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Literary Review
Politics of conservation
SHIFTING cultivators, populating peripheries or frontier zones of modern states, seem to share much of the same predicaments. They are commonly perceived by the State and people at large as aliens or outsiders, with a culture and mode of livelihood that is regarded as uncivilised and outdated. Politically, they are often seen as a threat to the national unity, and with present-day concern for nature conservation and protection of forests, they have become the very epitome of environmental devastation. To become proper citizens it appears that they have to abandon their entire way of life.
The anthropologist Pinkaew Laungaramsri deals with this problematic in her recent book Redefining Nature: Karen Ecological Knowledge and the Challenge to the Modern Conservation Paradigm (2001). The book deals with the politics of nature conservation in Thailand and how recent extension of protected areas affects the life of the Karen people, an ethnic minority living in the northern highlands bordering Burma. In the eyes of the Thai state, and in accordance with the dominant conservation ideology, "hill tribes" and shifting cultivation equals destruction of forests. In short, people like the Karen have no place in the new schemes of things.
But, however marginalised, the Karens do not passively accept their lands being taken away from them. As Laungaramsri convincingly shows, they resist the state intrusion in various ways. In alliance with other communities, several NGOs and concerned academics, they have successfully created a counter-discourse that challenges the dominant conservation paradigm and where hill people like the Karens are invested with special local knowledge of the environment and appear as caretakers rather than destroyers of nature. The practice of shifting cultivation, for example, is thus portrayed as part of a local subsistence system that is ecologically sound. The Karens seek, above all, recognition of rights to their lands and resources. The most successful strategy in demanding such rights has been what Laungaramsri refers to as "counter-mapping": the making of detailed topographical resource maps by local people themselves. Maps have usually been a tool of those in power, but by appropriating the technology of map-making, the Karens have acquired an effective means through which they can negotiate with the state authorities and reassert themselves to outsiders.
Redefining Nature is Pinkaew Laungaramsri's doctoral thesis from the University of Washington. It is a challenging study that covers a wide range of issues that are of great importance in contemporary world. Like many similar studies of subaltern communities, Laungaramsri takes her theoretical point of departure in Foucault's understanding of power, that every power relationship contains sites of opposition and possible strategies of resistance. Power is constituted in and through discourses and the task Laungaramsri sets for herself is to interrogate the institutionalisation and bureaucratisation of nature conservation within Thailand's forestry sector. Through an in-depth study of this process she hopes to reveal and unravel the structures of domination and subsequently question the "truths" or taken-for-granted assumptions of contemporary conservation ideology in Thailand. "Truths" that render hill tribes enemies of the nature and legitimise resettlement and appropriation of their lands.
Laungaramsri is explicitly political, and she places herself in the tradition of action research that not only seeks to understand the society but also to change it. Her aim is to broaden the Thai society and open a space for dialogue and acceptance of different groups of people in the country. No research enterprise is neutral, she claims, and every researcher is shaped by the ideas through which she or he understands the world. We are all situated and speak from some particular (political) stance. And for a researcher like Laungaramsri, it is a question of self-critical reflections upon once ideological and theoretical points-of-departures rather than hiding behind presumed scientific neutrality. This is hardly a novel position today, and one that many would label as "postmodernist". Currently, there is a tendency within certain camps in the social sciences to reach for the guns as soon as something smells postmodernism. For the critics, this is another term for poor scholarship — trendy, lofty theories, at the expense of solid, empirical data. Redefining Nature is an excellent example of the contrary. The book is a piece of in-depth, grounded research: prolonged ethnographic fieldwork combined with archival research, interviews, newspaper articles and other written material as well as a good coverage of previous research in the field.
The book contains seven chapters. In the introduction, the author gives an overview of the research project and addresses a number of theoretical and methodological issues. Chapters two and three are more historical and give an account of the construction of Karen as a "hill tribe" and the development of modern ethnic classifications in Thailand (chap. 2), with respect to the different discourses related to the forest and thus, for example, addresses the emergence of modern forest conservation, including establishment of protected areas (chap.3). In chapter four, the focus shifts towards the forest establishment and looks at the beliefs and perceptions of foresters and conservationists. Chapter five deals with the Karens and their "local knowledge" related to the environment. Here we learn about their way of classifying the forest and for example how the dense forests that are cool and moist is regarded as "female forest" whereas the forests surrounding the village used for shifting cultivation is perceived as "male forest". This chapter contains the fascinating account of how people learnt the skills of map-making and started to make use of local resource maps in negotiations with the forest authorities. In this process the anthropologist herself played an active part. Chapter six traces the expansion of state control over the highland communities. The central theme is the discourse on shifting cultivation and how the Thai state increasingly had come to view this type of resource use in negative terms and attach various stereotypical prejudices against those who practice it. One of the most sensitive issues is the question of "overpopulation", where the Thai state asserts that increased population among the highland swidden agriculturalists is the main cause of forest destruction in the hills. Laungaramsri questions what she calls "the mechanistic assumption of a linkage between population growth, shifting cultivation and development". What this assumption fails to take into account, she argues, is "the larger political economic forces which affect the sustainability of upland agriculture" (pp. 206-207). Most critical is the considerable expansion of protected areas (national parks, sanctuaries and watershed forests) into village lands, leaving people with less cultivable land and thus a shortening of the rotation cycle.
Finally, in the conclusion the author sums up her main arguments and ends with a popular Karen tale of the sand bird as an allegory of the fate of small people in the periphery of modern states. The sand bird got her nestlings killed by a careless elephant that did not listen to her pledge to be cautious and not step on her small ones. To the elephant the birds were too unimportant creatures to be bothered with. The sand bird mother was totally devastated by her loss, and cried out her grief in the jungle. Other small animals heard her cries and promised to help her, and with all of them doing their little parts, the elephant was made to fall off a cliff and die. The Karens are similarly trying to make their voices heard through petitions, demonstrations and through dialogue with the majority population. Eventually, if others join in, those in power are bound to take notice and address their grievances. The arrogance of the ones in power might have its price. In the long run, no state can afford mistreating subaltern communities. This is at least the case when enough people aspire for justice and for an equal and democratic society.
In sum, Redefining Nature is a valuable book, of interest to both scholars and activists. Today, there is unfortunately little dialogue between South Asian and Southeast Asian studies. Earthworm books should be commended for bringing this excellent political ecology study of Thailand's woodlands to the Indian public.
Redefining Nature: Karen Ecological Knowledge and the Challenge to the Modern Conservation Paradigm, Pinkaew Laungaramsri, Earthworm Books, 2002, p.257. ISBN: 81-86945-17-2
B. G. Karlsson is a research fellow at the Dept. of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology at Uppsala University. He is the author of Contested Belongings: An Indigenous People's Struggle for Forest and Identity in Sub-Himalayan Bengal (2000, Curzon Press).
B.G. KARLSSON
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