Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- 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
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- 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
Summary
Both colonial technical staff and farmers in the plains show little consideration for and even despise swidden practices all over their colonies in Southeast Asia. Yet one hears little of the centuries during which the Mayan civilization ruled over Central America, which is strewn with their masterpieces. The colonial administration did not know, for example, that swidden had played a major role in the demographic expansion of the twelfth century in France: it transformed vast areas into cultivated fields of cereals. It was also the case that swidden was widespread in Europe during the nineteenth century, and it is also mentioned as existing in Austria during the 1960s. If you walk through the forest of Fontainebleau you will come across many sites or hamlets with the name ‘I'Essart’ or ‘Essart’ (swidden) on the survey maps. (Condominas 2009, 267)
The seed of this book dates back, at least in part, to 2006, when I attended a seminar on ‘shifting cultivation’ – swidden farming, pejoratively known as ‘slash-and-burn’, and in northeast India as jhum. This seminar, delivered by P. S. Ramakrishnan, inspired me to undertake my research among the hill farmers of Eastern India. This manuscript is a labour of love, written through years of commitment working with jhum farmers in Nagaland. Ramakrishnan was, at that time, a member of the advisory committee in a transnationally funded jhum regeneration project. The project, entitled Nagaland Empowerment of People through Economic Development (NEPED), was funded by the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the India–Canada Environmental Facility (ICEF) primarily to implement ‘carbon sink’ and target global warming and climate change–induced environmental risks through the regeneration of forest land and by incentivizing farmers to grow horticultural and plantation cash crops in the eastern Himalayas. This region is a major biodiversity hot spot in South Asia and has grasped the attention of biologists, geographers, climate scientists and ecologists who see jhum as a hazardous and unproductive form of farming, threatening local biodiversity. The appraisal of the project's success and research funding from the Felix Scholarship, UK, to pursue my work at the Anthropology Department of the School of Oriental and African Studies drove me to hike the Saramati mountain range across the India–Myanmar borderland.
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- The Politics of Swidden Farming (Jhum)Environment and Development in Eastern India, pp. 1 - 24Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2018