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- Convenors:
-
Christopher Atwood
(University of Pennsylvania)
Jonathan Schlesinger (Indiana University--Bloomington)
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- Theme:
- HIS
- Location:
- Room 303A
- Sessions:
- Saturday 12 October, -
Time zone: America/New_York
Short Abstract:
Mongol herders, Chinese farmers: this binary ethno-ecological assumption underlies the field of Inner Asian history. These papers, covering the China-Mongolia frontier from the tenth to fourteenth centuries, challenge the adequacy of this dichotomy for understanding the history of Inner Asia.
Long Abstract:
In the history of Mongolia and China, few ideas are as axiomatic as the distinction of Inner Asian herders and Chinese farmers. The political regimes and languages examined by researchers may vary, but the binary division of steppe and sown, as seen in works such as Thomas Barfield's Perilous Frontier, remains a fundamental assumption. Ethnicity and ecology are fused in an often deterministic fashion and intermediate populations who might combine herding and farming, or who might practice some entirely different way of life are largely ignored.
This panel scrambles the binary distinction of steppe and sown, and challenges the easy assumption of ethnic and ecological congruence. Han herders in North China, Mongolic-speaking jacks in the lands northeast of Beijing, and Chinggisid princes ruling agro-pastoral shrine complexes in the heart of Mongolia: these figures from Inner Asia in the tenth to fourteenth centuries show that ecology's relationship to ethnicity was complex, shifting, and unpredictable. But the papers also show how such binary assumptions were not simply modern-day constructions of scholarship, but that they were also firmly entrenched in how state-building elites both to the south and to the north of the frontier zone constructed their ideal subjects.
In her paper Soojung Han (Princeton) takes up the Shatuo, represented in Chinese sources and modern scholarship as Turkic pastoralist invaders ruling conquest dynasties in tenth century North China. She argues that herding was not a distinctive part of their ethnic profile and that they defined themselves not through pastoralism but through military organization and open genealogies. Zachary Hershey (University of Pennsylvania) demonstrates how the Qai, speaking a Serbi-Mongolic language, pursued a wide variety of livelihoods that resisted any clear identity as "farmers" or "herders." But Song literati exoticized the Shatuo as pastoralists and the Kitan Liao dynasty assigned the Qai to their own "Northern" system of administration, obscuring the ways in which the Qai followed neither "northern" nor "southern" stereotypes Finally Dotno Pount (University of Pennsylvania) illustrates how the Mongol Yuan-era shrine complex built around Chinggis Qan's four palace tents eschewed fetishizing Mongolian pastoral nomadism, but instead became the heart of a mixed agro-pastoral principality.
Together these papers show how the division of steppe and sown in Inner Asia was never a purely natural ecological frontier, but instead a political and social construction fashioned out of diverse landscapes and populations.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Saturday 12 October, 2019, -Paper long abstract:
Owen Lattimore claimed in his classic study of the frontiers of China that an agricultural-pastoral divide in north China originated with the rise of the Xiongnu starting in the late Warring States period (475-221 BC) and continuing up into the Mongol conquest of the 13th century. Since Lattimore, studies of the pre-modern economy of East Asia have tended to follow the common trope that an almost tangible boundary between plain and steppe in North China divided the intensive, sedentary agrarian world of Han civilization from the extensive, pastoral world of the "barbarian" steppe. Scholars have admitted the apparent existence of an intermediary zone in which people practiced varying mixtures of agriculture, gathering, hunting, and pastoralism, but little work has been done to quantify these practices or understand the people and how they were administered. In this paper, I explore land usage in the modern-day Hebei-Liaoning-Inner Mongolia borderland under Liao (907-1125) and Jin (1125-1234) dynasty administration in order to demonstrate the existence of an intermediary zone of mixed economic production between intensive agriculture in the south and extensive pastoralism in the north. During the Liao-Jin period, the region was inhabited by a mixture of different cultural groups including Han and Kitan—traditionally considered to be agricultural and pastoral respectively—however another Mongolic group, the Qai (known in Chinese sources as the Kumo Xi or Xi), are recorded as both tilling the land and raising livestock. Rather than focus on the political or cultural boundaries between empires, mapping the geographic distribution and understanding the administration of subject groups within the Liao and Jin reveals the presence of mixed land usage well beyond the border between Han and their northern neighbors in what is now northern portion of modern-day Hebei. Tracing the evolution of the administration of the Qai provides a first step towards a reevaluation of land usage in the region. Demonstration of the existence of an intermediary zone of semi-agricultural production outside of the traditional realm of Han Chinese, or "sinic space" as termed by Nicolas Tackett, problematizes our understanding of ecology, economy, and even ethnicity in north Asia.
Paper long abstract:
The Shatuo Turks, a nomadic people from Inner Asia, migrated to China during the Tang Dynasty in the eighth century. Following the collapse of the Tang in 907, this group of migrants came to wield power in Central Plain, founding three short-lived dynasties: Later Tang, Later Jin, and Later Han. Ever since the Shatuo Turkic rulers, through generations of administration, established a firm command over Hedong, previously a region of the northern part of Tang, the Shatuo Turks had legitimized themselves as a significant political force in the region. Interestingly, although the Shatuo Turks have been living in North China for generations as an elite political group, Song historians who compiled history for this period in time predominantly characterized the Shatuo Turks as a people with a primarily pastoral occupation.
In this paper, I explore the description of Shatuo Turks' nomadic identity by historians from later periods, or in other words, outsiders. Specifically, I focus on the metaphor "raising horses and sheep" Song historians used in their characterization of Li Cunxu (885-926), Zhuangzong of Later Tang. Did the migrants really raise horses and sheep? Was this pastoral livelihood limited to the Shatuo Turks or did Han-Chinese also raise the horses and sheep? I argue that by associating the Shatuo Turks with the stereo-typically nomadic lifestyle of "raising horses and sheep", later historians attempted to confirm their depiction of the Shatuo Turks as foreigners and "barbarians", which seemingly disregarding China's active engagement in similar pastoral livelihood.
Conjointly, I examine the identity of the Shatuo Turks from their own perspective. What strategy did the Shatuo Turks use in order to maintain their group identity? I explore how this migrant group's identity was preserved and constructed through the practice of "ethnicity without blood" in practical life. Especially during the late Tang, the migrant group maintained their bonds with military groups through a unique use of genealogy. This research ultimately helps contribute to medieval Sino-Inner Asian history by rethinking etic perspectives of migrant groups and strategies in which migrant groups were able to forge their own identity.
Paper long abstract:
When the disparate records of enfeoffment to Mongol aristocrats in the Yuan History 元史 are pieced together, vast estates emerge into view. Chief among them was the estate put under the control of the Chinggis Qan shrine. The shrine itself survived until 1959 in the form of eight white gers housing the relics from the eponymous state founder. This and other shrines also have transmitted texts in the forms of instructions for the rituals as well as the prayers. The estates reconstructed from the contents of these texts and evidence from the Yuan History are characterized by a distribution of agricultural and pastoral enterprises indiscriminate of the ethnicity of either the managers or the employees. Neither is the location of these estates of much consideration — the Han were assigned to pastoral estates as much as Mongols and immigrants from the Western part of the empire given agricultural duties. This is quite contrary to the assumption in our time — as well as many historical eras — that Mongols nomadize in Mongolia, and the Chinese cultivate in China. In this paper, I will discuss the results from tracing the movement of people, commodities, and money in relation to the Chinggis Qan shrine, and thereby argue that, in the absence of a preoccupation with matching ethnicity to "modes of production," the ecological features of each region was exploited with the goal of achieving optimal efficiency. The Yuan-era patterns of resource exploitation provides a wealth of data that can be compared to land-use patterns of later periods, and thus forms a "base-line" for understanding the effects of ethnic identity on land-use.