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(Ann)
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Analysis of pristine foraging has also been problematic for contempor-
ary western anthropology. Scholarship from the late 1980 s challenged
prior assertions of the existence of“primary”hunter-gatherers, who only
foraged and never needed to farm or trade. In contrast,“secondary”
hunter-gatherers are understood as diversifying their subsistence activ-
ities, although some scholars dismiss the category of forager altogether as
a purely subjective construction of modern observers. More recently,
a basic consensus has emerged on retaining hunter-gatherers in a less
essentialized and anachronistic conceptual form to accommodate the
diversity of their lifeways, especially today.^23
Different levels of the Qing state made conflicting distinctions between
foragers as well, discussed in greater detail below. While reflecting past
and present categorical ambiguities, the evidence suggests the existence of
particular northeastern foraging practices that required space to maintain
interconnected human and natural resources. Such enclaves could be
existential prerequisites for the preservation of a forager identity
depending on when, where, and how this identity is defined. From the
perspective expressed in the Korean account of 1536 , individual forage
mountains in Jilin were necessary to the physical survival of any Jurchen
aiman, who all appear as pristine foragers. From the Ming perspective in
1617 amalgamated forage was critical to the political survival of the Jin
state, which by that time was clearly engaged in secondary foraging
augmented by agriculture and herding. Once the Qing state had overcome
both the Koreans and the Ming to consolidate itself in China proper, the
significance of foraging areas diminished in these brute existential terms.
However, it increased, from the dynasty’s eighteenth-century perspective,
for the preservation of the embodiments of“the old, pure and honest
Manchu traditions.”This deliberate state policy to preserve, even deter-
mine, foraging culture for purposes other than immediate survival was the
basis for a third borderland identity constructed through “imperial
foraging.”^24
imperial foraging: the administrative space
of cultured nature
After 1644 , the environment for best cultivating imperial foraging lay in
parts of Jilin and Heilongjiang that could be kept largely isolated from
corrosive non-Manchu elements, especially Han agro-urban practices. In
fact, incompatibility between Han farming and Manchu hunting had
already left a preconquest record and legacy.
The Nature of Imperial Foraging in the SAH Basin 69
