Organizer: Akhil Gupta, Stanford University
Chair: Arun Agrawal, University of Florida
Discussants: James C. Scott, Yale University; Nancy Lee Peluso, Yale
University
"After the Flood": Negotiating Ethnic Identities in Central Borneo
Communities
Jennifer Alexander and Paul Alexander, University of Sydney
The construction of Southeast Asia's largest dam in Sarawak will result in the 'resettlement' of 15 Central Borneo longhouses comprising some 8,000 people who are conventionally assigned to six different ethnic groups. In the process of negotiating compensation, these longhouses have been forced to re-evaluate their notions of ethnic identity. The choices are particularly stark for the very small communities such as the 350 Lahanan speakers occupying a single longhouse. Do they assert their unique language and cultural identity and run the risk of having no part in the negotiations? Do they accept the official view that they are merely a branch of the Kayan, the politically and demographically dominant group in the area, and hope that their leader can maintain his prominent position among the Kajang leadership? Or do they join with other small ('non-Kayan') groups to create a new ethnic identity, the Kajan, and negotiate independently?
Gender, Environment and Collective Action
Bina Agarwal, Delhi University
Forests and village commons have always been important sources of livelihood in rural India. For the poor, and especially for women who own little private land, they have been critical for survival. However, their availability has been declining rapidly, due both to degradation and to shifts in property rights away from community control and management, to state and individual control and management, through the processes of statization and privatization.
More recently, though, we are seeing small but significant reversals in these processes. Numerous community oriented forest management schemes have emerged, some state-initiated, others self-initiated by village communities, yet others catalyzed by non-governmental organizations. But unlike the old communal property systems which recognized the usufruct rights of all villagers, in the new systems, rights depend on membership. In other words, membership is replacing citizenship as the defining criteria for establishing rights in the commons. This raises critical questions about participation and equity, especially gender equity. Are the benefits and costs of the emergent institutional arrangements being shared equally by women and men? Or are they creating a system of property rights in communal land which are strongly male centered, thus depriving village women of the only remaining land resource in which they have rights unmediated through male relatives? What constrains or facilitates women's participation in these initiatives?
In answering these questions, the paper will demonstrate the relevance of the feminist environmentalist perspective in understanding gendered responses to the environmental crisis, as opposed to the eco-feminist perspective.
Contested Views of the Ecological Impact of "Green Revolution"
Agriculture in North India
Akhil Gupta, Stanford University
This paper sets out to examine the ecological impact of high-yielding varieties of wheat, which have now been cultivated in parts of western Uttar Pradesh for more than a quarter of a century. What effect has chemical fertilizer had on the soil? Has the intensive use of groundwater resulted in its depletion?
Based on ethnographic research conducted intermittently over a decade since 1984, I present "peasant" perceptions of the effect of chemical fertilizers and groundwater on the fertility of the land. Farmers had conflicting interpretations of whether and how chemical fertilizers were affecting the "strength of the soil." These differences were not only about whether the strength of the soil was declining, but if so, how fast, and what the mechanisms of the decline were. Similarly, there were conflicting interpretations of how to account for the falling water table. Was it primarily due to successive years of poor rainfall, to multiple cropping introduced with the high-yielding varieties, or to the introduction of water-hungry crops like sugarcane?
Paying attention to these conflicting explanations brings out the crosscutting nature of interests and identities very clearly. Any explanation based on unitary principles of class, gender, caste, level of formal educational achievement, or previous or secondary occupation fails to account for the patterns of difference found in the explanations advanced by variously situated people. One has to pay attention simultaneously to the micropolitics of village life and to global development discourse to explain how these multiple axes of identity intersect to shape people's "interests."