There tends to be two kinds of edited volumes in the academic world. One we might call the “collection of convenience,” which gathers together a group of papers from a conference, slaps an introduction onto the front that tries to muster some coherence out of them, however awkwardly, and otherwise leaves it to readers to sort out the disparities, gaps and contradictions that bubble up among the chapters. Such collections are useful in their own ways, but sometimes disappointing when read as a whole. The other we might call the “gestalt collection,” in which an overall argument or theme is conveyed by the volume as a whole, with that argument reinforced in diverse and often subtle ways by the individual chapters. Such gestalt volumes add up to more than the sum of their parts. Mapping Shangrila is, happily, much closer to the gestalt model. It is a tightly conceived and rigorously framed volume offering a set of case studies from the Sino-Tibetan borderlands of Yunnan, Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai. Its “gestalt” argument is that, as summarized by the editors, “landscapes are deployed … in contests for epistemological authority” in China's borderlands (p. 7). The volume thus contributes much to Chinese borderland studies, but also to understanding China's new governmentalities of ecology and culture, and the ongoing construction and contestation of ethnic, cultural and nature tourism landscapes. It features a nice mix of contributors, ranging from newly minted to well-established scholars. Four, including the editors, are geographers, four are anthropologists, and the remainder are scholars of environmental studies, literature, ecology and conservation. The volume also includes a practising conservationist and a local scholar from the Shangrila region itself.
As Stevan Harrell points out in his foreword, the very title of the volume presents a laconic statement of the contradictory tension that runs throughout the collection. How, after all, do you map utopia? How do you map something – the imaginary paradise famously conceived in James Hilton's Lost Horizon – that doesn't exist? Well, obviously, you can't. Or at least you can't until you turn that imaginary geography into an actual place. And that is just the point. Hilton's imagined geography has, by virtue of state alchemy, been transformed into an actual place, mappable (and consumable) for tourists and environmentalists alike, and secured firmly within the geo-body of the People's Republic of China. In his afterword, Ralph Litzinger adds the important point that Shangrila can no longer be called a Western fantasy. It has now become a Chinese fantasy as well, and one that “got entangled in a global ecological imaginary of biodiversity conservation” (p. 281). But the tension that runs through Mapping Shangrila is not simply a tension between Western and Chinese perspectives on “nature” and “development” – though this is a significant issue explored throughout the volume. It is also a tension between state projects of conservation and development, and the local working-out and negotiation of these projects.
Three themes emerge from reading the volume as a whole. First, these borderlandscapes, as we might call them, can be viewed as “media for the social construction of territory, nature, and personhood” (p. 7) in China as a whole. In this way the volume makes a strong claim for geographical margins not to be taken as the realm of distant exoticism. Any understanding of China, the editors argue, that does not account for the territorial margins is incomplete. It's in the peripheries, in other words, that “dynamics of middle-class subject formation, the creation of national geographic imaginaries, processes of state territorialization, and principles of ecological governance are worked out” (pp. 7–8). Second, China's borderlands are usefully conceived as ethnically, culturally and linguistically fluid and complex. “Hybridity” is a theme that runs through most of the chapters, and it offers productive ways of thinking about Chinese national identity, as well as state efforts to order and standardize that fluidity and complexity. Here, the editors make use of the analytic of “biopower” to help make sense of those state-ordering projects in the borderlands. Third, the Shangrila region is explored as a site where the “ecological state” is being formed, where we see with clarity the Chinese state's vision of China's ecological modernization.
The book is organized into three sections that help bring out these themes. The first focuses most directly on the construction of ethnic tourist landscapes in Shangrila. Chapters by Li-hua Ying, Chris Vasantkumar, and Travis Klingberg explore the ways that borderlandscapes are central to projects of nation-building. That the Sino-Tibetan borderlands are “fertile grounds for reimagining ‘the nation’” (Ying, p. 49) is particularly true since the tourists visiting Shangrila are mostly domestic Chinese. Shangrila is above all a consumable landscape, one marked most prominently by an idealized version of traditional Tibetan culture.
The second section examines resource governance and the construction of nature. Chapters by John Aloysius Zinda, Robert Moseley and Renée Mullen, Michael Hathaway, and Michelle Olsgard Stewart explore various instances of environmental governmentality. The saga of The Nature Conservancy's Yunnan Great Rivers Project figures prominently in this section, laying bare the competing visions of and interests in ecological conservation among global academic and conservation interests, and national, regional and local actors. A key theme in this section is the disunity within the ecological state, reflected also in the disunity between academics and practitioners of conservation.
The third section focuses on contests over state projects of a “harmonious society” as a strategy for reinforcing China's territorial sovereignty in the borderlands. Chapters by Chris Coggins and Zesang Zeren, and by Charlene Makley, both look at the revival of Tibetan cults of zhidak – mountain-dwelling territorial deities – in the context of neoliberal development, while Emily Yeh's chapter examines the construction of the “green Tibetan” as an indigenous environmental steward, a construction that Tibetans have themselves encouraged as a means of promoting Tibetan culture.
This is a fine collection. It will be of great interest to anyone who has been keeping up with borderland and frontier studies in China, but also those interested in nation-building, tourism, ethnic relations, environmentalism and conservation, and the political economy of regional development in China more generally.
