Paper short abstract:

The political strategies of Mongol elites in northwestern China involve portraying animal mobility as congruent with state spatiality, in order to defend pastoralism against state environmentalism. This invites us to reconsider the relationship between animal bodies and national geo-bodies.

Paper long abstract:

Recent work on infrastructure has shown how roads and railways play a central role in the projection of state power over territory. Conversely, the use of pack animals has been associated with peoples and places where state territoriality is weak, or even with 'subversive mobility' (Shell 2015). In official modernising discourses the mobility afforded by animals has often been temporally stigmatised as 'backward'. This paper, by contrast, discusses recent positive representations in the Chinese media of the role of camels in the 20th century state territorialisation of western China. Such representations help to create space for the defence of pastoralist land use in a part of the world where expanding deserts have led to large-scale state intervention. The paper describes how ethnic Mongol elites in the desert region of Alasha, Inner Mongolia, deploy these representations of the camel's 'loyal mobility' as they seek to defend traditions of open-range grazing against the state's policies of grassland enclosure, forced destocking and afforestation. I use this case study to question a tendency of some recent literature in a posthumanist vein to focus exclusively on nonhuman mobility which undermines state territoriality. I show how resistance to the state's projects of environment rule can be carried out instead through the alignment of animal bodies with the geo-body of the nation.