Crafting the Public Sphere in the Forests of West Bengal Democracy, Development, And Political...

Crafting the Public Sphere in the Forests of West Bengal: Democracy, Development, andPolitical ActionAuthor(s): K. SivaramakrishnanSource: American Ethnologist, Vol. 27, No. 2 (May, 2000), pp. 431-461Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/647179 .

Accessed: 04/12/2013 06:42

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Wiley and American Anthropological Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve andextend access to American Ethnologist.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Wed, 4 Dec 2013 06:42:58 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=anthro

http://www.jstor.org/stable/647179?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


crafting the public sphere in the forests of West Bengal: democracy, development, and political action

K. SIVARAMAKRISHNAN

University of Washington

Participatory conservation and development initiatives have proliferated all over the world as the 1990s became the decade for restructuring states and

celebrating civil society. Examining one such major effort, called joint forest management, I propose several new directions for the anthropology of mo-

dernity, development, and environment. I scrutinize processes of local statemaking in the forests of southern West Bengal, India, to reveal key tensions between development and democratization through an ethnography of political action. [bureaucracy, democracy, development, ethnicity, forest conservation, identity politics, science and technology, the state, India]

Modernity has an independent, living, and simultaneously ancient and highly up-to-date wellspring of meaning in its midst: political freedom. The latter is not exhausted by daily use; instead, it bubbles up with greater life and vigor.

Beck, 1998

The anthropology of modernity could well take as its task the cultural analysis of political freedom. In many countries, notably India, development became the main 20th-century aspiration of free nationhood, and socialist democracy the chosen route to this desired future. To study political freedom, then, it would be instructive to focus analysis on the contentions and effervescence generated by simultaneous pursuit within nation-states of development and democracy. In this article, I take up this challenge by showing how the changing landscape for the politics of development yields a key tension between the technocratic practices of development managers and the newly pluralistic political practices created by processes of democratization.

Development has always provoked strong opinions among those engaged in it or affected by it. But the spectrum of controversy surrounding development has widened rapidly during the last two decades. The diversification and expansion of debates about development is evident in several quarters. The effects of a proliferation of prac- titioners with differing perceptions of the normative basis of development are compounded by the fact that political-economic and geo-strategic considerations order the priorities of developers even when they do agree on development's basic goals. Over the last 50 years, the rapid increase and divergence of contexts of development around the world ensures that development is not simply an accumulation of experience, but involves different histories.

Some of this variety has been documented, chiefly by anthropologists, in studies focused on indigenous knowledge threatened with extinction by the spread of modern developmentalist knowledge (see Brokensha et al. 1980; Brush and Stabinsky 1996;

American Ethnologist 27(2):431-461. Copyright ? 2000, American Anthropological Association.



american ethnologist

Chambers et al. 1989; Hobart 1993; Moock and Rhoades 1992; Richards 1985; Scoones and Thompson 1994; Sillitoe 1998; Warren et al. 1991). But this work has filled in only one side of the picture. As Gardner (1997) points out, and several essays in Grillo and Stirrat (1997) demonstrate, developmental knowledge deserves nuanced analyses as well, for "it is also created and recreated by multiple agents, who often have very different understandings of their work" (Gardner 1997:134).1 Anthropologists have begun to

study the production of diverse development knowledges by building on, and at times

repudiating, the findings of the first wave of studies that emphasized the hegemonic as-

pects of developmental discourse. It is possible to distinguish among these studies on the basis of their relative focus on revealing hegemony or documenting the instrumental effects of development-as-discourse. But they share, for the purpose of my argument, a conviction in the broadly stated Western origins of development.2

The new studies have yielded some creative conceptual modifications. In some cases, discourse remains the organizing idea, but its hybridity, malleability, and co-

production by implementors and target populations of development is stressed (see, for example, Gupta 1998; Pigg 1992). For others, the term narrative better captures the plurality and subjective orchestrations of a developmental field (Fairhead and Leach 1996; Fortmann 1994; Hoben 1995; Roe 1991). More recently, further destabi- lizing unitary and linear renderings of how development makes its object, Sivaramak- rishnan and Agrawal (1998) propose that development-as it is imagined, practiced, and re-created-is best described as stories that can change in their telling, as they are pieced together into contingently coherent narratives. Development's stories are rife with a micropolitics often obscured by the consistency or more orderly progression implied by the terms discourse or narrative.

In development-speak, micropolitics are simply a function of the multiplication of stakeholders. As David Mosse writes (in the context of tank irrigation development in Tamil Nadu, India): "Policy reform is shaped by multiple institutions with different interests (the World Bank and other donors), Non Governmental Organizations, the state bureaucracy and elected government" (1997:265). This is not to say that the differ- ences among groups of people and agencies were not involved in development before the 1980s. But before the purveyors of development ventured into the messy world of promoting participation, empowerment, and governance reform, the key players ap- peared to be neatly contained in a few categories like First World experts and finan- ciers, nation-states, backward places and their backward populations. The first of these categories was the recognized source of ideas and money, the second provided the in- frastructure and institutions for the execution of the projects, and the last made up the targets. They would receive development and be transformed by it in the image created by the scheme that identified them. This simple and elegant scheme was overtaken by development's changing fashions. When development agencies took more interest in sustainable local social and political institutions, promoted devolution and decentralization of government, and insisted on participatory project design and management, they were compelled to acknowledge a wider range of actors, interests, and forums. The encounters revealed that the linkages between locality, region, nation, and the international realm had assumed several additional dimensions.

The neat triangle of international expertise and funds, national interest and infra- structure, and local site and beneficiaries no longer describes the development context or process. As developers (driven by their internal fractures) started grappling with the consequences of this breakdown, they firmly focused on the reform of government.3 In most cases, international agencies like the World Bank expect this reform to propagate a Western democratic model of plural and open government. For the anthropology of

432



crafting the public sphere

development-a field already animated by the anthropological debates on nationalism, globalization, transnational flows, diasporic cultures, and most importantly the cultural analysis of modernity, postmodernity, and postcoloniality-there is, then, a

doubly reinforced challenge to think beyond the study of discourse, representation, knowledge, narrative, and all other manners of cultural construction.

I believe the path to innovation lies in the ethnographic study of political action.

Ethnologists have to examine the ways in which agencies and structures engaged in

development designate public spheres for presenting and contesting the political, and the manner of creating publics that produce and consume development in varied inter-linked sites. By making a distinction between cultural construction and political action, I do not want to deny the necessary and unavoidable relationship between symbol systems and political processes.4

Further, I believe social life must be understood in terms that do justice both to objective material, social, and cultural structures, and to the constituting practices and experiences of individuals and groups. The more general contours of this argument are well traced out in the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1990) and Anthony Giddens (1984). Its relevance for the study of development, specifically the key social relations through which development works, can be appreciated in several social fields. Given the multiple ways in which the state is linked to development enterprises, I will be chiefly concerned with social processes and cultural politics of statemaking in the context of development. This will lead me into issues of identity and bureaucracy, hierarchy and egalitarianism, community and nation, in short, "to the dialectics of dif- ferentiation in what we are pleased to call the modern world" (Herzfeld 1993:184).

In this article, I explore some of the ways in which the interaction between rural work and the negotiation of ethnic identities takes place in this field of force generated by processes of statemaking. Field of force refers to the ensemble of social relations that enframe cultural production (see Thompson 1978). The institution and management of the distinction between state and civil society is one principal object of my inquiry. As Tim Mitchell (1991:95) has recently pointed out, "The state should not be taken as a freestanding entity, whether an agent, instrument, organization or structure, located apart from and opposed to another entity called society."5 With the term statemaking I refer to the ways in which institutions of government and ideas of governance are negotiated in specific contexts by local actors and agents of central design or bearers of official ideologies. Statemaking refers also to the power of the central government to penetrate rural society, exact compliance, and invoke commitment. This power rests on "a delicate balance between autonomy and control in the relationship between state and society" (Siu 1989:8).6 Statemaking is fundamentally about defining the forms and legitimations of government and governmentality.

Against the backdrop of statemaking, I draw into relief the play of changing social hierarchies on the pragmatics of citizenship and the way identities are shaped by local articulations of development (see Sivaramakrishnan 1998c). These are issues that come to the fore in my study of joint forest management in West Bengal. I argue here that individual franchise and community membership constitute alternate bundles of rights. People are connected to these bundles of rights by somewhat contradic- tory processes of statemaking that can be observed in joint forest management. Social forestry in India has been a de-territorializing influence and now joint forest management is re-territorializing rural development forestry in the sense, suggested recently by Arjun Appadurai (1996:54-55), of creating new localized communities based on constructed notions of local autonomy and resource sovereignty. The de-territorializing effects of social forestry were manifest in the way state-sponsored plantation forestry

433




moved from the confines of state-owned forested lands to all kinds of public and even private lands. Social forestry programs were designed to assume the development function of supplying fuel, fodder, small timber, and lean-season employment to rural poor in forest-dependent areas. In this way, social forestry undermined the internal territorialization through which bureaucratic natural resource management often developed in modern Asia.7 The shifting relationship of territoriality to forest control in the West Bengal case examined here is a good example of this recent history of forest management.

Joint forest management is important for several reasons. It is a development program predicated on active cooperation between foresters and villagers residing around the forests. Joint forest management is also a set of silvicultural techniques chiefly intended to secure the natural regeneration of sal (shorea robusta) in the dry deciduous forests of southern West Bengal.8 Over the last ten years, joint forest management in India has received more than $200 million from various bilateral and mul- tilateral agencies. Joint forest management has become the centerpiece of participatory forestry on over 1.5 million hectares of land in 20 Indian states. Active promotion by U.S. development agencies, based on euphoric accounts about India's joint forest management largely written by the development agencies' representatives, has encouraged similar projects in places as disparate as Senegal, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Thailand, the Philippines, and the Pacific Northwest region of the United States (Sivaramakrish- nan 1998a:25-26).

West Bengal is a pioneer state for a nationwide relocation of development in sites earlier fenced off for the satisfaction of global conservation agendas or national economic imperatives. The processes of statemaking through which conservation, development, and political devolution have combined in West Bengal have several unique characteristics. These may be overlooked in the easy celebration of West Bengal as a success story in empowerment. To identify the distinctive features, specifically the aspects salient to the study of what I call cultural micropolitics, I investigate ethnographically (to use the words of John Gledhill) "the dynamics of political processes at the local level, particularly where we are dealing with the way institutional politicians interact with popular social movements and informal aspects of power relations" (1994:9). I discuss processes of statemaking by investigating a few events in the crosscutting public spaces delineated by panchayat (local self-government) institutions, technocratic bureaucracies, and the soli- darities of regional political autonomy movements. In this context, forest management is both scientific expertise and bureaucratic practice. I will demonstrate how each facet of forest management is constituted through localized contestation and how the composite of forest management emerges as a powerful social technology bearing the distinctive stamp of the places in which it is produced.

joint forest management in southwest Bengal

West Bengal was the first Indian province to initiate joint forest management in 1990. Soon after, joint forest management became an integral part of the World Bank- sponsored West Bengal Forestry Project started in 1992. The project promised 25 percent from all net forest revenues to village forest protection committees that had formally existed for five years or more and engaged these committees in forest management through microplans. The scheme required the Divisional Forest Officer and the local panchayat to form forest protection committees that would include all adult male heads of households and their wives.

For various reasons having to do with the kinds of leadership that emerged in forest protection committees (based on traditional male-dominated patterns), the participation

434




of women in deliberative aspects of joint forest management has remained limited. I encountered only one female committee member who lived in the Santhal village where she was a widowed head of a household. (Mahatos, Santhals, and Lodhas are the main ethnic groups in the region.) The timing of meetings (late evenings) and the

gendered distribution of forest use practices in the area (Mahato women did not en-

gage in forest product collection except for gathering sal leaves in the spring season) also proved inimical to female participation in public committee activities for women from Mahato households. Lodhas, women and men alike, were least able to attend

meetings as their livelihoods depended on fairly unplanned daily mobility that was in-

compatible with planned sedentary activities like meetings. These village-wide committees elect six members to an executive committee that

includes the local forest beat officer and panchayat representatives. They organize forest protection, assist the Forest Department in silvicultural work, and maintain the rule of law. Joint forest management means that functionaries like the beat officer and forest guard have to step out of their official compounds to confer with leaders of vil-

lage forest protection committees for the management of sal (shorea robusta) regeneration. These discussions allow village leaders to describe their concerns and interests. The forest protection committees end up managing not only endemic sal forests, but also the eucalytpus plantations created by the Forest Department in earlier, less consultative regimes.

In the mid-1 990s, when my field research was completed, the young secondary sal jungles were doing considerably better than in the late 1980s when I had first vis- ited the region to learn more about the fascinating initiative crafted through cooperation between traditionally hostile foresters and villagers in Midnapore.9 If not subject to intensive lopping and slashing, these forests typically became thick with underbrush soon after the monsoons. Management operations comprised a few well- known procedures like thinning and shoot cutting, which require selecting an erect bole for preservation before removing other shoots from the base of the stool. After shoot cutting the stand looks sparser, but there is still profuse undergrowth in the typi- cal mixed dry deciduous dipterocarp forest of southern West Bengal.

Farmers fire the forest floor in April usually to clear the underbrush and release sal regeneration, secure fresh growth of annual grasses, and convert slash into ashes that wash down into their fields as fertilizer. This last act remains controversial and does not receive the consent or approval of the Forest Department. I am referring, then, to a scheme that requires consultative planning and a silvicultural regime based on natural regeneration of sal and its principal associates. Joint forest management, so organized, compels me to ask: how can management be devolved? How can some- thing quintessentially scientific escape the tyranny of hierarchies and shrinking circles of expertise to join the circles of popular practice? What kinds of institutions can create and sustain communities of resource managers? These questions are at the heart of the key challenge for social development in the future, described recently by Alan Rew as the "need to vest planning responsibilities in common purpose groups that are appropriate to the task and aim at issue and to a prior understanding of the social and cultural conditions governing effective participation in planning" (1997:101).

Seeking answers to these questions leads ultimately to a fundamental redefinition of the role of states in resource management. States are themselves complex and con- tradictory institutions. They reflect a range of societal interests, but are also subject to their own internal dynamics of regulation, interagency accommodation, and development. To explore these processes of statemaking I consider the local politics where states and public spheres articulate in the dry forests of southern West Bengal. But

435




first, I must briefly sketch the social ecology of Bandhgora, the southern West Bengal location where I conducted my field research.10

the social landscape of southern West Bengal

The sal forest zone extends from the lower Himalayan ranges in the north to the central Indian peninsula in the south. Within this wide geographic spread, sal forests are of two types: moist and dry deciduous. Southern West Bengal falls in the dry areas where annual rainfall is from 30 to 60 inches. My research in the western part of Mid- napore district revealed it to be part of a regional agroforestry complex that had taken shape in the late 18th century, lasting well into the middle of this century. In this complex, forests formed a patchwork landscape along with savannah, dry uplands, and wet lowlands. Various tenurial arrangements reflected the fluidity of the agrarian landscape, specially the utbandi (informal tenure) arrangement where, before every monsoon, zamindars (landlords) and mandals (village headmen) negotiated the extent of village uplands to be cleared for cultivation in that season.'1

Physiographically speaking, the region is at the edge of the lateritic-ferallitic landforms that slope down from the Chota Nagpur plateau in the west to the alluvial river valley of the Gangetic basin in the east. Most Bandhgora rice fields were created within the last 90 years by the temporary tillage of uplands earlier sown with coarse grains like millets and pulses. Even after this crop transition, these lands were only cropped once or twice every seven to eight years. The extensive uplands provided pasturage and intermittent rice fields in this dry land agroforestry complex.

At the time of my fieldwork, the Bandhgora area was dotted with 11 small villages. No village had more than 60 families; the smallest had a mere 15 households. Most people lived in mud houses with thatch roofs. The better-off farmers could be identified most easily by tin roofs or the well-maintained painted exterior of their homes. Mahatos, Santhals, and Lodhas occupy a social hierarchy that combines factors of class, ethnicity, and ecology. Mahatos are the most prosperous, engaged mostly in wet rice cultivation on good low-lying inundated fields. Even in the landlord era, as headmen and village watchmen, Mahatos exercised control over forests and enjoyed special rights to timber. Their interests in forest management are chiefly commercial. Mahatos, relatively recent migrants into the region, spent much of the 19th century consolidating their economic position as a substantial.peasantry by controlling most of the good, low-lying paddy lands and socially distinguishing themselves from tribal society by adopting religious, marriage, and some dietary practices that marked their claim to caste standing.

Santhals occupy, both hierarchically and physically, the middle of the three-tier scenario. Rice, maize, and a cassava-like vegetable are their main foods, which are grown on unembanked upland plots. The Santhals are most interested in animal hus- bandry and keep the widest range of domestic animals. Santhals worked initially as agricultural pioneers, pushing out the extensive margins of dry-land cultivation. Later, by the end of the 19th century, they became iconic tribes of the region as some colonial administrators, missionaries, and radical politicians collectively generated representations of the Santhals as the indigenes most in need of protection from material and cultural expropriation by the forces of colonialism and capitalism.

Lodhas, who suffered a dramatic decline in their fortunes over the colonial period, are clearly at the bottom of the economic scale. They own very little land and live in the most intimate relation to the forest where they took refuge when the colonial government designated them a criminal tribe. Consequently, in recent history, Lodhas have been the least visible of the three ethnic groups. Hunting, fishing, and

436




trapping are critical to their subsistence. Gathering roots, tubers, medicinal plants, and fuel wood and laboring in seasonal farming and forestry are their other main oc-

cupations. Lodha men make daily trips into the forests to cut firewood, including green sal trees; the women take the wood in headloads into Jhargram town for sale. There is obviously more that can be said about social relations between and within the groups that I have identified, not to speak of their links with other communities, diasporas, and a wider context of rural-urban flows (see Sivaramakrishnan 1996: chs. 10 and 1 1). At this point, however, I would like to focus on the role of development in

shaping ethnic identities. Shambhu Bhakta, a Lodha man from the village in the cluster where I lived, first brought this correlation to my attention.

On a clear autumn day, Shambhu Bhakta and I were walking to the bazaar in Pu- ratan Jhargram.'2 He saw a cow straying into a paddy field, doing damage to recently transplanted seedlings. Briefly forgetting our mission, Shambhu jumped into the field and chased the cow out. I asked why he took the trouble, and he said, "Paddies are

living testimony to the planter's worth. To trample them is to despoil the person." This chance occurrence sparked a longer conversation that led to other talks with Shambhu and many of the older Lodha men. Over the weeks of pursuing these topics, I discovered the deep farming aspirations that cut across different generations in the Lodha village.

In conversations about regional agrarian histories, Lodha men often invoked coherent memories of their farming days. But more significantly, the cumulative effect of their descriptions of farming in the region, and their limited role in it as seasonal labor, was to produce a critique of land reforms and its failure to extend unnayan (development) to the project of making them landholders-that is, those who could declare their worth by planting wet rice paddies.13 Yet in government development programs the standard approach to their problems has been to classify Lodhas as hunter-gatherers who need a combination of employment schemes and forest regeneration schemes to restore some of their depleted incomes by augmenting wages and replen- ishing the forest products they used to gather or hunt. There is a serious disjuncture between what is offered as development to Lodhas and their own expectations based on both self-image and a shrewd assessment of possibilities. At an earlier time, Lodhas may have been cultivators. Now, they wish to regain a prior social condition recog- nizably superior to their later degradation as fugitive forest dwellers, itinerant traders, and nomadic laborers. From their perspective, treating them as the quintessential hunter-gatherers of anthropological theory is ahistorical.14

Alternately, it could be said that having labored on Santhal and Mahato fields and having seen how the allotment of good agricultural land has benefited so many people in an economy where agriculture is heavily subsidized and not taxed, the es- sentially nomadic Lodhas, now sedentarized, see no real possibility of returning to their former way of life. They now see buying into what is being sold by development pundits as the best option. This preference could express, in my view, a yearning for inclusion in the world of deserving poor-the ones to whom the government gives assets-surely a powerful motivation for a group of people blighted by the slur of "criminal tribe" for the last 80 years.15 In this case, Lodhas-as subalterns-in practice seek autonomy and independence, but in the parlance of a development discourse that is shot through with hegemonic ideas (see Sivaramakrishnan 1995b). Their intimate knowledge of the forest, the role they play as forest labor in silvicultural operations, the reliance that all groups in Midnapore have to place on the cooperation of Lodhas to secure the success of the joint forest management program, all point to a degree of autonomy-subaltern autonomy-on their part. But their aspirations, and

437




liminality, also indicate the extent to which subaltern consciousness is forged in dia- logue with elite discourse.

Where ethnic groups are related in a stratified system, this implies the existence of special processes that maintain differential control of assets. This point is crucial to understanding how the Lodhas are reproduced as marginal in Midnapore-or as liminal citizens of India-a process facilitating elite control over arable land and forest resources but undermining the radically democratic aspirations of land reforms and joint forest management.16 A related point is that modern variants of polyethnic organization emerge in a world of bureaucratic administration, developed communica- tions, and progressive urbanization. As cultural hierarchies become entangled in political processes and structures, ethnicity emerges as both an influence on state formation and a product of it-homogenizations are the inevitable consequence to the development of nationalism and other modern forms of large-scale secular identities.'7 Further, identity is constituted in multidimensional political practice. A study of political action, such as this, must recognize that there are historical constraints on political practice, but the study cannot treat relations of production as the determining set of constraints.'8 This brings me back to the consideration of political or public order institutions that shape individual, group, and societal identities.

technocrats, devolution, and local politics

Political freedom, channeled through democracy, depends on economic and social conditions as well as on the design of political institutions (see also March and Olsen 1989:17). In any discussion of joint forest management, the institutions of particular relevance are those concerned with forest management, local government, and rural development. These bureaucratic agencies, panchayats, and forest protection committees are not only arenas for contending social forces, they are also the manifestations of distinct governmental disciplines and can be observed as discrete collections of standard operating procedures that both define and destabilize interests and identities. Any examination of such processes that fix or change identity must attend to the lability of classifications and their recasting in the familiar terms of local experience through which people use and reshape them (see Douglas 1986; Handel- man 1990; Herzfeld 1993:68). Thus, for instance, by extending the meaning of participation in joint forest management, villagers are both subverting and reconstructing state power.19 Villagers, as well as innovative bureaucrats, are deploying their tactical power within the determinate settings offered by structural power-the power of bureaucratic agencies or law (see Wolf 1990). Democracy thus creates deliberative spaces and sustains plurality in political processes. The democratic intent of forest protection committees, and the mechanisms for consultation between officials and villagers, defines the deliberative spaces-meetings, planning groups, and joint work parties. When the selection of people and places for deliberation accommodates leaders, politicians, and representatives nominated by other institutions of democratic politics-panchayats, party cadres, or self-help organizations supported by nongov- ernmental organizations (NGOs)-then the constitution and utilization of deliberative spaces is pluralized.

Control of the plural political processes also involves the issue of expertise. For- est management is necessarily, though not exclusively, about the cultivation of individual trees and forest landscapes. Foresters make powerful claims to exclusive control over the pertinent expertise; yet, forestry is always entangled in wider issues of land administration.20 There is then a tension between fitting forestry into a wider universe of managed landscapes and identifying it as a distinct, separate, professionalized

438




activity. (The work done by this tension suggests a constant production and transformation of science in its very applications.) In much of the world, these applications-science's contexts-have come to be known as development. The analysis of tensions between the demand for expertise and the desire for public involvement has to track these changes.21

Looking at the social to understand the way rules and practices shape each other (see Pickering 1992:1-28), reveals that scientific activity is flexible and that scientific

knowledge and expertise are shot through with uncertainty (see Wynne 1992a, 1992b, 1992c; see also Collins and Pinch 1993). Scientists who explore their ways out of problems on the basis of experience find their interests in establishing management regions shaped by the constraints imposed by ecology.22 Bengal foresters were, and continue to be, interested in growing sal in large contiguous blocks along con- venient conversion and transport networks for timber. Their silvicultural options were soon limited by their cumulative experiential knowledge to natural regeneration. For this reason, scientific forestry focused on devising silvicultural systems where concen- trated natural regeneration of sal could easily be obtained.23 In the case of forestry, participatory development is constrained by expert routines of regeneration themselves of long historical provenance.

In what follows, I will show that, under democratic imperatives of account-

ability, technology can create space for social movements. The theoretical explana- tion for how the space for such agency emerges follows from the recognition that "ac-

countability is a socially produced, culturally saturated amalgam of ideas about person, presence and polity. Despite its claims to universal rationality, its meanings are culturally specific, and its operation is constrained by the ways in which its opera- tors and clients interpret its actions" (Herzfeld 1993:47). Thus, just as technology is indelibly marked by landscape and history, politics can recreate past struggles in contemporary contexts (see Sivaramakrishnan 1995a).

In practical terms, the webs of decentralized democracy that enmesh joint forest management are a product of the tensions between local autonomy and central direc- tion that dogged the colonial state in forest management.24 If colonial governance proved a long and ineffectual struggle to shrink the public sphere from the state side, the new coalitions promoted by joint forest management are about a generative politics that would expand the public sphere from the social side. Thus "reconciling autonomy and interdependence in the various spheres of social life" is refashioned as the issue of the day (from Giddens 1994:13).25 Only now the discrepancy seems to lie between an identity-based local autonomy politics and the interest-based local democracy that institutions of local self-government like Panchayati Raj would seek to entrench.26 In the midst of the not surprising antagonisms between identity and interest-based politics is a third force-the technocratic bureaucracy.

Who are the foresters involved in joint forest management? At the lowest level, there are forest guards and the casually employed van mazdoor (forest labor). These are the foot soldiers of the department, drawn from the region, often themselves members of forest protection committees in their own jurisdictions.27 The hierarchy of beat and range officers marks widening circles of territorial jurisdictions that culminate in the district head-the Divisional Forest Officer. All except this functionary are members of the subordinate forest services. Typically the district chief is from the Indian Forest Service, a federally recruited and trained elite corps. These officers and their superiors, mostly based in Calcutta, lead what has recently been characterized as a paramilitary organization (Saxena n.d.: 11).

439




When advocating joint forest management, some Bengal foresters developed an official narrative of landlord forest mismanagement that had increasing pressure on resources and conflicts:

After state takeover in 1955 forests were brought under scientific management... but these were short lasting... as a big gap had already been created between demand and supply of forest produce. The situation was aggravated by a phenomenal rise in popula- tion. ... Growing unemployment led to complete disenchantment of people towards ... forest preservation.... The job of forest protection has become extremely hazardous, leading to frequent clashes with people.... Usual forest protection has failed to miti- gate the situation, as a direct consequence felling as per working plan had to be brought down to 25 percent of the prescribed area. [Department of Forests 1988:59]

By 1988, this narrative had ramified through the state government, and the idea had entered official rhetoric with government support. At this time, the Forest Minister, Ambarish Mukherjee, made the following remark in his budget speech: "Our policy is to create the forest with help of people, maintain them with their cooperation and mul-

tiply them with their active cooperation" (Department of Forests 1988:60). The spread of forest protection committees in the next few years was rapid, and

local reports on their working were very positive. In June 1989, the West Midnapore Divisional Forest Officer (DFO) described committees in the division as uniformly effective.28 But soon thereafter the initiative was seized by the higher authorities. With the passage of the July 1989 government resolution, which approved a scheme for the setting up of forest protection committees, panchayat oversight of the progress of the scheme was also introduced. No longer considered the daring innovation of low-level foresters, the joint forest management scheme became a test of subordinate field foresters' willingness to adopt new styles of functioning.29

Not only were NGOs being funded by the Ford Foundation to assist in smooth transitions from custodial to cooperative forest management, the new World Bank Forestry Project made administrative restructuring and attitudinal reform among field staff a fundamental goal of the project.30 The idea had been mooted from within the higher echelons of the Bengal Forest Service itself. Writing some time in 1990, Subi- mal Roy, the Conservator of Western Circle, had observed:

long used to institutional rigidity, often assuming repressive dimensions, in chilling isolation from the people, it is a difficult task to bring about attitudinal change among Forest Department staff to freely interact with villagers taking them as equal partners in a mutually beneficial set up. However, unless this is achieved, Forest Protection Com- mittees will either not be formed or wither in neglect-even if grudgingly formed to obey superior directive.31

While the formation of committees continued apace, the Divisional Forest Officer and his subordinate officers (interviewed during my fieldwork) were not pleased with the idea that they needed attitudinal-change training at the hands of NGOs. Instances of conflict arising from committee formation had also begun to be reported by the forest guards. In several forest ranges in the early 1 990s, people competed for rights to resources by looting forests protected by people of other villages. These incidents helped field foresters to argue that attitudinal change was more urgently needed among these competing villages and the panchayat-based oversight committees, which in their view showed little interest in protecting plantations.32

Beat officers function as the member-conveners of ten to 20 forest protection committees that comprise their beats. Range officers participate in block level oversight committees for forest management, through the panchayats, for the five to seven

440




beats they supervise. The district head directs the program in the entire forest division and is empowered under relevant government orders to register the forest protection committees. Registration requires the prior completion of a series of inquiries by the beat officer, certification by panchayats, and the demarcation of forest areas assigned to the concerned committees. These procedures take time to complete and are fraught with conflicts.33

The district head, in consultation with the panchayats, retains the authority to dissolve forest protection committees that do not perform their forest protection tasks as laid out in a microplan. These microplans are not only charters of the various restrictions placed upon and policed by villagers involved in committees, they are also

development plans, designating the agreed infrastructural projects to be taken

up-such as wells, roads, and the occasional community facility. These microplans contain the silvicultural prescriptions for the relevant forest areas as well. They are

supposed to be prepared through deliberations in the forest protection committees; however, the numerous such meetings I attended in Bandhgora (and others about which I had reports) used committees primarily as sounding boards for schemes the

department wished to take up in particular villages, or simply as occasions to an- nounce new annual projects.

This failure of forest protection committees to realize their full range of deliberative and managerial functions was rooted primarily in the Forest Department's unwill- ingness to devolve either information or power. District forest chiefs were aware of this. They were also sensitive to the political clout of panchayats. For these reasons, they never exercised their power to dismiss errant forest protection committees. Re- moved from the hurly-burly of daily dealings with villagers in their committees, and having a technical-if largely symbolic-control over the fate of these committees, district heads could appear to be above the fray.34 These officers acted as the public face of joint forest management through large assemblies where they would share the platform with panchayat luminaries. On such occasions local officials and politicians would make speeches praising the joint forest management scheme and functionaries would collect feedback on the working of the scheme.

From my experience of several such gatherings, it became clear that these assemblies were secular durbars (stylized public appearances by high officials).35 Repre- sentatives of forest protection committees presented a litany of grievances and asked for development projects, funds, and greater police support for forest protection. In one such meeting, the Sabhapati of the block panchayat made a particularly grand speech. In his exhortations to the gathering, he underlined the moral obligation of villagers to protect the forests that so munificently yielded them usufructs. But he also deftly reminded them that the panchayats were available to provide development. They, and not the Forest Department, should be approached for such demands.36

At this rather high divisional level in the governance of joint forest management, issues of control and constituency become apparent. The Forest Department had built its program through minor rural development projects, the most popular being the digging of wells-always welcome in jungle areas of southern West Bengal due to water scarcities. The Forest Department was also visibly loath to surrender control of the program and so held on to key functions like plot demarcation, committee registration, conflict resolution, and so on. Panchayats have begun, since the early 1 990s, to assert their own supervisory role after the noted success of the Forest Department. They are formally charged with land and rural development administration. So block panchayats, led by the ruling Communist Party, are particularly sensitive to village

441




panchayats, led by the Jharkhand Party, establishing direct links with government de- partments and thereby encroaching in their domain of governance.37

At the level of beats, panchayats are less visible. But the foresters are more am- bivalent and unsure about joint forest management. One beat officer, who must be considered basically unsympathetic to the program, said to me: "Forest protection committees cannot be expected to work miracles. We have formed committees with thieves. Party politics aggravate the situation ... a couple of years ago my predeces- sor was assaulted with bows and arrows."38 In the symbolic context of southern West Bengal politics, this was a powerful charge (not merely of lawlessness, but of wild- ness), a willful declaration of being beyond development.

Another beat officer, who professed great commitment to joint forest management, confounded my skepticism one day when he covertly provided the details of the annual working schemes and budgets to the Dhansol-Phulgerya forest protection committee leaders. This daring move on his part went against standing instructions in the department. It sparked a prolonged agitation by the committee about the scale of operations taken up and the potential employment opportunities generated in the 1994 lean season. The informed analyst could justifiably treat this as a case where the committee had been pitchforked into microplan negotiations of the sort that were norma- tively prescribed. But the beat officer's superiors in the range did not take such a view. He was transferred out of the Jhargram region with indecent haste. The incident briefly made the individual official a hero in the Bandhgora area. It also revealed the general lack of forester support for the more radical aspects of joint forest management.39

The Forestry Training Institute at Jhargram organizes regular courses for the forest guards and beat and range officers, and much of the focus in this training is now on joint forest management. In several workshops for beat officers held there (I attended a few), these field officers were encouraged to speak freely about their reservations about joint forest management and they did. One aspect of their critique was skepticism about microplanning. Another was their frustration with the increased amounts of time spent in formal consultation with villagers. If consultation was the new face of departmental culture in the field, villagers were quick to seize upon its possibilities and expand its scope. Panchayats, on the contrary, wanted such consultation always to be through their channels and under their auspices. Beat officers were new to these pulls and pressures.40 While some beat officers enjoyed exchanging the hostility of their earlier relations with villagers for the newer paternalist experience of dispensing development, others were visibly upset by what they construed as a decline in their authority, social standing, and ability to extort prebends.

A closer look at the work of beats helps account for the impact of the program on the lowest rungs of forester bureaucracies. Their responsibilities may be broadly classified as forest protection and forestry operations. The former category comprised routine patrolling and periodic special drives to deal with sporadic, but major, occurrences of wood theft. All aspects of protection work were now-after the formation of forest protection committees-shared with forest protection committees and this had greatly minimized routine patrolling. After the creation of village committees, protection work done by guards could not escape the scrutiny of villagers organized in these committees. Opera- tions included civil works, like soil conservation or water management, and a range of silvicultural works like thinning, multiple shoot cutting, plantations, and nurseries.

While forest protection committees are readily admitted into the selection of civil works through microplanning, foresters-irrespective of rank-are reluctant to treat silviculture as negotiable in village plans. This last bastion of technical control is being fiercely guarded. Effective committees, most often led by village elites, insist that

442




all meetings be attended by range officers. They shrewdly recognize that the range of

things on which summary decisions in the meetings can be solicited increases in direct relation to the rank of the forest officer present. Beat officers are resentful of this turn, for it has worked to shrink their domain of autonomous action from both ends. As a result, they have raised through their associations the demand for smaller beats with greater delegation of powers. As one beat officer, and office-bearer of the West

Bengal subordinate Forest Service Association, put it when I asked, this delegation would "make them more effective implementers of the joint forest management."41

The role of committees and foresters in program implementation has under-

standably become the point on which many crucial interpretations and disputes turn. As more villagers travel (not only on routes charted by their social obligations, but also in groups organized by the Forest Department) to visit committees in neighboring ranges, they have become secular pilgrims. These trips in particular are forging a new dimension in their regional identity. Some leaders in Bandhgora even spoke of joint forest management as a social movement. Is joint forest management indeed becom- ing a social movement? Does it create new political spaces for the social integration that is necessary in such movements? Who are the social agents involved? These

questions will inform the next section, in which I trace the politics of labor mobilization for forestry operations in the Dhansol-Phulgerya committee's jurisdiction during March and April 1994. I will then place the conflicts over labor mobilization in a wider reflection on political action and statemaking.

work and place: mobilizing for seasonal forestry operations

In February 1994, the Jhargram beat officer announced the start of multiple shoot cutting operations in the Khas Jungle. Early in the morning, men trooped out of the three villages, and a few neighboring ones, with their axes slung across their shoulders to assemble on the large dahi maat (upland field) east of Dhansol where the foresters would meet them and begin the work. The leaders of the local forest protection committee were buoyant, for they had become privy to the microplan in the manner already mentioned in the previous section. When the beat officer arrived, he began by taking a few leaders into the woods, "to assess the quantum of work." This was a euphemism for agreeing upon the days of work and number of men to be employed. When they returned, the beat officer was looking ashen, while the village leaders were smiling. Faced with the revelation that the budgetary provision was no more an official secret, the beat officer found his control over the operations sharply diminished.

But other problems remained for the village leaders. There was the issue of labor lists. The panchayat officials had always provided the list of approved workers to whom the employment opportunities were to be provided. Ostensibly the panchayat list was prepared according to poverty criteria from among all villagers resident in the jurisdiction of the panchayat. In the case of Bandhgora, that meant 11 villages. The committee leaders insisted, in this case, that only villagers from the committee's jurisdiction of three villages, and others they allowed, should get work in the forestry operations. In short, they defined a different principle of eligibility based on notions of place-those that worked to protect the forests and thus constituted a local community.42 This conflict gave the foresters some leeway to determine the composition of the work party. But the matter of who could work was not resolved for several weeks, during which time the forest protection committee leaders kept any work from being done. They preferred not to initiate the work until all details had been settled to their satisfaction since a few days earlier a neighboring committee had been discredited for

443




agitating after the cutting operations began. These ill-fated neighbors had forcibly pre- vented the removal of slash and invited punitive raids by foresters and the local police.

In the villages around Khas jungle, there was electricity in the air through March. A flurry of late evening meetings followed, and the leaders, mostly drawn from the older substantial Santhals of Dhansol and the Oriyas of Phulgerya, wisely took the

high ground, making the protest against shoot cutting an issue of microplanning.43 The plan for operations had been drawn up without consulting the forest protection committee, and the details of the scheme (specific tasks, mandays, budget) were be-

ing kept secret by the Forest Department. Greater functional transparency and institu- tionalization of participatory decision making, elements advocated in the official scheme, were the core demands made by villagers in this case. Foresters dealt with the issue by trying to redefine management to restrict the scope of the term. This re-

quired the corresponding redefinition of technical aspects (the science-dependant components of management) where foresters claimed the deciding voice. In claiming such superior powers in technical aspects, the foresters appealed at once to property rights and to the world of modern science, the intricacies of which they were better

equipped to understand. Following a prolonged agitation, multiple shoot cutting in Khas Jungle was taken

up in early April but only after the range officer had conceded the principle that all villagers of the forest protection committee, and two adjoining villages, would get equal work. In addition, the foresters agreed to build a village road that would con- nect the residential cluster (bastu) of Phulgerya to the main road two miles away. Thus the agitation served to reinforce a regional solidarity that undermined both the panchayat, as the sole local arbiter of development, and Lodhas (who might have got more work under a poverty principle). This "success" of the committee leadership was made possible by fractures within the Forest Department, intervillage solidarity made necessary by intravillage factionalism, and a general disaffection with panchayats.

statemaking, labor, and pluralism in the public sphere

Panchayats, vanguards of democratic decentralization, are being harnessed to a Left Front agenda that is inimical to regional autonomy based on a politics of place. This point is well illustrated by the labor mobilization case. Ultimately, in protecting the principle of village-level unity, the forest protection committee in this case surren- dered the interests of the Lodhas. Apparently, who should work, and who should determine that question, were separate issues here. When the panchayat offered to pre- pare the labor list, this was in keeping with the practice in which recognized leaders determine who should work. But the forest protection committee was claiming the right to say "we decide." They also wanted to leave the exact composition of the work force to principles undermining the panchayats and, more fundamentally, they wanted to retain the approach to a labor mobilization that relied on some objective criteria, and a government-nominated agency, for list making.

The case of labor lists, especially the struggle over how exactly the matter of labor mobilization under joint forest management would become routinized and hence ritualized in affirming the traditional authority of specific institutional actors, points to a performative moment, an effervescence, that in another context Tambiah (1985) has designated as crucial to the creative modification of rituals. In this case, I am concerned with new rituals of forest management. Statemaking is fraught with such moments when "whatever the prevailing system of government may be, the possibility of reinterpreting official pronouncements in terms of immediate social experience must always threaten it" (Herzfeld 1993:21). The idiom of performance seems apt to the

444




study of joint forest management also because of the way forest protection committees have become the main legitimating mechanisms of the program. It is the performance of committee work that crucially determines the success of the individual schemes and by their aggregation the success of joint forest management itself. The quantified evaluative procedures of government and donors ensures that success is less perceived in the trees raised, or the people enfranchised, than in the spread of active committees. The frequency of meetings-the creation of deliberative development spaces-becomes the most important measure of schematic performance.

On the part of villagers affected by the developmental energies of these efforts, the programmatic insistence on committees also leads to "rituals of personal commitment" (Herzfeld 1993:37) to generate new political institutions. Or, I could say, as village cultural forms for collective decision making respond to "authoritative patterns of political analogy" (Geertz 1980:108) established by rites of state, they reorder the disposition and practice of power in daily encounters. An example will illustrate this point. Chitta Mahato was an older resident of the lower para (neighborhood) in the Mahato village called Belpahar. He had turned his periodically cultivated uplands into eucalyptus plantations in the heydays of social forestry (the late 1980s). There were persistent violations of these fenced plantations by cattle belonging to Mahato families in the upper para. Hostilities between the paras, aggravated by their affili- ations with different political parties in the 1988 panchayat elections, had delayed the resolution of the problem.

The constitution of the village forest protection committee in 1989 and the principle it enshrined-respect for the sanctity of protected forests-led to fresh initiatives to solve the conflict. After many failed attempts, Chitta Mahato successfully convened a meeting in the village schoolroom in the summer of 1992 by resorting to the village forest protection committee. By this time, the Belpahar committee had already won respect as one of the more enduring institutions spawned by joint forest management in the Bandhgora area. The village headman (traditional authority) and the elected panchayat member for the area (modern authority) lent their presence, but it was the chairman of the village forest committee-a resident of the upper para enjoying village-wide credibility-who presided. A mutually acceptable settlement was thrashed out drawing on the relatively new authority of the forest protection committee.44

Whether reconciling labor lists with forest officials or managing intravillage disputes, the committees had pluralized and redefined the public sphere, the arena of action where the disposition of power was enacted, contested, and reinforced. The process was in fact compounded by the failure of the Forest Department to complete demarcation of lots assigned to different committees. "Who works," as the struggle over employment in forestry operations indicates, can become part of the evidence later when the present situation of blurred boundaries is rectified. But in this case, it was not at all clear who might gain from neatly marked out lots-an outcome generally of state simplification procedures.45 This brings me back to the politics of place and the broadening of decision making that I have been emphasizing.

Panchayats are comprised of better-off people who use their allegiance to larger party structures to resist broadening of decision making. Forest protection committees draw most inspiration from the political autonomy movement in view of a recent history where both decentralized democracy and state-sponsored development have failed to empower the poor. If panchayats are apprehensive about the forest protection committee, it is precisely in those situations where they represent two contradic- tory modes of political mobilization. To succeed, the forest protection committee tends toward solidarity in a small territorial unit, whereas the panchayats have often

445




become the newest face of patronage dispensing developmentalism, operating through factional loyalties.

I return to the labor list for illustration. The panchayat made the list on the basis of vertical allegiances to factions, party, and so on. The forest protection committee, in- sisting that all villagers should work, sought to preserve a horizontal unity. Panchayat members were prone to designate themselves ardhek karmachari (part official); the forest protection committee leaders resolutely saw themselves as pratinidhi (representatives). The committee leaders unambiguously drew upon the shared experiences of deforestation, of temporary gains too soon dissipated, benefits flowing to outsiders, and a politics of place that panchayats (as the arm of government) could not.46 In the final analysis, panchayats were compromised by their implication in statemaking.

Interestingly, young men trading on their formal educations dominated panchayats elected in Bandhgora in 1988 and 1993. Local elders, often lacking a school education, and confident in their identity as rooted farmers, seemed to control the forest protection committees. This generational divide was also manifest in the representations through which forest utilities were identified. A young Santhal prad- han (head) of the village panchayat proudly told me about forests being carbon sinks-but in conversation with his uncle I found they marked more deeply a familiar lived landscape.

This distinction between resources and lived landscape is reinforced by ideas about preferred modes of political action. Nimai Hansda of Dhansol, an older leader and committee organizer, argued against michil (procession). He said, "I prefer solv- ing local problems through local means. Michils politicize problems, they rally the support of sympathetic outsiders, but do so through the channels of party and pressure group." Leaders like Nimai asserted repeatedly that their movement was apolitical and hinged on drawing clear lines between insiders and outsiders in relation to a particular place. The need for forest demarcation and committee registration were their persistent demands upon the Forest Department. These demands were clearly made in the service of their ability to distinguish insiders from outsiders.

Lodhas stand at the edge of joint forest management. My most striking recollec- tion of numerous committee meetings in Bandhgora is of my friends from the Lodha village of Lodhapara standing outside the schoolhouse or at some distance from the old tree under which the rest assembled to transact committee business. These liminal Lodhas have remained spectators to elite politics. But they have also become sought- after constituencies in the pluralization of politics.47 Even while some elites woo them, however, joint forest management is quickly heading to a fast-growing sal- eucalyptus plantation system that promises few benefits to Lodhas.

Lodhas have lost their encroached state forest land to this development project. This was a matter of considerable regret to several Lodha men I knew. During our regular trips through the woods, they showed me lands from which they had been evicted, reminding me that both the land reforms of the 1980s and joint forest management in the 1990s had excluded them from development categories of the deserving poor designated in official political rhetoric. Many Lodhas acknowledged that the unattained programmatic goal of participatory forestry-widening the range of tree species and privileging local fruit varieties-may continue to elude joint forest management. In part, this failure of joint forest management to diversify tree species planted will be an outcome of unrealized microplanning. Plantation, nursery, soil conservation, and land development schemes that might emerge out of truly democratic microplans would require vacation of other encroachments of state forest lands extensively made by elites. Lodhas thus realize that forest lands actually brought under

446




joint forest management do not include all public lands potentially available for this

purpose. The illegal activities of village elites, and the reluctance of foresters to control them, reduces the efficacy of joint forest management. The new form of commu-

nity engendered by joint forest management does not, therefore, readily include Lod- has. They suffer on account of both their class and ethnic statuses. Yet, their critique of

development seeks less to revive a predevelopment lifestyle and more to argue as-

tutely for the implementation of a forest management program that would make them real economic beneficiaries.

As panchayats and forest protection committees compete for local political power in the villages of Bandhgora, similar locations in western Midnapore, and southern West Bengal more generally, Lodhas and others among the poorest of the landless poor are being multiply constituted as objects of development. They are now the focus of attention from development schemes, alternate development proposals, antidevelopment agitations, indigenous people organizations, and environmental

groups. As they continue to headload, pollard trees, burn the forest floor to collect better crops of tubers, and hunt the remaining hare and fowl, Lodhas remain an awk- ward reminder that joint forest management in Bandhgora cannot live down the chal-

lenges to its credibility that are posed by their exclusion.48 With Lodhas standing at the critical margin, forest protection committees, seem

to emerge from the tension created by three types of political mobilization engendered in these processes. The first, signified by Panchayati Raj institutions, extends the domain of classical democracy, with its attendant features of elected proportionate representation and national and regional parties operating through cadres. The second, symbolized by the Forest Department, is the logic of technical bureaucracies; their managerial, custodial agency is asserted via technical expertise and operates on identified collectivities in the peasantry who usually get called things like "user groups." Third, there is the long-standing politics of autonomy. From the episodes of tribal unrest in southern West Bengal, known after their instigators as Chuar rebel- lions, that date from the late 18th century to the Jharkhand movement 200 years later, this variant of local politics and its brand of governance favors traditional elites and emphasizes apolitical organization of local people around issues that lend themselves to dichotomizing insider and outsider. The politics of place works through historical transformations of regional culture in southern West Bengal.49

While the forest protection committees broaden the base of decision making in forest management (and in this respect Panchayati Raj helped established the environment), the present leadership of these committees has strong affinities with the third type of politics identified above: the politics of autonomy. This development poses a challenge to panchayats. While drawing some inspiration from decentralized democracy, forest protection committees are not in step with the officially sanctioned form of decentralized democracy.50

conclusion

Changing patterns of land use redefine village communities tied to each other, and to a particular landscape, by their collective struggle for livelihood. The challenge for anthropologists is to perceive and analyze the ways in which environmental change and political change interlock in this struggle. That is why I have discussed the crosscutting public spaces delineated by panchayats, technocratic bureaucracies, and regional political autonomy movements against the shifting backdrop of a transformed agroforestry complex. I have shown, further, that bureaucratic practice and technical expertise are constituted through localized contestation. They combine to

447




become a powerful social technology-bearing the name joint forest management in this case-that is always marked by the distinctive stamp of the places in which such technology is produced.

My argument is that cadastral surveys, censuses, land reforms, and commercial

forestry have historically worked, as joint forest management is doing now, to insti-

gate land use changes that redefine the village community in ways that have pitted village against neighboring village. Governmental procedures that nominate one form of community as relevant to the government's vision of development promptly move villagers and political representatives to reveal the existence of numerous other forms of community. The denial of other forms of community, implicit in the imposi- tion of one form, threatens certain interests and identities. These are then asserted in the ensuing contest to give particular shape to public order institutions. For these reasons of state, and others relating to the state's internal diversity, any village community, and particularly that specified in joint forest management, is not a natural grass- roots unit. It is a product of several microlevel specifications associated with power gradients within and across small-scale units of society. For example, the inclusion of women in forest protection committees assigns them a forest property right. But this measure alone cannot, and does not, alter existing gendered patterns of forest utilization and access. Granting women discrete membership rights in committees extends the logic of individuation and citizenship into village communities. Pushing for these gendered rights as several feminist women's groups do, however, undermines the logic of territorial community that holds forest protection committees together. This sets in motion an intravillage renegotiation of forest rights centered on the new locus of authority created in forest protection committees. The discord between the rights- based gender equality of citizenship and the highly gendered world of political mobilization for committees, panchayats, and party cadres only exacerbates these contradictions. Through constitutional fiat, 30 percent of elected panchayat representatives are women, but this does not much alter the fact that men initiate most of the political activity relating to public order institutions in the public sphere of rural West Bengal.51

These cultural micropolitics of joint forest management must engage anthropologists of environment and development more widely because participatory conservation is increasingly being promoted in democratizing contexts and because different patterns of political devolution produce different cultural logics of locality. From livestock in Lesotho to green revolution in northern India, recent studies of development and environment have provided powerful critiques of hegemonic modernism (Ferguson 1994; Gupta 1998). But to be critical and constructive, it is not enough to describe the settled cultural logic of development or environmental management. Future scholarship should seek out the more unsettled moments of cultural production in which development or environ- mentalism takes shape. Ethnographies of statemaking and political action should focus on procedures, in de Certeau's (1988) sense of the term-practical procedures that produce the state in contexts of participatory conservation.

One road to such new directions for the anthropology of development leads to an emerging area that can be described as the anthropology of modern political free- doms, especially where it involves the study of layered and spatially distributed for- mations like "the state" or "civil society." As Helen Siu (1989, 1995), Ann Anagnost (1997), and Akhil Gupta (1995, 1998) point out-from rather different perspectives- researchers have to attend to the imaginative and practical production of the state. I have developed the concept of statemaking by combining this insight with ideas provided by James Scott (1998). Scott points out that entities called states come into existence and have effects that can be explained in terms of their institutional cultures.

448




It is important to unpack these cultures and describe the processes of routiniza-

tion, ritual performance, contestation, and mobilization through which they are formed and altered. In other words, as I have shown in this article, anthropologists have to study political action in everyday life and understand the concretization of

political culture at the points where power is affirmed and contested in social practice (Gledhill 1994: ch. 1). Modern statemaking in India emerges out of the intersection of colonial forms of knowledge (so elegantly classified by Bernard Cohn's [1996] pio- neering studies of the culture of colonialism in India) and the specific rationalities of

postcolonial socialist state formation. Many of the features identified by Katherine

Verdery (1996)-hierarchy, centralization of production, surveillance, and paternalist redistribution-are also characteristics of the Indian developmental state and even more so of the Left Front government in West Bengal after 1977. Following Michael Herzfeld's (1993, 1997) important analysis of Western bureaucracy and the nation- state, and Akhil Gupta's (1995:376) related call for more ethnography of lower-level bureaucracies in Indian subdistricts and development blocks, I have viewed state-

making, in this study, on the common ground shared by bureaucratic practice and popular belief. Here I would simply like to flag the idea that statemaking also has the effect of reshaping the public sphere (cf. Habermas 1989).

Since 1950, statemaking in India has been characterized by the pursuit of de-

mocracy and development, which together constitute the bipolar cultural core of modern nation building in the late 20th century. At the most elementary level, de-

mocracy can be understood as the process of political participation whereby people choose and dismiss governments (Dahrendorf 1996:229). Democratization has been described as the pluralization of power within a civil society protected and encouraged by an accountable framework of institutions (Keane 1988:61). These simple definitions are useful to start with but they minimize the selective participation that is enforced by social inequalities in formal democracy, in that they imply that democracy is exclusively a function of social capacities or the strength of civil society.52 It is important to distinguish, as some scholars have recently argued, between formal and substantive democracy so as to understand how substantive democracy hinges on a clear analytical concept of statemaking (Jalal 1995:3). Two other characteristics are important. First, anthropologists need to recognize that democracy institutionalizes general rules that risk loss of power by higher echelons of state structure. Second, democracy has always been a matter of political crafting to accommodate a broad consensus. To that extent, as Edward Friedman points out, "democracy is not the antithe- sis of a strong state. Democracy actually is enhanced by effective state institutions" (Friedman 1994:48; see also Anderson 1992; de Palma 1990; Hirschman 1992).

I then have to ask: what institutional arrangements in stratified societies work to narrow the gap in participatory parity between dominant and subordinate groups? If democracy creates space for, and sustains, plurality in political processes the question that follows is: does development work in concert, or does it have tendencies that bring it into conflict with democratization?

With its impulse to create plural structures of political decision making, democracy combines awkwardly with development, which serves most often as a vehicle for elite nationalism, to create a tense field of force for modern politics. In other words, democracy and development conjure different frameworks of citizenship. The political institutions constructed and contested to invoke citizens' rights under these different framings are often at variance with each other. An examination of this conflict across public order institutions becomes important in the light of recent assessments

449




(Preston 1994; World Bank 1997) that development is now increasingly a matter of

crafting the public sphere in a democratic mold.53

notes

Acknowledgments. This article is based on research carried out, over 14 months between June 1992 and June 1994, as part of a larger project entitled, "Revising Laws of the Jungle: Changing Peasant-State Relations in the Forests of Bengal." This research was assisted by a grant from the Joint Committee on South Asia of the Social Science Research Council and the Ameri- can Council of Learned Societies with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Financial support for this project was also provided by the Wenner- Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, New York; the Center for International and Area Studies, Yale University; and the Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University. Over the last three years, different versions of this article have been presented at anthropology department seminars at the University of Chicago; School of Oriental and African Studies, London University; Wellesley College; Boston University; and the University of Washington, Seattle. Comments received from participants at these seminars were very useful for successive revi- sions. Special thanks to Ann Anagnost, Arjun Appadurai, Thomas Barfield, Fredrik Barth, John Comaroff, James Fairhead, Stevan Harrell, Miriam Kahn, Anastasia Karakasidou, Charles Keyes, Sally Merry, David Mosse, Parker Shipton, and Terry Turner for their sustained engagement with this work at these many venues. At various stages of writing this article, I also benefited from the suggestions of Arun Agrawal, Vinay Gidwani, Ramachandra Guha, Michael Herzfeld, William Kelly, James Manor, Donna Perry, James Scott, Helen Siu, Saroj Sivaramakrishnan, Eric Worby, and three anonymous readers for American Ethnologist. I alone remain responsible for errors and omissions.

1. This point is developed in greater detail in Gardner and Lewis 1996. 2. The first wave of scholarship on development as discourse includes such key works as

Apffel-Marglin and Marglin 1990, Crush 1995, Escobar 1995, Ferguson 1994, and Sachs 1992. An important review of the state of social science engagement with development may be found in Cooper and Packard 1997, a volume in which several essays underline the need to take the multiple sources and styles of development discourse into account. From a social-theoretical perspective, Preston (1994) had already provided a differentiated rendering of development discourse. Periodizations of development discourse may be found in Peet and Watts 1996 and Si- varamakrishnan and Agrawal 1998.

3. The shift in development ideology among influential international actors is reflected in these words taken from a recent World Development Report: "For human welfare to be ad- vanced, the state's capability-defined as the ability to undertake and promote collective actions efficiently-must be increased ... and it means making the state more responsive to people's needs, bringing government closer to the people through broader participation and decentralization" (World Bank 1997:3, emphasis in original).

4. It is useful to remember here Bourdieu's (1993:273-274) discussion of history as some- thing that exists in the embodied state as habitus and in the objectified state as fields. Because habitus is linked to the field within its functions by a relationship of ontological complicity, the action of the "practical sense" amounts to an immediate encounter of history with itself, through which time is engendered. The relation between habitus and field through and by which it is created is an unmediated, infraconscious practical relation, not to be mistaken for a conscious project or a calculated scheme.

5. Also see Migdal 1988 and Young 1994. In formulating my ideas on statemaking I have also drawn inspiration from Bayart 1993, Corrigan and Sayer 1985, Douglas 1986, Gupta 1995, Herzfeld 1993, Nugent 1994, Peel 1983, and Weber 1968.

6. For another East Asian case of 19th-century statemaking that exemplifies a similar argument, see Kelly 1985. A fuller discussion of the term may be found in Sivaramakrishnan 1999: ch. 1.

7. For explication of the term internal territorialization, see Vandergeest and Peluso 1995.

450




8. Sal is an endemic hardwood dipterocarp tree species found in eastern India, ranging from the Himalayan foothills to the Gangetic lowlands.

9. In Sivaramakrishnan 1998b, I have carried out a symbolic-anthropological analysis of

joint forest management "origin narratives" and the way they construct the program as initiating a period of peace following a protracted low-intensity war.

10. The place of my fieldwork, in western Midnapore district, was part of a wider geographic formation including the erstwhile Jungle Mahals district, comprised of the contemporary West Bengal districts of Purulia, Bankura, western Burdwan, and southern Birbhum. Located at the place where the Chotanagpur plateau dips to meet the alluvial floodplain of the

Ganges, the plateau fringe is a rolling upland with small isolated hills breaking the monotony of the flattish landscape. The red soils, green forests of sal, glades of mahua (Bassia latifolia) and

gnarled trees of palas (Butea frondosa) with their scarlet bloom, add color to the scene. For further details on the geology and topography of this landscape, see Bose 1968. Bandhgora anchal

(village cluster) where I lived and worked was part of the Jhargram administrative subdivision, the Jhargram Development Block, and the Bandharbhola Forest Beat in the Jhargram Range of West Midnapore Forest Division. It was in the heart of the forest-savannah transition zone that characterized most of western Midnapore. The little market town of Jhargram was a few miles

away, and all the villagers of Bandhgora went there on the weekly market day, but also several other days in the week to seek work, buy food and clothes, and sell vegetables from their home

gardens and fuelwood from the forests. All village names in this article are pseudonyms used to

protect the identity of informants. 11. This undulating landscape is now more precisely captured by recent imagery from the

Indian Remote Sensing satellites. Images of Midnapore and Bandhgora-my field site-from 1988-89 satellite scenes reveal the continuation of a forest-savannah-field mosaic in southern West Bengal after Indian independence and the transfer of large tracts to the Forest Department for management as forests. Some of these patchy forests, in the three southern West Bengal districts, came under joint forest management in the early 1990s.

12. Puratan (old) Jhargram was also the seat of the Raja, erstwhile zamindar(landlord), who lived in the dilapidated rajbari (palace) facing the equally broken down but much revered Savitri temple that was believed to be at least three hundred years old. Bandhgora, the village cluster in which I settled down for fieldwork, had been the site of the battle in 1767 where British sepoys had vanquished the Raja's militia and set in motion the conquest of the jungle mahals.

13. Since 1986, the redistribution of vested lands under the land reforms program has been at a virtual standstill in the southern West Bengal region. For figures and other details on this topic, see Sivaramakrishnan 1996: ch. 10.

14. The idea that Lodhas were hunter-gatherers and foragers and would thus have little interest in, or ability for, development-based land rights entails a wider stereotype about hunters and foragers in other parts of the world. These ideas have only recently come under criticism by scholars who show the complex relations hunters and foragers had with land and the way social ties mediated these relations. Historical processes obscuring and severing such relations have to be understood. See Merry 1992 and Wilmsen 1989 for a discussion of these essays in the context of legal studies of land tenure and indigenous rights.

1 5. The declaration of the Lodhas as a criminal tribe in 1916 coincides with the settlement process and the consolidation of landlord rights in forests. Bhowmick notes, "As the forests became private property. . . Lodhas were treated as criminals if they violated general restrictions" (1963:266-277). See also Bhowmick 1961 and Gupta 1959. Though they were no longer criminal tribes after 1957 in the official record, the stigma has remained and marked their relations with Santhal and Mahato neighbors well into the 1980s.

16. The context of democracy and its radicalization needs careful specification in the study of identity politics, because identities are contingent in the sense that the construction of difference that defines them is part of an open ongoing social process; differentiated, in the sense that subjects usually occupy more than one system of difference at a time; and relational in the sense that the social powers constructing difference are never fully bound as a system within, but are constructed against and through an always present oppositional moment. See Jones and Moss 1995 and especially Mouffe 1995.

451




17. Williams (1989) ably makes this last point. For discussions of state and development as factors in ethnic politics in India, see Brass 1991, Gupta 1996, various essays in Kohli 1988, and

Nandy 1989. 18. Khan (1997:40) provides a good example of this point. She shows that cultural hierar-

chies are not usually a gloss on political-economic constraints. Occupation plays a part in the discursive construction and lived experience of cultural hierarchy. Again, spatiality and power are factors that are not readily mapped onto economy in matters of identity politics. For a cogent presentation of this argument, see Massey 1994. One of the best demonstrations of the claim that class analysis cannot exhaust the intricacies of identity politics is Scott 1985.

19. Verdery (1996:204-228) provides an excellent discussion of these processes in the context of privatization, mafia, decollectivization of land, and the struggle to establish local

government in Romania. As she shows, researchers have to constantly tack between the broad historical perspective and analysis of local detail to describe the processes and performances that reconstitute state power.

20. The extent to which conflicts over expertise influence the organization of environmental management has not drawn the scholarly attention the topic deserves. This is especially surprising in the United States, where bureaucratized land and resource management has a long and contentious history. An early lead provided by Worster (1985) has only been occasionally followed up, as in Waller 1994.

21. For recent work that stresses that scientific ideas were not imported into colonies and were more often in a process of continuous construction, reconstruction, and transformation there, see several essays in Chambers 1987.

22. I use the term exploration to signify a mode of learning or knowledge creation that is incremental, contingent, and dependent on localized guidance, as opposed to discovery, which is more taxonomic and systematic in using unmodified classificatory frames available to dominant cultures. Carter (1989) develops this insightful distinction. Livingstone (1995) elabo- rates these ideas in proposing spatialized understandings of scientific knowledge, its creation and dissemination.

23. This condition of science as historical and localized practice is what I illustrate using the case of forestry from West Bengal. I am arguing that "scientific knowledge has to be seen as intrinsically historical, in that its specific contents are a function of the temporally emergent contingencies of its production" (Pickering 1995:209). As Ravetz wrote, "In every one of its aspects, scientific inquiry is a craft activity depending on a body of knowledge which is informal and partly tacit" (1971:103). For recent reiteration of this point, see Rouse, who writes, "Scien- tific knowledge is fundamentally local knowledge, embodied in practices that are not fully ab- stractable into theories and context free rules for their application" (1987:108).

24. The primary vehicle for bringing democracy to the local level has been decentralization, which may be defined as centrally initiated efforts to move authority and responsibility for

significant government activity downward to local statutory government units, along with the

accountability of those units to the local populace through elections. For a discussion of common property management in India along these lines, see Blair 1996.

25. In the arena of development policy in India more generally, this problem has become the central dilemma in the political economy of rural poverty. The puzzling question is: how can decentralization be increased without letting powerful locals occupy all the deliberative and decision-making spaces so provided? For further discussion, see Dasgupta 1993:295-296.

26. As Kaviraj (1996) points out, local self-government reforms failed to undermine the power of a small rural elite in India. They more often gave the dominance of that elite a dubious seal of electoral approval, adding to their economic power a new form of political legitimacy. He also notes the identity-based politics of local autonomy contradict interest-based local de-

mocracy. When disadvantaged groups mobilize on the basis of caste or regional deprivation, they have behind them numbers of dispossessed and resources of an elite that make cross-class coalitions effective in short-run election competitions. This leads to a call for equal treatment of groups in a whole field of communities, rather than individual equality in civil society. Such or-

ganization leads to greater involvement of state in social processes. See also Chatterjee 1993, for a discussion of what he calls "precapitalist identities" and how they enter democratic politics.

452




27. In an exception to general practice, two Lodha men of Lodhapara were working as forest guards in the Jhargram Range, where they also lived. When committee meetings in Dhansol-

Phulgerya (of which Lodhapara was a part) took place they arrived with the beat officer on their

bicycles and then stood at the fringes in complete silence. They participated thus not only in Lodha marginality to forest protection committees, but their stance also evoked the liminality of

guards to the Forest Department power structure. 28. Divisional Forest Officer West Midnapore (DFOWM), File 14-4/1987, no. 2463/14-4,

dated Jhargram June 17, 1989, DFO to Conservator of Forests (CF) Western Circle, p. 81. 29. Divisional Forest Officer West Midnapore (DFOWM), File 14-4/1987, no.

4461 For/D/15-16/88 dated Calcutta July 12, 1989, resolution of the Forest Department, Gov- ernment of West Bengal, pp. 86-88; no. 3657-3662/2M-41 dated Alipore August 4, 1990, CF Western Circle to DFO, p. 121; no. 2945/14-4 dated Jhargram July 29, 1992, DFO to Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (PCCF), pp. 438-439.

30. DFOWM, File 14-4/1987,no. 16203/TRC/2M-3A dated Calcutta November 13, 1992, from PCCF to all field officers, pp. 469-471.

31. DFOWM, File 14-4/1987, Subimal Roy, "Participatory Forest Management in West

Bengal," undated note, p. 5. 32. DFOWM, File 14-4/1987, no. 4215/14-4 dated Jhargram November 30, 1992, DFO

to PCCF, p. 476; no. 618/14-4 dated Jhargram February 8, 1993, DFO to CF Western Circle. 33. A common problem was that when lists of households in member villages were pre-

pared, names of some family heads would be excluded due to partisan politics. Alternately, powerful villagers would have several names from their houses included as this would potentially multiply their future share in profits from forest management. Belpahar, already divided into warring paras (neighborhoods), was faced with this intractable problem of faulty list prepa- ration, which several beat officers had failed to resolve.

34. This goes also for the Assistant Forest Officer and other staff officers working out of the Divisional Forest Officer's office. As they had a range of duties and joint forest management was only one part of them, these officials retained a level of remove from the scheme that marked them off from the range and beat staff. The public involvement that forest protection committees entailed did not impinge directly on their official lives to the degree that it did at the beat level.

35. I use the term durbarto emphasize the spatial and hierarchical arrangements through which power-inflected deliberative spaces are created. As Cohn (1987:636) suggests, in durbars there were well-established rules for the relative placement of people and objects. The spatial order of a durbar fixed, created, and represented relationships with the ruler.

36. DFOWM Report of FPC Meeting, February 7, 1994, p. 3. For reasons of confidentiality, I cannot reveal more about the venue of the meeting or the author of the report.

37. The anxiety of the block panchayat was partly produced by the logic of socialist governmentality. They had in some ways assumed the mantle of higher levels of government in respect of planning and dispensing developmental largesse. Katherine Verdery perceptively describes it in her general discussion of the socialist state: "The center wanted to keep as much as possible under its control because that was how it had redistributive power; and it wanted to give away the rest, because that was how it confirmed its legitimacy with the public" (1996:26).

38. Interview October 11, 1993, with a beat officer in Jhargram Range. The names of the beat and the officer have to be concealed for confidentiality.

39. This incident and its consequences are vivid exemplification of the need to take seri- ously the place of regularization, situational adjustment, and indeterminacy in social processes. Researchers then learn how and why order never fully takes over, nor could it. The cultural, contractual, and technical imperatives always leave gaps, require adjustments and interpretations to be applicable to particular situations, and are themselves full of ambiguities, inconsis- tencies, and often contradictions. Rituals, rigid procedures, regular formalities, symbolic repetitions of all kinds as well as explicit laws, principles, rules, symbols, and categories are cultural representations of fixed social reality (Moore and Myerhoff 1977:39).

40. This paragraph draws not only on my own field observations, but also on discussions with the Assistant Director of Forest Training Institute, Jhargram and the Chief Conservator of

453




Forests (Development), West Bengal. The latter was a regular speaker in the training programs for beat officers.

41. I do not want to overlook the irony of the situation. A scheme to transfer forest management responsibilities to civil society institutions has encouraged demands for expanding the numbers and structures of state apparatuses.

42. This was a symbolically charged moment. Affiliative identities were up for affirmation. By choosing one over another, the forest protection committee leaders were demonstrating that "politics is the site par excellence of symbolic efficacy, the action that is performed through signs is capable of producing social things, and in particular groups" (Bourdieu 1985:741).

43. Their actions reveal the understanding that political performance is discordant, pos- sessing a polysemous communicative virtuosity that is imposed on political performances by the need to adjust constantly to audience responses, where performer and audience are inter-

changeable as events unfold, and where people move between apparently discrete interpretive communities to befuddle any attempt to orchestrate performance from a single perspective.

44. The performative inscription of statemaking by local cultural practice that I have described here has interesting parallels in other postcolonial contexts of development. For a com- parable discussion, see, for instance, Worby 1998 and his discussion of minor theaters of power in rural Zimbabwe.

45. See Scott 1998 for amplification of the term state simplifications. 46. Several scholars, notably, Geertz (1983), Giddens (1984), and Goffman (1971) have

explored the question of place and its relation to local knowledge. While Goffman suggests that the quality of certain places facilitates assemblages that provide agents with repertoires of structural meaning, I am arguing that by drawing on these received repertoires, realizing that certain affiliative affinities and linkages historically privileged them, the forest protection committee leadership articulated a politics of place to challenge the transubstantiated modernist logic of representative and hierarchic leadership exemplified by Panchayati Raj.

47. My use of the term liminalityfollows the early work of Turner (1974:1 2-15). Clearly, the eagerness of joint forest management organizers to include Lodhas is a recognition that they occupied such a liminal space and could participate in a liminoid genre of political action that would destabilize the carefully constructed consensus around the meanings of participatory forestry. As Turner says, "Without liminality, program might indeed determine performance. But given liminality, prestigious programs can be undermined and multiple alternative programs may be generated" (1974:14).

48. This solicitation of Lodha support follows from a pluralization of politics and the organizational imprint of specific development schemes that may not intend to secure either outcome. Other studies of local politics inflected by multiparty politics and by inclusive natural resource development programs have noticed similar trends. For an Indian example, see Agrawal 1999:61-78, and for an African example see Moore 1998:395-402.

49. This concept of regional culture is discussed in greater detail in Sivaramakrishnan 1996: chs. 10-11, but it would be useful to say here that regional culture refers to religious, social, and political institutions. When the focus is on political institutions, as it has been in this article, paying due attention to regional culture means examining the changing nature of inter- mediation between various levels of political action. A good example of such work may be found in Lomnitz-Adler 1992. Adler shows how regional brokers called caciques had long mediated between people and the postrevolutionary state. With bureaucratic centralization ca- ciquismo changed character. There are different forms of cacique power that Lomnitz-Adler explores through the notion of regionally specific intimate cultures of class domination.

50. Making a somewhat similar observation based on his study of panchayats and collective action in Andhra Pradesh, south India, Robert Wade writes, "The arm of the state does not exercise enough force at the village level to be able to prevent the villagers making their own arrangements.... At the same time, the state's model of local government forms have provided ideas for independent arrangements" (1988:190).

51. A similar finding is reported from the rubber tapper movement in Brazil, where women's involvement usually began with their services being needed in traditional roles of pro- viding food and caring for children. They were often at the forefront of demonstrations against

454




forest clearing by ranchers, but women were less involved in adult education, unions, and sub- sequent negotiations. Men dictated in great measure the nature of women's involvement in the struggle (Campbell 1996:35-42).

52. For a fuller critique, see Cohen and Arato 1992:12-15, who argue for a new theory of civil society that overcomes the difficulties of elite versus participatory democracy, rights-oriented liberal- ism versus communitarianism, and welfare statism versus neoconservative anti-statism.

53. The enterprise becomes more interesting when researchers bear in mind Bayart's (1993) cautionary tale that states are always severely limited by civil society. He points out that state power may be limited by forms of political accountability that have little to do with democracy and that basically incompatible systems of accountability may not conform to any easily observed pattern when civil society has been made discontinuous by the impact of prolonged colonial rule.

references cited

Agrawal, Arun 1999 Greener Pastures: Politics, Markets, and Community among a Migrant Pastoral Peo-

ple. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Anagnost, Ann 1997 National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation and Power in Modern China. Dur-

ham, NC: Duke University Press. Anderson, Perry

1992 Zone of Engagement. London: Verso. Apffel-Marglin, Frederique, and Stephen A. Marglin

1990 Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture and Resistance. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Appadurai, Arjun

1996 Sovereignty without Territoriality: Notes for a Postnational Geography. In The Geog- raphy of Identity. Patricia Yaeger, ed. Pp. 40-58. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Bayart, Jean-Francois 1993 The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly. Mary Harper, Christopher Harrison, and

Elizabeth Harrison, trans. London: Longman. Beck, Ulrich

1998 Democracy without Enemies. Mark Ritter, trans. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bhowmick, P. K.

1961 Crime and Criminals among the Lodhas of West Bengal. Vanyajati 9:150-158. 1963 The Lodhas of West Bengal: A Socio-Economic Study. Calcutta: Punthi Pushtak.

Blair, Harry 1996 Democracy, Equity and Common Property Resource Management in the Indian Sub-

continent. Development and Change 27(3):475-499. Borneman, John

1997 Settling Accounts: Violence, Justice, and Accountability in Postsocialist Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Bose, S. C. 1968 Geography of West Bengal. New Delhi: National Book Trust.

Bourdieu, Pierre 1985 The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups. Theory and Society 14(6):723-744. 1990 The Logic of Practice. Richard Nice, trans. Cambridge: Polity Press. 1993 Concluding Remarks: For a Sociogenetic Understanding of Intellectual Works. In

Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives. Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone, eds. Pp. 263-275. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Brass, Paul 1991 Ethnicity and Nationalism: Theory and Comparison. New Delhi: Sage.

Brokensha, David, D. Michael Warren, and Oswald Werner, eds. 1980 Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Development. Lanham, MD: University of Amer-

ica Press.

455




Brush, Stephen, and Doreen Stabinsky, eds. 1996 Valuing Local Knowledge: Indigenous People and Intellectual Property Rights. Wash-

ington, DC: Island Press.

Campbell, Connie 1996 Out on the Front Lines but Still Struggling for Voice: Women in the Rubber Tappers'

Defence of the Forests in Xapuri, Acre, Brazil. In Feminist Political Ecology: Global Issues and Local Experiences. Dianne Rocheleau, Barbara Thomas-Slayter, and Esther Wangari, eds. Pp. 27-61. London: Routledge.

Carter, Paul 1989 The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History. Chicago: Univer-

sity of Chicago Press. Chambers, Dave W.

1987 Period and Process in Colonial and National Science. In Scientific Colonialism: A Cross-Cultural Comparison. Nathan Reingold and Marc Rothenberg, eds. Pp. 297-322. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Chambers, Robert, Arnold Pacey, and Lori Ann Thrupp 1989 Farmer First: Farmer Innovation and Agricultural Research. London: Intermediate

Technology Publications.

Chatterjee, Partha 1993 The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press. Cohen, Jean, and Andrew Arato

1992 Civil Society and Political Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cohn, Bernard S.

1987 Representing Authority in Victorian India. In Anthropologist among Historians and Other Essays. Bernard Cohn, ed. Pp. 632-682. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

1996 Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Collins, Harold M., and Trevor Pinch 1993 The Golem: What Everyone Should Know about Science. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Cooper, Frederick, and Randall Packard, eds. 1997 International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics

of Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Corrigan, Philip, and Derek Sayer 1985 The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution. London: Basil Black-

well. Crush, Jonathan, ed.

1995 Power of Development. London: Routledge. Dahrendorf, Ralf

1996 Economic Opportunity, Civil Society, and Political Liberty. Development and Change. Global Visions 27(2):229-249.

Dasgupta, Partha 1993 An Inquiry into Wellbeing and Destitution. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

de Certeau, Michel 1988 The Practice of Everyday Life. Steven Randall, trans. Berkeley: University of California

Press. de Palma, Guiseppe

1990 To Craft Democracies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Department of Forests

1988 Project Report on Resuscitation of Sal Forests in Southwest Bengal through Peoples' Participation. Calcutta: Government of West Bengal.

Douglas, Mary 1986 How Institutions Think. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

456




Escobar, Arturo 1995 Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Prince-

ton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fairhead, James, and Melissa Leach

1996 Misreading the African Landscape: Ecology and Society in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ferguson, James 1994 The Anti-Politics Machine: "Development," Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power

in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fortmann, Louise

1994 Talking Claims: Discursive Strategies in Contesting Property. Paper Presented to the

Weekly Colloquium, Program in Agrarian Studies, New Haven, CT: Yale University. Janu- ary 14.

Friedman, Edward 1994 Democratization: Generalizing the East Asian Experience. In The Politics of Democra-

tization: Generalizing East Asian Experiences. Edward Friedman, ed. Pp. 19-51. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Gardner, Katy 1997 Mixed Messages: Contested "Development" and the "Plantation Rehabilitation Proj-

ect." In Discourses of Development: Anthropological Perspectives. Ralph Grillo and Jock Stirrat, eds. Pp. 133-156. Oxford: Berg.

Gardner, Katy, and David Lewis 1996 Anthropology, Development and the Postmodern Challenge. London: Pluto Press.

Geertz, Clifford 1980 Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-

versity Press. 1983 Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic

Books. Giddens, Anthony

1984 The Constitution of Society: The Outline of a Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Pol- ity Press.

1994 Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gledhill, John

1994 Power and Its Disguises: Anthropological Perspectives on Politics. London: Pluto Press.

Goffman, Erving 1971 Relations in Public: Microstudies of Public Order. London: Allen Lane.

Grillo, Ralph, and Jock Stirrat, eds. 1997 Discourses of Development: Anthropological Perspectives. Oxford: Berg.

Gupta, Akhil 1995 Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the

Imagined State. American Ethnologist 22(2):375-402. 1998 Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India. Durham, NC:

Duke University Press. Gupta, Dipankar

1996 Political Sociology of India: Contemporary Trends. New Delhi: Orient Longman. Gupta, Ranjit

1959 Lodhas Revisited. Man in India 39(3):210-219. Habermas, Jurgen

1989 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Thomas Burger, trans., with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence. Cam- bridge, MA: MIT Press.

Handelman, Don 1990 Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events. Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press.

457



458 american ethnologist

Herzfeld, Michael 1993 The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bu-

reaucracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1997 Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York: Routledge.

Hirschman, Albert 1992 Rival Views of Market Society and Other Recent Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press. Hobart, Mark, ed.

1993 An Anthropological Critique of Development: The Growth of Ignorance. London: Routledge.

Hoben, Allan 1995 Paradigms and Politics: The Cultural Construction of Environmental Policy in Ethio-

pia. World Development 23(6):1007-1021. Jalal, Ayesha

1995 Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative and Historical Per- spective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jones III, John Paul, and Pamela Moss 1995 Democracy, Identity, Space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13:

253-257.

Kaviraj, Sudipta 1996 Democracy and Development in India. Mimeo. Berkeley: Center for South Asian

Studies, University of California. Keane, John

1988 Democracy and Civil Society: On the Predicaments of European Socialism, the Pros- pects for Democracy, and the Problem of Controlling Social and Political Power. London: Verso.

Kelly, William W. 1985 Deference and Defiance in Nineteenth-Century Japan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-

versity Press. Khan, Aisha

1997 Rurality and "Racial" Landscapes in Trinidad. In Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy. Barbara Ching and Gerald Creed, eds. Pp. 39-69. London: Rout-

ledge. Kohli, Atul, ed.

1988 India's Democracy: An Analysis of Changing State Society Relations. New Delhi: Ori- ent Longman.

Livingstone, David 1995 The Spaces of Knowledge: Contributions towards a Historical Geography of Science.

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13(1):5-34. Lomnitz-Adler, Claudio

1992 Exits from the Labryinth: Culture and Ideology in the Mexican National Space. Berkeley: University of California Press.

March, James, and Johan Olsen 1989 Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics. New York: Free Press.

Massey, Doreen 1994 Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Merry, Sally Engle 1992 Anthropology, Law, and Transnational Processes. Annual Review of Anthropology

21:357-379. Migdal, Joel

1988 Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World. Princeton: NJ: Princeton University Press.

Mitchell, Timothy 1991 The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics. American Politi-

cal Science Review 85(1):77-96.




Moock, Joyce, and R. Rhoades 1992 Diversity, Farmer Knowledge and Sustainability. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Moore, Donald 1998 Clear Waters and Muddied Histories: Environmental History and the Politics of Com-

munity in Zimbabwe's Eastern Highlands. Journal of Southern African Studies 24(2): 377-403.

Moore, Sally Falk, and Barbara G. Myerhoff 1977 Secular Ritual. Assen: Van Gorcum.

Mosse, David 1997 The Ideology and Politics of Community Participation: Tank Irrigation Development

in Colonial and Contemporary Tamil Nadu. In Discourses of Development: Anthropologi- cal Perspectives. Ralph Grillo and Jock Stirrat, eds. Pp. 255-292. Oxford: Berg.

Mouffe, Chantal 1995 Postmarxism: Democracy and Identity. Environment and Planning D: Society and

Space 13:259-265. Nandy, Ashish

1989 The Political Culture of the Indian State. Daedalus 118:1-26. Nugent, David

1994 Building the State, Making the Nation: The Bases and Limits of State Centralization in "Modern" Peru. American Anthropologist 96(2):333-369.

Peel, John David Yeadow 1983 The Incorporation of a Yoruba Kingdom, 1890s-1970s. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press. Peet, Richard, and Michael Watts

1996 Liberation Ecology: Development, Sustainability, and Environment in the Age of Mar- ket Triumphalism. In Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Move- ments. Richard Peet and Michael Watts, eds. Pp. 1-45. London: Routledge.

Pickering, Andrew 1992 From Science as Knowledge to Science as Practice. In Science as Practice and Culture.

Andrew Pickering, ed. Pp. 1-28. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.

Pigg, Stacey Leigh 1992 Constructing Social Categories through Place: Social Representations and Develop-

ment in Nepal. Comparative Studies in Society and History 34(3):491-513. Preston, Peter Wallace

1994 Discourses of Development: State, Market, and Polity in the Analysis of Complex Change. Aldershot, U. K.: Avebury.

Ravetz, Jerome 1971 Scientific Knowledge and Its Problems. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Rew, Alan 1997 The Donor's Discourse: Official Social Development Knowledge in the 1980s. In Dis-

courses of Development: Anthropological Perspectives. Ralph Grillo and Jock Stirrat, eds. Pp. 81-106. Oxford: Berg.

Richards, Paul 1985 Indigenous Agricultural Revolution: Ecology and Food Production in West Africa.

London: Hutchinson. Roe, Emery

1991 Development Narratives or Making the Best of Blueprint Development. World Devel- opment 19(4):287-300.

Rouse, Joseph 1987 Knowledge and Power: Towards a Political Philosophy of Science. Ithaca, NY: Cor-

nell University Press. Sachs, Wolfgang

1992 The Development Dictionary. London: Zed.

459




Saxena, Naresh N.d. The Indian Forest Service. Center for Sustainable Development Issues Paper. Mussoorie:

National Academy of Administration. Scoones, lan, and John Thompson

1994 Beyond Farmer First: Rural People's Knowledge, Agricultural Research and Extension Practice. London: Intermediate Technology Publications.

Scott, James C. 1985 Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press. 1998 Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have

Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sillitoe, Paul

1998 The Development of Indigenous Knowledge: A New Applied Anthropology. Current

Anthropology 39(2):223-252. Siu, Helen F.

1989 Agents and Victims in South China: Accomplices in Rural Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

1995 Subverting Lineage Power: Local Bosses and Territorial Control in the 1940s. In Down to Earth: The Territorial Bond in South China. David Faure and Helen F. Siu, eds. Pp. 188-208. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Sivaramakrishnan, K. 1995a Imagining the Past in Present Politics: Colonialism and Forestry in India. Compara-

tive Studies in Society and History 37(1):3-40. 1995b Situating the Subaltern: History and Anthropology in the Subaltern Studies Project.

Journal of Historical Sociology 8(4):395-429. 1996 Forests, Politics, and Governance in Bengal, 1794-1994. Vols. 1 and 2. Ph.D. disser-

tation, Department of Anthropology. Yale University. 1998a Comanaged Forests in West Bengal: Historical Perspectives on Community and Con-

trol. Journal of Sustainable Forestry 7(3/4):23-51. 1998b Modern Forestry: Trees and Development Spaces in West Bengal. In The Social Life

of Trees: Anthropological Perspectives on Tree Symbolism. Laura Rival, ed. Pp. 273-296. Oxford: Berg.

1998c Work, Identity, and Statemaking in the Forests of Southern West Bengal. Political and

Legal Anthropology Review 21 (2):26-40. 1999 Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India.

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sivaramakrishnan, K., and Arun Agrawal

1998 Regional Modernities in Stories and Practices of Development. Crossing Borders: Re-

vitalizing Area Studies, Rethinking Development and Environment, Working Paper No. 1. New Haven, CT: Center for International and Area Studies, Yale University.

Tambiah, Stanley 1985 Culture, Thought and Social Action: An Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press. Thompson, Edward Palmer

1978 Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class? Social History 3(2):133-165.

Turner, Victor 1974 Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, NY: Cor-

nell University Press. Vandergeest, Peter, and Nancy Peluso

1995 Territorialization and State Power in Thailand. Theory and Society 24:385-426.

Verdery, Katherine 1996 What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press.

460




Wade, Robert 1988 Village Republics: Conditions for Collective Action in South India. Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press. Waller, Tom

1994 Expertise, Elites and Resource Management Reform: Resisting Agricultural Water Conservation in California's Imperial Valley. Journal of Political Ecology 1:13-42.

Warren, D. Michael, Jan Slikkerveer, and David Brokensha, eds. 1991 Indigenous Knowledge Systems: The Cultural Dimensions of Development. London:

Kegan Paul. Weber, Max

1968 Economy and Society. New York: Bedminster Press. Williams, Brackette

1989 A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation across Ethnic Terrain. Annual Re- view of Anthropology 18:401-444.

Wilmsen, Edwin 1989 We Are Here: Politics of Aboriginal Land Tenure. Berkeley: University of California

Press. Wolf, Eric

1990 Facing Power: Old Insights, New Questions. American Anthropologist 92:586-596.

Worby, Eric 1998 Tyranny, Parody, and Ethnic Polarity: Ritual Engagements with the State in Northwest-

ern Zimbabwe. Journal of Southern African Studies 26(3):561-578. World Bank

1997 The State in a Changing World. Washington, DC: World Bank. Worster, Donald

1985 Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity and the Growth of the American West. New York: Pantheon.

Wynne, Brian 1992a Misunderstood Misunderstanding: Social Identities and Public Uptake of Science.

Public Understanding of Science 1(3):281-304. 1992b Public Understanding of Science: New Horizons or Hall of Mirrors? Public Under-

standing of Science 1(1):37-43. 1992c Uncertainty and Environmental Learning: Reconceiving Science and Policy in the

Preventive Paradigm. Global Environmental Change 2:137-154. Young, Crawford

1994 The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. New Haven, CT: Yale Univer- sity Press.

acceptedApril 3, 1999 final version submittedJuly 27, 1999

K. Sivaramakrishnan Department of Anthropology University of Washington 241 Denny Hall Box 353100 Seattle, WA 98195 sivaram@u. washington.edu

461



Date post:	26-May-2017
Category:	Documents
Upload:	mail2agastaya7024
View:	214 times
Download:	1 times

Crafting the Public Sphere in the Forests of West Bengal Democracy, Development, And Political...

Documents