The Politics of Swidden farming

Debojyoti Das

Description

An ethnographic case study offering a new explanation for the changes taking place in slash-and-burn farming in the highands of eastern India.

‘The Politics of Swidden farming’ offers a new explanation for the changes taking place in slash-and-burn (jhum or swidden) farming in the highlands of eastern India through an ethnographic case study. Today market-led agriculture is transforming land and labour relations. Jhum cultivators are beneficiaries of state schemes, including internationally funded, community-driven development or biodiversity conservation programmes.

The book traces the story of agroecological change and state intervention to colonial times (including post Indian independence) when Nagaland was seen as the frontier of state and civilization. Contemporary agrarian change can be understood by contextualizing farming not just in terms of the science and technology of agriculture or conservation/biodiversity but also in terms of technologies of rule. For the colonial administrators of the Naga Hills – who saw their role partially in terms of rescue and record ethnography – jhum practices were part of backward Naga customs and traditions. Improving farming practices was bound up with indirect rule as a distinct process of governance involving forms of knowledge and intervention. It was political expediency rather than imperial science that changed local agroecologies and pressurized shifting cultivation. Crucially, neighbouring Naga terrace rice cultivators were promoted as offering a more civilized – yet local – alternative.

‘The Politics of Swidden farming’ demonstrates how contemporary agrarian development reflects this complex colonial heritage, including linkages between the state and village elites. Evangelical missionaries in the post-Independence period also contributed by appropriating local institutions to a Protestant (Baptist) ethic of work. Reinforcing the colonial state’s privileging of rice as the crop of civilization, the missionaries’ moral discourse installed new time disciplines geared to settled agriculture. To this end, the book adds a new dimension to the underdeveloped literature on shifting cultivation in South Asia by focusing on the social ecology of farming and agrarian change in the hills. It provides a comparative viewpoint to state-centred and donor-driven development in the frontier region by bringing in different actors and institutions that become the actants and agents of social change.

Methodologically, the author engages with the many voices that shaped his fieldwork, providing evidence from in-depth household-based participant observation and life histories, and a household survey, while also drawing extensively on original archival research and colonial photography to provide documentation of colonial representations of the swidden landscape. The research was undertaken in a milieu of fear and violence, which raises further methodological and ethical issues.

List of Illustrations; Foreword; Acknowledgements; List of Abbreviations; Chapter 1 Introduction; Chapter 2 Methodology and Fieldwork: Negotiating Hazardous Fields; Chapter 3 Ethnography, Violence and Memory: Telling Violence in the Naga Hills; Chapter 4 Jhum and the ‘Science of Empire’: Ecological Discourse, Ethnographic Knowledge and Colonial Mediation; Chapter 5 Land and Land-Based Relations in a Yimchunger Naga Village: From a Book View to a Field View; Chapter 6 The Politics of Time: The Missionary Calendar, the Protestant Ethic and Labour Relations among the Eastern Nagas; Chapter 7 The Micro-Politics of Development Intervention: Village Patrons, Community Participation and the NEPED Project; Chapter 8 Conclusion; Notes, Bibliography; Index.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• General officer
• Social sciences
• Anthropology
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 28 septembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783087778
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Politics of Swidden Farming
The Politics of Swidden Farming: Environment and Development in Eastern India
Debojyoti Das
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2018
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© Debojyoti Das 2018

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Das, Debojyoti, author.
Title: The politics of swidden farming : environment and development in eastern India / by Debojyoti Das.
Description: London, UK; New York, NY: Anthem Press, an imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018022207| ISBN 9781783087754 (hardback) | ISBN 1783087757 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Shifting cultivation–India–Nagaland. | Naga (South Asian people)–Agriculture.
Classification: LCC S602.87.D37 2018 | DDC 631.5/8180954165–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018022207

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-775-4 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78308-775-7 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.
This book is dedicated to Georges Condominas (b. 1921) who passed away on 17 July 2011 and who had such a remarkable influence on swidden studies in Southeast Asia (Vietnam); and to the friends of the study village who helped me in every possible way during my fieldwork; and to our loving son, Aryan.
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Foreword
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
1. Introduction
2. Methodology and Fieldwork: Negotiating Hazardous Fields
3. Ethnography, Violence and Memory: Telling Violence in the Naga Hills
4. Jhum and the ‘Science of Empire’: Ecological Discourse, Ethnographic Knowledge and Colonial Mediation
5. Land and Land-Based Relations in a Yimchunger Naga Village: From Book View to Field View
6. The Politics of Time: The Missionary Calendar, the Protestant Ethic and Labour Relations among the Eastern Nagas
7. Micro-Politics of Development Intervention: Village Patrons, Community Participation and the NEPED Project
8. Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure
6.1 Index: L1 – Church, attending church service and meeting; L2 – Meals: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner; L3 – Hanging around and visiting people’s houses; L4 – Ceremony: Collective rituals related to church; L5 – Rest, lying down in one’s own house during daylight hours, reading, listening to music
Images
1.1 A climate-change poster at Clerk Theological College, Mokokchung
1.2 Moyang, the highly popular Konyak chief
2.1 The Compromise Document
2.2 AK-47 bullet mark on the village lamp post
2.3 A public servant being guarded during the Hornbill Festival, 2008
2.4 Journalist photographing folk dancers during the Hornbill Festival, 2008
3.1 Pictures depicting a Japanese raid in 1944
3.2 Major R. Kathing and his wife with early village guards
3.3 Arms captured from the first China-returned Naga rebels
4.1 Irrigation marvels of the Angamis
4.2 Konyak Naga headhunters as swidden cultivators
5.1 Bird’s-eye view of the study village
5.2 Murung house in the middle khel of the village
5.3 Citizens’ pillar in the village
5.4 Wet irrigated field opened in the 1980s
5.5 Traction plough
5.6 Household labour in irrigation fields during the cropping season
5.7 Man engaged in controlling irrigation water in paddy fields
6.1 Yimchunger Baptist Church Calendar
6.2 Church revivals session 2009, Leangkonger
7.1 Naga villagers as represented by the project staff
7.2 Yimchunger Naga villagers drinking locally made wine. Photograph taken in Kutur village by anthropologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf (1937)
7.3 NEPED handbook showing Leangkonger success story
7.4 Maize and long beans relay cropping in Leangkonger
8.1 Alder-based plantation in Leangkonger village
8.2 A poster depicting potential of a tree
Maps
1.1 Location map of Nagaland and the study region
3.1 Topographical maps of Assam and Burma; the blank space is an un-administered and unsurveyed area
3.2 Assam–Burma frontier map of area brought under Naga Hills in 1937 after the Pangsha anti-slavery campaign
3.3 Route followed by the 1936 expedition
5.1 Sketch map of the study village, prepared in the field with the help of village informants and host
8.1 Mokokchung villages land dispute maps with signatures of dobashis
Tables
4.1 Chronology of legislation passed in Assam since 1834 by the British Indian Administration
4.2 Fund allocation to creating rice terraces in Naga villages
4.3 Mokokchung subdivision
4.4 Showing amount spent in Kohima Sadar
4.5 Showing amount spent in Mokokchung subdivision
4.6 TRC Projects implemented in Assam Hills District and their relative success
6.1 Yimchunger ‘Forefather’ Calendar
FOREWORD
The title of this book, The Politics of Swidden Farming: Environment and Development in Eastern India , hardly conveys the ethnographic depth and historical reach of the study. This scope becomes apparent as the reader comes to discover the significance of swidden or shifting cultivation, not just as a relationship of communities to land and ecology, but as a critical mediator of relationships with the colonial and postcolonial state and its civilizing or development projects over the past century. The study is located in a region and among people who become, through their social lives and livelihoods (including their swidden cultivation), as Anna Tsing puts it, ‘icons of the archaic disorder that represents the limit and test of state order and development’ (Tsing 1993 : 28). The remote Naga villages that are the ethnographic focus of this book are in this sense represented simultaneously as a political–administrative border, an agricultural margin and a moral frontier. The kinds of colonial and postcolonial projects that have sought to regulate and control such borderland communities, whether irrigation projects, roads, settlement schemes or plantations, are well known, but what is rarer is the kind of longitudinal account offered here of the interplay of state power, Christian mission and local communities, examined also through the complex relationships between and within these Nagaland villages themselves. With regard to this latter theme of the role and agency of local communities in their own transformation, it becomes evident not only that colonial administrative power was asserted through harnessing inter-group antagonisms, but also that transformations brought to the cultivated landscape, to social institutions and cultural practices through Christian missions, came by way of neighbouring social groups, who modelled new ways of worshipping and working the land, expanding cash-crop or rice cultivation (an established archetype of settled civility).
Violence is a thread that runs through the account of the political and moral relationships of this frontier zone. Debojyoti Das offers the reader his own experience of being caught up in a violent episode involving a kidnap, interrupting the decade-long ceasefire between the army and Naga militants, as a route into ethical and methodological reflection. As the book explains, through use of remarkably candid archival sources on the brutality of the British administration, the people of this frontier have long existed as the target of counter-insurgency violence, both physical and representational. Having imagined the local Naga communities in terms of their violence – as head-hunting, slave-taking savages and insurgents – British ‘punitive expeditions’ of quite remarkable destruction and violence were undertaken. The moral framing of such violence as civilizing allowed an unguarded record of the dreadful violence involved in such penalizing action. All the more disturbing for the scholarly discipline in which Das is trained, is the evidence he brings to show that it was in alliance with this administration that anthropology’s ‘rescue and record’ ethnography was produced, including the photographic capture of the ‘naked Nagas’ for display in the Illustrated London News from the 1930s. Intersecting violence meant the British frequently exploited existing inter-group rivalries, and in the context of World War II, actually rewarded Nagas for the taking of Japanese heads, the practice that had justified their punitive expeditions.
Das has discovered a wealth of new archival material on the colonial administration of this frontier region kept in local record offices. Despite the important light thrown on direct military assertions of colonial power, these sources are used to show