"disorder" Natural

The ethnographic materials for this study are drawn from an Inner Mongolian community, located in the central-west of that Autonomous District, and this is one of many such communities that have suffered from severe problems for their environment. The theoretical perspective for the research is historical-structural, that is, empirically grounded and yet conceptually oriented. My argument is that the form of modern state power, in its attempt of transforming the local community, has caused a complex of environmental problems, social consequences, and moral dilemmas for the people involved. The nation state, as the central order of modernity, incarnated the modernism which is characterized by modernization project. It means that the modern state reconstruct the nature and the society according its own logic. In this process, the premise of order reconstruction is to treat the traditional order as problematic. This is the key point: in order to create a society according to such a new logic, that is, to tame nature, to define individual rights clearly, to bring everything into transaction on market, the state started its project by taking the local community as a "disorder" condition of life. The notion of "creation" is important here, because I want to show that the decline of local community is "created" by the development of modern state power. That is, statism, scientism, and marketism are all based on the repression and disparage of the local community both in the structural and spiritual sense. As part of global capitalist expansion, the combination of the state power and the monopoly power of market reorganized the local communities and accelerated the commercialization of labor and land, which brought great social and environmental crisis. My point is that there is no way to develop or develop sustainably without the vitality of a healthy and self-determination community.After the Introductory chapter, in chapter two, I have provided a discussion of the process in which the grassland-boundaries were defined and redefined, in order to show the development of a new system of property-rights. The property rights are not given but constructed in the process of continual interaction between the state and the local community. For the government, this is a process of pursuing certainty in the full sense of the term, but, in fact, with much uncertainty involved. Its environmental consequence still beyond our understanding. One thing is certain: along with this development, the reach of the state penetrated deeply and collective or communal conscience began to collapse. And this does not simply mean the decrease of collective or communal economy but, rather, a weakening of the foundation of people's moral practice. With more and more disputes over property rights, people became hostile to each other, and there seems arising of a world perfectly understandable for Hobbes: War of everyone against everyone. This kind of fragmented individualism is fit for the governance of the state. But for the nature, Hardin's "tragedy of commons" was never resolved under the uniform property right. No matter it is the state property or the private property. As anthropologists have shown, there may be different understandings of rights and properties among different cultures. What looks clear a system of rights, may not work well in any actual situation of life, and this has been proved by the continued ecological deterioration in this part of Inner Mongolia. There may be, as I argue, between the state and the individual, "common property" which has been practiced efficiently and sustainably in the human history is an alternative choice.In chapter three, I have tried to show how the state facilitates the substitution of scientific view of nature for the traditional holism view of nature, and argued that this substitution is necessary for the state-making process. The state view is built on modern science which emphasizes the distinction between the human world and the natural environment and resorts to the human's manipulation over the nature, which is the epistemology of modernity. In the case of China, from 1949 onwards, there has been a systematic attempt by the state to set up scientific institutions to deal with grasslands and other environmental issues. Albeit different in form, this modern idea of man struggling against nature has always been part of the state policies. In practice, as we have seen, the expert knowledge which is supposedly scientific, has gained its authority by fighting with and denouncing "local knowledge". Though, the importance is to note that, in such a struggle for scientific victory, the social world of local people has also been reconstructed, which has resulted in a reformation of their ethical practice. One of the consequences is that the state has gained a symbolic power as a provider of key natural resource such as water and grass which has been partly as a substitution for the authority of the God, however, created a lot of environmental crisis. The intensive natural resources exploitation system which is based on the application of technology and the management of capital was the result of state's grassland construction and grassland management policy. The emergence of the modern state power makes itself as a dominant role in the relationship between the human and nature. The introduction of technology, especially the huge construction projects such as highroad and railroad and the more elaborated techniques such as map and statistics, consolidated the central surveillance and control of the state. In short, the state tries to rationalize the population and natural environment and make them under its governance through scientific administration method. Although the indigenous ecological knowledge has been gradually accepted and legitimated by the scientific knowledge, my sociological point is that knowledge is by definition social, both in terms of its genesis and function; it is not simply a set of brilliant ideas produced by a single mind. And when the social context for local knowledge disappears, there is no longer any hope for such knowledge to function for the community in any proper sense. It would have to become a means for assisting the power of capital, national or global.Chapter four discusses the birth and decline of an ecological relocation village, and shows how local people experienced the policy change in the eco-governance age. In such a change, local herders came to be objected as the grassland destructor and the ecological burden, and therefore the state sees itself and its intervention as the only solution. Such an attempted solution further destroyed the symbiotic relationship between local people and the grassland. People's moral engagement with nature and other people was weakened. The state has asked people to move away from their lands, to be resettled in a more rational or economically beneficial way. This is, in fact, a serious attempt to get local people involved in this seemingly indispensable process of marketization, which contains risks which are beyond the control of them. The cow breeding industry which is unfit for the local ecological quality was developed rapidly with the support of government. This does not only mean that the poor herders were changed into commercial labor but also mean that the new ecological risks were created. The combination of state and market force oppressed the vitality of local community. The conflict between the state as environment protector and the state as development promoter became more evident.In sum, the private property system characterized by utilitarian morality, the scientific world view characterized by the distinction between human and nature and the market system characterized by commercialization of land and labor are all matched the state-making process which was represented as the collapse of local community and its collective norms. This thesis want argue that we can not ignorant the social nature of human being and the morality rooted in people's sociality. To empower the local community the power of self-determination is the only way of sustainable development.