Organizer: Arun Agrawal, University of Florida, Gainesville
Chair: Jennifer Alexander, University of Sydney
Discussants: Michael R. Dove, East-West Center; Margaret A. McKean, Duke
University
Environmental discourse has moved from a focus on questions of the commons that assumed a singular subject to an emphasis on multiple identities and interests operating in formal and informal institutions that regulate the use of renewable resources. Emphasis on the gendered nature of environmental degradation, for example, has done much to dismantle the assumption that environmental problems had unitary effects on subject populations. Similarly, recognition of conflicts between the interests of the community and the state, the local and the global, and the indigenous and the outsider have helped move the scholarship in new directions. While this has resulted in a new, and much needed, appreciation of the highly differentiated impacts of environmental problems, it has also resulted in the consolidation of a series of dichotomies that threaten to become naturalized.
In this panel, a group of scholars of South and Southeast Asia examine situations of environmental conflict with three goals in mind: first, that axes of contestation are rarely bipolar-they tend to be multiple, intersecting, and crosscutting; second, that the relation between identities and interests produced during resource allocation conflicts are contingent on the specific historical and cultural context; and third, that unitary subject positions entailed in dichotomous analyses always have a repressive as well as a coalescing function.
The panel will consist of a series of cases that closely examine particular situations in South and Southeast Asia with these goals in mind. By drawing on detailed empirical investigations from two regions, and showing the similarities in the concerns of scholars across these regions, we hope to build on existing theoretical work on the micro-politics of resource use and the links of such politics with other levels of analysis.
British Imperium and Forested Zones of Anomaly in Bengal
K. Sivaramakrishnan, Yale University
In Bengal and other parts of India, forests have been treated as 'the fringes of the arable.' Forested landscapes and their inhabitants have signified the frontier of empire, areas of nominal control. Such summary accounts of hill and jungle tracts are manifestly unsatisfactory. In other parts of India welcome re-examinations of regional history from forested vantage points have begun to rectify these omissions.
My paper takes up a similar project in Bengal, but focuses more directly on how forests and their people presented a landscape of manifold differences. Examining the first entry of British rule into the jungle mahals, I shall describe the complex perceptions and practices through which forest Bengal was encountered and defined in exceptional terms. The administration of forested estates sparked protracted struggles between the East India Company and jungle landlords. Defying the reduction of zamindaris(landed estates) from polity to unit of economic administration, and limiting the spread of settled cultivation, the jungle mahalsof southwest Bengal marked out a zone of anomaly in emerging patterns of colonial state-making. Looking closely at the creation of such anomalies provides greater insight into colonial state-making as a process, allowing us to recognize the diversity of political forms it encompassed. Through regional patterns of inclusion and exclusion, the making of 'tribal places' was foreshadowed in Bengal. This in turn influenced local variations in colonial forest management and post-colonial peasant-state relations in forest Bengal.
Conflicting Histories: Negotiating Realities and Myths Around the CHIPKO
Y. Garb, Harvard University; H. Rangan, University of Kentucky
This paper attempts to make sense of the numerous stories that are told about Chipko, a social movement that emerged over forest resources in the Garhwal Himalayas of India in the 1970s. The movement remains the reigning icon of grassroots environmentalism around the world. Tree huggers in Canada and the Pacific Northwest invoke Chipko to explain their seemingly incomprehensible actions to police officers sent to arrest them. David Chipko emerges in England to protect a chestnut tree from being felled by an accountant who wants to protect the value of his residential property. But the stories of Chipko seem to display little concern regarding the region's political, economic and social realities-facts and events surrounding its emergence-both during the seventies and after the movement's rise to fame around the world. They are like fantastic legends and myths, placeless and timeless-free from the constraints of history. The paper deals with the problem of dealing with the myriad versions of the legend and grappling with the realities of the conflicting histories they produce.
The paper, thus, explores the paradox of recognizing the motivational power of Chipko stories, yet contending with the difficulty of basing environmental action and policy on Chipko-myths that are powerful essentially because they have broken free of their historical and geographical realities. Are Chipko legends, rather than its history, more valid in dealing with questions of ecological sustainability and social justice in a complex and changing world?
Local Agency in "Colonial" and "Postcolonial" Contexts: A
Comparative Study of Community Forest Use in India
Arun Agrawal, University of Florida, Gainesville
As the rhetoric around the centrality of "community" to resource management becomes more vocal it becomes increasingly important to examine the conception of community in this rhetoric and the extent to which state-community co-management initiatives actually allow relatively autonomous communities to emerge. This paper traces the history of the attempts by the state in colonial and post-colonial India to involve local communities in forest management. The specific instruments upon which the paper focuses are: (1) The Forest Panchayat Act of 1931 in Uttarakhand which set the terms of interactions between the Colonial British state and village communities in the hills, and (2) The Joint Forest Management orders that attempt today to craft a new understanding between village residents organized into forest protection committees and specific provincial governments. While the explicit focus of the paper is on co-management programs in India, I use examples from other contexts to draw out parallels. In examining the evolving histories of the relationships between the state and the local communities the paper: (a) problematizes easy demarcations between the colonial and the post-colonial periods; (b) examines how local agency can emerge within constraining macro-political structures, and (c) points to the impossibility of containing the direction of institutional change.