ann
(Ann)
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This has been a comparative disadvantage, past and present, for these
less centralized formations. Structured by more“tribal”types of organ-
ization, they“are still widely considered inherently unstable, transi-
tional and incomplete”with“their trajectories unfinished until such
time as they become states or...collapse.”Terms and concepts related
to tribal and foraging peoples have been relegated to the bottom of this
hierarchy of state centralization. Carole L. Crumley has countered that
less rigidly ordered organizational forms may be more flexible in
responding to periods of marked environmental change.^44 Whatever
the truth of this observation, less centralized formations do seem to
exhibit more direct, immediate interdependence with their surrounding
ecologies.
The imperial agrarian state anchored in China proper was, of course,
an inherited legacy of its Han, Tang, Song, and Ming predecessors. Yet, in
contrast, the Qing nevertheless did make a concerted, if often conflicted,
effort to protect and even nurture networks of environmental relations
other than those constituting Han agrarianism. The resulting complexity
of merging new and old forms under a single imperial system required
continuous dynastic adaptation to maintain the awesome Qing radiance.
Discursive adaptation in the context of the enormous project of
reordering connections between peoples and ecologies is a main subject
ofChapter 1. The chapter traces these connections as links between
culture and nature that produced the empire’s primary forms of economic
and military power. These links appear as two main forms of environ-
mental relations,“arablism”(or“arable-ism”) and“venery,”terms that
refer to nature-culture interactions informing both agriculture and
hunting, respectively. The state constructed a Han identity in China
proper on the basis of imperial arablism, while militarized hunting, or
venery, formed a similar basis for Inner Asian identity of Manchus and
Mongols. Both networks, as more than just“farming”and“hunting,”
produced the empire’s primary forms of economic and military power,
respectively. Other networks emerged as state adaptations to more
specific regional borderland conditions.
InChapter 2 , one such variant network, imperial foraging, is examined
as the main environmental relation producing a borderland order in
Manchuria embodied in the“borderland Manchu.”The formation of
this identity was the Qing response to the seventeenth-century Russian
invasion of the Sahaliyan-Amur-Heilong (in Manchu, Russian, and
Chinese, respectively, or“SAH”) River basin in north-central Manchuria.
Initially hunted, gathered, and mobilized under relations of sable pelt
Introduction 13
