Ressource pédagogique : C. Pat Giersch (Wellesley College), "Patterns of Inclusion and Exclusion Along Twentieth-Century China’s Southwestern and Tibetan Borderlands"

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In recent years, increasingly sophisticated work has traced the remarkable changes in early twentieth-century state-building along China's southwestern and Tibetan borderlands. During this same period, however, the tentacles of global commerce were reaching into these regions, too, but we do not yet fully understanding the links between state and commerce, on one hand, and the long-term trajectories of change that left many borderlands communities with less and less control over their own political and economic futures. Rather than conceiving of these regions as autonomous until after 1945, as James Scott would have it, this paper argues that significant changes were already underway by the early twentieth century. These changes included the organization of trade, as new types of shareholder firms as well as state-owned companies emerged; control over resources and profits, as outside traders and officials gained access to land, mineral rights, commodities, and trade routes. To chart these changes, the paper focuses on two regions--southern Yunnan and western Sichuan's Tibetan (Kham) areas--and the commodities that they produced, including rubber, pack animals, medicinal materials for Chinese Traditional Medicine, and gold dust. While these areas had been involved in trading these commodities for, in some cases, centuries before the twentieth century, the paper explores how the unique combination of modern commerce and state-building began to transform these regions. International conference “Territories, Communities, and Exchanges in the Sino-Tibetan Kham Borderlands,” Februray 18-20, 2016. This conference is an outcome of a collaborative ERC-funded research project (Starting grant no. 283870). For more information, please visit the project's Website: http://kham.cnrs.fr 

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• Sociologie et anthropologie (301)

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