Map of Yunnan (Image downloaded from dragonlightphotography.com)

How does my research connect to contemporary issues and debates in border and borderlands?

By studying the border landscapes of tea in southwest China, my research connects to contemporary border issues and debates. Borders, be they symbolic boundaries or physical borderlines, are key issues concerning citizenships, identities, and the power of exclusion and inclusion across world regions. The process of globalization, however, has made the notions of borders problematic due to its unprecedented “cross-border” flows of goods and ideas. Nevertheless, that does not mean globalization has erased borders to reach a “borderless” world. For example, studies of national borders still provide insights for understanding borders as the essential elements to legitimize state sovereignty and policy violence of national security. Acknowledging the significance of borders in the context of globalization, my research seeks to understand borders as spaces of mixing identities and as zones of power negotiations. Specifically, through the investigation of the relationship between modern tea trade and China’s southwest border landscapes, I expect to demonstrate the paradoxes, contrasts, and compromises that are implied in the narratives of borders and identities, and in the practices of power. I will analyze the structural and ideological constituents of border landscapes by looking into the market manipulations and state interventions. Additionally, I use ethnographic research to engage in local ethnic minorities’ everyday life, where border landscapes are symbolically and materially reproduced. By looking beyond borders as the fixed and essentialized entities, I aim to re-conceptualize borders and borderlands as ongoing cultural processes of blurring, blending and hybridization.

Ancient Tea Horse Road (Image downloaded from china.com.cn)

How do the debates in human-nonhuman relation inform my research?

Social sciences have been studying the roles of non-humans in forging social relations. In addition to human geography, anthropology, sociology, and science and technology studies have been engaging a “more-than-human” approach to challenge the human-nonhuman dichotomies. “Non-human agency,” thus, has become a debated concept in re-theorizing the assemblage of the heterogeneous associations among disparate natural and social, human and non-human elements. Broadly, I situate my research in the current debates about the “more-than-human” research approach. This interdisciplinary approach informs my research in two ways. First, tea trade in China’s southwest borderlands has been unsettling, mobilizing, sustaining, and re-assembling the associations between human elements (the entrepreneurs, the state officials, the local ethnic minorities, etc.) and non-human elements (the ancient tea trees, modern tea production technologies, the historical trade route, etc.). Second, instead of taking landscape only as a tangible object “out there” to be empirically accessed, described, and researched, my research also inquires into “what landscape does” by highlighting the mutual constructions between border landscapes and the economic, political, cultural values. Investigation of the mutual constructions will indicate the dynamic formulation of social and subjective identities attained by different groups of people in the borderlands.

Ancient Tea Trees in Jingmai (by Po-Yi Hung)

How does my research engage with landscape studies in human geography?

My research engages with both political economy and poststructuralist approaches within landscape studies of human geography. In order to theorize landscapes as constituted both by their symbolic meanings and by their physical qualities, my research takes political economy and poststructuralism as complementary explanatory tools. More specifically, I use poststructuralist approach to investigate the emerging imageries of China’s border landscapes of tea, and the resulting politics of modern representations of China’s borderlands. In addition, political economy provides me with the methods to focus on the structure of the tea industry’s market economy, and to pay attention to the market and state interventions in local people’s livelihood practices. Therefore, my research not only applies discursive analysis of images and discourses of border landscapes, but also emphasizes the material effects in people’s everyday lives resulting from land-use changes. The aim is to understand the landscapes of tea in China’s southwest borderlands as struggles over material access to space and land as well as over their symbolic meanings. Therefore, my research avoids the crude binary opposition between material determinism and representational politics.

Harvest tea leaves from the ancient tea trees (image downloaded from www.dayoo.com on 2009/12/14)

Does the market economy in post-socialist China produce different meanings of its borderlands? My research investigates the relationship between cross-regional tea trade and the ongoing physical and symbolic changes of China’s southwest border landscapes. The aim is to understand the interactions among tea entrepreneurs, the state, and the local ethnic minorities, and the resulting contestations over the post-socialist development of China’s southwest borderlands.

The recent boom in popularity of Pu’er tea has radically altered the border landscapes in southwest China. Among the various products of Pu’er tea, the “ancient tree tea” (gushu cha) has been much more highly valued in the market since the early 2000s. For a long time, local ethnic minorities have harvested the ancient tea trees for everyday drinking, and expressed little interest in selling the tea. Most of the ancient tea trees are found in the borderlands of Yunnan Province, where border landscapes have been considered by the state as culturally backward and economically underdeveloped. Nevertheless, the growing popularity of ancient tree tea, especially in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Guangdong, and the Chinese communities in Thailand and Malaysia, has attracted both national and international entrepreneurs’ attentions to the borderlands. In Jingmaishan, a mountainous area with over ten thousand acres of ancient tea trees near the border of China and Burma, a tea entrepreneur from Taiwan signed a 50-year contract with the county government in 2003 to retain the right for producing ancient tree tea. The entrepreneur started his tea factory in Jingmaishan, and introduced the ideas of organic agriculture and modern techniques to standardize production processes. Since then, local Dai and Bulang people have been recruited and trained by the company to participate in the modernization of organic tea production. However, for the Dai and Bulang people, this “modernization” of tea production creates an ambivalent perception of the ancient tea trees. On the one hand, they expect a better life by harvesting the trees for the cross-regional market; on the other, they confront more interventions in their livelihood practices and land uses, such as the prohibition of free harvest.

Additionally, the ancient tea trees denote the power of the state. Chinese historians argue that tea production of China’s southwest borderlands can actually be traced back to the eighth century, with tea shipped by caravans to Tibet via a historical trade route called “Ancient Tea-Horse Road” (chama gudao). The state has used the history of cross-regional trade relationship to claim the integration of southwest frontier and Tibet into the nation-state of China. As a result, the state regards the ancient tea trees as an evidence of the tea trade history, and imposes more regulations to protect the trees as “national heritage” to memorialize the political integration of the borderlands.

Based on these initial findings from my preliminary research, my major hypothesis is that border landscapes of southwest China have been mutually constructed with a complex entanglement between tea trade, the state governance, and everyday life of local ethnic minorities. With focuses on the landscapes of ancient tea trees, three main questions will guide my future research: 1) How do the images and texts convey new meanings of the ancient tea trees due to the boom in popularity of Pu’er tea?; 2) How are different perceptions of the ancient tea trees contested among tea entrepreneurs, government officials, and the local ethnic minorities?; 3) How have local ethnic minorities’ livelihood practices reproduced the meanings for the ancient tea trees?

Image downloaded from www.xsbn.gov.cn on 2009/12/15

AAA (American Anthropological Association) 2009 Annual Meeting: Session Abstract

Landscape under Connections: Networks and Encounters of Place-Making in East and Southeast Asia

Up until the mid-1970’s, social science in general took landscape as a tangible object “out there” to be empirically accessed, described and researched. At this time, social scientists traced the evolution of landscape by emphasizing reconstruction of the past and privileged the non-urban or pre-industrial sites for landscape studies. Since the 1980’s, looking for more engagement with the wider social context in which cultures are formed and explained, social scientists of landscape studies started conceptualizing landscape as the manifestation of critical sociopolitical issues like difference, inequality, power, exclusion, social stratification, etc. However, this vibrant theoretical ferment of landscape studies has confronted another challenge resulting from the scenarios of multi-scale connections between different actors working with diverse objectives, and a reorientation of studies seems imperative to understand the significance of landscape under current multi-scale connections. Accordingly, incorporating different studies in and of East Asia and Southeast Asia, this session intends to regroup landscape studies by dealing with three related sets of theoretical frameworks:

1) Landscape as the arena for different actors to work with diverse objectives: This discussion highlights landscape as the arena for different actors to work with diverse objectives. The networks between different actors will then (re)shape the relationship between the global market economy, power of the state, and local people’s everyday life. The actors include the entrepreneurs, governmental officials, local elites, ethnic minority laborers, researchers, etc. These actors work with diverse objectives, including profit making, poverty alleviation, political control, livelihood earning, sustainable development, and natural conservation. On the one hand, the physical forms and symbolic meanings of landscape are changed by these disparate actors and objectives; on the other, landscape is also the imperative element for these heterogeneous actors to forge and sustain the networks between them.

2) Place-making as an ongoing event mobilizing interrelations between the landscape and other actors:  Different actors are not automatically forged in a network. On the contrary, the practice of a network, to connect, is contingent on and initiated by specific social events in space and time. Our session consists of different papers addressing diverse ongoing events mobilizing and sustaining the connections between disparate actors in place-making, be they entrepreneurs, the state, or local ethnic minorities. It is also the process of place-making as the force specifically pulling the landscape into the network linking different actors.

3) Landscape as manifestation of the contingent encounters between different groups of people: Landscape has been shaped by historical contingencies of encounters between different groups of people. These different groups of people brought different perceptions of landscape to create meanings for a place. However, this does not designate landscape only as a passive receiver of historically imposed meanings, but an active participant in place-making. As a result, place-making in the era of globalization is assumed as a particular combination where multi-scale connections interweave with meanings and practices previously “sedimented” in the local landscapes.