Introduction

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. I lived among the Yimchungers to develop my field-based knowledge, which informs the ethnography in the book.

In this book, I trace the story of agroecological change and state intervention back to colonial times when the Naga Hills were seen as the frontier of state and 'civilization'. We need to understand contemporary agrarian change by contextualizing farming, not just in terms of the science and technology of agriculture or conservation and biodiversity, but also in terms of 'technologies of rule'. For the colonial administrators of the Naga Hills – who saw their role partially in terms of rescue-and-record ethnography – jhum practices were part of backward Naga customs and traditions. 'Improving' farming practices was bound up with indirect rule as a distinct process of governance involving forms of knowledge and intervention. It was political expediency rather than 'imperial science' that changed local agroecologies and put pressure on the practice of shifting cultivation. Crucially, neighbouring Naga terrace rice cultivators were promoted as offering a more civilized – yet local – alternative.

Here I propose to deliver anthropological insights into the social ecology of farming that may help to understand how swidden has been framed within statist and epistemic discourses that have informed both policy and practice on agriculture development in upland South Asia. Besides developing an ethnography of jhumland development in the hills, the work has other objectives that originate from my engaged and collaborative ethnographic fieldwork and from my use of multiple sources and methods of data collection in a sensitive field site (particularly colonial photographs, archival records and policy dossiers). This work also demonstrates how contemporary agrarian development reflects this complex colonial heritage, including linkages between the state and village elites. Evangelical missionaries in the post-independence period also contributed by appropriating local institutions and incorporating them into a Protestant (Baptist) ethic of work. Reinforcing the colonial state's favouring of rice as the 'crop of civilization', the missionaries' moral discourse installed new time disciplines geared to settled agriculture.

Methodologically, I engage with the many voices that shaped my field research, providing evidence from in-depth, household-based participant observation and life histories and a household survey, while also drawing extensively on original archival research and colonial photography to provide documentation of colonial representations of the swidden landscape. This research was undertaken in a milieu of fear and violence, which raises further methodological and ethical issues in the book that are relevant for ethnographies carried out in dangerous field sites (see Chapter 2).

Global Discourses: An Overview of Swidden

To begin with I provide an overview of jhum, northeast India's swidden farming. Swidden agriculture is a technique of rotational farming in which land is cleared for cultivation (normally by fire) and then left to regenerate after a few years. This is followed in a cycle. However, in northeast India, as elsewhere in the tropics, various factors – such as demographic changes, the introduction of new cash and plantation crops, the building of big dams and the submergence of forest land in catchment areas – have reduced the land use needed for swidden farming. Simultaneously, governments worldwide have long sought to eradicate swidden agriculture, terming it 'slash and burn' because of an erroneous belief that it is the sole driver of deforestation and soil erosion in the hills.

Swidden is today increasingly understood in national and transnational agroecological discourse as an obsolete form of land use that not only puts pressure on land and its dwellers, but also destabilizes forests, soil and biodiversity in highland ecosystems. The environmental narratives of shifting cultivation that induced damages to ecology were produced, and scientifically...