The first publication to come out of this project has landed! My article “Planting and its Discontents: or How Nomads Produced Spaces of Resistance in China’s Erstwhile Xikang Province” appeared in issue 3 of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities. The issue’s special theme is “environmental humanities from below,” and it emerged from an environmental history symposium at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2014, though several more authors joined the issue after that.

Click here for a pre-print version of the article.

“Planting and its Discontents” makes the argument that nomadism in the Kham region was inherently subversive in the context of China’s fervently agrarian politics during the early twentieth century. But who or what exactly was subverting the state? I make the case that the culprit wasn’t just the “friction of terrain,” to use James C. Scott’s phrase, but nor was it just indigenous Khampa defiance. Instead, ecological characteristics of Khampa nomadic pastoralism gave it the upper hand over agriculture above 3,500 meters where grain was no longer viable, making it difficult for China’s modern bureaucracy to function in those spaces–including the carceral system.