Animate Landscapes: NATURE CONSERVATION AND THE PRODUCTION OF AGROPASTORAL SACRED SPACE IN SHANGRILA

Before 1949, governance in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands was subject to negotiation, expedience, fortune, and alliance. The projection of state power from afar was mediated by local polities that resisted domination by following cosmological orderings attuned to local livelihoods and other interests. Local ritual practices and everyday understandings of sacred space helped deflect territorial claims by distant states; today they continue to challenge official distinctions between religion and politics, the human and the nonhuman, and nature and culture. In Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, in northwest Yunnan, the formal governing bodies and cultural institutions of China and Tibet have long competed for