Bard College at Simon's Rock: the Early College

Faculty Forum with Chris Coggins

Monday, February 27, 2017

Liebowitz Center for International Studies


Book Talk: Mapping Shangrila: Contested Landscapes in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands 

The second Simon's Rock Faculty Forum for 2017 features Chris Coggins, Professor of Geography and Asian Studies, discussing the book that he co-edited with Emily Yeh and to which he contributed a chapter based on multiple rounds of field research in western China between 2004 and 2011.  As noted on the dust jacket: In 2001 the Chinese government announced that the precise location of Shangrila-a place that previously had existed only in fiction-had been identified in Zhongdian County, Yunnan. Since then, Sino-Tibetan borderlands in Yunnan, Sichuan, Gansu, Qinghai, and the Tibet Autonomous Region have been the sites of numerous state projects of tourism development and nature conservation, which have in turn attracted throngs of backpackers, environmentalists, and entrepreneurs who seek to experience, protect, and profit from the region's landscapes.

Mapping Shangrila advances a view of landscapes as media of governance, representation, and resistance, examining how they are reshaping cultural economies, political ecologies of resource use, subjectivities, and interethnic relations. Chapters illuminate topics such as the role of Han and Tibetan literary representations of border landscapes in the formation of ethnic identities; the remaking of Chinese national geographic imaginaries through tourism in the Yading Nature Reserve; the role of The Nature Conservancy and other transnational environmental organizations in struggles over culture and environmental governance; the way in which matsutake mushroom and caterpillar fungus commodity chains are reshaping montane landscapes; and contestations over the changing roles of mountain deities and their mediums as both interact with increasingly intensive nature conservation and state-sponsored capitalism.

Bio: Chris Coggins has been a full-time faculty member at Bard College at Simon's Rock since 1998.  His research focuses on rural China, and his interests include political ecology, biodiversity, sacred landscapes, protected area management, and globalization.  In addition to co-editing Mapping Shangrila (University of Washington, 2014) with Emily Yeh, he is the author of The Tiger and the Pangolin: Nature, Culture, and Conservation in China (University of Hawaii Press, 2003) (runner-up for the 2003 Julian Steward Award for best book in environmental/ecological anthropology and nominated for the Kiriyama Prize in non-fiction).  He is also the co-author of The Primates of China: Biogeography and Conservation Status -- Past, Present, and Future (China Forestry Publishing House, 2002).  He has published refereed articles in many geography, environment, and Asia-related books and periodicals. Since 2011, he has led five international teams engaged in a multi-year, mixed methods, field and archival research project on the fengshui forests of southern and central China.

Cost: Free

Contact:
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