Mountains of science and sorrow posthuman sovereignty under tibet's chinese anthropocene Xiao Schutte Ke

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Schutte Ke, Xiao, author.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania. Anthropology., degree granting institution.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cultural anthropology.

Asian studies.

Climate change.

0326.

0342.

0404.

Local Subjects:

Cultural anthropology.

Asian studies.

Climate change.

0326.

0342.

0404.

Genre:

Academic theses

Physical Description:

1 online resource (346 pages)

Contained In:

Dissertations Abstracts International 87-12A

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, 2026

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Over the past two decades, the Tibetan Plateau has become a heated zone for Chinese natural science research, Tibetan community science, as well as state ecological projects under climate change. Based on twenty-four months of ethnographic research (2016-2025) in Amdo Tibet (China) and Dharamshala (India) - including participant observation, archival research, and interviews with grassroots Tibetan environmentalists, Han-Chinese scientists, and diasporic Tibetan media - I investigate how science-making has become a contested site of colonial governance, ecological reparation, and Indigenous sovereignty. Rather than treating 'science' as a given category, I analyze science as both a meta-semiotic framework that organizes messy materiality into actionable visions involving nonhumans, and a metapragmatic framework in which the act of 'appearing scientific' produces sociological differentiations.Drawing on Science and Technology Studies, linguistic anthropology, and political ecology, I analyze how the Chinese state and its technoscientific institutions have historically enacted the "environmentization" of Tibet - a discursive and material process that homogenizes the plateau into an extractable background, isolating human and nonhuman actors from their relational ecologies. To examine and repair this isolation, I employ a posthuman anthropology. Against a backdrop of climate grief and state-led extraction, I demonstrate how Tibetan (agro-)pastoralist communities strategically reverse-engineer scientific styles. Central to this dynamic is the inevitable rapport bridging Han-Chinese scientists and grassroots Tibetan environmentalists, humans and nonhumans, and the state and pastoralist communities. "Rapport" is the in-between-ness that critical theorists and anthropologists draw on to repair a Western scientific tradition that prioritizes objectification and decontextualization. Yet rapport is also the starting point of analysis in Tibetan ecological thinking, centering on the principle of tendrel (རྟེན་འབྲེལ།, often translated as "interdependence").Throughout the dissertation, I advance two central arguments: First, (post-)colonial contestations of ethnonational sovereignty live and shift within technoscientific projects of ecological reparation under climate change. While Tibetan pastoralist communities have contributed fundamentally to the making of plateau science, science as a normative style increasingly overshadows Indigenous land-based affects. Second, under scientific climate research and intervention, the dialectics of state ignorance and Indigenous non-participation are reanalyzed into what I term posthuman sovereignty. This sovereignty continuously challenges the Chinese Anthropocene and its promise of exclusively scientific and technological solutions to the human condition

Notes:

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 87-12, Section: A.

Advisors: Agha, Asif; Anand, Nikhil Committee members: Atwood, Christopher; Carruthers, Andrew; Ng, Emily

Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania 2026

Vendor supplied data

Local Notes:

School code: 0175

ISBN:

9798247983439

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license