The World in Sand

This event will be held in collaboration with the Department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Arts at the University of Malta.

In the alpine wetlands and grasslands along the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, desertification was not historically a familiar environmental category for local residents. Since the 1990s, however, it has come to be widely framed by state and scientific institutions as a major ecological threat. Beginning in the mid-1990s, a series of state-sponsored intervention projects introduced intensified investment and a range of biophysical strategies aimed at restoring degraded grasslands.

Paradoxically, these interventions have not halted ecological degradation. From the early 2000s onward, this paradox prompted local pastoral communities to critically reassess expert-driven explanations that attributed desertification primarily to overgrazing and nomadic practices. Through a renewed recognition of pastoral knowledge and agency, local communities began to develop low-cost and locally adapted strategies to rehabilitate degraded grasslands, demonstrating forms of resilience embedded within pastoral lifeworlds.

Drawing on ethnographic materials from the Zoige Grasslands, this study examines the entangled relations among humans, livestock, and land as an “ontological choreography” through which pastoral dwelling is enacted. It interprets resilience not as a fixed ecological outcome, but as an evolving process expressed through adaptive mobility, interactive modes of action, and a relational ethics of cohabitation embedded in everyday pastoral life.

Speaker Bio:

Yun Tang is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on disaster, landscape, memory, religion, and heritage, with particular attention to social transformation and cultural adaptation over time, drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Southwest China.

She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology and served as Professor of Ethnology and Chinese Studies at Southwest Minzu University. She has also been an Academic Visitor at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnology, University of Oxford, and a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Modern and Contemporary Chinese Studies (CECMC), CNRS.