Gods and the State: Environmental Change in the Blang Mountains, China

This episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast explores the environmental and social transformations in the Blang Mountains of southwestern China through the lens of anthropologist Daniel Moseni-Kabir Beckstrom's research. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, Beckstrom examines how the forced abandonment of swidden (shifting) cultivation—banned by the Chinese state in the 1980s—has led to a dual ecological crisis: declining soil fertility requiring chemical fertilizers, and a dramatic loss of biodiversity in the forests. Locally, these changes are interpreted not just as environmental degradation but as a rupture in spiritual and relational cosmologies, where the land was once seen as 'theogenic'—fertile through divine agency rather than human labor. The Blang people’s traditional practices, rooted in a dynamic relationship with mountain gods and cyclical land use, are now undermined by state-imposed conservation policies and agricultural modernization. Despite this, Beckstrom highlights the resilience and historical agency of the Blang communities, who have long used migration and self-organization as forms of resistance and environmental stewardship. He argues that their experience offers profound lessons for global environmental movements facing systemic inertia and a sense of powerlessness in the face of climate change. The episode concludes with a reflection on the broader implications of this case study: that freedom and ecological sustainability are not only possible within repressive systems but are actively created through relational, non-territorial forms of autonomy. Beckstrom’s next research direction will focus on how such 'pockets of freedom' are cultivated in constrained political environments. The discussion underscores the importance of studying marginalized communities not just for their local knowledge, but as sources of radical political and ecological imagination in an era of planetary crisis.