Daniel Mohseni Kabir Backstrom

• Bäckström, Daniel Mohseni Kabir; Hansen, Mette Halskov & Nielsen, Kenneth Bo (2026). Ecologies of Gods and States: Theogenic Soils and Forests in the Blang Mountains, China. In Hansen, Mette Halskov & Nielsen, Kenneth Bo (Ed.), Religion and Ecological Crisis: Responses from Asia. Leiden University Press. ISSN 9789087285081. p. 201–221. doi: https:/muse-jhu-edu.ezproxy.uio.no/pub/293/oa_edited_volume/chapter/4305167. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This chapter traces how relations between Blang communities and their upland environment has changed with the recent arrival of the Chinese state. It begins by analyzing how the change from swidden/shifting to paddy cultivation has transformed soil fertility from being theogenic (caused by gods) to anthropogenic. It then analyzes how these changes have created competing conceptualizations of what constitutes a forest, and the resultant effects on biodiversity. The chapter then explores the underlying change in the logic of how to solve environmental problems, from a relational to a manufacturing logic. Finally, it analyzes how Blang communities’ perceived lack of ability to change these relations are related to state curtailment of the previous techniques used to create freedom of action.

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• Backstrom, Daniel Mohseni Kabir (2019). Religious Ecology and Sinofuturism: Religious studies and modernities in contemporary Chinese discourse. Projekt Verlag - Verlag für Wissenschaft und Kultur. ISBN 9783897335028. 105 p. Full text in Research Archive

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• Nielsen, Kenneth Bo & Bäckström, Daniel Mohseni Kabir (2026). Gods and the State: Environmental Change in the Blang Mountains, China - New Books Network. doi: https:/newbooksnetwork.com/gods-and-the-state-environmental-change-in-the-blang-mountains-china. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  What happens to the environment when the state enters previously self-governed villages in rural China? We explore this question in the Blang mountains in southwestern China, a region that was incorporated into the nascent people’s republic of China from 1953 onwards, with immense consequences for Blang communities and ecologies. Our guest Daniel Mohseni Kabir Bäckström disentangles how the arrival of the state disrupted long-standing relations between Blang communities and the local mountain gods, making the land sick. And what Blang people can teach us about tackling the ongoing climate crisis.

• Bäckström, Daniel Mohseni Kabir (2025). When the next Buddha comes: towards a comparative anthropology of the end of the world. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  For Blang people, living in the uplands of the China-Myanmar border, the end of the world is a joyous event. When the next Buddha arrives “everything will be as flat as this board,” there will be no rich or poor, no mountains or valleys, everyone will be equally tall and beautiful. Our era of inequality will come to an end and the world will be swept clean. In some ways, Blang communities are themselves prefigurations of their own end times. They were born from conquest, epidemics, and state violence. Surviving the end of their worlds, Blang communities escaped the lowlands and established communities, self-governed through direct consensus democracy, with communal land allotment, and mutual aid. Blang communities are not utopias, but forms of social organisation considered utopian in our societies are commonplace in theirs. Blang ends of worlds are radically different from out own. This highlights the need for a comparative approach: what does the end of the world mean? How do people live before, in, and after the end of the world?

• Bäckström, Daniel Mohseni Kabir (2025). Everyday ethics in the Blang Mountains. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The Blang villages that dot the mountainous China-Myanmar border are moral communities. Mapmun (ethics) inflect all aspects of everyday life: from eating food, to village self-governance, and relations with powerful others. Buddhist ethics are at the heart of what it means to be Blang. Children are taught what constitutes mapmun from an early age, from not lying to not singing while eating. Being Blang means living in a Blang village, which means abiding by the village rules—based on mapmun. People are not expected to succeed in being moral, but they are expected to apologise and pay a fine for violating village rules. The only act that can get someone banished from the community is repeatedly failing to apologise for their misdeeds. Relations between villages are based on an ethics of autonomy. Each village decides its own rules, and no other village can tell them what to do. Powerful others, such as ghosts, gods, and the state have a big impact on life in the Blang Mountains. Blang communities relate to these powerful others that surround them, based on an ethics of mutual aid: “we are good to them, so they should be good to us.” Because local ecologies are ruled by mountain gods, mutual aid ethics make possible everything from soil fertility and good harvests, to land degradation and locust prevention. This paper investigates what translating Blang everyday ethics can teach us about life in contemporary China and of potential futures on a warming planet.

• Bäckström, Daniel Mohseni Kabir (2025). Connections and disconnections on the China-Myanmar border. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The COVID-19 pandemic was a disconnecting experience for most scholars; able only to keep in touch with friends and interlocutors digitally. For me, returning to the Blang village of Man La, along the mountainous China-Myanmar border, was not just a reconnection, but also a process of coming to terms with the many changes the area had undergone in just a few years. On the one hand, Xishuangbanna is more closely connected to China than ever. What used to be a 24-hour sleeper-bus journey from Jinghong to Kunming, now takes three to four hours by high-speed rail. Conversely, the newly constructed border fence bisects the mountains just south of Man La, disconnecting flows of labor, kin, migration, and religion. Villages that used to take less than an hour to travel to are now days away. This paper traces the changing connections and disconnections, and how a new spatiality affect the lives of people who are used to living far away from states; how it has changed the importance of citizenship, impinged on autonomy and self-governance, and emptied the monasteries.

• Bäckström, Daniel Mohseni Kabir (2025). Theogenic soils: humans, gods, and ecology in the Blang Mountains, China. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In the Zomia uplands of southwest China, along the China-Myanmar border live a small ethnic minority that call themselves Blang. Until the 1950s, Blang communities lived in self-governed villages at the edges of kingdoms, maintaining soil fertility and and a diverse ecology through shifting, swidden cultivation. In scholarship, such soils are often termed anthropogenic, however, in the Blang context, it makes more sense to think of the resultant soils and forests as theogenic. According to my Blang friends and interlocutors, the land surrounding their villages is owned by local mountain gods. Humans can borrow land for cultivation from the gods, but when soil fertility is depleted after a year or two, they return their borrowed acreages, and fertility is restored. This likewise creates a varied forest, which can sustain a variety of beings. Since the arrival of the nation-state into the mountains, this system of knowledge and practices has been disrupted by modernisation attempts and land reforms. Blang communities blame the banning of shifting, swidden cultivation for the illness that now afflicts the land, forcing them to employ fertilizers and pesticides, which in turn makes the land sicker. In my presentation, I would like to show how the arrival of a new force—the state—has affected knowledge-making and the ecology.

• Bäckström, Daniel Mohseni Kabir (2025). Fear not ruin: Post-catastrophe social organisation in the Zomian uplands of the China-Myanmar border. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In the Zomian uplands of the China-Myanmar border live several "minority ethnic groups" who trace their origins to maroons and migrants who escaped slavery, epidemics, war, and conquest to establish new societies on the margins of states. Among them are Mon-Khmer speaking communities who call themselves Blang. My presentation will analyse what Blang communities can teach us about post-catastrophe social organisation. All Blang communities with oral or written histories maintain that they originally lived in lowland kingdoms, which they for varying reasons abandoned to escape into the mountains. Rather than (re)establishing their own kingdoms in the mountains, these communities are founded on the basis of consensus democracy. Each village is autonomous and social organisation differs somewhat from village to village, but they share some basic premises. Firstly, any issue that affects the entire village must be decided by the village general assembly (pom yung) which must reach consensus (pom bing). Without consensus there is no option but to keep deliberating. Secondly, specialists and office holders are selected by either committee, sortition, or primogeniture, but must ultimately be appointed by consensus of the village general assembly. Majority elections were only introduced by the Communist Party. In fact the biggest issue facing Blang communities is not climate change, but the state which since 1953 impinges on the village's self-governance. The social organisation of Blang communities thus suggest that catastrophe is not necessarily a simply destructive process, but that the ends of the world can also represent the birth of new possibilities.

• Bäckström, Daniel Mohseni Kabir (2025). Escape Futures and the Future of Escape: Lessons from the Chinese uplands. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In the Zomian uplands of present-day southwest China, communities have long lived beyond the reach of states and capitalism. Beginning in the mid-twentieth century many of these previously self-governed communities began to be incorporated into nascent nation states. Working with a small community who call themselves Blang, in an area called the Blang Mountains in what is today China’s Xishuangbanna prefecture, I am constantly faced with the slow infringement of freedom as my friends and interlocutors are slowly being integrated into the Chinese nation state. Blang villages trace their origins to maroons that escaped lowland states to create alternative communities governed by forms of direct, consensus democracy, and who annually allotted land for swidden, shifting cultivation. Rooted in Graeber and Wengrow’s recent call for an anthropology of freedom, I hope to contribute to the panel, by thinking with Blang freedom creating practices about prefigurative politics and the possibilities and impossibilities of escape as a liberatory technique. I would also like to highlight the transformative effects on my own thinking from spending time with people that have long lived beyond state control.

• Bäckström, Daniel Mohseni Kabir (2025). Infrastructures of Ghosts and States. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In China’s southwest, along the mountainous China-Myanmar border, live a small ethnic minority who call themselves Blang. Blang communities are surrounded by powerful, immaterial others: ghosts, gods, and states impose on the village from the outside. Ghosts are unable or unwilling to feed themselves; when hungry they afflict humans with mischief, misfortune, or violence in order to be fed. But how can humans send things to ghosts if they cannot see or touch them? My conference paper will examine the ritual infrastructure that makes possible interactions with ghosts; how humans can send foil, bamboo, and clay figures, that for the ghost becomes great riches; and how it makes possible the dispatching of ghosts, using infrastructure to send them away. Until 1953, Blang communities say they “had no state.” Much like ghosts you cannot shake hands with the state. How did this powerful, immaterial other make its way into the mountains? Employing lessons from the ritual infrastructure Blang communities employ to interact with ghosts, I show how infrastructure in the traditional sense (the construction of roads, border fences, and electricity lines) has made possible the transformation of something conceptual for one party into something real for the other. Just as humans send conceptual and metaphorical riches that become real for ghosts, so what was first conceptual (citizenship, population, borders) has recently become real for Blang communities.

• Backstrom, Daniel Mohseni Kabir (2024). Ghosts and the State. Full text in Research Archive
• Backstrom, Daniel Mohseni Kabir (2023). Translating Practices: Placebo, Additional Medicine and the Healing Power of Ritual. Full text in Research Archive
• Backstrom, Daniel Mohseni Kabir (2023). Rapport från kinesisk bergsby: Reflektioner från fältarbete i Blangbergen. FokusKina. ISSN 2002-7362. Full text in Research Archive
• Backstrom, Daniel Mohseni Kabir (2022). Shifting Relations, Shifting Terrain. Reconfigurations of Place in the Zomian Highlands. Full text in Research Archive
• Backstrom, Daniel Mohseni Kabir (2018). Kraftfulla tatueringar i Xishuangbanna. FokusKina. ISSN 2002-7362. Full text in Research Archive
• Bäckström, Daniel Mohseni Kabir (2025). Ghosts and the State: Immaterial Agencies in the Blang Mountains. University of Oslo (UiO). Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  On the Zomian frontier between China and Myanmar lives an ethnic minority called Blang. These communities retain a great degree of autonomy and self-governance, but they are impinged upon from all sides by powerful invisible others, such as ghosts, gods, and the state. This dissertation is about how Blang communities interact with these powerful others. It asks and attempts to answer a very fundamental question: how do people interact with things they cannot see or touch like ghosts and the state? The dissertation details several techniques and technologies employed to make these interactions possible. Because they cannot be grasped, materialisation affords immaterial agencies a material extension in the phenomenal world, affording humans the possibility of grasping the intangible. Infrastructural technologies are employed by both humans and nonhumans to overcome distance, both spatial and ontological. Power is moved or networked to act across space. Things are sent across the ontological divide between humans and these powerful others. The dissertation will also investigate the processes by which Blang communities attempt to order the world, and the competing ordering regimes of the state on every level from the body to the cosmos. In Blang communities—violence though prevalent—is to some extent inhuman, and as we shall see both ghosts, gods, and the state employ violence in order to make humans acknowledge their agency and desires. According to Blang theories of possession, when a ghost enters a person, it transforms embodied perception making them see the world as the ghost does. When the state first entered the Blang Mountains in 1953 only its cadres considered Blang communities Chinese, now people see themselves as the state sees them. Is Chineseness, is citizenship then not in a sense a form of possession? Finally, the dissertation investigates how the current state differs from its predecessors and what its arrival has meant for human relations.

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