Globally, integration into market economies and state governance systems offer both opportunities and challenges for rural, resource-dependent communities. While improved connectivity and access to trans-local goods, technologies, knowledge, and markets have expanded life choices, the long-term resilience of communities — historically supported by non-market systems of production and exchange and collectively held identities, knowledge, and resources — may be undermined by externally led developmental projects, internalization of hierarchical narratives, and erosion of place-based knowledge transmission.
Against this backdrop, this paper presents a grassroots initiative to revitalize mountain-based production systems and associated ways of life in contemporary contexts. Amidst rapid sociocultural and economic changes in rural China over recent decades, a family from Queniao, a Miao village located in the Leigong Mountain Nature Reserve in southeastern Guizhou, has undertaken a series of agritourism and conservation projects to sustain and adapt local ways of life. Distinguished by their autonomy-centered, sustainability-driven, and co-creative characteristics, these projects embody “biocultural design” — a concept that acknowledges Indigenous and local contributions to sustainable practices and promotes endogenous innovation through iterative and mutually beneficial linkages between local and exogenous elements.
Drawing on ethnographic research into the knowledge, networks, meanings, and everyday practices underpinning these projects, this paper aims to corroborate and advance a relational conceptualization of commons — not as isolated systems of economic resource extraction, but as non-commodified, multidimensional systems of social reproduction rooted in collective memories, relationships, and values, constantly affecting and affected by broader political and economic processes. It also highlights efforts to facilitate mutual understanding and egalitarian collaboration as processes of commoning, widening the scope for actions and interventions towards sustainability goals.
