shows how such policies have been contested and negotiated on the ground, in the context of the state’s intensifying nation-building project. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Alasha, in the far west of China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Thomas White describes how ethnic Mongols have foregrounded the local breed of Bactrian camel, mobilizing ideas of cultural heritage and resource conservation to defend pastoralism. However, this cultural politics of livestock conservation was inevitably shaped by the post-ethnic sensibilities of the contemporary Chinese state.

The speaker is Thomas White, lecturer in China and Sustainable Development at the…