Organizer and Chair: Nancy Lee Peluso, Yale University
Discussant: James C. Scott, Yale University
This panel will explore various aspects of resource tenure as it was treated in law and in practice. In forest areas across the entire Asian region, forest laws and policies shaped patterns of legal access to forest flora and fauna. The imposition of colonial law significantly changed the socio-political landscape of forest-basedcommunities and subsequent states. Not all laws, however, were implemented equally. Papers will explore the capacities andinabilities of various legal tools and implementing agencies for changing the ways people have used forest resources.
A Comparison of Nineteenth Century Forest and Land Policies in British, Dutch,
and Non-colonized Southeast Asia
Nancy Lee Peluso, Yale University; Peter Vandergeest, York University
The precursors of contemporary national laws providing for the appropriation and management of the considerable forest resources of Southeast Asian nations were put into place by the middle of the nineteenth century. In this paper, we examine some key sources of variation among the processes of making such laws and their content in the Netherlands East Indies, parts of British Malaya, Sarawak, and Siam. We use these case studies to illustrate differences and similarities deriving from patterns of center-periphery relations, from local property relations, and from different colonial experiences (including the "non-colonized" status of Siam). We show in particular how historical differences at the state level produced diverse ways of dealing with "customary" or local property relations during the transition from the colonial period to national states and market economies.
Hunting in Pre-Colonial and Colonial Indonesia, 1600-1950
Peter Boomgaard, Koninkujk Instituut voor Taal, Land en Volkenkunde
The history of resource use in Indonesia has always been focused on agriculture. To a much lesser extent attention has been paid to livestock raising and forest use. Hunting, however, has been almost entirely neglected by historians. This neglect may be partly explained by a scarcity of historical sources, but perhaps also by the fact that the importance of hunting is underestimated.
In my paper I address four types of hunting, namely hunting as a major subsistence activity (among hunter-gatherers), as a side-line (among peasants), as a profession (also in peasant societies, but also among Europeans). It goes without saying that the intensity of hunting influences the density of game, which implies that higher population densities led to a drop in the density of game animals. A decreasing density of game must have influenced the use of other natural resources, as people had to find alternative sources of fat and protein. However, hunting also influenced land use more directly, for instance through the regular burning of certain areas, and through the creation of hunting reserves by the nobility. Finally, increasing population pressure also led to a reduction of "wild" areas and the concomitant disappearance of game.
Contestation Over Usufruct Privilege Lands in India
Shiv Someshwar, Harvard University
In this paper I investigate deforestation processes in usufruct privilege lands in the Western Ghats of South Kanara, India, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Particular agricultural parcels in South Kanara have attached to them usufruct privileges over the neighbouring state forest lands. The privileges are termed kumaki privileges and the forest lands are callad kumaki lands. Kumaki privileges were formalized by the colonial state, in the early nineteenth century to improve agricultural productivity. The institution of the kumaki, however, also allowed timber felling under certain circumstances. Ironically, rather than being sources of biomass to improve agricultural productivity, as I illustrate in my paper, kumaki lands came to be regarded by the local cultivators, in the period 1650-1890, as a source of firewood for sale in the regional markets, and, from 1950 onwards, as a primary source of commercial timber both of which resulted in extensive tree felling. The state's view as a resource for agricultural improvement has clashed repeatedly with the local population's as a resource of high commodity value and has resulted in the deforestation of kumaki lands.