Continent in Dust - Experiments in a Chinese Weather System

"This brave and original book argues for the experimental nature of both state governance and landscape terraformation. Wind-sand shifts between dunes and storms, and shifting with it are policies, protests, and the flow of particulates across continents. Take the politics seriously: in the open-endedness of weather systems, 'China' will never be the same."––Anna Tsing, coeditor of Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene

"What could be more timely than an ethnography of strange weather? In Jerry Zee’s radical anthropology, form is displaced by temporality, practice defined through experiment, and the radical uncertainty of climate generates a new conceptual vocabulary that compresses matter, metaphor, and politics. Continent of Dust marks a new and vital stage in the ongoing reimagining of nature in anthropological discourse."––Hugh Raffles, author of The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time

"Through arresting accounts of wind-sand embroilments along a transcontinental airstream, Continent in Dust shows us how to discern and conceptualize forms of life and governance emerging in the slips and accretions of blown ground and changing weather. Necessary and sustaining reading for getting on in the planetary Sinocene."—Timothy Choy, author of Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong

List of contents

Contents

        List of Illustrations
        Acknowledgments

        Apparatus A. Nightwind
        Introduction: Earthly Interphases
    
Part I  Wind-Sand
         Apparatus B. The Wind Tunnel
     1. Machine Sky
         Apparatus C. A Sheet of Loose Sand
     2. Groundwork
         Apparatus D. Five Thousand Years
     3. Holding Patterns
     
Part II  Fine Particulate Matter
     4. Particulate Exposures
         Apparatus E. Wildfires
     5. City of Chambers

Part III Continent in Dust
         Apparatus F. A Sinocene
     6.  Downwinds 
         Apparatus G. Monsters
         
         Notes
         References
         Index

About the author

Jerry C. Zee is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University.

Product details

• Authors: Jerry C. Zee
• Publisher: University Of California Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.01.2022
• EAN: 9780520384088
• ISBN: 978-0-520-38408-8
• No. of pages: 332
• Series: Critical Environments: Nature, Science, and Politics
• Subjects: Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories; Nature / Environmental Conservation & Protection, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Environmental Policy, TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Environmental / General, TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Agriculture / Forestry, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, NATURE / Weather, Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography, environmental science, engineering & technology, Social and cultural anthropology, Weather, Weather and climate: general interest, Forestry & silviculture: practice & techniques, Environmental policy & protocols, Environmental science, engineering and technology, Environmental policy and protocols, Forestry and silviculture