ann
(Ann)
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in practice, because both groups, to say nothing of their complex and
variegated subdivisions, hunted and herded. The following section will
qualify this distinction through a brief examination of venery, a term
intended to describe hunting relations that construct human identity in
dynamic interdependency with prey as mounted hunter-soldiers. Venery
was the environmental tie common to both groups as inhabitants of
ecosystems north of the passes.
Venery was, moreover, central to the imperial construction of non-
Han borderland identity, whereas herding tended to be more regionally
and ethnically specific in application. Qing rulers such as Nurhaci,
addressing Khalkhaotogin 1619 , could certainly assert that“Mongols
raise animals and eat meat...but [Manchus] plowfields and eat grain,”
but such attitudes were selectively held.^81 In fact, meat eating itself seems
to have been a Manchu characteristic in the view of their imperial prede-
cessors, the Ming. One Ming official, Song Yihan, contemptuously
observed a few years later around 1621 that“these Jianzhou tribals
[i.e., Jin Jurchen] live rough, eat meat, and are unable to farm the land
they acquire.”^82 Yet Nurhaci’s and Song’s diametrical views both assume
the superiority of agriculture, and, in this respect, both are expressions of
imperial arablism across an ethnic boundary.
Hunting, however, in the Manchu view was never entirely yoked to
agriculture, but was held a vital, indeed strategic, component of both
Manchu and Mongol identity. This is clear even before the conquest in the
numerous adjudications of hunting cases that appear in the records of the
early Qing.^83 Some of these cases involved restricting Manchu elites from
hunting excesses, involving trespass into battuefields or simply breaches of
discipline stemming from clamorous rivalry to bag the quarryfirst, which
scared off game. Mongol enthusiasm had to be likewise disciplined, as in the
Lifanyuan(Court of Territorial Affairs) decision in 1638 to limit the number
and type of game tribute presented to the throne to avoid excesses that
would burden Mongol nobles’subjects and exhaust their horses.^84
Venery was not comparable to arablism in the imperial environmental
scheme of things in scale and general influence. It did, however, receive
heavy patronage during the Qing as part of the dynasty’s efforts to
accustom arablism to the empire’s newly expanded boundaries. These
included efforts to preserve a“Manchu”identity that was often amal-
gamated with banner members of various ethnicities, including Mongols.
Indeed, there were actually several distinct banner systems simultaneously
in operation mainly distinguishable by their degree of autonomy, always
limited, from central state control. I will prefix the Manchu term for
Qing Fields in Theory and Practice 49
