Landscape and temporality are the major unifying themes of archaeology and social‐cultural anthropology. This paper attempts to show how the temporality of the landscape may be understood by way of a ‘dwelling perspective’ that sets out from the premise of people's active, perceptual engagement in the world. The meaning of ‘landscape’ is clarified by contrast to the concepts of land, nature and space. The notion of ‘taskscape’ is introduced to denote a pattern of dwelling activities, and the intrinsic temporality of the taskscape is shown to lie in its rhythmic interrelations or patterns of resonance. By considering how taskscape relates to landscape, the distinction between them is ultimately dissolved, and the landscape itself is shown to be fundamentally temporal. Some concrete illustrations of these arguments are drawn from a painting by Bruegel, The Harvesters.

The temporality of the landscape

The term "access" is frequently used by property and natural resource analysts without adequate definition. In this paper we develop a concept of access and examine a broad set of factors that differentiate access from property. We define access as "the ability to derive benefits from things," broadening from property's clas- sical definition as "the right to benefit from things." Access, following this definition, is more akin to "a bundle of powers" than to property's notion of a "bundle of rights." This formulation includes a wider range of social relationships that constrain or enable benefits from resource use than property relations alone. Using this fram- ing, we suggest a method of access analysis for identifying the constellations of means, relations, and processes that enable various actors to derive benefits from re- sources. Our intent is to enable scholars, planners, and policy makers to empirically "map" dynamic processes and relationships of access.

A Theory of Access.

Rural development: putting the last first

The intention of this work is to show that European expansion not only transformed the historical trajectory of non-European societies but also reconstituted the historical accounts of these societies before European intervention. It asserts that anthropology must pay more attention to history.

Europe and the People without History

This review examines the social, economic, and political effects of environmental conservation projects as they are manifested in protected areas. We pay special attention to people living in and displaced from protected areas, analyze the worldwide growth of protected areas over the past 20 years, and offer suggestions for future research trajectories in anthropology. We examine protected areas as a way of seeing, understanding, and producing nature (environment) and culture (society) and as a way of attempting to manage and control the relationship between the two. We focus on social, economic, scientific, and political changes in places where there are protected areas and in the urban centers that control these areas. We also examine violence, conflict, power relations, and governmentality as they are connected to the processes of protection. Finally, we examine discourse and its effects and argue that anthropology needs to move beyond the current examinations of language and power to attend to the ways in which protected areas produce space, place, and peoples.

/pdf/parks-and-peoples-the-social-impact-of-protected-areas-3d3id7yn6g.pdf

Parks and Peoples: The Social Impact of Protected Areas

Modernity has helped to popularize, and at the same time threaten, indigeneity. Anthropologists question both the validity of the concept of indigeneity and the wisdom of employing it as a political tool, but they are reluctant to deny it to local communities, whose use of the concept has become subject to study. The concept of indigenous knowledge is similarly faulted in favor of the hybrid products of modernity, and the idea of indigenous environmental knowledge and conservation is heatedly contested. Possibilities for alternate environmentalisms, and the combining of conservation and development goals, are being debated and tested in integrated conservation and development projects and extractive reserves. Anthropological understanding of both state and community agency is being rethought, and new approaches to the study of collaboration, indigenous rights movements, and violence are being developed. These and other current topics of interest involving indigenous peoples challenge anthropologic...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/25064921.pdf

Indigenous People and Environmental Politics

Swidden agriculture is today the focus of a great deal of debate in the context of agroforestry development in humid, tropical countries This paper argues that much of this debate deals not with the empirical facts of swidden agriculture, however, but rather with widely-accepted myths, and that this explains the widespread failures of developmental schemes involving swidden agriculturalists The paper examines three of these myths in some detail One myth is that swidden agriculturalists own their land communally (or not at all), work it communally, and consume its yields communally The truth is that their land (including land under secondary forest fallow) is typically owned by individual households, it is worked by individual household labor forces and/or by reciprocal but not communal work groups, and its yields are owned and consumed privately and individually by each household A second myth is that swidden cultivation of forested land is destructive and wasteful, and in the worst cases results in barren, useless grassland successions The truth is that swidden cultivation is a productive use of the forests, indeed more productive than commercial logging in terms of the size of the population supported, and forest-grassland successions are typically a function not of rapaciousness but of increasing population/land pressure and agricultural intensification — the grasses, including Imperata cylindrica, having value both as a fallow period soil-rebuilder and as cattle fodder A third myth is that swidden agriculturalists have a totally subsistence economy, completely cut off from the rest of the world The truth is that swidden agriculturalists, in addition to planting their subsistence food crops, typically plant market-oriented cash crops as well, and as a result they are actually more integrated into the world economy than many of the practitioners of more intensive forms of agriculture In the conclusion to the paper, in a brief attempt to explain the genesis of these several myths, it is noted that they have generally facilitated the extension of external administration and exploitation into the territories of the swidden agriculturalists, and hence can perhaps best be explained as a reflection of the political economy of the greater societies in which they dwell

/pdf/theories-of-swidden-agriculture-and-the-political-economy-of-5c52mjczro.pdf

Theories of swidden agriculture, and the political economy of ignorance

The study begins with a parable from Kalimantan, relating how the discovery of a big diamond can bring misfortune to a poor miner. It is suggested that this parable applies more generally to resource development in the tropical forest, and that the major challenge is not to give more development opportunities to forest peoples but to take fewer away. This thesis of resource exploitation is at variance with the `rain forest crunch' premise: namely, forest reserves are being over-exploited by forest dwellers, the reason for this is the absence of other sources of income, and the solution is to help forest dwellers find such sources. It is suggested that there has been no lack of such sources in the past, and that the problem has been in maintaining the forest peoples' control of them. The lesson of this analysis is not to ignore minor forest products, but to clearly place them - and their potential development value for indigenous forest peoples - within their proper political-economic context. Any resolution of the problems of tropical forest development and conservation must begin not by searching for resources that forest dwellers do not already have, but by first searching for the institutional forces that restrict their ownership and productive use of existing resources. De-mystification of the current debate over tropical deforestation and development is needed.

A Revisionist View of Tropical Deforestation and Development

Swidden agriculture is today the focus of a great deal of debate in the context of agroforestry development in humid, tropical countries. This paper argues that much of this debate deals not with the empirical facts of swidden agriculture, however, but rather with widely-accepted myths, and that this explains the widespread failures of developmental schemes involving swidden agriculturalists. The paper examines three of these myths in some detail.One myth is that swidden agriculturalists own their land communally (or not at all), work it communally, and consume its yields communally. The truth is that their land (including land under secondary forest fallow) is typically owned by individual households, it is worked by individual household labor forces and/or by reciprocal but not communal work groups, and its yields are owned and consumed privately and individually by each household. A second myth is that swidden cultivation of forested land is destructive and wasteful, and in the worst cases results in barren, useless grassland successions. The truth is that swidden cultivation is a productive use of the forests, indeed more productive than commercial logging in terms of the size of the population supported, and forest-grassland successions are typically a function not of rapaciousness but of increasing population/land pressure and agricultural intensification- the grasses, including Imperata cylindrica, having value both as a fallow period soil-rebuilder and as cattle fodder. A third myth is that swidden agriculturalists have a totally subsistence economy, completely cut off from the rest of the world. The truth is that swidden agriculturalists, in addition to planting their subsistence food crops, typically plant market-oriented cash crops as well, and as a result they are actually more integrated into the world economy than many of the practitioners of more intensive forms of agriculture.In the conclusion to the paper, in a brief attempt to explain the genesis of these several myths, it is noted that they have generally facilitated the extension of external administration and exploitation into the territories of the swidden agriculturalists, and hence can perhaps best be explained as a reflection of the political economy of the greater societies in which they dwell.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2406767_code925459.pdf?abstractid=2406767&mirid=1

Theories of Swidden Agriculture, and the Political Economy of Ignorance

This study critiques one of the prevailing theories of tropical deforestation, namely that the forest is being cleared because its riches have been overlooked (the purported solution to which is the marketing of ‘rainforest crunch’). Edelman's work on the language of ‘helping’ is drawn on to suggest that a focus on the microeconomics of forest dwellers diverts attention from macro-economic and political issues whose impact on the forest is far more serious.The study begins with a parable from Kalimantan, relating how the discovery of a big diamond can bring misfortune to a poor miner. It is suggested that this parable applies more generally to resource development in tropical forests, and that the major challenge is not to give more development opportunities to forest peoples but to take fewer away.This principal is illustrated with respect to gold mining, rattan gathering, and truck-farming, in Indonesia. In each case, when a forest resource acquires greater value in the broader society, it is appropriated by external entrepreneurs at the expense of local communities. A detailed case-study is presented of the development of Para Rubber cultivation. Smallholders currently dominate this cultivation, despite steadfast opposition by both contemporary and colonial governments, whose self-interests are better served by the cultivation of the Rubber on large estates.Each of these cases illustrates the predisposition of political and economic forces in the broader society to take over successful resource development in the tropical forest. Contemporary efforts to develop ‘non-timber forest products’ are reinterpreted, in this light, as attempts to allocate to the forest dwellers the resources of least interest to the broader society. The absence of research in this area is attributed not to academic oversight but to conflicting political-economic interests.This thesis of resource exploitation is at variance with the ‘rain-forest crunch’ premise: namely that forest reserves are being overexploited by forest dwellers, that this is due to the absence of other sources of income, and that the solution is to help forest dwellers to find such sources. It is suggested that there has been no lack of such sources in the past, and that the problem has been in maintaining the forest peoples' control of them. The lesson of this analysis is not to ignore minor forest products, but to place them — and their potential development value for indigenous forest peoples — clearly within their proper political-economic context.Any resolution of the problems of tropical forest development and conservation must begin, not by searching for resources that forest dwellers do not already have, but by first searching for the institutional forces which restrict the forest dwellers' ownership and productive use of existing resources. One of these institutional forces is discourse. It is widely understood that state elites seek to control valuable forest resources; it is less widely understood that an important means to this end is the control of resource-related discourse. De-mystification of the current debate over tropical deforestation and development is thus sorely needed.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0376892900037188

Michael R. Dove

Papers

Indigenous People and Environmental Politics

Theories of swidden agriculture, and the political economy of ignorance

A Revisionist View of Tropical Deforestation and Development

Theories of Swidden Agriculture, and the Political Economy of Ignorance

A Revisionist View of Tropical Deforestation and Development