Geography Department Speaker Series

Emily T. Yeh

University of Colorado Boulder

Pests, Keystone Species and Hungry Ghosts:

Human Pika Relations on the Tibetan Plateau

For over half a century, the Chinese government carried out large-scale poisoning campaigns on the Tibetan Plateau in an effort to exterminate the plateau pika, which is viewed as a pest that competes with livestock and causes grassland degradation. Since the 1990s, an ecological counternarrative has emerged in which pikas areate have been the ways in which Tibetan pastoralists understand and relate to pikas. Based on interviews and observations in two pastoral communities, as well as readings of ts been depleted, causing irritation to territorial deities, Tibetan practices include rituals to feed hungry ghosts, appease territorial deities, anarth. Building on proposals for political ontology, I examine the ways in which these different ontologies, or practices of worlmmetric power relations and non-liberal recognition of difference.

Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences www.geography.rutgers.edu

Co-sponsored by the Rutgers Center for Chinese Studies and the Rutgers Global Asias Faculty Collaborative.