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"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.
