ann
(Ann)
#1
for purposes of enhanced security, even as they deforested the material
basis for the nurturing of the empire’s elite mounted soldiery. Some
bannermen, such as Buhi, were worried by this continued contraction
of venery space and its attendant identity. Others seemed unconcerned
with the end of dismounted battue hunting in places such as Beijing.
An 1801 banner request terminated the practice pursued since the
dynasty’s early years when“afit habitat remained for birds and beasts”
in the city’s forested environs. Long years of agricultural clearance had
left nofit habitat for wild animals and, so, none for serious military
exercises.^7
Things appear so grave for all the empire’s main environmental
relations by this time that sustainable swiddening, foraging, and pastor-
alism can seem deliberate choices“to remain outside state space.”^8 This
insight is applicable, however, mainly to those states that do not main-
tain their own substantial versions of herding or hunting and gathering
or slashing and burning. Foraging or herding, and even swiddening,
could all be encompassed within theQing empire. Their orchestration
in concert with Han agriculture was what made the empire distinctively
Qing. This was less a choice than necessary adaptations to ecological
conditions defining Manchurian forests, Mongolian steppe, Zomian
mountains, or Beijing suburbs. All are strategies to “accommodate
the spatial and temporal structure,intensity and unpredictability of
environmental relations.”^9
These strategies employ“technologies of self and power”for“the
creation of new subjects”recursively linked to their diverse ecologies in
such a way as to replicate both within a stable imperial hierarchy.^10 Qing
disaster management mechanisms, for example, reconstruct an“environ-
mental subject.”Thus is restored a politically stabilizing environmental
relationship, imperial pastoralism, from which local people have become
alienated through loss of livestock. This alienation can arise through
human (raids) and/or ecological (dzud) agencies but is unlikely to return
to a“steady state”if left to itself, and likely to continue if grain and silver
substitutes are proffered as relief.
The proper formation or restoration of an environmental subjectivity
in premodern terms, however, should internalize the conviction that what
has been socially constructed is entirely natural. In modern terms, it
should internalize the conviction that there is no nature but that which
is socially constructed. The major difference between this premodern and
modern“environmentality” is that the premodern enfolds the social
within the natural, while the modern engulfs the natural within the social.
Qing Environmentality 269
