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- Title
House Society and Environmental Resource Sustainability of rGyalrong Tibetans in Denba County.
- Authors
Bor-wen Tsai; Ming-kuang Chung; Yung-ching Lo; Chia-nan Lin
- Abstract
Recent studies of environmental resource governance turn their attention to the relationships between local knowledge and issues of sustainability, biodiversity, land use ethics, and resource management. This study selects Denba (...) as the target of interest. Denba is located in Ganzi (...) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, which is an autonomous prefecture in Sichuan Province in southwestern China. Residents of Denba belong to the rGyalrong (...) ethnic group which was certified as the rGyalrong Tibetan officially in 1954 by China government. Those Tibetan communities have lived on deep slopeland for hundreds of years and survived in a self-sufficient way. The population in 2003 was 2948 persons in 551 households. Most of them were Tibetan. This study discusses the sustainable landscape in such marginal area in terms of a special social institution--house society. The translation of primogeniture, labor exchange and traditional knowledge into sustainable resource management is explored. High resolution satellite imagery was used to identify major land use types and their configurations. Field survey and interviews were employed to investigate the social and cultural aspects of the research issues. Results show that a house for a family is an exemplification of local knowledge as well as the driving force for shaping landscape. The inheritance system of a house establishes a special social and labor network. The construction of a house demonstrates the rGyalrong Tibetan's traditional skill and knowledge. The layout of a house corresponds to their daily activities and the utilization of natural resources. This indicates that the house society is a crucial issue for the sustainability of this Tibetan landscape. The spatial configuration of the landscape demonstrates the local intelligence of resource management including the terraces for cultivation, the woods between terraces for water resource conservation and building materials, the drainage system for irrigation, the use of fragmental land around houses, the seasonal grazing in alpine grasslands, and so on. The suitability of land use is actually embedded in their social institutions which are centered in the house society. However, this sustainable landscape has begun to change. We have observed the impact on traditional social institutions of phenomena such as tourism activities, dam construction, and the forest restoration policy in recent years. The challenge becomes the community adaptation to this impact. This will be an interesting issue for further research. It also reminds us that sustainability is a dynamic process. The interactions between man and environment as well as the response to the environmental, economic and political change should be considered simultaneously.
- Subjects
SUSTAINABILITY; BIODIVERSITY; LAND use; NATURAL resources management; RGYAL-ron (China); ETHICS
- Publication
Taiwan Journal of Anthropology, 2014, Vol 12, Issue 2, p53
- ISSN
1727-1878
- Publication type
Article