Burning Pelts and Blazing Passions: Transnational Environmentalism and Nationalism in Tibet

Emily Yeh will lecture on Tibet at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Emily T. Yeh is an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She has conducted field research on property rights, conflicts over access to natural resources, environmental history, emerging environmentalisms, and the political economy and cultural politics of development and land use change in Tibet. She has also worked on the cultural politics of identity and race in the Tibetan diaspora, and on interdisciplinary projects investigating the vulnerability of herders to snowstorms and the determinants of grassland degradation in Tibet. Her work has appeared in journals such as Society and Space, Environment and Planning A, Environmental History, Conservation and Society, The China Quarterly, and Annals of the Association of American Geographers.

In spring 2006, Tibetans across the Tibetan Plateau gathered together to burn millions of dollars worth of pelts of endangered animals, often life savings, after the Dalai Lama's Kalachakra speech in India earlier that year in which he called for Tibetans to stop wearing them. Since the demonstrations of 2008 these events have frequently been interpreted merely as a nationalist run-up to those events, but I argue that this interpretation obscures as much as it reveals. The paper examines the contingent set of events that came together to allow these burnings to take place, how they were then mobilized in a variety of competing interpretive frameworks, and the interplay of transnational environmentalism, nationalism, and development that they reveal.