Following the caterpillar fungus: Nature, commodity chains, & the place of Tibet in China's uneven geographies

The Institute for Chinese Studies at the Ohio State University presents a talk on nature, commodity chains, and Tibet's role in Chinese geography.

Emily Yeh, Associate Professor of Geography, University of Colorado at Boulder

My main research interests are on questions of power, political economy, and cultural politics in the nature-society relationship. Using primarily ethnographic methods, I have conducted research on property rights, natural resource conflicts, environmental history, development and landscape transformation, grassland management and environmental policies, and emerging environmentalisms in Tibetan areas of China. In addition, I have also worked on the politics of identity and race in the Tibetan diaspora, and on several NSF-funded interdisciplinary, collaborative projects on putative causes of rangeland degradation and vulnerability to climate change on the Tibetan Plateau. Broader research and teaching interests include transnational conservation, critical development studies, the relationship between nature, territory, and the nation, and environmental justice. My regional expertise is in China, Tibet, and the Himalayas.

Lecture Abstract:
Caterpillar fungus has become the single most important source of income for rural Tibetans in China. Following caterpillar fungus as it travels from the Tibetan plateau to wealthy Chinese consumers, the talk will examine the intersection of political and moral economies along the commodity chain, focusing on the cultural politics of value and how this intersects with inequality in China’s uneven geographies of development. In particular, the paper points to the importance of non-human nature in setting barriers to the production of the wild harvest for the market. At the same time, a geographic imaginary of a pristine Tibetan nature, used to sell caterpillar fungus, erases the labor of Tibetan harvesters and constitutes Tibet as a natural resource for a Chinese middle class anxious about health and pollution, maintaining deep-rooted geographical inequalities. A new set of meanings has also emerged to sell caterpillar fungus, centered on the biomolecular nature of its active ingredients, exacerbating the potential for the figurative and literal erasure of Tibetans and their political grievances in contemporary China. Showing how following a small fungus can shed light on the uneven geographies obscured in monolithic narratives of China’s rise, the paper demonstrates the value of expanding commodity chain studies beyond those that end with Western consumers.