This book, along with Yuanyuan Xie's Ecological Migrants, marks the first book-length treatment of the Ewenki, a reindeer-herding group of northern China.Footnote 9 Using their deer for transport and milk, the Ewenki depended on hunting for subsistence and trade. The Chinese state brought the Ewenki under administration in the 1950s. Deteriorating relations with the USSR caused the government to relocate the Ewenki away from the border to a newly created settlement, Aologuya, in the mid-1960s. The state also directed the Ewenki to turn from fur-hunting to harvesting reindeer antlers. Meanwhile, their homelands were increasingly opened to logging, which, along with poaching, caused wildlife to decline. Thus, in 2003 the state outlawed hunting and moved the Ewenki to New Aologuya, some 250 kilometers away. New Aologuya includes an ethnic Ewenki reindeer tourist park, to provide a source of income. A few families continue to herd the dwindling numbers of reindeer.
Reclaiming the Forest offers fascinating discussions of tensions inherent in the evolving situation of the Ewenki: tensions in gender roles, as herding, traditionally a female occupation, became masculinized with the rise in antler harvesting and the demise of hunting; changes in Ewenki mobility and territoriality with the penetration of forestry roads into their herding and hunting grounds; and evolving discourses about who were “real hunters,” as allocation of insufficient housing in New Aologuya prioritized hunters. The essays show how officials in charge of relocating the Ewenki vacillated between justifying the move due to environmental degradation (overhunting), and rationalizing it in terms of improving Ewenki living standards. The former rationale disregarded the role state forestry operations played; the latter rationale could disqualify the relocation project from the targeted environmental relocation funding on which it depended.
Fascinating observations are also offered on the evolving role of museums in Old and New Aologuya in creating and shaping ethnic categories, and in effecting Chinese nationality policy and governance practices. Evolving vernacular Ewenki architecture is contrasted with statis in state representations of what constitutes “real” Ewenki dwellings. The volume's many insights will be of interest to cultural anthropologists, cultural geographers, and political scientists.
If several chapters repeat the telling of the history of the Ewenki in relation to the Chinese state, this is a strength: the different authors, hailing from China, France, Norway, and the United Kingdom, critique the same events through markedly different lenses. And, innovatively, eight academic chapters are followed by a poem and two essays on life in the taiga written by Ewenki from Aologuya.
