E T Yeh
Biographic Data
| ID | 28418 |
|---|---|
| NAME | E T Yeh |
| GIVEN NAMES | E T |
| FAMILY NAME | Yeh |
| SIGNATURE | YEH E T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Colorado Boulder |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4401-2404 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 54 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 663 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 54 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Living space and the struggle against geothermal energy projects in Flores, Indonesia
Framed as part of the country's green energy transition, the Indonesian government declared Flores a “Geothermal Island” in 2017. However, geothermal projects have provoked strong opposition due to concerns about risks of water and air pollution, lethal accidents, and loss of livelihoods. This article examines how two Manggarai communities on Flores have struggled against geothermal development by mobilizing around the defense of ruang hidup or “…
Resilience among 1.5 generation Korean American emerging adults
Global Geographies of Weather Modification in an Era of Climate Change
As climate change impacts intensify, interest in the practice of cloud seeding to induce precipitation and otherwise modify the weather is on the rise around the world. It is also increasingly associated in the public imagination with solar radiation management, a highly controversial form of geoengineering that works at much larger spatial scales. Despite the importance of weather modification in the context of global heating, it has attracted l…
China at COP27: CBDR, national sovereignty, and climate justice
Based on event ethnography conducted at the UNFCCC COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, this article examines the contradictory ways in which China, as a key actor in global climate negotiations, has shaped climate (in)justice, as well as how the spatiality of the COP reinforces inequity. Despite the important role China has played in promoting equity for developing countries through advocating for the principles of common but differentiated responsi…
What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make
What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make is the second installment of an “academic trilogy” of monographs from the Matsutake Worlds Research Group. Whereas the first book, Anna Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World, used the matsutake as a framework for rethinking capitalist ruins and the Anthropocene, Michael Hathaway's What a Mushroom Lives For constitutes an extended argument that fungi in general, and matsutake in …
Houses for People and Houses for Goats: Reducing Pastoralist Mobility in Tibet
Since 2000, a number of programmes have been implemented in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China aimed at sedentarisation, defined as the spatial and temporal concentration of pastoralists and their livestock. In our case study village in Nagchu, a programme to move pastoralists into concentrated housing failed to sedentarise them. By contrast, a secondary programme component to build subsidised livestock shelters has had a much more pronounced e…
Sky River: Promethean Dreams of Optimising the Atmosphere
Faunal Medicalisation in Mao’s China
Of Crayfish, Rice, and Anxiety: Agricultural Modernization in Chongzhou, Sichuan
This essay examines the emergence of crayfish and crayfish rice production in Chongzhou, Sichuan as a product of China’s agrarian transition and at the conjuncture of several forms of food anxiety. To earn revenue, the Chongzhou government has encouraged the cultivation of crayfish. Once a local peasant food, crayfish has been rebranded as a luxury item and made a centerpiece of local placemaking efforts. However, Chongzhou is also the site of an…
The locally managed agrarian transition in China: Land shareholding cooperatives and the agricultural co-management system in Chongzhou, Sichuan
China is undergoing a rapid agrarian transition from dispersed household farming to large-scale, mechanized, and commercialized agricultural production, while retaining collective rural land ownership. Reforms have encouraged transfers of rural land to new subjects of agriculture including agribusinesses, family farmers, and cooperatives, leading to capitalist dynamics in agriculture both from above and from below. Central-state pressure to scale…
Ethics and the Geography–Military Nexus: Responses to Wainwright and Weaver
This commentary includes a series of responses to Wainwright and Weaver’s “A Critical Commentary on the AAG Geography and Military Study Committee Report.” The contributors’ responses vary from the sympathetic to the critical, yet all agree that geographers’ engagements with military and intelligence organizations can be fraught with ethical issues that deserve careful consideration. The aim of this commentary is therefore to contribute to the on…
Marketization induced overgrazing: The political ecology of neoliberal pastoral policies in Inner Mongolia
The cultural politics of new Tibetan entrepreneurship in contemporary China: Valorisation and the question of neoliberalism
Over the past decade, new forms of Tibetan entrepreneurship have emerged and proliferated in China, at the intersection of a national push for entrepreneurship in response to a slowing economy, the closure of non‐governmental organisations in Tibetan areas, declining state‐sector employment, and state concerns about stability. This paper explores the rise of these new Tibetan entrepreneurs in relation to two inter‐related concerns. First, it cont…
The land belonged to Nepal but the people belonged to Tibet: Overlapping sovereignties and mobility in the Limi Valley Borderland
Recent scholarship on the lived experiences of borderlands has foregrounded and theorized the pervasiveness of anxiety, violence, and lawlessness. While useful, these do not capture all of the ways in which borderland residents relate to diverse constellations of power. This paper examines the China (Tibet Autonomous Region) – Nepal borderland through the case of the Limi Valley, in the northwest corner of Nepal’s Humla district. Before 1959, the…
Pests, keystone species, and hungry ghosts: The Gesar epic and human-pika relations on the Tibetan Plateau
For over half a century, the Chinese government has carried out large-scale poisoning campaigns on the Tibetan Plateau in an effort to exterminate the plateau pika, which is viewed as a pest that competes with livestock and causes grassland degradation. Since the 1990s, an ecological counternarrative has emerged in which pikas are keystone species rather than pests, and indicators rather than prime causes of grassland degradation. Virtually ignor…
Tibetan Indigeneity: Translations, Resemblances, and Uptake
Tibetans in Tibet live with the ideology of multiculturalism but also, simultaneously, repeated state denunciations of “national splittism”. Tibetan claims and representations about environmental stewardship and ecological wisdom resonate strongly with other indigenous formations. The “tribal allegory” of Tibetan ecological wisdom and deep connection to nature has been an available narrative for Tibetans in exile since the 1980s, and has more rec…
An integrated community and ecosystem-based approach to disaster risk reduction in mountain systems
Development and divergent post-disaster trajectories in a mountain village: Temporal dynamics of differentiation after the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake
Urbanization, education, and the politics of space on the Tibetan Plateau
This article provides an introduction to a special collection of five articles showcasing the work of rising scholars in the geography and anthropology of Tibetan regions in China (Eveline Washul, Andrew Grant, Tsering Bum, Huatse Gyal and Duojie Zhaxi, published in Critical Asian Studies 50: 4 and Critical Asian Studies 51: 1). It contextualizes the authors’ contributions in the recent promotion of planned urbanization in Tibetan regions as the …
A Historical Atlas of Tibet
A Historical Atlas of Tibet is a stunning achievement. Gorgeously designed, with forty-nine original maps and many more photographs of artwork, temples, and historical and contemporary landscapes, geographer Karl E. Ryavec's book is also meticulously researched and brimming with insight and information. True to its name, it is a historical atlas, the first to be produced about the vast region of Tibet. As such, it treats Tibet as a civilizational…
Political Ecology, Critique, and Multiple Ontologies: Musings on the Post-human and Other Environmental Turns
Research Article| March 01 2017 Political Ecology, Critique, and Multiple Ontologies: Musings on the Post-human and Other Environmental Turns Emily T. Yeh Emily T. Yeh University of Colorado Boulder [email protected] Emily T. Yeh is professor of Geography at CU Boulder. She researches development and nature-society relations in Tibetan parts of the PRC, including the political ecology of pastoralism, vulnerability to climate change, ideologi…
Pastoralist Decision-Making on the Tibetan Plateau
Commentary: On the Possibilities of Transdisciplinary Asian Studies
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Going West and Going Out: Discourses, migrants, and models in Chinese development
In 1999 China announced the launching of the Open up the West campaign, sometimes called “Going West,” to help western China finally catch up to the much wealthier eastern, coastal areas after several decades of lagging behind. The same year, China also announced a “Going Out” strategy to encourage Chinese investment abroad. The 15 years since then have witnessed dramatic Chinese government investment in various development activities in western …
Introduction: The geoeconomics and geopolitics of Chinese development and investment in Asia
China’s “Going Out” (zou chuqu) strategy, officially launched in 2000 to promote globally competitive enterprises and encourage foreign investment, has had a profound impact on China’s influence ab
Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development
The violent protests in Lhasa in 2008 against Chinese rule were met by disbelief and anger on the part of Chinese citizens and state authorities, perplexed by Tibetans' apparent ingratitude for the generous provision of development. In Taming Tibet , Emily T. Yeh examines how Chinese development projects in Tibet served to consolidate state space and power. Drawing on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork between 2000 and 2009, Yeh traces how …
Greening western China: A critical view
How can experience of local residents be "knowledge"?' Challenges in interdisciplinary climate change research
Despite widespread acceptance of the idea of working across disciplines and methods in climate change research, the interpretive social sciences continue to be relatively neglected in interdisciplinary research endeavours. Much greater appreciation across epistemological differences is necessary for inclusive collaborative efforts, which in turn requires explicit discussion of what those differences are. Based on the author's participation in an …
Exile Meets Homeland: Politics, Performance, and Authenticity in the Tibetan Diaspora
Tibetans are often imagined as authentic, pure, and geographically undifferentiated, but Tibetan identity formation is, in fact, varied and deeply inflected by national location and transnational trajectories. In this paper I examine the frictions of encounter between three groups of Tibetans who arrived in the USA around the same time, but who differ in their relationships to the homeland. The numerically dominant group consists of refugees who …
Recasting the rural: State, society and environment in contemporary China
Going West and Going Out: Discourses, migrants, and models in Chinese development
In 1999 China announced the launching of the Open up the West campaign, sometimes called “Going West,” to help western China finally catch up to the much wealthier eastern, coastal areas after several decades of lagging behind. The same year, China also announced a “Going Out” strategy to encourage Chinese investment abroad. The 15 years since then have witnessed dramatic Chinese government investment in various development activities in western …
Green Governmentality and Pastoralism in Western China: Converting Pastures to Grasslands
One of China's newest large-scale 'ecological construction' projects, 'converting pastures to grasslands' (tuimu huancao), calls for the creation of three new types of zones on existing pastures: zones in which grazing is to be permanently banned, zones in which grazing is to cease for a period of several years, and zones in which pasture is to be seasonally closed. This project is likely to significantly alter the livelihoods of tens of thousand…
Following the caterpillar fungus: Nature, commodity chains, and the place of Tibet in China's uneven geographies
Following caterpillar fungus as it travels from the Tibetan Plateau to wealthy Chinese consumers, this article makes several interventions into geographical studies of commodity chains. First, it argues for an expansion beyond the usual call to connect the political economy of production with cultures of consumption; the cultural politics of production and political economies of consumption must also be considered. Second, it argues for bringing …
Rural politics in contemporary China
We examine overarching themes in the contributions, including critiques of neo-liberalism, rural-urban linkages, the relevance of mixed methods and cross-disciplinary approaches, the need to engage social theory, and variation across space and time. At the same time, we provide an overview of rural Chinese politics and explain that the goal of the collection was to bring findings that have appeared in area studies or disciplinary outlets into con…
The politics of conservation in contemporary rural China
Placing conservation within a broad framework of agrarian and environmental politics, this review article argues that natural resource governance is fundamental to rural politics in China. Much of the environmental literature adopts a technocratic approach, ignoring the political nature of the redistribution of access to and control over natural resources, and of knowledge vis-à-vis degradation. Reading the managerial literature with and against …
Tropes of Indolence and the Cultural Politics of Development in Lhasa, Tibet
Tibetans in Lhasa negotiate development, as a hegemonic project, through idioms animated by situated practices and historically sedimented memories. Two related idioms through which development is experienced are a pervasive trope of Tibetan indolence and one that describes Tibetans as being spoiled. A Gramscian analysis of contradictory consciousness is critical to understanding the trope of indolence, which is both a performative speech act and…
Unexpected climate impacts on the Tibetan Plateau: Local and scientific knowledge in findings of delayed summer
From Wasteland to Wetland? Nature and Nation in China's Tibet
The environmental history of Lhasa's Lhalu wetland reveals problems with competing ecological nationalist narratives of the Chinese state and Tibetan exiles. Both deny Tibetans the possibility of being historical agents vis-à-vis nature. The article traces a series of environmental projects enacted on the wetland from the 1950s to the present. Each one, enacted to secure the unstable edges of state sovereignty, ironically paved the way for the ne…
Introduction: The geoeconomics and geopolitics of Chinese development and investment in Asia
China’s “Going Out” (zou chuqu) strategy, officially launched in 2000 to promote globally competitive enterprises and encourage foreign investment, has had a profound impact on China’s influence ab
Tibet and the Problem of Radical Reductionism
This article takes issue with a mode of argumentation advanced by a number of left-leaning, radical scholars, including those associated with China's New Left, about the causes of the Tibetan unrest in China in spring 2008. According to this stance, the Tibetan protests were the result of external manipulation by neoconservative, reactionary forces, ranging from the CIA to the Dalai Lama. The unstated premise of this response is that taking a cri…
Tibetan Range Wars: Spatial Politics and Authority on the Grasslands of Amdo
This article focuses on one of the most disturbing features of life on the Tibetan grasslands today: intractable, violent conflicts over pasture. The author argues that understanding spatial and historical dimensions of the process through which Amdo was incorporated into the People's Republic of China (PRC) helps us make sense of these conflicts. State territoriality attempts to replace older socio-territorial identities with new administrative …
Hip-Hop Gangsta or Most Deserving of Victims? Transnational Migrant Identities and the Paradox of Tibetan Racialization in the USA
This ethnographic paper examines the complex cultural politics of Tibetan transnational migration by examining racialized everyday practices in Tibetan communities in the San Francisco Bay Area and Boulder, Colorado. After providing an overview of Tibetan migration to the USA, we discuss migrants' contradictory insertion into American racial bipolarism. On the one hand, Tibetans' racialized class positions place them at the lower end of a spectru…
Tibetan pastoralism in neoliberalising China: Continuity and change in Gouli
The effects of neoliberal contexts on livestock production have been relatively ignored in geography. This paper contributes to this literature through a case study of continuity and change in pastoralism on the Tibetan Plateau in China. Since use rights to winter pasture were allocated to individual households, herders in Gouli, Qinghai, have developed an extensive, new practice of renting livestock and pasture from each other. Written contracts…
Urbanization, education, and the politics of space on the Tibetan Plateau
This article provides an introduction to a special collection of five articles showcasing the work of rising scholars in the geography and anthropology of Tibetan regions in China (Eveline Washul, Andrew Grant, Tsering Bum, Huatse Gyal and Duojie Zhaxi, published in Critical Asian Studies 50: 4 and Critical Asian Studies 51: 1). It contextualizes the authors’ contributions in the recent promotion of planned urbanization in Tibetan regions as the …
Pests, keystone species, and hungry ghosts: The Gesar epic and human-pika relations on the Tibetan Plateau
For over half a century, the Chinese government has carried out large-scale poisoning campaigns on the Tibetan Plateau in an effort to exterminate the plateau pika, which is viewed as a pest that competes with livestock and causes grassland degradation. Since the 1990s, an ecological counternarrative has emerged in which pikas are keystone species rather than pests, and indicators rather than prime causes of grassland degradation. Virtually ignor…
Tibetan Pastoralists' Vulnerability to Climate Change: A Political Ecology Analysis of Snowstorm Coping Capacity
Blazing Pelts and Burning Passions: Nationalism, Cultural Politics, and Spectacular Decommodification in Tibet
A few months after the fourteenth Dalai Lama stated at the Kalachakra Initiation Ceremony in India in January 2006 that Tibetans should cease wearing clothing lined with endangered animal skins, Tibetans across the Tibetan Plateau destroyed millions of yuan worth of otter, leopard, tiger, and other pelts. Outsiders' interpretations of these events have flattened out the complexity of participants' motivations, which included not only religious an…
The land belonged to Nepal but the people belonged to Tibet: Overlapping sovereignties and mobility in the Limi Valley Borderland
Recent scholarship on the lived experiences of borderlands has foregrounded and theorized the pervasiveness of anxiety, violence, and lawlessness. While useful, these do not capture all of the ways in which borderland residents relate to diverse constellations of power. This paper examines the China (Tibet Autonomous Region) – Nepal borderland through the case of the Limi Valley, in the northwest corner of Nepal’s Humla district. Before 1959, the…
Ephemeral 'communities: Spatiality and politics in rangeland interventions in Mongolia
In recent years, the number of community-based natural resource management projects for rangeland conservation and development has grown rapidly in Mongolia. Such projects seek to develop social capital through the formation of herder groups and pasture user groups, in order to enable the coordination of complex, collective tasks needed for sustainability. Through analysis of social networks, interviews and ethnographic data from two places where…
Marketization induced overgrazing: The political ecology of neoliberal pastoral policies in Inner Mongolia
Tibetan Range Wars: Spatial Politics and Authority on the Grasslands of Amdo
This article focuses on one of the most disturbing features of life on the Tibetan grasslands today: intractable, violent conflicts over pasture. The author argues that understanding spatial and historical dimensions of the process through which Amdo was incorporated into the People's Republic of China (PRC) helps us make sense of these conflicts. State territoriality attempts to replace older socio-territorial identities with new administrative …
State Power and the Logic of Reform in China's Electricity Sector
Green Governmentality and Pastoralism in Western China: Converting Pastures to Grasslands
One of China's newest large-scale 'ecological construction' projects, 'converting pastures to grasslands' (tuimu huancao), calls for the creation of three new types of zones on existing pastures: zones in which grazing is to be permanently banned, zones in which grazing is to cease for a period of several years, and zones in which pasture is to be seasonally closed. This project is likely to significantly alter the livelihoods of tens of thousand…
Border Landscapes: The Politics of Akha Land Use in China and Thailand
Key Words: access to resourcesborderChinaethnic minoritieslandscapeterritorializationThailand Additional informationNotes on contributorsEmily T. YehReviewed by
Hip-Hop Gangsta or Most Deserving of Victims? Transnational Migrant Identities and the Paradox of Tibetan Racialization in the USA
This ethnographic paper examines the complex cultural politics of Tibetan transnational migration by examining racialized everyday practices in Tibetan communities in the San Francisco Bay Area and Boulder, Colorado. After providing an overview of Tibetan migration to the USA, we discuss migrants' contradictory insertion into American racial bipolarism. On the one hand, Tibetans' racialized class positions place them at the lower end of a spectru…
Tropes of Indolence and the Cultural Politics of Development in Lhasa, Tibet
Tibetans in Lhasa negotiate development, as a hegemonic project, through idioms animated by situated practices and historically sedimented memories. Two related idioms through which development is experienced are a pervasive trope of Tibetan indolence and one that describes Tibetans as being spoiled. A Gramscian analysis of contradictory consciousness is critical to understanding the trope of indolence, which is both a performative speech act and…
Exile Meets Homeland: Politics, Performance, and Authenticity in the Tibetan Diaspora
Tibetans are often imagined as authentic, pure, and geographically undifferentiated, but Tibetan identity formation is, in fact, varied and deeply inflected by national location and transnational trajectories. In this paper I examine the frictions of encounter between three groups of Tibetans who arrived in the USA around the same time, but who differ in their relationships to the homeland. The numerically dominant group consists of refugees who …
Forging Environmentalism: Justice, Livelihood and Contested Environments . Joanne Bauer, ed
Sustainable Development in Western China: Managing People, Livestock and Grasslands in Pastoral Areas . Colin G. Brown , Scott A. Waldron , John W. Longworth
From Wasteland to Wetland? Nature and Nation in China's Tibet
The environmental history of Lhasa's Lhalu wetland reveals problems with competing ecological nationalist narratives of the Chinese state and Tibetan exiles. Both deny Tibetans the possibility of being historical agents vis-à-vis nature. The article traces a series of environmental projects enacted on the wetland from the 1950s to the present. Each one, enacted to secure the unstable edges of state sovereignty, ironically paved the way for the ne…
Greening western China: A critical view
Tibet and the Problem of Radical Reductionism
This article takes issue with a mode of argumentation advanced by a number of left-leaning, radical scholars, including those associated with China's New Left, about the causes of the Tibetan unrest in China in spring 2008. According to this stance, the Tibetan protests were the result of external manipulation by neoconservative, reactionary forces, ranging from the CIA to the Dalai Lama. The unstated premise of this response is that taking a cri…
Indigeneidades contemporáneas: Cultura, Política Y Globalización
Durante los últimos siglos, muchas sociedades tribales han sido aniquiladas por la guerra, la enfermedad, la explotación y la asimilación cultural. Sin embargo, lejos de desaparecer, como alguna vez se vaticinó, los pueblos nativos hoy se muestran fortalecidos e incluso crecen en términos demográficos. Así, los pueblos indígenas han afirmado su lugar en la cultura, la economía y la política mundial del siglo XXI, a pesar de lo heterogéneo de sus …
Tibetan pastoralism in neoliberalising China: Continuity and change in Gouli
The effects of neoliberal contexts on livestock production have been relatively ignored in geography. This paper contributes to this literature through a case study of continuity and change in pastoralism on the Tibetan Plateau in China. Since use rights to winter pasture were allocated to individual households, herders in Gouli, Qinghai, have developed an extensive, new practice of renting livestock and pasture from each other. Written contracts…
Transnational environmentalism and entanglements of sovereignty: The tiger campaign across the Himalayas
The Roles of Overgrazing, Climate Change and Policy as Drivers of Degradation of China's Grasslands
Climate change and overgrazing are believed by policy makers to have been the drivers of grassland degradation in China over the past thirty years. However, recent work has suggested that policies that have led to privatization of use rights and household enclosures are more important drivers of degradation. An analysis of available evidence from scientific publications and national survey data relating to climate change, livestock numbers, and m…
Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development
The violent protests in Lhasa in 2008 against Chinese rule were met by disbelief and anger on the part of Chinese citizens and state authorities, perplexed by Tibetans' apparent ingratitude for the generous provision of development. In Taming Tibet , Emily T. Yeh examines how Chinese development projects in Tibet served to consolidate state space and power. Drawing on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork between 2000 and 2009, Yeh traces how …
Following the caterpillar fungus: Nature, commodity chains, and the place of Tibet in China's uneven geographies
Following caterpillar fungus as it travels from the Tibetan Plateau to wealthy Chinese consumers, this article makes several interventions into geographical studies of commodity chains. First, it argues for an expansion beyond the usual call to connect the political economy of production with cultures of consumption; the cultural politics of production and political economies of consumption must also be considered. Second, it argues for bringing …
Blazing Pelts and Burning Passions: Nationalism, Cultural Politics, and Spectacular Decommodification in Tibet
A few months after the fourteenth Dalai Lama stated at the Kalachakra Initiation Ceremony in India in January 2006 that Tibetans should cease wearing clothing lined with endangered animal skins, Tibetans across the Tibetan Plateau destroyed millions of yuan worth of otter, leopard, tiger, and other pelts. Outsiders' interpretations of these events have flattened out the complexity of participants' motivations, which included not only religious an…
Rural politics in contemporary China
We examine overarching themes in the contributions, including critiques of neo-liberalism, rural-urban linkages, the relevance of mixed methods and cross-disciplinary approaches, the need to engage social theory, and variation across space and time. At the same time, we provide an overview of rural Chinese politics and explain that the goal of the collection was to bring findings that have appeared in area studies or disciplinary outlets into con…
The politics of conservation in contemporary rural China
Placing conservation within a broad framework of agrarian and environmental politics, this review article argues that natural resource governance is fundamental to rural politics in China. Much of the environmental literature adopts a technocratic approach, ignoring the political nature of the redistribution of access to and control over natural resources, and of knowledge vis-à-vis degradation. Reading the managerial literature with and against …
Unexpected climate impacts on the Tibetan Plateau: Local and scientific knowledge in findings of delayed summer
Environmental Winds: Making the Global in Southwest China
Tibetan Pastoralists' Vulnerability to Climate Change: A Political Ecology Analysis of Snowstorm Coping Capacity
Nowhere to Call Home: A Tibetan in Beijing
Political science (34 works) · Geography (29 works) · Sociology (27 works) · China (24 works) · Politics (24 works) · Law (18 works) · Economics (17 works) · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology (17 works) · Ecology (14 works) · China's Ethnic Minorities and Relations (12 works)