Engendering the Swidden

Engendering the Swidden

Swidden cultivation is a system that is used all over the tropics, that has endured 10 000 years and that supports the life of millions of people worldwide (Cairns 2007). It is a combination of agriculture, horticulture and forestry and involves a cyclic concept of the use of areas for different modes of (re)production.
While generations of anthropologists have pointed to the cultural embeddedness and sustainability of that holistic system, discipline based scientists from forestry, agriculture or soil science have pointed at it being a destructive practice.
State governments have implemented repressive regulations on swidden cultivation, especially where fire was involved. Development agencies have taken it as a challenge to transform agricultural activities into static ones and hand over parts of the forest to conservationist goals that exclude local people. Political ecologists have stressed the powerful relations involved and the colonial background of the described regulation. In the light of the rise of indigenous peoples´ rights in the international arena, discourses have partly changed and environmental governance on the issue has become more complex.
This paper is an attempt to use ecofeminist theoretical frameworks to approach this contested form of environmental management from a gender perspective.
Wherever possible, I will draw on my own data that I have collected during two fieldtrips to the Philippines in 2013 and 2014/15. These were gathered in the Ancestral Domain of the Matigsalug Manobo Indigenous People. Swidden cultivation is practiced in that area but, to a certain extent, criminalized by Datus (Indigenous male leaders), local government officials and state agencies responsible for the forest. The area is occupied to a high degree by Imperata Cylindrica, a grass that is associated with environmentally denuded areas by the mainstream discourses. Many research protagonists are missing certain forms of collective action (Bayanihan) that used to be practiced along with swidden agriculture.
My discussion will be structured by three different dimensions, which are used in the social-ecological framework of (re)productivity (Biesecker/Hofmeister 2010) that I apply in my dissertation project, to which this research belongs.
Regarding the cultural-symbolic dimension (1) of swidden, I will discuss the issue of naming of the practice. The naming of the practice as slash-and-burn, swidden or shifting cultivation can be linked to different actors in science and society and different views and reactions upon the practice (Cairns 2007) that can be analyzed from a gender perspective (e.g. Banzon-Cabanilla 2002). On one hand, swidden has been romanticized and feminized and therefore described as an adapting, sensitive and holistic system that is applied by somehow noble indigenous people. Something that science based technocrats (masculine symbolization) can neither tolerate nor understand with their fragmenting colonial and control oriented knowledge. On the other hand, swidden can be described as having some queer, some hybrid qualities that makes it even more promising for sustainable development and even more vulnerable at the same time.
Here, the socio-cultural dimension (2) is touched upon: The fact that state authorities divide into different agencies responsible for agriculture and forest conservation, with the latters power continuously increasing, is a threat to swidden cultivation (Fox et.al 2009). Other issues of that dimension are the gender structure of labor in the swidden or in the surrounding labor market (Cramb und Colfer et.al).
In each of the points that I will discuss, the material-technical dimension (3) is strongly interwoven. Scientific assessments of the material base of swidden are strongly influenced by symbolic and power related biases (Dove 2004, Rambo 2007). At the same time, the whole discussion has a material base to which I will always keep the connection during the process of engendering.

Sources
Banzon-Cabanilla, Daylinda (2002): Contradictions and False Dichotomies in Ecogovernance: Shifting Cultivation as Agroforestry. In: Official Journal of the Philippine Sociological Society 50, pp. 18–34.
Biesecker, Adelheid; Hofmeister, Sabine (2010 ): Focus: (Re)productivity. In: Ecological Economics 69 (8), pp. 1703–1711
Cairns, Malcolm (2007): Preface. In: Malcolm Cairns (Ed.): Voices from the forest. Integrating indigenous knowledge into sustainable upland farming. Washington, DC: Resources for the Future, pp. XIII–XV.
Cramb, R. A.; Colfer, Carol J. Pierce; Dressler, Wolfram; Laungaramsri, Pinkaew; Le, Quang Trang; Mulyoutami, Elok et al. (2009): Swidden Transformations and Rural Livelihoods in Southeast Asia. In: Hum Ecol 37 (3), pp. 323–346.
Dove, Michael (2004): Anthropogenic grasslands in Southeast Asia. Sociology of knowledge and implications for agroforestry. In: Agroforestry Systems 61, pp. 423–435
Fox, Jefferson; Fujita, Yayoi; Ngidang, Dimbab; Peluso, Nancy; Potter, Lesley; Sakuntaladewi, Niken et al. (2009): Policies, Political-Economy, and Swidden in Southeast Asia. In: Hum Ecol 37 (3), pp. 305–322.
Rambo, A. Terry (2007): Observations on the Role of Improved Fallow mangement in Swidden Agricultural Systems. In: Malcolm Cairns (Ed.): Voices from the forest. Integrating indigenous knowledge into sustainable upland farming. Washington, DC: Resources for the Future, pp. 780–801.



Vortrag mit ppt