In recent years, there has been an efflorescence of excellent work in the social sciences regarding the role played by non-human actors in human social landscapes. Similarly fruitful avenues of enquiry have included those which have investigated the multi-faceted nature of environmentalist discourse, the political deployment of the concept of ‘indigeneity’, and the complex role (or roles) played by ‘the state’ (whatever that means) in areas marginal to the core of contemporary nation-building projects. With an ethnographic focus on the camel herders and other inhabitants of Alasha, in China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR), Thomas White's excellent book is a worthy contribution to these and other debates: a work of exemplary clarity and richness of insight, written with a keen eye for nuances of ethnographic detail and telling instances of linguistic slippage – a fascinating exchange sees a flash of anger from one of his interlocutors regarding the difference between ‘protected animals’ and ‘protected livestock’ in Chinese state regulations – but whose scholarly acuity is tempered by a welcome dose of humanity – interlocutors are often, straightforwardly, referred to as ‘friends’ – and even humour. A long disquisition about the nature of camels as ‘social infrastructure’, facilitating connections between herders across ethnic and linguistic boundaries, ends with a picture of a camel acting as ‘social infrastructure’ by lying on the ground while a herder lounges against it, the animal's face a picture of glacial unconcern. This is, as I say, an excellent book. White's focus, throughout, is on the question of what it means for Alasha – a particularly impoverished and arid part of Inner Mongolia – to have been designated ‘China's Camel Country’: what it means for the herders who live there; what it means for the Chinese government (and the ex-officials that White evocatively describes as living in ‘the penumbra of the state’); and what it means for those of us who are interested in the political economy of the environment in China, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Through six chapters, White delineates various transformations that have taken place in Alasha's camel-herding landscape. First, he describes how herding itself has changed from a putatively backward economic practice of the Mongol ethnic minority into a valorized cultural practice of the Alasha grassland peoples (whose ethnicities are erased). Next, we hear of how rituals associated with herding have been transformed from religious practices into ‘cultural’ ones. The third chapter, less explicitly concerned with transformations in the minds of the people of Alasha and perhaps more with transformations in the minds of White's readers, is about how camel herding – and the agency of camels themselves – structures rural sociality in Alasha, and often does so in ways that run contrary to stereotypes about pre-existing ethnic and linguistic divisions. The final three chapters then delineate, in turn, the erasure of camels as labouring animals (and their reconfiguration as ideally ‘wild’), the commodification of camels’ bodies (and their transformation from taboo foodstuff into organic wild health food), and the simultaneous but contradictory attempt to transform camels into dairy animals, amenable to machine milking and further domestication. The book then concludes with some meditations on the future, and the present difficulties faced by many herders in the face of economic and infrastructural upheaval. Throughout, the book's conspicuous achievement is that it clarifies contradictions without abolishing them – put another way, that it preserves complexity without simply leaving it where it is, without shrinking from the task of analysing and deconstructing it. We are left not with a simplified picture of the contradictions faced by Alasha's Camel Country – caught between the need to preserve the ‘ancient genetic material’ of the camels, and to ‘modernize’ camel breeds; caught between the need to domesticate camels for milking, and the ideal sense that camels are valuable because they are ‘semi-wild’; and so on – but rather with a complex picture delivered in higher resolution, with the contrast turned up. Another analogy: faced with a tangle of wool made up of many different threads, of many colours, White proceeds to carefully and methodically highlight each colour, one by one – not insisting on untangling the chaos, but simply providing a hugely clarified vision of what the chaos contains. What emerges is a fascinating account of a place and its people occupying multiple positions, on many different frontiers – of nation, of science, of ecology; an account that brings a great deal of light without a great deal of undue noise. As a result, what might seem a subject of somewhat expert interest becomes simultaneously an excellent introduction, for any student of social anthropology, to various hugely important fields: to the political economics of the environment; to the politics of ethnic division in contemporary China; and to the role that animals play in the construction of human societies, the human navigation of human lives. And it has jokes in it. As I say: it's an excellent book.
Theo Hughes‐Morgan (Fri,) studied this question.