This book sheds light on the social imagination of nature and environment in contemporary China. It demonstrates how the urgent debate on how to create an ecologically sustainable future for the world s most populous country is shaped by its complex engagement with religious traditions, competing visions of modernity and globalization, and by engagement with minority nationalities who live in areas of outstanding natural beauty on China s physical and social margins. The book develops a comprehensive understanding of contemporary China that goes beyond the tradition/ modernity dichotomy,...

This book addresses the imaginative portrayal of Tibet among contemporary Tibetans and non-Tibetans as well as the global phenomenon known as "imagined Tibet." It critiques divergent perceptions of eco-religious practices, collective memories, and earth-inspired emotions in Tibet with emphasis on the potency of landscape. It is written for readers interested in the religious, cultural, and ecological aspects of Tibet.

Based on the author's cross-regional fieldwork, archival findings, and critical reading of memoirs and creative works of Tibetans and Chinese, this book recounts how the potency of Tibet manifests itself in modern material culture concerning Tibet, which is interwoven with state ideology, politics of identity, imagination, nostalgia, forgetting, remembering, and earth-inspired transcendence. The physical place of Tibet is the antecedent point of contact for subsequent spiritual imaginations, acts of destruction and reconstruction, collective nostalgia, and delayed aesthetic and...