Workshop Program

Day 1 – Saturday, February 20, 2021 | 10:45 am – 1 pm EST

Welcome address by Prasenjit Duara, Duke University, 10.45 am – 11:00 am

An Amphibious World: Living in between Land and Water along the Yangzi of Late Imperial and Modern China
Yan Gao, University of Memphis (Formerly at Duke University)
Presentation time: 11.00 am-11.30 am
Discussant: Sucheta Mazumdar – 11.30 am- 11.45 am

This paper focuses on the local communities that lived in between land and water in Central Yangzi region of late imperial China. It analyses the ecological systems for agricultural cultivation and fishing in a flood prone area and how local people developed an amphibious lifestyle to cope with frequent flooding and drainage problems. It argues that water was integral to social institutions as well as cultural practices of this region. As an attempt for an intertwined analysis of materiality and social construction, this empirical study provides a case seeing an amphibious world in late imperial China in which space, lifestyle, and social activities were organized through water and influenced by the materiality of water. This paper also discusses how Manchus and Mongols, who migrated to Central China during the Qing, adapted to the amphibious environments, and how the “amphibiality” of the region was crucial in shaping the relationship between the Central Yangzi and the Qing state. As this paper shows, when the environments were more amphibious, local people had more autonomy; when the amphibious lives were pushed to the margins, so was the autonomy of the locals.

Deltas as in between ecotones: The Sundarbans of littoral South Asia
Debojyoti Das, Sussex University (Current SSRC Fellow)
Presentation time: 11.45 am-12.15 pm
Discussant: Prasenjit Duara, Duke University – 12.15 pm- 12.30 pm

Life in the Bay of Bengal delta is like the edge of a knife. The area is environmentally vulnerable, densely populated and ecologically susceptible to natural disasters such as cyclones, tsunamis and floods. Deltas were once the facilitators of trade and commerce in Asia till land transportation overtook inland navigation and state building practices made these landscapes peripheral to the national imagination. A transdisciplinary approach, which highlights the socio-economic, political, cultural and ecological aspects of interaction, is essential to understanding the multiple facets of deltas and coastal regions in Asia. The objective of the paper is to test the colonial and post-colonial imagination of the Sundarban delta as a land-based, revenue reserve, and paddy frontier by focusing on and re-imagining deltas as a ‘connected’ ecological waterscape and cultural milieu shaped by amorphous interplay of land and water ecologies. Though delta remain anonymous and discrete geographical features within ‘area studies’, they have historically shaped connected worlds between land and water through tributaries and backwaters that unite maritime and terrestrial sites enabling circulation, mobility and spatial histories. The paper will particularly focus on the ‘little’ and ‘great’ tradition advanced by American anthropologists such as Robert Redfield, Milton Singer and McKim Marriott and develop a critique of the concept by reflecting on the liminal religious and syncretic cultural practices that blur such old-fashioned distinctions. This will in turn figure the significance of ‘ecotones’ and ‘third space’ in understanding hybrid landscapes.

Q and A session: 12.30 pm -1.00 p.m. 

Day 2, Sunday February 21, 2021 | 10:00 am – 1 pm EST

Regimes of Governance at the Forest Edge: the Case of Kenya
Ross Anthony, Stellenbosch University (current SSRC fellow)
Presentation time: 10.00 am-10.30 am
Discussant: Rohan D’souza, Kyoto University – 10.30 am- 10.45 am

 While ecotones are often conceptualized as spatial zones broaching at least two ecosystems, the definition may also refer to the way in which such zones shift over time. Using post-independence Kenya as an example, this paper traces the shifting boundary between forests and anthropogenic landscapes and how such transformations are inextricably bound to both regimes of governance and broader geopolitical contexts. Under the Kenyatta senior and Moi regimes, large tracts of forest were irregularly degazetted and doled out to cronies and supporters, leading to massive deforestation. Since the early 2000s, this trend has been subject to a reversal, with the expulsion of settlers, revocation of title deeds, reforestation and the setting up of community forest organizations. However, the increased tightening of forest boundaries has occurred in tandem with a significant increase in the number of new infrastructure projects which run through forests and other wilderness areas. A primary reason for this is cost: building road and rail through wilderness areas side-steps the issue of buying up numerous parcels of private land. This latter development can be situated within the context of an increasingly technocratic ‘green’ governmentality discourse, which lumps together eco-system rehabilitation and economic development and is actualized primarily by Chinese actors, who fund and implement the majority of these projects. The earlier and current Kenyan governments thus deploy the logic of exceptional status – albeit in different forms – both of which determine the shifting contours of the forest edge. In this vein, the paper argues that shifting ecotones and shifting forms of governance can, in certain contexts, function as two sides of the same coin.

A Fearsome Land of Ice and Sand: The Gobi Desert and the Ecologies of Buddhism
Matthew King, University of California-Riverside (former SSRC Fellow)
Presentation time: 10.45 am-11.15 am
Discussant: Micah Muscolino, UCSD – 11.15 am – 11.30 am

The Gobi Desert is a formidable space of connection and obstruction spread across Asia’s heartland. Antiquarian trading routes and city-states we today know as the Silk Road perilously threaded across its sands, rock, ice, and grasses. Eurasian peoples confronted one another along its corridors since before recorded history, and its mute landscapes have witnessed countless claims upon its ferocious reaches, from Turkic horseman to Chinese emperors, Arab Caliphs, Tibetan tsen po, Mongolian khagans, British, Japanese, and Russian imperial forces, to the PRC’s Belt and Road Initiative. All the global history that has been made in the Gobi has been beholden to the harshness of its landscape eastern desert steppe to the Alashan plateau and the Dzungarian basin, which is all in effect a vast ecotone of rain shadows stranded behind the Tibetan plateau which blocks precipitation from the Indian Ocean, extended between Mongolia’s fertile grasslands, the Taklamakan Desert, the Hexi Corridor, and the North China Plain. While the Gobi has been holy ground for many religious traditions over the ages, for some two thousand years it has been a site for innovating Buddhist life for communities spread between China and Pakistan, Tibet and Siberia, Japan and Persia. This paper sets out to examine the Gobi beyond the territorial fixities of area studies and by adopting feminist and indigenous critiques that require seeing cultural formation as relational to land. I explore ways that the topographical and climatic affordances of the Gobi was never simply a stage but a protagonist in the production of Buddhist life in Asia’s heartland.

Beyond the Battle for Vị Long:  Đại Cồ Việt- Dali-Song Engagement in the Dong World within a World Historical Perspective
James A. Anderson, UNC-Greensboro
Presentation time: 11.30 am-12.00 pm
Discussant: Micah Muscolino, UC San Diego – 12.00 pm – 12.15 pm

The 1014-1015 battle for Vị Long 渭龍native prefecture (modern-day Tuyên Quang 宣光 province, Vietnam), culminating in the capture and execution of the native prefect Hà Trắc Tuấn何昃俊, can be seen as a conflict triggered by border trade.  However, the Dali kingdom of Southwestern China and the Vietnamese  Đại Cồ Việt kingdom were also competing for control of Vị Long and all the other jimi 羈縻 native prefectures in the borderlands between the two states, while these native communities were fighting for dominance over each other.  A part of the Tai-speaking “Dong 峒World” region, the northern borderlands of the Đại Cồ Việt kingdom was a mountainous region with steep terrain. This region shared its topography with the southeast corner of the Dali Kingdom and acted as an ecotone area transition between the uplands Dong World riverine communities and the largely lowland Đại Cồ Việt kingdom.  As Li Weizhen notes in a recent article that the native communities of this region were inextricably linked with the Nanzhao’s local governance by the end of this kingdom’s reign. Li argues that shared ethnic origins of the Dali leadership explains why the borderlands communities between Dali and Đại Cồ Việt were more accepting of Dali rule, but as we will see in this paper that the native elite also more easily abandoned their support for Dali when faced with an even larger power in the arrival of Mongol forces.  This paper compares the events surrounding Hà Trắc Tuấn and the conflict at Vị Long Prefecture with the efforts of Nùng Trí Cao 儂智高 (ca. 1025-1055) and his followers to carve out an autonomous polity in the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands several decades later.  Hà Trắc Tuấn and Nùng Trí Cao both had impacts on the relationship between the Dali and Lý and Song courts, but the outcome of these conflicts differed, based on the relative strength of the three larger states involved.  The 1014-1015 battle for Vị Long Prefecture led directly to Nùng Trí Cao’s three failed rebellions, which in turn brought about changes on the Vietnamese borderlands that culminated in the 1075-1076 war between Đại Việt kingdom and the Song empire.  The general characteristic of these borderlands’ engagements appears elsewhere in Asia and in geopolitics worldwide in more recent times.  This paper will explore some comparisons in a world historical framework.

Q and A session 12.15 pm -12.45 pm 

Closing remarks 12.45 pm -1.00 pm
Sucheta Mazumdar, Duke University