In this fascinating book, anthropologist Michael Hathaway explores how global formations are constructed through a particular focus on international environmental movements in Yunnan. In dialogue with current debates on the mechanisms of globalization, Hathaway examines the interaction between local and international forces in the creation of environmental movements in China.
In the first chapter of Environmental Winds, Hathaway lays out his main conceptual argument; namely, that globalization should not be conceived of as moving in “flows” from the Global North to the Global South (as he argues many authors understand it), but with the metaphor of “winds.” Hathaway derives this terminology from Chinese notions of winds (feng) as social formations that are shaped through human agency (p. 11), a view he posits as being distinct from “flows,” which he sees as generally implying a lack of agency for peoples in the Global South. For Hathaway, environmental “winds,” like other global forces, “are formed by the travels of and encounters with different people, ideas, stories, and practices” (p. 38).
The other chapters of the book explore these conceptual issues through an ethnography of Chinese government officials, Chinese scientists, workers at foreign environmental NGOs such as the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), and local villagers in Yunnan. Chapter 2 traces the environmental winds of the 1980s through an examination of the projects that were carried out to protect Yunnan's forests and wild animals from the then-demonized “slash-and-burn” farming practices of local villagers, despite a lack of scientific evidence that these practices were actually terribly damaging (pp. 66–67). Such protectionist policies were new in the 1980s, when the PRC began to shift away from attitudes that put agricultural production before any environmental concerns (p. 15). Hathaway shows that post-reform PRC state narratives viewing peasants as being in need of development fit well with international environmentalist ideas dominant at the WWF (p. 69). He argues that the coming together of international and Chinese official narratives serves as evidence for his larger conceptual thesis that global environmental ideas have not been forced on China, but were shaped “through finding areas of traction that linked people across national boundaries in shared interests and concerns” (p. 72).
Chapter 3 turns to focus on the responses of the villagers. Hathaway frames his discussion against claims that indigenous peoples have often resisted environmental policies, instead arguing that in Yunnan they tried to forge new social connections with foreign environmentalists and Chinese government officials, practicing what he calls “the art of engagement” (p. 73). He argues that villagers did not try to remove themselves from state or other outside forces—as one might expect while following a narrative of resistance—but instead sought to engage with environmental policies in the hope of finding outside patrons that might help improve their lives, in the process helping to shape global formations (pp. 114–15).
Chapter 4 expands on this approach to local villagers' agency by discussing how local practices shaped new discourses of “indigeneity” in the 1990s. Hathaway argues that with the help of advocates such as the horticulturist Xu Jianchu, local farming practices stopped being so quickly demonized by the state and environmental NGOs and came to be seen as local indigenous knowledge that could actually be beneficial to the environment (pp. 134–40).
Chapter 5 moves away from questions of human agency in the construction of global formations to examine how elephants have been active participants in social networks in Yunnan, working to help shape wildlife conservation efforts, despite their often tumultuous (and deadly) relationship with local villagers (pp. 183–84).
Ultimately, the main focus of Environmental Winds is to advance new ways of understanding the formation of global forces. It will be of interest to scholars in various fields concerned with the processes of globalization. While the book is full of intriguing conceptual ruminations, it is unclear if it entirely succeeds at its central task. After numerous theoretical turns across multiple disciplines, it is not novel to argue that global forces from capitalism to modernity to environmentalism have not simply flowed from the West, and as such it is difficult to tell how Hathaway's metaphor of winds helps us advance our understanding of the circulation of these forces. Hathaway admirably strives to give Chinese actors great agency in shaping environmental discourses, and this argument seems to ring true for how those ideas have changed over time. At the same time, one wonders if it is possible to apply Hathaway's model of flattening out power relations—Hathaway sometimes seems to suggest that local villagers, the Chinese state, and the WWF all operate on an equal playing field—to other global forces such as neoliberal capitalism. Of course workers in developing countries' sweatshops have agency, but what is the intellectual or political value in arguing that they play an equal role in shaping the “winds” of neoliberalism? It seems possible to recognize that impoverished peoples have agency without erasing the power differentials that shape the world.
