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(Ann)
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Chieftainships were exceptional from the onset of Qing rule, when they
were permitted to“temporarily follow their old customs until the region
was stabilized.”Only gradually would they be“made aware of ortho-
doxy and slowly compelled to a respectful compliance with the new
system”to effect the adoption of“norms and ethics identical”with China
proper’s.^14 This assimilation process, however, was qualified by security
concerns. As provincial military official Zhou Huafeng explained,
“China’s having native chieftains is like a residence having a fence.
If the fence is not secure, then the residence will not be peaceful”and
subject to incursion by other indigenous peoples or Myanmar invasion.
He also admitted that“the reason that native chieftainships along the
border...all accept our institutions and pay our taxes and labor services
without becoming disaffected is because of our state’s bountiful favor and
virtue and because we dare not recklessly interfere with foreign
customs.”^15 Such remarks indicate that chieftainships resembled allies
more than subjects and were treated accordingly by officials. Human
agency and ecological conditions necessitated compromise for the inter-
mittent Qing control of inner frontier chieftainships, which were tied to
an unstable concept of indigenous identity as the only option to embody a
dynastic presence in an otherwise forbidding disease environment.
Malaria was, in contemporary terms of eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century Yunnan, an immutable reality that did not arrest but did structure
and constrain human action. The following examination of interaction
between disease and human agency takes select environmental conditions
into active historical account without allowing them to dictate human
actions. Specifically, mosquitoes and haematozoa have contributed to the
spatial and ethnic formation of Yunnan’s imperial borderlands even as
these borderlands were formed by interactions of the region’s indigenous
peoples, Qing administrators, and Han settlers. Indeed, spatial and iden-
tity formations arising from human interaction with disease environments
were restricted neither to western Yunnan nor to the Qing empire
between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.
disease: some comparative considerations
Concepts of“biopower”or“biosociality”are some of the more influen-
tial approaches to the study of the formation of“health identities,”that
is, the production of human social diversity based on perceptions of
variation in the physical condition of human bodies. It has recently been
suggested, however, that the central concern of these approaches with
174 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
