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(Ann)
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demonstrated. Officials’rhetorical assertions that particular groups were
chieftainships did not prevent these groups from colluding with Myanmar,
raiding Yunnan proper, failing to grow“proper” rice, or even being
physically indistinguishable from their wild counterparts. Qing garrisons
might ensure greater conformity by chieftainships to dynastic expecta-
tions, but malaria’s effect on troops and officials made this stabilizing
presence biologically impossible to maintain on an effective scale.
There were also practical administrative and gustatory difficulties with
glutinous rice cultivation. Although many of these problems seem tied
mainly to human agency, the underlying basis for the exercise of most
of this agency to either abet or resist Qing power was also ecological.
The disease remained a fundamental check on the formation of a
congenial“tribal”identity, and by extension a dynastically manageable
borderland, even as it necessitated such a formation. Southwestern
Yunnan’s environmental network inhibited its dynastic disposition to a
far greater extent than in either Manchuria or Mongolia. This inhibition
was mainly due to the region’s“nature”as primarily manifested in its
mountainous and malarial disease environment. Regional networks
could be used within certain limits, but never fully controlled by any
group at the time, because these networks’full range was not sufficiently
comprehended by anyone.
Malaria is particularly significant in this borderland comparative per-
spective precisely because it included elements that dynastic authorities
either did not perceive as relevant, likeAnopheles, or simply did not
perceive at all, likePlasmodium. The inability to identify particular
insects and microbes as relational elements key for the construction of
its mountainous southwestern borderland contrasts starkly with the acute
Qing awareness of the critical roles played by livestock on the steppe,
forage in the forest, and game beyond the Great Wall. The dynasty was
left to rely on much more narrowly anthropocentric modes of adaptation,
namely, the native chieftainship“system,”rather than the more con-
sciously comprehensive structures like imperial foraging or imperial
pastoralism.
Swidden agriculture along with forest foraging under generally moun-
tainous conditions was the actual“Zomian”counterpart to Manchurian
hunting and gathering and Mongol herding. It is a testimony to the
imperial Chinese state’s indifference to Zomia’s fundamental environ-
mental relation that no “imperial swiddening” emerged. Perhaps
“Zomi-culture”would be an appropriately distinctive neologism, but
“imperial Zomi-culture”must wistfully remain a Qing might-have-been,
The Nature of Imperial Indigenism in Southwestern Yunnan 209
