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  • The End of Nomadism? Society, State and the Environment in Inner Asia
  • Thomas Barfield
Caroline Humphrey and David Sneath. The End of Nomadism? Society, State and the Environment in Inner Asia. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. vi, 355 pp. Hardcover $64.95, ISBN 0-8223-2107-6. Paperback $21.95, ISBN 0-8223-2140-8.

The grasslands of Inner Asia constitute the eastern part of the Eurasian steppe. For more than 2,500 years they have been the home of societies with a distinctive culture based on horse-riding nomadic pastoralism. Historically, the Inner Asian steppes and deserts constituted a hard frontier for China. The region remained culturally distinct and politically independent for most of its history. The nomads formed their own supra-tribal political organizations that that fought the Han, Tang, and Ming dynasties to a standstill, extorting lucrative trade and tributary benefits in return for their cooperation. The high point of the region's political power came under the Mongol empire, when nomads from this region conquered most of Eurasia in the thirteenth century. Beginning in the seventeenth century, however, the steppe peoples of Inner Asia gradually lost their political autonomy to the expanding empires of Qing China and Czarist Russia. After the Qing dynasty collapsed, the northern part of Mongolia broke away to become independent for a short time only to find itself incorporated as a satellite of the new Soviet Union. Northern Xinjiang and southern Mongolia remained part of China.

The collectivist socialist policies implemented by the Soviet Union and Mongolia beginning in the 1930s and in the People's Republic of China after 1949 transformed the region by totally reorganizing the economy and creating a new social order. However, the course of this transformation varied considerably depending on the duration of socialist control, its effectiveness, and the degree to which it was compatible with pastoralism. The End of Nomadism? examines the economic, ecological, and social impact of these policies on Inner Asian pastoralists and how they have coped with the consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union and China's decollectivization. The study is based on data drawn from the Environmental and Cultural Conservation in Inner Asia Project, a research effort carried out between 1991 and 1995 under the direction of the book's authors. This international anthropological project examined twelve different pastoral communities in three countries (China, Russia, and Mongolia) and produced a set of individual studies that were unparalleled in their scope, detail, and common focus. Drawing on this research, the book reviews the current state of Inner Asian pastoral societies and their prospects for the future.

Humphrey and Sneath argue that Inner Asia is best treated as a single unit because the people there inhabit a relatively uniform steppe region in which they practice some form of pastoralism and because they share a common Mongol [End Page 142] Buddhist heritage (with the exception of some Turkic groups in the west). At the same time they demonstrate that the economic and political differences in each country (and sometimes within a country) have had strikingly different impacts on the environment and the effectiveness of pastoralism as an economic base for people in the region today. Their book is unique in its range of comparisons and its emphasis on Inner Asia as a region worthy of study in its own right and not just as a peripheral part of China or Russia.

Nomadic pastoralism as historically practiced in Inner Asia was targeted for destruction under socialism. Central planners considered it a low-technology, low-output system of production that was inferior to any sort of agriculture. They were particularly offended by the thought of people moving around seasonally and living in yurts with no fixed addresses, which they regarded as the height of primitiveness. It should be noted that this prejudice was widely shared by governments in nonsocialist countries with populations of pastoralists, but here planners had the capacity to do something about it directly. They settled the nomads into fixed communities organized around collectives. Resistance to collectivization was less here than in Central Asia where people often killed their animals rather than give them to the state, perhaps because so much...

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