Making nature in southwest China: Transnational notions of landscape and ethnicity.

This dissertation examines the shifting contemporary politics of nature in Southwest China's Yunnan Province. In this dissertation, I analyze the larger social field of these politics, including relationships among local residents of protected areas, global conservation non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Chinese officials and Chinese experts. I situate these relationships within a larger historical frame. Specifically I argue that the conservation sciences underwent a sea change during the 1980s and 1990s, particularly in rethinking human-environmental relationships. I use the term epistemic thaw to describe this change, distinguishing it from Thomas Kuhn's notion of a paradigm shift. Unlike a paradigm shift, an epistemic thaw is spatially and temporally uneven. Likewise, rather than creating an absolute, wholesale shift in thinking, the epistemic thaw expanded the range of environmental understandings. Before the thaw, almost all conservation organizations saw local people as peasants; later, however, some organizations regarded certain groups as indigenous peoples with non-antagonistic relationships to the environment, who therefore deserved enhanced sets of rights. To explore this phenomenon, I examined two international conservation NGOs in Yunnan, one in Lijiang and one in Xishuangbanna Prefecture. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) held highly divergent notions of local people. Eighteen months of ethnographic and archival research reveals how, from 1987--1996, WWF moved away from its previous view of regarding local people as peasants. The study also shows how TNC, from 1998--2002, treated some groups as peasants and others as indigenous, the latter category representing a novel social category in China. While much scholarship on indigenous peoples tends to reify that category, this study traces the changes in how rural groups were understood and redefined within domestic and global arenas. The study also challenges two major assertions in the critical development literature: international organizations are able to unilaterally impose their projects, and local residents inevitably resist outside interventions. Rather, the study suggests that locals selectively engage by actively resisting and assimilating development plans, and forging potential alliances within and alongside projects. The study sheds new light on understanding transnational cultural encounters by using an approach that is attentive to difference and transformation.PhDCultural anthropologyEnvironmental scienceHealth and Environmental SciencesSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/126436/2/3253284.pd