Dan Smyer Yü | Yunnan University (original) (raw)
Videos by Dan Smyer Yü
Ensouling the Mountain [documentary 55 min., a rough cut] Directed by Dan Smyer Yu This ethnogr... more Ensouling the Mountain
[documentary 55 min., a rough cut]
Directed by Dan Smyer Yu
This ethnographic film documents a pilgrimage of lamas, scholars, writers, filmmakers, and students to Mt. Amne Machen (Amne Machin) located in Golok, Amdo, currently in Qinghai Province of China. Most pilgrims, as an integral part of the film crew, are both behind and forefront of different scenes. The film crew pulls its focus on how Amne Machen symbolizes home, belonging, and humanization of natural landscapes. As Amne Machen is known as lha-ri or "soul-mountain" to which local communities and prominent historical figures entrust their collective memories, the sense of home and place-making are the primary topics of the pilgrims' reflections. Through the narratives of the pilgrims and cinematic capturing of the awe-inspiring landscape of the mountain, this film relives powerfully gripping moments when place becomes a placeless, flowing cultural consciousness in the minds of the pilgrims.
39 views
Papers by Dan Smyer Yü
The Extractive Industries and Society, 2024
Serving as a regional assessment of China's ongoing mining and application of REEs, this article ... more Serving as a regional assessment of China's ongoing mining and application of REEs, this article addresses the concurrence of green transition and environmental degradation contextualized in the global sphere of the Critical Mineral mining and application. It narrates a history of China's developmental strategies for REEs mining and production since the late 1970s and addresses the environmental outcomes from the state-determined, globalized national economy and the state-initiated environmental regulations on domestic REEs mining. Focusing on a historical assessment of China's geopolitically-strategized Critical Mineral production and the high environmental cost of the REEs-based green transition, this article discusses how UN's concept of sustainable development is being indigenized in China through the Chinese state's policy practices as well as through the receptiveness of the Chinese populace, and supports the ongoing argument of just transition as an unjust energy transition creating unjustified environmental dispossession, particularly in the local societies in China and elsewhere in the world.
Religion & Development , 2023
The environmental engagement of religious practices and academic research is becoming a formidabl... more The environmental engagement of religious practices and academic research is becoming a formidable trend of global endeavors for building new environmental ethics in the Anthropocene, the currently human-induced geological state of the earth. This trend is predictable given the demographic fact that over 80% of the world’s population consist of different religious traditions. The UNEP Faith for Earth Initiative attests to this diversely represented, spiritual approach to rethinking the geological and ecological meanings of being human in the 21st century. In this context, this article is intended to initiate what the author calls a public theology of the Anthropocene to discuss the ecological implications and environmental values of religiously and spiritually conceived understandings of the Earth as sacred and sentient. To this end, it comparatively takes Buddhist and Christian approaches to environmental sustainability as case studies and argues that, theologically and environmentally complementary to one another, the Christian idea of the sacred and the Buddhist notion of sentience offer geologically- and ecologically-lively spiritual understandings of the scientific concept of Deep Time, regarding the intrinsic value of the Earth with a life of her own.
Keywords: public theology – the Anthropocene – sacred – sentience – Deep Freedom – indigenous Earth
This chapter addresses the climatic connections between the oceanic and mountain worlds through m... more This chapter addresses the climatic connections between the oceanic and mountain worlds through monsoons in Asia, and offers a history of the anthropocenic changes in the Himalayan highlands and Bengal since the 1800s. Manifested as a series of intertwined natural and human events, climate change in this chapter is understood as what the authors call clime change, which refers to actual meteorological, ecological, geomorphological, livelihood, and social transformations. It is physical, political, and affective as shown in the colonial history and the postcolonial environmental state of South Asia. As an alternative way to understand climate change, the clime perspective, as the authors argue, allows us to see place, specific places in all their particularity, as embodiments of climate as well as agents of climate change in both natural and anthropogenic senses. Based on the authors’ archival and field research, this chapter builds a case of a modern terrestrial nexus of the Himalaya, Bengal, and the Indian Ocean as a set of monsoon climes that have undergone human-induced changes from the colonial era to the present. It invites readers to rethink the climatic meaning of being human in the Anthropocene.
This chapter tells a story of the shrinking habitats of Asian elephants in China over the last ei... more This chapter tells a story of the shrinking habitats of Asian elephants in China over the last eight centuries, during which the elephants are understood as both climatic and political refugees. It presents a case of how the Little Ice Age played a forceful role in changing the imperial maps of Inner Asia, East Asia, and the eastern Himalayas from the 1200s to the 1800s before the advent of the modern republican era. By correlating human and elephant histories with climate history, the chapter shows how the Little Ice Age and the Mongols’ conquest of China and the foothills of the eastern Himalayas worked together to push the remnants of the elephant population into Yunnan. This chapter narrates historical climate change as clime change. Climate and clime are synonymous in this historical case; however, the use of clime, understood as place or habitat embodied with climate history, is intended to emphasize the terrestrial experiences and meanings of climate change. The perceptual shift from climate change to clime change in this chapter is an endeavor to minimize the commonly recognized disconnection between abstract climatological knowledge and lived experiences of climate change.
Storying Multipolar Climes of the Himalaya, Andes and Arctic, 2023
Marcel Kurz, a Swiss topographer and mountaineer, was the first person to speak of Mt. Everest (C... more Marcel Kurz, a Swiss topographer and mountaineer, was the first person to speak of Mt. Everest (Chomolungma) as “the Globe’s Third Pole” after his 1930 expedition (Kurz 1933). Twenty-five years later, Günter Dyhrenfurth’s (1955) The Third Pole: History of the High Himalaya extended the coverage of Kurz’s metaphoric toponym from the highest mountain to the entirety of the Himalaya. Thus, the Himalaya became formally, though metaphorically, associated with the Arctic and the Antarctic. Not too long after, the “Third Pole” was not merely a phrase used by mountain climbers to express their impression of the Himalaya, but had entered the public’s environmental consciousness and compelled scientists and scholars to connect the Himalaya with the Earth’s two poles for a range of natural scientific and cultural understandings of global water, climate change, and ultimately connecting it with the fate of the Earth. Thanks to Kurze and Dyhrenfurth, what is obvious is that our perception of the Earth has evolved from a bipolar to a tri-polar vision. However, from the geological perspective, the Earth is a multipolar planet. The Himalaya is not the only altitudinal highland on Earth. The Andes, the Southern Great Escarpment, and the Rocky Mountains, to name a few such regions, are also parts of the Earth critical for the survival of humans and nonhumans. Additionally, the Arctic and the Antarctic are also home to altitudinal highlands, some of which are formed by ice, such as Greenland’s North and South Domes, the Arctic Cordillera, and the Transantarctic Mountains. In the fields of climate and environmental studies, the geological vision of a multipolar Earth compels us to formally initiate, variously, “multipolar climate/clime studies,” “multipolar environmental studies,” or “multipolar environmental humanities.”
Religions, 2023
Abstract: Buddhist environmentalism in its varieties across the world is an integral part of the ... more Abstract: Buddhist environmentalism in its varieties across the world is an integral part of the global environmental discourse centered on exploring new planetary ethics for sustainable futures. While recognizing the Buddhist role in global environmental movements, the author of this article proposes
that the observable strength of Buddhist environmentalism is in local and global environmental advocacy grounded in the Buddhist ethics of interdependence, even as, canonically, Buddhism does not offer what is commonly recognized by scientists and scholars as traditional ecological knowledge or religious ecology. To substantiate this, this article offers a textual assessment of the Buddhist canon’s lack of systematic ecological knowledge, and a case study of how freeing domestic animals and advocating vegetarianism among contemporary Tibetan Buddhists in China, inclusive of non‑Tibetan converts, mainly benefits human wellbeing and at the same time is entangled in social affairs that have little to do with the ecological wellbeing of the Tibetan Plateau and urban China. This debate is by no means intended to negate the successes of Buddhist environmentalism; instead, it draws fine lines between the claimed canonic basis of Buddhist ecology, the strength of Buddhist environmental advocacy, the everyday practices of Buddhism, and the aspirations for strengthening the ecological foundation of Buddhist environmental activism. Thinking in line with eco‑Buddhists, the author concludes the article by proposing an Earth Sutra, a hypothetical future canonic text as the ecological basis of Buddhist environmentalism.
Keywords: freeing animals; vegetarianism; eco‑Buddhism; environmentalism; Earth Sutra
International Quarterly for Asian Studies, 2022
This article offers an ideological examination of China's ecological civilisation initiative with... more This article offers an ideological examination of China's ecological civilisation initiative with respect to its globalisation agenda. The basic argument is that the Chinese state's eco-civilisation project is an open-ended, statist technocratic bricolage that appropriates a philosophy of humannature harmony and facilitates a reformed communism intended to enchant both domestic and global audiences with a set of human universal values. The article considers eco-civilisation to be technically devised as an attractive initiative packed with the Chinese state's propagated universal values without a specific manual of operations. It is a one-size-fits-all concept but provides enough room for creative tailoring under specific circumstances in different geographical, cultural, economic and political contexts. In the course of delivering this argument, the article discusses how eco-civilisation is domestically and internationally promoted and how it is an inherent part of the renewed but reformed communism of the Chinese state.
This chapter is a study of Sino-Tibetan borderlands situated in the Hengduan Mountain region, whi... more This chapter is a study of Sino-Tibetan borderlands situated in the Hengduan Mountain region, which is adjacent with Southeast Asia in the south, and gradually lowers its altitude when it meets the southwestern edge of the Mongolia Plateau and the Loess Plateau of Northwest China. Geologically situated between the pastoral Tibet and agricultural China, this vast
mountainous region is a home to both human diversity and biodiversity hotspots. However, this human-nonhuman mountain diversity is often shaded over inadvertently by the binary Sino-Tibet interface in the politically centred studies of the borderlands. This China-Tibet duality landmarked in the Hengduan Mountains is often characterised as ‘frontier’ (Gros 2019),
‘convergence zone’ (Jinba 2014: 6), and ‘the middle ground’ (Lipman 1997: xxxiii; Giersch 2006:3). As the region is a unique part of the Earth’s geological creativity and inter-Asian environmental connectivity, I take a Zomian approach to recontextualise Sino-Tibetan borderlands not merely as borderlands but also as a multitude of montane habitats with steep ecological gradients in close proximity, which promote biodiversity, ecologically niched human dwellings, and ethnolinguistic diversification. The Hengduan Mountains as Sino-Tibetan borderlands and as a unique ecogeological region of its own, deserve more complex understandings in both human and environmental terms. Environmentally, I intend to lay out a set of ecogeological affordances from the Hengduan Mountain region as an unacknowledged environmental basis of the human centric political duality of Tibet and China. On the human side, I recount the Hengduan Mountain region as a human diversity hotspot that is environed in the region’s biodiversity.
Journal of Asian Studies, 2022
This chapter conceptualizes corridor as transregion generative of what the author calls “environm... more This chapter conceptualizes corridor as transregion generative of what the author calls “environmental edging process” as its inherent ecological, cultural, and geographical function for interregional transition and connectivity. The coinage of transregion and environmental edging process is meant to signify the combined role of the physical earth and humans in shaping the transregionality of Southwest China, Southeast Asia, and the eastern Himalayas. Based on the author’s own research and peer conversations with van Schendel (2020, 2005 and in this book), Gros (2016), Giersch (2006), and Saxer (2016), both “trans-” and “edging” highlight human and environmental flows and their transboundary encounters in and between these regions. Corridor-as-transregion in this case thus precipitates environmental and human edging processes in the interregional history of Southwest China, Burma, and the Bengal. This chapter invites readers to a conceptual discussion of transregional connectivity in both human and environmental terms. It also provides historical illustrations in the cases of the Hengduan Mountain region and the Mongol Empire’s shaping of an inter-Asian corridor linking together Southwest China and Southeast Asia. It particularly focuses on one of the political effects of the imperial presence of the Mongol Yuan, Ming, and Qing Dynasties known as “local chiefdoms” which were the nodes of imperial corridors in the borderlands of what is currently Southwest China and Southeast Asia.
Yunnan-Burma-Bengal Corridor Geographies: Protean Edging of Habitats and Empires, 2021
This chapter is an introduction of “corridor geographies,” a phrase coined here with the intent t... more This chapter is an introduction of “corridor geographies,”
a phrase coined here with the intent to reexamine and reconceptualize
both connectivity and disconnectivity between Yunnan, Burma, and Bengal.
The proposed corridor geographies conceptually overlap process geographies but go beyond human geography by encompassing environmental flows and nonhuman aspects of transregionality—especially transboundary river systems, mountain ranges, and megafauna such as elephants.
Environmental Humanities in the New Himalayas Symbiotic Indigeneity, Commoning, Sustainability, 2021
Environmental Humanities in the New Himalayas: Symbiotic Indigeneity, Commoning, Sustainability edited by Dan Smyer Yü and Erik de Maaker , 2021
The right of Dan Smyer Yü and Erik de Maaker to be identified as the authors of the editorial mat... more The right of Dan Smyer Yü and Erik de Maaker to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Buddhism and Business: Merit, Material Wealth and Morality in the Global Market Economy, 2020
As an increasing number of Tibetan lamas reach out to non-Tibetan populations in contemporary Chi... more As an increasing number of Tibetan lamas reach out to non-Tibetan populations in contemporary China, Tibetan Buddhism is undergoing various transformations especially in urban settings. As its engagement with many aspects of the Chinese society, such as higher education, social morality, philanthropy, environmental conservation, and modern science, the pattern of its transregional and trans-ethnic expansion shows itself as an urban lay Buddhist movement. Based on the author’s ethnographic work, this chapter narrates how politics of religion and the economic affluence in China reshape Tibetan Buddhism into a Buddhist urbanism. It argues that Tibetan Buddhism in urban China is evolving into a modern Buddhism with Chinese characteristics. These characteristics are expressed in the political environment of religion and the cross-regional Sino-Tibetan Buddhist networking, which the author respectively terms “neo-Communist secularist conditions” and the “constellative networks.” The former prompts Buddhists to enact their agentive responses to the state politics of religion. The latter is intended as a conceptual term to discuss how the organizational pattern of Tibetan Buddhism in urban China is part and parcel of a new Buddhist modernism.
Mindscaping the Landscape of Tibet: Place, Memorability, Ecoaesthetics, 2015
This chapter explores eco-aesthetic meanings of natural landscape, religious practices, and home-... more This chapter explores eco-aesthetic meanings of natural landscape, religious practices, and home-making in a Tibetan farming village in Amdo, currently Qinghai Province of China
JSRNC, 2020
This article offers a new animist study of 'the affective consciousness of earth' to explore deep... more This article offers a new animist study of 'the affective consciousness of earth' to explore deeper meanings and values of the earth as a planetary life system. Woven together as an interdisciplinary text with perspectives, concepts, and imaginative visions from earth sciences, religion and ecology, and environmental humanities, it introduces a conceptual proposition that the earth's Critical Zone is a planetary animist sphere for the purpose of highlighting the livingness of the earth as a union of the biotic and the abiotic worlds. By interfacing relevant planetary perspectives from humanities and natural sciences, it argues that the metaphor of Gaia, as employed in geophysiology, inadvertently engenders a metaphoric animism that is a form of new animism in which the livingness of the earth is expressed in biochemical, sentient, and affective terms. The recognized complementarity of Critical Zone science and new animist studies in this article is meant to articulate a planetary environmental consciousness that is a hybrid of scientific and humanist endeavors for environmental sustainability.
Current Anthropology, 2020
This article discusses the persistent absence of a consensus on a script for the language of the ... more This article discusses the persistent absence of a consensus on a script for the language of the Hmong, a kinship-based society of 5 million spread over the uplands of Southwest China and northern Indochina, with a vigorous diaspora in the West. In search of an explanation for this unusual situation, this article proposes a political reading inspired by James C. Scott's 2009 book The Art of Not Being Governed. A particular focus is put on Scott's claim of tactical rejection of literacy among upland groups of Asia. To set the scene, the case of the Hmong is briefly exposed before detailing the successive appearance of orthographies for their language(s) over one century. It is then argued that the lack of consensus on a common writing system might be a reflection of deeper political motives rather than merely the result of historical processes.
Ensouling the Mountain [documentary 55 min., a rough cut] Directed by Dan Smyer Yu This ethnogr... more Ensouling the Mountain
[documentary 55 min., a rough cut]
Directed by Dan Smyer Yu
This ethnographic film documents a pilgrimage of lamas, scholars, writers, filmmakers, and students to Mt. Amne Machen (Amne Machin) located in Golok, Amdo, currently in Qinghai Province of China. Most pilgrims, as an integral part of the film crew, are both behind and forefront of different scenes. The film crew pulls its focus on how Amne Machen symbolizes home, belonging, and humanization of natural landscapes. As Amne Machen is known as lha-ri or "soul-mountain" to which local communities and prominent historical figures entrust their collective memories, the sense of home and place-making are the primary topics of the pilgrims' reflections. Through the narratives of the pilgrims and cinematic capturing of the awe-inspiring landscape of the mountain, this film relives powerfully gripping moments when place becomes a placeless, flowing cultural consciousness in the minds of the pilgrims.
39 views
The Extractive Industries and Society, 2024
Serving as a regional assessment of China's ongoing mining and application of REEs, this article ... more Serving as a regional assessment of China's ongoing mining and application of REEs, this article addresses the concurrence of green transition and environmental degradation contextualized in the global sphere of the Critical Mineral mining and application. It narrates a history of China's developmental strategies for REEs mining and production since the late 1970s and addresses the environmental outcomes from the state-determined, globalized national economy and the state-initiated environmental regulations on domestic REEs mining. Focusing on a historical assessment of China's geopolitically-strategized Critical Mineral production and the high environmental cost of the REEs-based green transition, this article discusses how UN's concept of sustainable development is being indigenized in China through the Chinese state's policy practices as well as through the receptiveness of the Chinese populace, and supports the ongoing argument of just transition as an unjust energy transition creating unjustified environmental dispossession, particularly in the local societies in China and elsewhere in the world.
Religion & Development , 2023
The environmental engagement of religious practices and academic research is becoming a formidabl... more The environmental engagement of religious practices and academic research is becoming a formidable trend of global endeavors for building new environmental ethics in the Anthropocene, the currently human-induced geological state of the earth. This trend is predictable given the demographic fact that over 80% of the world’s population consist of different religious traditions. The UNEP Faith for Earth Initiative attests to this diversely represented, spiritual approach to rethinking the geological and ecological meanings of being human in the 21st century. In this context, this article is intended to initiate what the author calls a public theology of the Anthropocene to discuss the ecological implications and environmental values of religiously and spiritually conceived understandings of the Earth as sacred and sentient. To this end, it comparatively takes Buddhist and Christian approaches to environmental sustainability as case studies and argues that, theologically and environmentally complementary to one another, the Christian idea of the sacred and the Buddhist notion of sentience offer geologically- and ecologically-lively spiritual understandings of the scientific concept of Deep Time, regarding the intrinsic value of the Earth with a life of her own.
Keywords: public theology – the Anthropocene – sacred – sentience – Deep Freedom – indigenous Earth
This chapter addresses the climatic connections between the oceanic and mountain worlds through m... more This chapter addresses the climatic connections between the oceanic and mountain worlds through monsoons in Asia, and offers a history of the anthropocenic changes in the Himalayan highlands and Bengal since the 1800s. Manifested as a series of intertwined natural and human events, climate change in this chapter is understood as what the authors call clime change, which refers to actual meteorological, ecological, geomorphological, livelihood, and social transformations. It is physical, political, and affective as shown in the colonial history and the postcolonial environmental state of South Asia. As an alternative way to understand climate change, the clime perspective, as the authors argue, allows us to see place, specific places in all their particularity, as embodiments of climate as well as agents of climate change in both natural and anthropogenic senses. Based on the authors’ archival and field research, this chapter builds a case of a modern terrestrial nexus of the Himalaya, Bengal, and the Indian Ocean as a set of monsoon climes that have undergone human-induced changes from the colonial era to the present. It invites readers to rethink the climatic meaning of being human in the Anthropocene.
This chapter tells a story of the shrinking habitats of Asian elephants in China over the last ei... more This chapter tells a story of the shrinking habitats of Asian elephants in China over the last eight centuries, during which the elephants are understood as both climatic and political refugees. It presents a case of how the Little Ice Age played a forceful role in changing the imperial maps of Inner Asia, East Asia, and the eastern Himalayas from the 1200s to the 1800s before the advent of the modern republican era. By correlating human and elephant histories with climate history, the chapter shows how the Little Ice Age and the Mongols’ conquest of China and the foothills of the eastern Himalayas worked together to push the remnants of the elephant population into Yunnan. This chapter narrates historical climate change as clime change. Climate and clime are synonymous in this historical case; however, the use of clime, understood as place or habitat embodied with climate history, is intended to emphasize the terrestrial experiences and meanings of climate change. The perceptual shift from climate change to clime change in this chapter is an endeavor to minimize the commonly recognized disconnection between abstract climatological knowledge and lived experiences of climate change.
Storying Multipolar Climes of the Himalaya, Andes and Arctic, 2023
Marcel Kurz, a Swiss topographer and mountaineer, was the first person to speak of Mt. Everest (C... more Marcel Kurz, a Swiss topographer and mountaineer, was the first person to speak of Mt. Everest (Chomolungma) as “the Globe’s Third Pole” after his 1930 expedition (Kurz 1933). Twenty-five years later, Günter Dyhrenfurth’s (1955) The Third Pole: History of the High Himalaya extended the coverage of Kurz’s metaphoric toponym from the highest mountain to the entirety of the Himalaya. Thus, the Himalaya became formally, though metaphorically, associated with the Arctic and the Antarctic. Not too long after, the “Third Pole” was not merely a phrase used by mountain climbers to express their impression of the Himalaya, but had entered the public’s environmental consciousness and compelled scientists and scholars to connect the Himalaya with the Earth’s two poles for a range of natural scientific and cultural understandings of global water, climate change, and ultimately connecting it with the fate of the Earth. Thanks to Kurze and Dyhrenfurth, what is obvious is that our perception of the Earth has evolved from a bipolar to a tri-polar vision. However, from the geological perspective, the Earth is a multipolar planet. The Himalaya is not the only altitudinal highland on Earth. The Andes, the Southern Great Escarpment, and the Rocky Mountains, to name a few such regions, are also parts of the Earth critical for the survival of humans and nonhumans. Additionally, the Arctic and the Antarctic are also home to altitudinal highlands, some of which are formed by ice, such as Greenland’s North and South Domes, the Arctic Cordillera, and the Transantarctic Mountains. In the fields of climate and environmental studies, the geological vision of a multipolar Earth compels us to formally initiate, variously, “multipolar climate/clime studies,” “multipolar environmental studies,” or “multipolar environmental humanities.”
Religions, 2023
Abstract: Buddhist environmentalism in its varieties across the world is an integral part of the ... more Abstract: Buddhist environmentalism in its varieties across the world is an integral part of the global environmental discourse centered on exploring new planetary ethics for sustainable futures. While recognizing the Buddhist role in global environmental movements, the author of this article proposes
that the observable strength of Buddhist environmentalism is in local and global environmental advocacy grounded in the Buddhist ethics of interdependence, even as, canonically, Buddhism does not offer what is commonly recognized by scientists and scholars as traditional ecological knowledge or religious ecology. To substantiate this, this article offers a textual assessment of the Buddhist canon’s lack of systematic ecological knowledge, and a case study of how freeing domestic animals and advocating vegetarianism among contemporary Tibetan Buddhists in China, inclusive of non‑Tibetan converts, mainly benefits human wellbeing and at the same time is entangled in social affairs that have little to do with the ecological wellbeing of the Tibetan Plateau and urban China. This debate is by no means intended to negate the successes of Buddhist environmentalism; instead, it draws fine lines between the claimed canonic basis of Buddhist ecology, the strength of Buddhist environmental advocacy, the everyday practices of Buddhism, and the aspirations for strengthening the ecological foundation of Buddhist environmental activism. Thinking in line with eco‑Buddhists, the author concludes the article by proposing an Earth Sutra, a hypothetical future canonic text as the ecological basis of Buddhist environmentalism.
Keywords: freeing animals; vegetarianism; eco‑Buddhism; environmentalism; Earth Sutra
International Quarterly for Asian Studies, 2022
This article offers an ideological examination of China's ecological civilisation initiative with... more This article offers an ideological examination of China's ecological civilisation initiative with respect to its globalisation agenda. The basic argument is that the Chinese state's eco-civilisation project is an open-ended, statist technocratic bricolage that appropriates a philosophy of humannature harmony and facilitates a reformed communism intended to enchant both domestic and global audiences with a set of human universal values. The article considers eco-civilisation to be technically devised as an attractive initiative packed with the Chinese state's propagated universal values without a specific manual of operations. It is a one-size-fits-all concept but provides enough room for creative tailoring under specific circumstances in different geographical, cultural, economic and political contexts. In the course of delivering this argument, the article discusses how eco-civilisation is domestically and internationally promoted and how it is an inherent part of the renewed but reformed communism of the Chinese state.
This chapter is a study of Sino-Tibetan borderlands situated in the Hengduan Mountain region, whi... more This chapter is a study of Sino-Tibetan borderlands situated in the Hengduan Mountain region, which is adjacent with Southeast Asia in the south, and gradually lowers its altitude when it meets the southwestern edge of the Mongolia Plateau and the Loess Plateau of Northwest China. Geologically situated between the pastoral Tibet and agricultural China, this vast
mountainous region is a home to both human diversity and biodiversity hotspots. However, this human-nonhuman mountain diversity is often shaded over inadvertently by the binary Sino-Tibet interface in the politically centred studies of the borderlands. This China-Tibet duality landmarked in the Hengduan Mountains is often characterised as ‘frontier’ (Gros 2019),
‘convergence zone’ (Jinba 2014: 6), and ‘the middle ground’ (Lipman 1997: xxxiii; Giersch 2006:3). As the region is a unique part of the Earth’s geological creativity and inter-Asian environmental connectivity, I take a Zomian approach to recontextualise Sino-Tibetan borderlands not merely as borderlands but also as a multitude of montane habitats with steep ecological gradients in close proximity, which promote biodiversity, ecologically niched human dwellings, and ethnolinguistic diversification. The Hengduan Mountains as Sino-Tibetan borderlands and as a unique ecogeological region of its own, deserve more complex understandings in both human and environmental terms. Environmentally, I intend to lay out a set of ecogeological affordances from the Hengduan Mountain region as an unacknowledged environmental basis of the human centric political duality of Tibet and China. On the human side, I recount the Hengduan Mountain region as a human diversity hotspot that is environed in the region’s biodiversity.
Journal of Asian Studies, 2022
This chapter conceptualizes corridor as transregion generative of what the author calls “environm... more This chapter conceptualizes corridor as transregion generative of what the author calls “environmental edging process” as its inherent ecological, cultural, and geographical function for interregional transition and connectivity. The coinage of transregion and environmental edging process is meant to signify the combined role of the physical earth and humans in shaping the transregionality of Southwest China, Southeast Asia, and the eastern Himalayas. Based on the author’s own research and peer conversations with van Schendel (2020, 2005 and in this book), Gros (2016), Giersch (2006), and Saxer (2016), both “trans-” and “edging” highlight human and environmental flows and their transboundary encounters in and between these regions. Corridor-as-transregion in this case thus precipitates environmental and human edging processes in the interregional history of Southwest China, Burma, and the Bengal. This chapter invites readers to a conceptual discussion of transregional connectivity in both human and environmental terms. It also provides historical illustrations in the cases of the Hengduan Mountain region and the Mongol Empire’s shaping of an inter-Asian corridor linking together Southwest China and Southeast Asia. It particularly focuses on one of the political effects of the imperial presence of the Mongol Yuan, Ming, and Qing Dynasties known as “local chiefdoms” which were the nodes of imperial corridors in the borderlands of what is currently Southwest China and Southeast Asia.
Yunnan-Burma-Bengal Corridor Geographies: Protean Edging of Habitats and Empires, 2021
This chapter is an introduction of “corridor geographies,” a phrase coined here with the intent t... more This chapter is an introduction of “corridor geographies,”
a phrase coined here with the intent to reexamine and reconceptualize
both connectivity and disconnectivity between Yunnan, Burma, and Bengal.
The proposed corridor geographies conceptually overlap process geographies but go beyond human geography by encompassing environmental flows and nonhuman aspects of transregionality—especially transboundary river systems, mountain ranges, and megafauna such as elephants.
Environmental Humanities in the New Himalayas Symbiotic Indigeneity, Commoning, Sustainability, 2021
Environmental Humanities in the New Himalayas: Symbiotic Indigeneity, Commoning, Sustainability edited by Dan Smyer Yü and Erik de Maaker , 2021
The right of Dan Smyer Yü and Erik de Maaker to be identified as the authors of the editorial mat... more The right of Dan Smyer Yü and Erik de Maaker to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Buddhism and Business: Merit, Material Wealth and Morality in the Global Market Economy, 2020
As an increasing number of Tibetan lamas reach out to non-Tibetan populations in contemporary Chi... more As an increasing number of Tibetan lamas reach out to non-Tibetan populations in contemporary China, Tibetan Buddhism is undergoing various transformations especially in urban settings. As its engagement with many aspects of the Chinese society, such as higher education, social morality, philanthropy, environmental conservation, and modern science, the pattern of its transregional and trans-ethnic expansion shows itself as an urban lay Buddhist movement. Based on the author’s ethnographic work, this chapter narrates how politics of religion and the economic affluence in China reshape Tibetan Buddhism into a Buddhist urbanism. It argues that Tibetan Buddhism in urban China is evolving into a modern Buddhism with Chinese characteristics. These characteristics are expressed in the political environment of religion and the cross-regional Sino-Tibetan Buddhist networking, which the author respectively terms “neo-Communist secularist conditions” and the “constellative networks.” The former prompts Buddhists to enact their agentive responses to the state politics of religion. The latter is intended as a conceptual term to discuss how the organizational pattern of Tibetan Buddhism in urban China is part and parcel of a new Buddhist modernism.
Mindscaping the Landscape of Tibet: Place, Memorability, Ecoaesthetics, 2015
This chapter explores eco-aesthetic meanings of natural landscape, religious practices, and home-... more This chapter explores eco-aesthetic meanings of natural landscape, religious practices, and home-making in a Tibetan farming village in Amdo, currently Qinghai Province of China
JSRNC, 2020
This article offers a new animist study of 'the affective consciousness of earth' to explore deep... more This article offers a new animist study of 'the affective consciousness of earth' to explore deeper meanings and values of the earth as a planetary life system. Woven together as an interdisciplinary text with perspectives, concepts, and imaginative visions from earth sciences, religion and ecology, and environmental humanities, it introduces a conceptual proposition that the earth's Critical Zone is a planetary animist sphere for the purpose of highlighting the livingness of the earth as a union of the biotic and the abiotic worlds. By interfacing relevant planetary perspectives from humanities and natural sciences, it argues that the metaphor of Gaia, as employed in geophysiology, inadvertently engenders a metaphoric animism that is a form of new animism in which the livingness of the earth is expressed in biochemical, sentient, and affective terms. The recognized complementarity of Critical Zone science and new animist studies in this article is meant to articulate a planetary environmental consciousness that is a hybrid of scientific and humanist endeavors for environmental sustainability.
Current Anthropology, 2020
This article discusses the persistent absence of a consensus on a script for the language of the ... more This article discusses the persistent absence of a consensus on a script for the language of the Hmong, a kinship-based society of 5 million spread over the uplands of Southwest China and northern Indochina, with a vigorous diaspora in the West. In search of an explanation for this unusual situation, this article proposes a political reading inspired by James C. Scott's 2009 book The Art of Not Being Governed. A particular focus is put on Scott's claim of tactical rejection of literacy among upland groups of Asia. To set the scene, the case of the Hmong is briefly exposed before detailing the successive appearance of orthographies for their language(s) over one century. It is then argued that the lack of consensus on a common writing system might be a reflection of deeper political motives rather than merely the result of historical processes.
Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology, 2017
This chapter reconceives “the indigenous” or “indigeneity” as an inclusive term with two signifi... more This chapter reconceives “the indigenous” or “indigeneity” as an inclusive term with two significances. First, it encompasses all peoples of the earth who possess place-specific but pan-humanly intelligible knowledge and/or who retain the memories of such ancient land-based knowledge regarding human-earth relations. Second, for the purpose of advancing the science of religious ecology advocated by Grim and Tucker (2014:35-41), “the indigenous” is understood in the framework of the ongoing study of traditional ecological knowledge that is interdisciplinary and transregional in nature, and humanity oriented (Birkes 1999; 2004; and Birkes and Davidson-Hunt 2006).
Woven together as a text of humanities-based environmental research outcomes, Himalayan Climes an... more Woven together as a text of humanities-based environmental research outcomes, Himalayan Climes and Multispecies Encounters hosts a collection of historical and fieldwork-based case studies and conceptual discussions of climate change in the greater Himalayan region.
The collective endeavour of the book is expressed in what the editors characterize as the clime studies of the Himalayan multispecies worlds. As a terrestrial concept, the individual case studies concretize the abstract concept of climate change in their place- and culturally-specific correlations of weather, climate pattern, and landscape change. Supported by empirical and historical findings, the concept in each chapter showcases climate change as clime change. As place, clime is discerned as both a recipient of and a contributor to climate change over time in the Himalayan context. It affirms climate change as multispecies encounters, as part of multifaceted cultural processes, and as ecologically-specific environmental changes in the more-than-human worlds of the Himalayas.
As the case studies complement, enrich, and converse with natural scientific understandings of Himalayan climate change, this book offers students, academics, and the interested public fresh approaches to the interdisciplinary field of climate studies and policy debates on climate change and sustainable development.
Storying Multipolar Climes of the Himalaya, Andes and Arctic: Anthropocenic Climate and Shapeshifting Watery Lifeworlds, 2023
This book initiates multipolar climate/clime studies of the world's altitudinal and latitudinal h... more This book initiates multipolar climate/clime studies of the world's altitudinal and latitudinal highlands with terrestrial, experiential, and affective approaches. Framed in the environmental humanities, it is an interdisciplinary, comparative study of the mutually-embodied relations of climate, nature, culture, and place in the Himalaya, Andes, and Arctic. Innovation-driven, the book offers multipolar clime case studies through the contributors' historical findings, ethnographic documentations, and diverse conceptualizations and applications of clime, an overlooked but returning notion of place embodied with climate history, pattern, and changes. The multipolar clime case studies in the book are geared toward deeper, lively explorations and demonstrations of the translatability, interchangeability, and complementarity between the notions of clime and climate. "Multipolar" or "multipolarity" in this book connotes not only the two polar regions and the tectonically shaped highlands of the earth but also diversely debated perspectives of climate studies in the broadest sense. Contributors across the twelve chapters come from diverse fields of social and natural sciences and humanities, and geographically specialize, respectively, in the Himalayan, Andean, and Arctic regions. The first comparative study of climate change in altitudinal and latitudinal highlands, this will be an important read for students, academics, and researchers in environmental humanities, anthropology, climate science, indigenous studies, and ecology.
Yunnan-Burma-Bengal Corridor Geographies: Protean Edging of Habitats and Empires, 2021
Yunnan–Burma–Bengal Corridor Geographies: Protean Edging of Habitats and Empires Edited by Dan S... more Yunnan–Burma–Bengal Corridor Geographies:
Protean Edging of Habitats and Empires
Edited by Dan Smyer Yü, Karin Dean
Book Description
This book explores the historical interconnections between Bengal, Burma and Yunnan (China) and views the corridor as a transregion that exhibits mobility, connectivity and diversity as well as place-based ecogeological uniqueness. With a focus on the concept of corridor geographies that have shared human and environmental histories beyond sharply demarcated territorial sovereignties of modern individual nation-states, it presents the variety and complexity of premodern and modern pathways, corridors, borders, and networks of livelihood-making, local political alliances, trade and commerce, religions, political systems, and colonial encounters. The book discusses crucial themes including environmental edgings of human-nonhuman habitats; transregional migratory routes and habitats of megafauna; elephant corridors in Yunnan–Myanmar–Bengal landscape; framing spaces between India and China; Tibetan–Myanmar corridors; transboundary river systems; narratives of a Rohingya jade trader; cross-border flow of De’ang’s fermented tea; householding in upland Laos; cultural identities; and trans-border livelihoods.
Comprehensive and topical, with its wide-ranging case studies, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of history, routes and border studies, sociology and social anthropology, South East Asian history, South Asian history, Chinese studies, environmental history, human geography, international relations, ecology and cultural studies.
Environmental Humanities in the New Himalayas: Symbiotic Indigeneity, Commoning, Sustainability, 2021
Environmental Humanities in the New Himalayas: Symbiotic Indigeneity, Commoning, Sustainability s... more Environmental Humanities in the New Himalayas: Symbiotic Indigeneity, Commoning, Sustainability showcases how the eco-geological creativity of the earth is integrally woven into the landforms, cultures, and cosmovisions of modern Himalayan communities.
Unique in scope, this book features case studies from Bhutan, Assam, Sikkim, Tibet, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sino-Indian borderlands, many of which are documented by authors from indigenous Himalayan communities. It explores three environmental characteristics of modern Himalayas: the anthropogenic, the indigenous, and the animist. Focusing on the sentient relations of human-, animal-, and spirit-worlds with the earth in different parts of the Himalayas, the authors present the complex meanings of indigeneity, commonings and sustainability in the Anthropocene. In doing so, they show the vital role that indigenous stories and perspectives play in building new regional and planetary environmental ethics for a sustainable future.
Drawing on a wide range of expert contributions from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanist disciplines, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental humanities, religion and ecology, indigenous knowledge and sustainable development more broadly.
Dan Smyer Yü, Su Faxiang and Li Yunxia, eds. 2018 Trans-Himalayan Studies Reader II: Zomia, Front... more Dan Smyer Yü, Su Faxiang and Li Yunxia, eds. 2018 Trans-Himalayan Studies Reader II: Zomia, Frontiers and Borderlands. Beijing, Academy Press.
This is the second Chinese translation volume of the Trans-Himalayan Studies Reader Series from Academy Press. Dan Smyer Yü is the chief editor of this ongoing translation and publishing project intended to introduce critical literature of Himalayan studies in the West to the Chinese language world. It particularly caters to graduate students and scholars based in China, who are having growing interest in Himalayan studies as a unique transregional studies. This volume hosts the works of high impact scholars such as Jean Michaud, Willem van Schendel, Sara Shneiderman, Gunnel Cederlöf, Sarah Turner, Geoffrey Samuel, and Georgina Drew. The conceptual gravity of this volume is on Zomia from the perspectives of James Scott, Willem van Schendel, Jean Michaud, and Sara Shneiderman, who are currently the leading luminaries in deciphering the theoretical and transregional significances of Zomia as a concept and as a differently perceived world region in terms of geography, geology, ecology, ethnolinguistics, and inter-state power dynamics. It is intend as a contribution to building an informed, international arena of scholarly debates in contemporary China. The volume is the outcome of the united understanding and appreciation of intellectual diversity from the co-editors, translators, and the original authors.
Edited by Dan Smyer Yü and Jean Michaud Trans-Himalayan Borderlands Livelihoods, Territorialiti... more Edited by Dan Smyer Yü and Jean Michaud
Trans-Himalayan Borderlands
Livelihoods, Territorialities, Modernities
The societies in the Himalayan borderlands have
undergone wide-ranging transformations, as the
territorial reconfiguration of modern nation-states since
the mid-twentieth century and the presently increasing
trans-Himalayan movements of people, goods and
capital, reshape the livelihoods of communities, pulling
them into global trends of modernisation and regional
discourses of national belonging.
This book explores the changes to native senses of
place, the conception of border - simultaneously as
limitations and opportunities - and what the authors
call "affective boundaries," "livelihood reconstruction,"
and "trans-Himalayan modernities." It addresses
changing social, political, and environmental conditions
that acknowledge growing external connectivity even as
it emphasises the importance of place.
"This book offers a diverse collection of fascinating case
studies that, taken together, present a transboundary
approach that challenges the 'trait geographies' upon
which much area studies is still based."
Tim Oakes, Professor of Geography, University of Colorado, Boulder
"This is an excellent collection of original works. It makes
an important contribution to transboundary studies and
a dialogic approach to spatial and social processes in
and beyond Asia."
Li Zhang, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Davis
Introduction: Placiality of Tibet, 2015
Based on the author’s cross-regional fieldwork, archival findings, and critical reading of memoir... more Based on the author’s cross-regional fieldwork, archival findings, and critical reading of memoirs and creative works of Tibetans and Chinese, this book recounts how the potency of Tibet manifests itself in modern material culture concerning Tibet, which is interwoven with state ideology, politics of identity, imagination, nostalgia, forgetting, remembering, and earth-inspired transcendence. The physical place of Tibet is the antecedent point of contact for subsequent spiritual imaginations, acts of destruction and reconstruction, collective nostalgia, and delayed aesthetic and environmental awareness shown in the eco-religious acts of native Tibetans, Communist radical utopianism, former military officers’ recollections, Tibetan and Chinese artwork, and touristic consumption of the Tibetan landscape. By drawing connections between differences, dichotomies, and oppositions, this book explores the interiors of the diverse agentive modes of imaginations from which Tibet is imagined in China. On the theoretical front, this book attempts to bring forth a set of fresh perspectives on how a culturally and religiously specific landscape is antecedent to simultaneous processes of place-making, identity-making, and the bonding between place and people.
Focusing on contemporary Tibetan Buddhist revivals in the Tibetan regions of the Sichuan and Qing... more Focusing on contemporary Tibetan Buddhist revivals in the Tibetan regions of the Sichuan and Qinghai Provinces in China, this book explores the intricate entanglements of the Buddhist revivals with cultural identity, state ideology, and popular imagination of Tibetan Buddhist spirituality in contemporary China. In turn, the author explores the broader socio-cultural implications of such revivals.
Based on detailed cross-regional ethnographic work, the book demonstrates that the revival of Tibetan Buddhism in contemporary China is intimately bound with both the affirming and negating forces of globalization, modernity, and politics of religion, indigenous identity reclamation, and the market economy. The analysis highlights the multidimensionality of Tibetan Buddhism in relation to different religious, cultural, and political constituencies of China. By recognizing the greater contexts of China’s politics of religion and of the global status of Tibetan Buddhism, this book presents an argument that the revival of Tibetan Buddhism is not an isolated event limited merely to Tibetan regions; instead, it is a result of the intersection of both local and global transformative changes. The book is a useful contribution to students and scholars of Asian religion and Chinese studies.
This book sheds light on the social imagination of nature and environment in contemporary China. ... more This book sheds light on the social imagination of nature and environment in contemporary China. It demonstrates how the urgent debate on how to create an ecologically sustainable future for the world’s most populous country is shaped by its complex engagement with religious traditions, competing visions of modernity and globalization, and by engagement with minority nationalities who live in areas of outstanding natural beauty on China’s physical and social margins. The book develops a comprehensive understanding of contemporary China that goes beyond the tradition/ modernity dichotomy, and illuminates the diversity of narratives and worldviews that inform contemporary Chinese understandings of and engagements with nature and environment.
This publishing project is based on 2016 Yale-YMU (Yunnan Minzu University) Summer School (http:/... more This publishing project is based on 2016 Yale-YMU (Yunnan Minzu University) Summer School (http://himalaya.yale.edu/yale-yunnan-minzu-summer-school), a master class held in Kunming, Yunnan Province of China for young scholars from Asia, Europe and North America. The core organizing and instructional team members are Dan Smyer Yu, Director of the Center for Trans-Himalayan Studies at YMU, Alark Saxena, Program Director of Yale Himalaya Initiative, Mary Evelyn Tucker, Co-director of Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, John Grim, Co-director of Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, Georgina Drew, Senior Lecturer of Anthropology at the University of Adelaide, and Alexander Horstmann, Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Tallinn. The participants of the master class were Master’s and doctoral students, and early career scholars from China and around the world. Their home institutions are Minzu University of China, Tsinghua University, Xiamen University, Tibet University, Qinghai Minzu University, Yunnan Minzu University, Yale University, Bonne University, Cambridge University, London School of Economics, to name a few. Thirteen articles by leading scholars of Himalayan studies were selected for translation by sixteen participants. Dan Smyer Yu led the publishing project and co-edited the volume with Dr. Li Yunxia and Dr. Zeng Li of YMU. Academy Press (Beijing) designates this project as a book series featuring scholarly works from Himalayan studies and serving as reading materials and reference resources for graduate students and scholars in the Chinese language world.
Trans-Himalayan Borderlands: Livelihoods, Territorialities, Modernities The societies in the Him... more Trans-Himalayan Borderlands: Livelihoods, Territorialities, Modernities
The societies in the Himalayan borderlands have undergone wide-ranging transformations, as the territorial reconfiguration of modern nation-states since the mid-twentieth century and the presently increasing trans-Himalayan movements of people, goods, and capital reshape the livelihoods of communities, pulling them into global trends of modernization and regional discourses of national belonging. This book explores the changes to native senses of place, the conception of border – simultaneously as limitations and opportunities – and what the authors call “affective boundaries,” “livelihood reconstruction,” and “trans-Himalayan modernities.” It addresses changing social, political, and environmental conditions that acknowledge growing external connectivity even as it emphasizes the importance of place.
Dan Smyer Yü is professor and director of Center for Trans-Himalayan Studies at Yunnan Minzu University. Jean Michaud is professor of social anthropology at Université Laval, Canada.
Trans-Himalayan Borderlands: Livelihoods, Territorialities, Modernities, 2017
This introductory chapter lays out a roadmap of the book regarding its overarching themes, concep... more This introductory chapter lays out a roadmap of the book regarding
its overarching themes, conceptual concerns, and individual chapter
highlights. It attempts to initiate a trans-Himalayan study aimed at an
ethnoculturally and ecologically coherent but geopolitically demarcated
world region. Based on the borderland perspectives of the contributors,
it deems the trans-Himalayan region a space of multiple state margins
between which connectivity and disconnectivity concurrently take place.
Concerning the diversity of trans-Himalayan livelihood, territoriality,
and modernity, the chapter emphasizes the criticalness of ecological
forces, which, along with human-induced global-local forces of change,
reshape the multidimensional borderland engagements between different
ethnic communities and nation-states in the greater Himalayan region,
including the highlands of Southeast Asia and Southwest China.
Keywords: Trans-Himalayas, Zomia, livelihood, horizontal connectivity,
multistate margins