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.