In 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?
Jerry C. Zee is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University.
"This brave and original book argues for the experimental nature of both state governance and landscape terraformation. Wind-sand shifts between dunes and storms, and shifting with it are policies, protests, and the flow of particulates across continents. Take the politics seriously: in the open-endedness of weather systems, 'China' will never be the same."––Anna Tsing, coeditor of Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene
"What could be more timely than an ethnography of strange weather? In Jerry Zee’s radical anthropology, form is displaced by temporality, practice defined through experiment, and the radical uncertainty of climate generates a new conceptual vocabulary that compresses matter, metaphor, and politics. Continent of Dust marks a new and vital stage in the ongoing reimagining of nature in anthropological discourse."––Hugh Raffles, author of The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time
"Through arresting accounts of wind-sand embroilments along a transcontinental airstream, Continent in Dust shows us how to discern and conceptualize forms of life and governance emerging in the slips and accretions of blown ground and changing weather. Necessary and sustaining reading for getting on in the planetary Sinocene."—Timothy Choy, author of Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong
332 pp.6 x 9Illus: 23 b/w illustrations, 1 map
9780520384088$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Jan 2022