Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather SystemIn China, the weather has changed. Decades of reform have been shadowed by a changing meteorological normal: seasonal dust storms and spectacular episodes of air pollution have reworked physical and political relations between land and air in China and downwind. Continent in Dust offers an anthropology of strange weather, focusing on intersections among statecraft, landscape, atmosphere, and society. Traveling from state engineering programs that attempt to choreograph the movement of mobile dunes in the interior, to newly reconfigured bodies and airspaces in Beijing, and beyond, this book explores contemporary China as a weather system in the making: what would it mean to understand “the rise of China” literally, as the country itself rises into the air? |
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aerosol air pollution air quality airspace airstreams Alxa Anthropocene antidesertification apparatus architecture Asia Asian Asian Dust atmospheric become Beijing Beijing’s body breathing capital Chen China Chinese cistanche climate contemporary Cultural Anthropology desert desertification downwind Duke University Duke University Press dunes Durham dust events dust storms dynamics earth ecological economic emergent engineering entanglement environment environmental ethnographic experimental experiments exposure forest forestry officials formations future geophysical grazing bans haze herders holoparasitic Hong human infrastructures Inner Mongolia intervention Korean landscape late socialism late socialist manipulation material meteorological Minqin mobile modern modes multiple Neoliberalism numbers ocean particulate matter pastures planetary planting political pose precarity programs projects question reconfiguration relation roots rou congrong sense shrubs smog social media space specific stability suosuo take shape technical temporal tion traced upwind urban Wang weather systems wind wind-sand windbreaks Xi Jinping Zhang