Landscape Transformation on the Chinese Borderlands: The Shift from Pastoralism to Intensive Agriculture in Modern Eastern Inner Mongolia

• In Event: Frontiers in Late Imperial and Modern Asia: From Inner Mongolia to the East Asian Sea

Abstract

This presentation will explore the impacts of the transformation of the landscape on expressions of identity in twentieth century Eastern Inner Mongolia. Building on Lattimore’s insight on the fluidity of frontiers, which are often coterminous with landscape and patterns of economic organization, the present research sheds light on the dialectical relation between territory and identity. Drawing from an ethnographic study stint in the Tongliao area in Eastern Inner Mongolia, I examine the recent shift from pastoralism to intensive agriculture, which radically transformed the landscape and disrupted previous forms of socio-economic organization. My ethnographical material that brings together local cults, housing, means of transportations, mineral exploitation and agricultural machinery shows how this territorial reorganization transformed people’s very relation to the land. First, I examine the division of the Mongol territory in bounded parcels of land and its impacts on social organization. Second, I explore how the new land divisions led to the displacement of identity markers in the territory, such as animals, local cults, and trees. I show that non-productive and symbolic elements were excluded from the public spaces, which fostered the homogenization of the territory. I argue that the shift from pastoralism to intensive agriculture induced a new form of power domination over the land, which became perceived and used by local people as an unifunctional productive asset. Finally, I show that the transformation of the territory in a way that aligned its function with the dominant form of socio-economic organization framed identities by reshaping social norms, power relations, and everyday life practices.

Author

• Anne-Sophie Pratte, Harvard University