How have national and state governments the world over come to “own” huge expanses of territory under the rubric of “national forest,” “national parks,” or “wastelands”? The two contradictory statements in the above epigraph illustrate that not all colonial administrators agreed that forests should be taken away from local
 people and “protected” by the state. The assumption of state authority over forests is based on a relatively recent convergence of historical circumstances. These circumstances have enabled certain state authorities to supersede the rights, claims, and practices of people resident in what the world now calls “forests.”

/pdf/genealogies-of-the-political-forest-and-customary-rights-in-1fuwav8fbv.pdf

Genealogies of the Political Forest and Customary Rights in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand

accomplishment of rule owes as much to the understandings and practices worked out in the contingent and compromised space of cultural intimacy as it does to the imposition of development schemes and related forms of disciplinary power.3 My study is grounded ethnographically in an analysis of Indonesia's official program for the resettlement of isolated people. Resettlement programs are familiar enough as objects of anthropological study and critique, and there are many important accounts of the damage done to indigenous folk by inept bureaucrats and bullying regimes. My focus is rather different, for I seek less to expose the all-too-predictable havoc wreaked by state power in the periphery than to highlight the significance of that periphery, and the activities that go on there, in the constitution of the self-proclaimed center. Just as others have shown that colonialism was critical to the self-fashioning of the West (Cooper and Stoler 1997), "development" is here explored as a modern state's attempt at self-fashioning and rule, considered always as fragile and contingent accomplishments.4

Compromising Power:Development, Culture, and Rule in Indonesia

Emily T. Yeh. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. xvii and 324 pp., maps, photos, notes, bibliography, index. $26.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-8014-7832-1), $75.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8014-5155-3).So...

Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development

http://personal.lse.ac.uk/FORSYTHT/eyes_of_state.pdf

In the Eyes of the State: Negotiating a “Rights-Based Approach” to Forest Conservation in Thailand

It is now widely agreed that the poor are not passive in the develop- ment process. Participation, once radical and controversial, is now main- stream management theory. Harnessing self-help potential is the order of the day. Properly 'empowered' or at least 'enabled', the poor are assumed to be able to overcome deficits of infrastructure and services and exhaust their tremendous entrepreneurial potential. Without altogether denying the validity of the self-help approach, the paper scrutinizes both its practical assumptions and ideological underpinnings. Does it work for all urban poor communities, and critically, for all people in such com- munities? And is it its efficiency, or rather the implicit justification of cutting subsidies and transfers, which make it so popular with governments and international financial institutions?

Left to their own devices? Community self-help between alternative development and neo-liberalism

A pervasive assumption in the critical literature and practice of development has been that capitalism and state-building has undermined relatively autonomous village communities in which there were equalizing institutions of mutual help or gift-giving. These assumptions tend to retain the dualisms of modernization theories by reversing them. The author argues that we should instead challenge these dualisms, and look for complexity and contradictions within both the past and the present. He then draws on a study in Thailand to show how the ‘village’ was a product of state-building, and how in the past the idiom of ‘helping’ constituted relations of domination and extraction as well as more egalitarian relations of mutual help. The use of the language of the gift confers power on the giver; since the 1930s, state officials have appropriated and transformed the language of ‘helping’ to coerce villagers into working on ‘development’ projects. Until the 1970s, villagers described ‘development’ as coerced serf labour, but since then, they have struggled with mixed results to redefine development as their right to participate in the national and global product. The author finishes by arguing that, in the context of the current global crisis of accumulation, we should reclaim rural development as a democratic right, opposing neoliberal attempts to redefine it as a gift which government and development agencies can discontinue at their will.

Peter Vandergeest

Papers

Gifts and Rights: Cautionary Notes on Community Self‐help in Thailand