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Papers by Thomas White

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2023

Representations of the friction of terrain play a significant role in the production of the terri... more Representations of the friction of terrain play a significant role in the production of the territorial imagination in contemporary China. As infrastructure and its attendant promises are rolled out to once-remote corners of the nation, the state has sought to memorialize the heroic experience of the friction of terrain during the Chinese Revolution and subsequent projects of territorial incorporation in Inner Asia, before the proliferation of durable infrastructure. At the same time, even as the Chinese state deploys increasingly high-tech, disembodied means to police its bor- ders, representations of charismatic transport animals used to patrol select sections of these borders have circulated in various media. This article argues that the mobility of animal bodies is deployed to produce a distinctive form of territorial imagination in China, one which foregrounds the friction of terrain at certain sites, and conjures up state fantasies of interspecies relations as/ and interethnic friendship. While much recent scholarly literature focusses on the collocation of infrastructure and state power, this article calls for attention to the ways in which states can also mobilize representations of selected sites of roadlessness, and concomitant animal-based mobilities.

Roadsides, 2022

In their introduction to this collection, Thomas White and Emilia Sułek argue that while animal l... more In their introduction to this collection, Thomas White and Emilia Sułek argue that while animal life and death have been transformed by the expansion of infrastructures, animal life itself can sometimes be understood as a vital part of infrastructural configurations.

Cosmopolitical Ecologies Across Asia: Places and Practices of Power in Changing Environments, 2021

China’s postsocialist reform era has witnessed the revival of numerous forms of religious practi... more China’s postsocialist reform era has witnessed the revival of numerous forms of religious
practice in its minority-inhabited borderlands. These are often rendered acceptable to the
secular state by being framed as examples of ‘cultural heritage’, which is increasingly
understood in regional rather than merely ethnic terms. This chapter draws on an
ethnography of a ritual to venerate a sacred mountain in western Inner Mongolia, at which a Mongol lama criticized state officials in attendance for allowing mining projects near this mountain, while also admonishing lay Mongol elites for their errors in conducting the ritual. This chapter uses this lama’s speech to think through what notions of ‘cosmopolitics’ can do for our understanding of postsocialist religious revival in the context of contested ecologies, but also uses this Inner Mongolian case to point some lacunae in the broader literature on cosmopolitics. Attention to the way in which other-than-humans are made political reveals the regionalization of culture in this Chinese borderland to be a contested project, and highlights the tensions between different forms of minority leadership. At the same time, the chapter argues for the need to attend to the particular conditions, and forms of subjectivity, which enable cosmopolitical speech in contexts where the ability to ‘make public’ other-than-humans cannot be taken for granted.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2021

In the name of ‘ecological civilization’, the Chinese state has sought to adjust the ecologies of... more In the name of ‘ecological civilization’, the Chinese state has sought to adjust the ecologies of its degraded northern grasslands, using market instruments, such as payments for ecosystem services, to induce ethnic minority pastoralists to pursue non‐herding livelihoods. In the far west of Inner Mongolia, the resultant decline in the availability of rural labour has meant that most domestic camels that remain on the rangelands are now left largely unmanaged throughout the year. Local Mongol officials and intellectuals have long regarded extensive animal husbandry as a bulwark against Mongol dispossession through Chinese agricultural expansion. This article shows how they now make use of dominant ecological and market rationalities to articulate their defence of this form of land use, by figuring these ‘semi‐wild’ camels as providers of ecosystem services. In doing so, however, their proposals bypass the figure of the culture‐possessing rural minority subject, which in this region is associated with training and working with camels, and which has been fostered by the cultural heritage policies of the reform era. Divergent understandings of the ‘wildness’ of nonhumans thus reveal tensions between ecological and cultural politics at China's margins, and anxieties surrounding the rural minority subject in the context of new modes of environmental governance.

Society & Space, 2020

In this short essay I show how recent approaches to infrastructure and to human-nonhuman relation... more In this short essay I show how recent approaches to infrastructure and to human-nonhuman relations across the social sciences can help us to sketch out a political road ecology.

https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/road-ecology

Ethnographies of Islam in China, 2021

Eurasian Geography and Economics, 2020

China’s Belt and Road Initiative has led to an efflorescence of interest in the heritage of the “... more China’s Belt and Road Initiative has led to an efflorescence of interest in the heritage of the “Silk Road,” both in China and abroad. In this article, I approach the BRI and its associated “Silk Road fever” ethnographically, discussing its effects on a particular region of China. What was once characterized in official discourse as a “remote border region” is now recovering its history of camel-based connectivity, and using this to imagine its future development. I situate this Silk Road discourse within the context of the politics of land, ethnicity, and the environment in a Chinese border region. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in this region, and analysis of local publications, the article shows how this discourse provides ethnic Mongol elites in the west of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region with resources to defend pastoralist livelihoods threatened by the state’s recent grassland conservation policies. I thus show how the BRI’s spatial imaginary is “domesticated” in a particular part of China, and shine a light on the spatial politics which this imaginary – and the nonhumans involved in it – affords.

What role do nonhuman animals play in human social life? This question has long interested anthro... more What role do nonhuman animals play in human social life? This question has long interested anthropologists, who have provided various answers, themselves reflective of broader theoretical trends within the discipline. For much of the twentieth century, animals were regarded as material and/or conceptual resources for humans, with different anthropologists regarding one or the other aspect as more important. More recently, anthropologists have sought to incorporate animals into their accounts as participants in human social life, rather than merely resources. Such approaches question the human exceptionalism of conventional social scientific thinking. Given the roots of sociocultural anthropology in this exceptionalism, however, attempts to move beyond it within the discipline encounter certain methodological and analytic problems, the proposed solutions to which have taken a variety of forms.

In recent years pastoral regions of western China have been subjected to significant spatial tran... more In recent years pastoral regions of western China have been subjected to significant spatial transformation in the name of economic development and environmental protection. Scholarly accounts of these regions have often focused on the state’s efforts to sedentarise herding households; this article, however, examines the significance of the administrative recategorisation of a pastoral district and the relocation of its centre, in line with the state’s policy of creating towns in rural areas. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Alasha, in the west of Inner Mongolia, I show how this particular transformation involved the combination of elements from two distinct spatial formations which characterised state territorialisation in this part of China in the early socialist period: the pastoral district or commune, and the military-agricultural colony. While much recent literature has highlighted the enduring legacy of pre-socialist spatiality in the face of the modern state’s projects of spatial reconfiguration, this article attends to the ways in which the spatial transformations of the early socialist period continue to reverberate today. I show how, for local ethnic Mongolians, the meanings inscribed upon the landscape during this period, and the infrastructural orientations which were established then, today sit awkwardly with official visions of an urban future.

Special issues by Thomas White

Special Issue by Thomas White

Inner Asia, 2020

Within this issue our focus is on human relations with animals in the domestic sphere (or domus) ... more Within this issue our focus is on human relations with animals in the domestic sphere (or domus) in Inner Asia. In the existing academic literature, there has been greater attention paid to human-nonhuman relations in North Asia (or Siberia), often between hunter and prey animal. The intention of this special issue is to ask what we can learn about relations between humans and domestic animals when we shift the focus to Inner Asia, a region that has long been characterized by multispecies pastoralism. The various contributors to this issue have conducted research across a broad swathe of Inner Asia, from Buryatia in the south east of Siberia (Oehler), Mongolia (Bumochir et. al., Charlier, Fijn, Hutchins, Swancutt), Inner Mongolia (White), Qinghai (Bumochir) to the south west of China (Swancutt).