The title of this book, The Politics of Swidden Farming: Environment and Development
in Eastern India, hardly conveys the ethnographic depth and historical reach of
the study. This scope becomes apparent as the reader comes to discover the
significance of swidden or shifting cultivation, not just as a relationship of communities to land and ecology, but as a critical mediator of relationships with
the colonial and postcolonial state and its civilizing or development projects
over the past century. The study is located in a region and among people who
become, through their social lives and livelihoods (including their swidden cultivation), as Anna Tsing puts it, ‘icons of the archaic disorder that represents
the limit and test of state order and development’ (Tsing 1993: 28). The remote
Naga villages that are the ethnographic focus of this book are in this sense
represented simultaneously as a political–administrative border, an agricultural margin and a moral frontier. The kinds of colonial and postcolonial
projects that have sought to regulate and control such borderland communities,
whether irrigation projects, roads, settlement schemes or plantations, are well
known, but what is rarer is the kind of longitudinal account o"ered here of the
interplay of state power, Christian mission and local communities, examined
also through the complex relationships between and within these Nagaland
villages themselves. With regard to this latter theme of the role and agency of
local communities in their own transformation, it becomes evident not only
that colonial administrative power was asserted through harnessing inter-group
antagonisms, but also that transformations brought to the cultivated landscape,
to social institutions and cultural practices through Christian missions, came by
way of neighbouring social groups, who modelled new ways of worshipping
and working the land, expanding cash-crop or rice cultivation (an established
archetype of settled civility).