• Author: Seonhwa Lee
• Publication Date: April / 2023
• Publisher: SNUPRESS

The grassland chicken farming project becomes the key to the desertification issue

This book is an attempt to analyze the new ecological constitution that starts with the production of scientific knowledge, the lifestyle of grassland farmers, and the ethical consumption of urban residents, by describing the experiment and test project in China’s northern grassland in ethnographical terms. The author conducted fieldwork research on the experiment and test project for preventing desertification done by the ecologists and the Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences in the grassland area in Hunshan Dake area in Inner Mongolia. She sought to document the process of various agents including humans and non-humans as they compromise, adjust, argue, and cooperate through translating the different interests from the perspective of ‘ecopolitics’. This book is characteristic of the common network of humans and non-humans that is placed in the center of ecological studies, breaking away from the existing cultural-ecological and political-ecological approaches that dichotomized nature and culture.

Author

Seonhwa Lee

Seonhwa Lee received her B.A. degrees in Geography Education and Anthropology at SNU and her M.A. degree in Anthropology with a thesis on the response of urban residents to the inflow of foreign laborers. Then she received her Ph.D. degree in the same department with a dissertation on an ethnographic study of desertification prevention in China’s Inner Mongolia grasslands. She researches the new world image generated by scientists, native residents, vegetation, soil, and animals as they unite in new ways around the ecological issues on Earth. After serving as a research fellow at SNU Institute of Cross-Culture Studies and an academic research professor at the Chinese Academy at Incheon National University, she now works as an assistant professor at the Dept. of Anthropology at Shandong Univ. in China. Publications include Modern China Through Cities 2 (co-authored) and papers such as “Crisis Construction in the Inner Mongolia Grassland and the Controversy of Desertification: The Emergence of Grassland Chicken Farming”, “The differentiation of lifestyles in Inner Mongolia, China – A case study of Mongolian village in a grassland area -“, “The New Cosmogram of Chickens and the Grasslands: Ecological Experiments for Desertification Management in the Grasslands of Northern China”, and “Chickens and Woori (Coop/Us): The Habituation of Animals and Eco–Politics of the Grassland”.