things in tune throughout its existing domains by the onset of the nine-
teenth. As I hope the following pages will show, however, orchestration
was never easy or natural because of the diversity Qing imperial relations
sought to harmonize. Yet disharmony became historically audible, espe-
cially when the state stopped adapting and started imposing.
Notes1 Qing Gaozong yuzhi shi 8 : 132 b.
2 Qingshigao, 8 : 1891.
3 Dichotomies such as“nature/culture”perpetuate illusory disjunctions, but
some such distinctions seem linguistically unavoidable and remain useful with
sufficient qualification; Haraway,“The Promises of Monsters,” 297 – 98.
4 In stressing mutually constitutive relations not fully encompassed by humans,
this study departs from work in“anthrozoology” that emphasizes how
humans“understand animals in the context of human society and culture”;
DeMello,Animals and Society, 9 – 11. No one in Qing China socially con-
structed blood parasites, for example, although some of their malarial effects
were so treated.
5 For overviews of these ethnic administrative systems, see Ma Ruheng and Ma
Dazheng, eds.,Qingdai de bianjiang zhengce; Di Cosmo,“Qing Colonial
Administration in Inner Asia,” 287 – 309. Regionally specialized studies
include Cheng ZhenmingQingdai tusi yanjiu; Yang Qiang,Qingdai Meng-
guzu mengqi zhidu; Du Jiaji,Baqi yu Qingchao zhengzhi lungao.
6 Hale,Ethnic Politics, 50. I am grateful to my colleague, Matthew Gildner for
directing me to Hale. Hale’s formulation recapitulates with greater precision
and interdisciplinary support a more commonsense generalization that“every
civilization has an ethnocentric world image in which outsiders are reduced to
manageable spatial units”; Dikötter,The Discourse of Race, 5. On the utility
of the concept of identity in various contexts, see Brubaker and Cooper,
“Beyond‘Identity’,” 1 – 47 ; Elliott,“Ethnicity in the Qing Eight Banners,”
32 – 35 ; Elliott,The Manchu Way,xiv–xv, 8 – 13 ; Crossley,“Thinking about
Ethnicity,” 7 – 8 , 11 , 25 , 27. I consider“early modern”ethnic identity as
semiconscious and not fully formed in a modern sense.
7 Crossley,“Thinking about Ethnicity,” 27. See also Brower and Lazzerini, eds.,
Russia’s Orient,xv–xvi.
8 For a rejection of nature as a purely cultural construct, see Ingold,“Hunting
and Gathering,” 117 , 129.
9 West,“Translation, Value and Space,” 633. For some trends in environmental
anthropology, see Headland,“CA Forum on Theory in Anthropology,”
605 – 30 ; Little,“Environments and Environmentalisms,” 253 – 84.
10 The“environment of Mongolian ethnic culture,”has, for example, become
an important issue in current development work in Inner Mongolia specific-
ally and in Inner Asia in general; Bilik,“Culture, the Environment and
Development in Inner Mongolia,” 161 – 62 ; Humphrey and Sneath,
“Introduction,” 2.