To access papers, please click this link Wood Age Papers. Please note that all papers are password protected. You will be given a password, if you are an invited conference participant. These papers are preliminary papers for the conference and should not be cited or circulated. All other guests, please contact the individual authors for paper copy requests.
Human impacts on the rainforests of Island Southeast Asia: a deep time perspective
Graeme Barker, University of Cambridge
Archaeology is providing a deep time perspective on human modifications to the rainforests of Island Southeast Asia, demonstrating that the Homo sapiens has actively manipulated tropical rainforest ecologies for at least 50,000 years. Some of the most detailed information has been recovered from multi-disciplinary studies of human occupation layers in the Niah Caves in Borneo, but there is cumulative evidence of similar forest modification behaviours by prehistoric and historic foragers, farmers, and forager-farmers across the region. Potentially this long human-rainforest history has considerable significance for present-day rainforest conservation and policy-making, but to realize this potential the challenge now is to develop methodologies for better understanding the nature and scale of these past human impacts on rainforest.
Woodlands, Rituals and Identity in Qing Zhili’s Forest-Steppe Ecotone
David Bello, Washington and Lee University
The paper explores the environmental relationship between northeastern Zhili woodlands, as habitat for flora and fauna, and ritual space, as the contested ground of identity, during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912). The growing literature on woodlands currently focuses mainly on their economic exploitation. There is, however, also a record of ritual exploitation, in the form of immense restricted woodland tracts reserved as elite hunting grounds and burial sites to sustain Inner Asian identity formation. Both ritual functions were critically dependent not on trees as lumber, but as a flourishing ecosystem that denied wood to, mainly Han, agriculturalists.
Fighting over Nature: Resource Disputes in Central Japan During an Age of Instability, 1475-1638.
John Elijah Bender, Concordia College
Late Sixteenth century Japan was an unpredictable and violent environment. In this highly competitive and politically fragmented era, the resolution of resource disputes proved unpredictable. This study examines how rural settlements in Central Japan’s Kai Province (Yamanashi Prefecture) took active steps to protect their interests and secure necessary resources during a period of upheaval. Competing claims to land, water, forest areas, and thoroughfares were dealt with via heavy-handed negotiations backed by militias comprised of the fighting-aged young men of the community. Elites who wished to reestablish political order had to act as guarantors to ensure local cooperation. Rather than imposition the imposition of a new administrative scheme, incorporation of territory in the Takeda domain in Kai was a process of endorsing local practice and interceding on behalf of local communities when their claims were challenged. This proved to be a founding principle upon which the reestablishment of order rested. Within the community, this integration reorganized hierarchies and led to a less participatory but largely autonomous administrative system in which local precedent became supreme.
Wood Procurement and Architectural Aesthetics in Ming and Qing China
Aurelia Campbell, Boston College
My paper will address how the availability of nan timber impacted architectural aesthetics during the Ming and Qing dynasties. When nanmu was first used in imperial construction, many large trunks were available for harvesting. The resultant buildings exhibited a plainness, strength, and monumentality that was closely tied to nature. By the 17th century, however, large nan trunks were so scarce that only small-scale buildings could be constructed out of nanmu. This gave rise to intimate and ornamented nanmu halls that invited close investigation. This paper thus helps shed light on the aesthetic dimension of construction material in traditional China.
Pines for Cardamom: Environmental Management and Ethnicity in Imperial Vietnam
Bradley Camp Davis, Eastern Connecticut State University
Focusing on the early nineteenth century, this presentation examines the nexus connecting forest resources, non-Vietnamese communities, and commercial agriculture in the uplands of northwestern and central Vietnam. Prior to French colonial rule, the Nguyen Dynasty (1802-1945, under French authority after 1885) initiated a project to radically reshape imperial power at high altitudes, placing areas previously vague in the official consciousness firmly into a conceptual grid. For the multi-ethnic uplands in northwest and central Vietnam, this political change brought swaths of forest and forest-based cultivars to the attention of officials newly dedicated to expanding both sedentary agriculture and the cultivation of cash crops in the hills. As varieties of trees, including agarwood (Calambac) and the Northern Vietnamese White Pine (pinus eremitana), became subject to imperial harvesting, commercial goods such as cardamom and anise were introduced in the uplands, products that shaped interactions not only between non-Vietnamese uplanders and imperial Vietnam, but also foreground more contemporary modes of environmental management in mainland Southeast Asia.
Woody Vegetation and Human Use of the Land in Southern Asia
Sumit Guha, Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin
The ability of the earth’s surface to bear woody perennial vegetation has been shaped by millions of years of interaction with the other organisms that consume, reproduce and modify the land. The human species only emerged some 200,000 years ago, but soon deployed fire to manage the land. Human impacts intensified with the development of agriculture and the rise of complex agrarian empires. South Asia was an early participant in these processes. Its integration into wider trading circuits and coming of the Industrial Revolution have intensified the human impact on its forests and woody vegetation generally. I will consider the many ways in which these modified woodland have been conceived and managed through the past 500 years and seek set it in a pan-Asian comparative frame.
Scientific Forestry and Ecologies of War in Taiwan during the Japanese Colonial Rule
Kuang-chi Hung, National Taiwan University
This paper explores the intersection between the environmental history and the Science and Technology Studies (STS) by using forestry in Taiwan under the Japanese colonial rule (1895-1945) as a case. In 1895, Taiwan became the first colony of the Japanese Empire. Eager to transform this colony’s “jungles” into the empire’s “resources,” the colonial government introduced what Euro-American empires had long practiced in their colonies—the so-called scientific forestry—in devising an effective environment-governing regime. Toward the late 1920s, however, the colonial government found that the regime hardly worked in terms of timber production and environmental conservation. In fact, the performance of Taiwan’s forestry once became so poor that forestry experts desperately termed forestry as “the shame of Taiwan.” Interestingly, entering into the mid-1930s, as the Japanese Empire prepared itself for the war, Taiwan’s forestry won the reputation as a spectacular “role model” in showing how Japan could make use of a scientifically devised regime to govern the environment both effectively and efficiently. How could the reputation of Taiwan’s forestry undergo such dramatic changes? Making use of a large set of documents left by Japanese forestry companies, which I recently found at the Forestry Bureau in Taiwan, my paper aims to shed light on this unknown page of the environmental history of Japan. I argue that scientific forestry could be put to use because the colonial government eventually rendered certain critical concepts and practices in scientific forestry into what STS scholars call “boundary objects,” thus satisfying needs of an array of actors (both human and non-human, and the colonizing and the colonized) that constituted Japan’s “ecologies of war.” I conclude this paper by outlining how Japan’s colonial legacy gave shape to the course of Taiwan’s environmental politics in the postwar era.
The Geography of Timber Scarcity in Early China
Brian Lander, Brown University
While China’s environmental history is often understood as a wave of deforestation spreading evenly across the continent, in ancient times it was only densely populated lowlands that suffered from a lack of timber. This paper will show that textual and archaeological evidence for timber scarcity in the first millennium BC comes mainly from the North China plain and from Shaanxi’s Guanzhong Basin. Mountainous regions of North China, and all of South China were still densely forested at this time. It was in areas of scarcity that wood-saving technologies were developed and China’s first silviculture originated. This established patterns of resource management that would endure in North China for the following two millennia, and would influence resource use in the South as its populations increased.
The Politics of Pine in Late Chosŏn Korea, 1684-1876
John S. Lee (University of Manchester)
For five hundred years, the Chosŏn dynasty maintained one of the longest continuous state forestry systems in world history, largely around the protection of pine. Pine forestry became the domain of government officials and bureaucratic knowledge. Mixed, deciduous forests were open to logging while pine forests near coasts and waterways were vigorously protected by a widening array of soldiers, wardens, and conscripted monks and villagers. Meanwhile, at the local level, literati and villagers produced a growing corpus of silvicultural knowledge and community forestry organizations around pine and numerous other tree species. As pine grew more and more dominant across the Korean landscape in the late Chosŏn era, its usage and cultivation became a rising point of conflict between the administrative state and local society, portending a series of social and political conflicts that would plague the Chosŏn dynasty in the nineteenth century.
Cultivating the Paper Mulberry, Cultivating Transformative Hands: The New Politics of Cultivating Hands in Late Chosŏn Korea
Jung Lee, Ehwa Womans University
Paper mulberry is one of the trees that the central court of the Chosŏn Dynasty paid serious attention to, as a levy item for governmental paper production and for which every magistrate had to keep a ledger regarding its management. Only, it was not possible for every magistrate to fulfill his duty as the tree grew only in the southern half of the peninsula. However, the paper mulberry extended its geographical boundaries by the eighteenth century after the strained levy and governmental paper production system had long disappeared; it was cultivated in all but the two northern-most provinces and circulated beyond Korea to Manchuria. This paper examines the everyday politics of the paper artisans and farmers who created this new ecology for paper mulberry. They cultivated not just the tree but new social relations among themselves and with central and local authorities, becoming not tax-evading, profit-seeking unworthy subjects but useful hands that served the state and enjoyed tax exemptions.
Borgos, Bridges, and Pot Plants: a study of the things that outlived the nineteenth century rubber frontier of British India
Aparajita Majumdar, Cornell University
My paper explores the realm of multi-sited ethnography through the study of the resource cultures that developed around a particular variety of the rubber tree, Ficus Elastica, native to the regions of Northeast India and Southeast Asia. George Marcus, while describing the modes of constructing multi-sited ethnography, notes that ‘following the thing’ is one of the viable approaches for such work [Marcus 1995]. He argues, that the ‘multi-sited space of research’ involves tracing the circulation of things across various contexts and processes. Anna Tsing’s insightful book The Mushroom at the end of the world, is an example of such an approach, where she follows the accumulation and circulation of Matsutake mushrooms across different social and commercial networks of the globe, where its meanings constantly shift as commodities, gifts, and food delicacies [Tsing 2015].
Brilliant as these works are, I however also see an emergent lacunae in their conceptual framework. Both Marcus and Tsing do not account for the shifting materiality of the thing, even as they explore its passage through different contexts. The ‘thing’ they follow is uncannily singular and retains a rigid material identity at all times. For instance, a mushroom in Tsing’s work remains a mushroom, in Japan as well as in Finland, in restaurants as well as in science labs. The zeal to retain the thing as the defining link between multiple sites, ironically renders it a conceptual immobility in its material essence.
My paper will attempt to address this issue by arguing that there is no one thing to follow, in the study of the resource cultures on Ficus Elastica. In doing so, I critique the historiographical position of Ficus elastica in present day scholarly works—where its constant portrayal as a ‘rubber tree’ reduces it to a plant whose historical efficacy is determined only by how its latex fared in the global rubber economy. In exploring the historical relevance of Ficus elastica I prefer using the term, Borgos, meaning ‘big tree’, which is the local name for the tree in Assam [Northeast India]. The neutral meaning of this term espouses a ‘useful’ disengagement of the tree from the rubber economy, thereby making it possible for us to recognize the alternate material forms that the tree takes up as different practices organize around it.
To elaborate the material dissonance of the Borgos, my paper will firstly look at it in its rubber emitting capacity, focusing on the ways in which the British colonial botanists attempted to mold the tree into the plantation model in the nineteenth century. Secondly, my paper will explore how the Borgos also exists today as 200 or 300 year old ‘living root bridges’ in the forests of Meghalaya, connecting border regions, where steel and concrete bridges still do not exist. Thirdly, my paper juxtaposes these natural architectures with another entity—the three or four feet high, horticultural Ficus elastica plants, adorning the drawing room settings of bourgeoisie households in India and abroad.
In tracking all of these trajectories, I take the reader into a multiplicity of temporal geographies that erupt not only from colonial archives and ethnographic fieldwork but also from my own childhood experiences with the tree.
Making Forests: Biotic and Institutional Transformations in South China, 1100-1600
Ian Matthew Miller, St. John’s University
From land surveys of the fourteenth century through land reform in the 1950s, forests (shan, literally “mountains”) were one of the four main categories of registered landholding in China. Yet the development of these categories of oversight has been largely overlooked by existing scholarship. In this presentation, I trace cadastral oversight from the 1140s, when forests were first surveyed by the Song state, through the late Ming, by which point “forest” was a well-established but largely empty category of oversight. Despite their inclusion in official surveys, the Song, Yuan, and Ming states paid little attention to the management of forests; by the fifteenth century, the few laws and regulations specific to forests were essentially dead letters. Yet I show that despite lack of official interest, the recording of forests in official cadasters spurred the development of commercial forestry, by giving foresters proof of ownership. The state’s laissez-faire approach to oversight left forest owners to innovate their own forms of management, largely through flexible use of contracts and land deeds. I claim that the state’s agnosticism toward specific forms of forest regulation left substantial room for private innovation.
Seeing Sun Yat-sen in the Trees: Making Forestry Nationalist in GMD China, 1927 – 1937
Larissa Pitts, Austin College
During the Nanjing Decade, the GMD initiated a nationwide reforestation program as a signal to the world that China had achieved ecological modernity. In addition to offering political and financial incentives, the GMD also commandeered China’s reforestation culture. They advocated that Chinese citizens should plant trees as a political act to commemorate Sun Yat-sen, rather than for personal, communal, or religious reasons. The GMD state thereby asked its citizens to see the spirit of Sun Yat-sen in the trees. I therefore see GMD state forestry not as a secularization of China’s religious forestry traditions, but rather a politicization of them.
Sal, Teak and a British Imperial Project: Redesigning an Ancient Landscape in India’s North East
Arupjyoti Saikia, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati
Salanibari or Segunbari are integral to the landscape of Assam, the northeastern state of India. Both these names indicate patches of forests dotted with Sal (Shorea robusta) and Teak (Tectona grandis). These manicured landscapes are largely a legacy of the British Empire’s forestry project. Unlike many other instances, these hardwoods were not import from the New World. Paleobotanical studies confirm the presence of hardwoods in Assam. But these hardwoods hardly played any critical role in the making of the pre-colonial empire. At the most, their natural life cycle came to an abrupt end at the cost of the slow expansion of the peasant agriculture. However, the life and times of these hardwoods underwent dramatic changes since the mid-19th century. Massive projects were undertaken by the British imperial foresters to plant miles after miles of landscapes with Sal and Teak. Several dynamics were at play behind this grand project to redesign an ancient landscape. The imperial foresters compared both Sal and Teak as what gold is among the metals. By the early 20th century Assam produced bulk of the Sal and Teak (apart from the neighbouring Burma) to fulfil the demands of the Empire. In the process, the landscape, which came to be dotted with these plantations, underwent layers of transformation. The march of peasant agriculture came to a halt; a complex range of flora made room for these two charismatic trees; the fauna, including the one-horned rhinoceros and elephants, retreated from there. This paper recounts the making of this grand imperial project.
Trees by the Water are Like Your Mother’s Brother: Nuosu Yi Traditional Knowledge and Ecosystem Sustainability
Amanda Schmidt, Oberlin College
Stevan Harrell, Brian D. Collins, R. Keala Hagman, and Thomas Hinckley, University of Washington
Nuosu (Yi) people have lived in the mountains of the Upper Baiwu Valley in Yanyuan County, Sichuan, for about 250 years, practicing swidden agriculture, animal husbandry, and forestry. They developed a complex system of traditional ecological knowledge that drew parallels between the ecosystem and the social system, prescribing practices to sustain both. Did it work? Did traditional practices result in a more sustainable landscape than the current one, a result of revolutionary development programs based on simplified applied science? We address this question in a broadly interdisciplinary manner, combining geomorphological studies of sediment transport and watercourse change over long time scales, ecological measurements of forest health and structure, and ethnographic and ethnohistorical interviews about Nuosu traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and local forest history. Our tentative conclusion is that traditional practices did not prevent erosion, but did maintain healthy and biodiverse forests.
“How could we receive logs by the thousand?”: Timber, Borders, and the Spatial Praxes of the State in Chosŏn-Qing Relations
Joshua Van Lieu, La Grange College
In the spring of 1864 a magistrate on the northeastern Chosŏn frontier with the Qing Empire sent messengers across the Tumen River to Hunchun to ask local Qing officials permission to send his lumberjacks over the border to harvest timber. This seemingly simple request involved a two- fold violation. First, there was to be no direct communications between the local officials of Chosŏn and Qing. Second, crossing the boundary between the two states to extract natural resources, in this case timber, was a gross transgression an essential feature of the state: the border. This paper examines the spatial tropes of the intra- and interstate communications of this incident to show that the demarcation of access to timber and other natural resources was complex of discursive and spatial praxes through which the Chosŏn and Qing states defined themselves and one another in their respective frontier landscapes.
Cinchona Plantations in Colonial Taiwan
Timothy Yang, University of Georgia
In the interwar years, nation-states with imperial ambitions competed for access to cinchona bark, the raw material for one of the world’s most important medicines at the time, the anti-malarial drug, quinine. My presentation examines one company’s attempt to supply cinchona for Japan’s expanding empire by cultivating it in the mountains of colonial Taiwan. Capitalizing on fears of quinine scarcity, Hoshi Pharmaceuticals crafted a cinchona cultivation proposal centered on supposedly self-sufficient plantations that “cooperated” with indigenous tribes, providing food and education in exchange for their land and labor. My presentation shows how Hoshi Pharmaceuticals’ cinchona cultivation project involved global translations that revealed the complex intersections and negotiations between private interests, scientists, and government bureaucrats. At a time when pharmaceutical production largely depended upon natural resources for raw materials — in contrast, perhaps, to synthetic derivatives common in Big Pharma today — Hoshi’s cinchona cultivation project revealed how the drug industry developed outside of the research laboratory, imbricated in the machinations of an expanding colonial empire.
Spirit Mediums and the Harvesting of Camphor in North Sumatra, c. 1700 to 1920
Faizah Zakaria, Nanyang Technological University
Wild camphor had been harvested in the highlands of North Sumatra and traded in ports of Sumatra’s West Coast since the end of the 11th century. Used in medicine and religious rituals across Asia, camphor was an important export commodity but the tree from which this substance was extracted generally resisted cultivation. This paper examines how the indigenous peoples in the North Sumatran highlands – the Bataks – searched for and extracted the resin before the Dutch colonized the area at the end of the nineteenth century. Paying particular attention to the rituals and myths surrounding camphor extraction found in Malay manuscripts and accounts from Dutch naturalists, I argue that these tales were not merely superstitions stemming from animist traditions. Rather, they play an important role in regulating the production of camphor and keeping the production sustainable, during a period when the Bataks (upland peoples) and Malays (coastal peoples) were increasingly active in the early modern commodities trade.
Categorization of Property Right Regimes on Forest Lands in Late Imperial China: “public mountain”, “state mountain”, “lineage mountain”, and beyond
Meng Zhang, Loyola Marymount University
While concepts of property rights in modern economics clearly differentiate between private, community, and state ownership of natural resources, directly applying such concepts to the study of forest lands in late imperial China proves to be challenging and problematic. Without careful examinations, some past scholarship has equated certain Chinese terms to modern economic concepts without much empirical basis except for what the literary meanings of the words might suggest. Using legal archives, land contracts, and late-Qing reports on customary practices, this article aims to delineate the corresponding relationships between several designations of forestland ownership commonly seen in late imperial China and contemporary property right concepts that are widely used by social scientists. In particular, I show the severe fallacies of the often-assumed equivalence between the late imperial “public mountains” (gongshan) and the modern concept of collectively owned commons, and between the late imperial “state mountains” (guanshan) and the modern concept of state-owned mountains. Establishing a set of consistent conceptualizations is the basis for making meaningful comparisons between studies of different regions and periods.