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identity formation in relatively narrow terms of bodily health may
obscure other elements that create health inequalities, including political,
economic, and technological factors.^16 Nevertheless, common to all these
elements is a focus on human action that effectively excludes nonhuman
factors often included as a matter of course in environmental studies.
“From an ecological perspective, disease does not exist as a thing in and
of itself,”but is rather“a process triggered by interaction between a host
and an environmental insult, most often a pathogenic organism...
Disease is one possible outcome of the relationship between the host
and the potential pathogen.”Disease is a relationship involving humans
but is not limited to them. The concept of adaptation is central to the
analysis of such relations as disease ecology, which views health and
disease as measures of the efficacy of human management of“cultural
and biological resources [to] adapt to their environments.”^17
Some results of these adaptations are spatial and ethnic. Both malaria
and yellow fever, for example, were critical for empire and state forma-
tion, as well as that of Creole identity, in the Greater Caribbean. As
argued by John Robert McNeill,“differential resistance”enabled accli-
mated locals to protract defense long enough for more susceptible outside
invaders to succumb to disease over a few months of regional military
operations. This difference was critical for the persistence of the Spanish
empire. It relied heavily on local recruits to hold out against much
stronger imperial rivals through the eighteenth century, with yellow fever
as“a crucial part of Spain’s imperial defense.”These diseases gave similar
support to subsequent revolutionary movements by acclimated Creoles
against further imperial domination.^18
As McNeill recognizes, humans and ecology entered into distinctive
relations to form these historical effects. Yet he goes on to assert that“the
disease environment of the Caribbean was a cultural artifact”that would
not have existed without the human initiated slave trade that brought
both yellow fever and malaria to the New World.^19 Although hardly a
deliberate construct and with many of its elements entirely beyond con-
temporary human calculation, this disease environment was indeed partly
the inadvertent creation of human beings. In significant contrast, south-
western Yunnan’s disease environment was not an anthropogenic prod-
uct. It was formed from environmental ties over an extended period that
included humans, but was not initiated or substantially directed by them.
Imperial indigenism, or the formation of space embodied in chieftainship
ethnicity, more closely resembles a cultural artifact, which emerged from
these ties. This artifact, however, was not monocultural. Human diversity
The Nature of Imperial Indigenism in Southwestern Yunnan 175
