Modern Forests

by Sivaramakrishnan, K.

• ISBN13: 9780804745567
• ISBN10: 0804745560
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-04-01
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

Modern Forestsis an environmental, institutional, and cultural history of forestry in colonial eastern India. By carefully examining the influence of regional political formations and biogeographic processes on land and forest management, this book offers an analysis of the interrelated social and biophysical factors that influenced landscape change. Through a cultural analysis of powerful landscape representations,Modern Forestsreveals the contention, debates, and uncertainty that persisted for two hundred years of colonial rule as forests were identified, classified, and brought under different regimes of control and were transformed to serve a variety of imperial and local interests. The author examines the regionally varied conditions that generated widely different kinds of forest management systems, and the ways in which certain ideas and forces became dominant at various times. Through this emphasis on regional socio-political processes and ecologies, the author offers a new way to write environmental history. Instead of making a sharp distinction between third-world and first-world experiences in forest management, the book suggests a potential for cross-continental comparative studies through regional analyses. The book also offers an approach to historical anthropology that does not make apolitical separations between foreign and indigenous views of the world of nature, insisting instead that different cultural repertoires for discerning the natural, and using it, can be fashioned out of shared concerns within and across social groups. The politics of such cultural construction, the book argues, must be studied through institutional histories and ethnographies of statemaking. In conclusion, the author offers a genealogy of development as it can be traced from forest conservation in colonial eastern India.

Author Biography

K. Sivaramakrishnan is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
List of Tables	p. xiii
Preface	p. xv
Glossary	p. xxii
Abbreviations	p. xxvi
Statemaking and Environmental Change	p. 1
The Importance of Diversity	p. 1
Statemaking and Political Society	p. 4
Critical Environmental Histories and Substantial Political Ecologies	p. 13
Narrative Sequences	p. 20
Intimations of a Governmental Rationality at the Margins of Empire	p. 29
British Entry into the Jungle Mahals	p. 34
Introduction	p. 34
The First Campaigns and Descriptions of Terrain	p. 39
People of the Jungle Mahals	p. 48
The Chuar Disturbances: A Politics of Place	p. 53
Jungle Landlords and the Police	p. 58
Zones of Anomaly in Woodland Bengal	p. 63
Geographies of Empire: The Transition from 'Wild' to Managed Landscapes	p. 76
Introduction	p. 76
Discerning and Making Tribal Places	p. 83
Extending the Arable: Securing Landscapes from Vermin	p. 90
Forestry Experiments: The Bengal Teak Plantations	p. 107
Visibility, Estimation, and Laying Down the Ground Rules	p. 121
Introduction	p. 121
Surveying and Enumerating Natural Resources Beyond Agriculture	p. 124
Beginning of Forest Conservancy in Bengal	p. 132
Formal Structures of Forest Management	p. 145
Varied Regimes of Restriction and Lumbering	p. 149
Introduction	p. 149
Territorialization Refined: A Fractured State	p. 153
Forest Working Arrangements	p. 156
Illustrative Forest Settlements: Porahat and Dhalbhum	p. 161
Biodiversity, Political Diversity, and Regional Variations	p. 165
Control of Revenue, Control of Land	p. 169
Protected Forests and Limited Conservancy in Southwest Bengal	p. 173
Forests in a Regional Agrarian Economy	p. 185
Introduction	p. 185
Conservancy Looking Between the Stems: Minor Forest Products	p. 187
Hill Station Development, Forests, and Grazing	p. 192
Commerce and Conservation in North Bengal	p. 197
Forestry, Agriculture, and Silviculture	p. 201
Nature's Science: Fire and Forest Regeneration	p. 211
Introduction	p. 211
Normalcy for Nature: Systematic Science and its Field of Vision	p. 213
Fire in the Forest: Organizing its Exclusion	p. 219
Scientific Forestry Fractured: Bringing Fire Back in	p. 225
Postlude: Grazing and Forest Regeneration	p. 232
Science and Conservation: Hybrid Genealogies of Development	p. 242
Introduction	p. 243
Forestry as Science and Practice: A Development Regime	p. 247
Working Plans as Instruments of Remote Control	p. 252
Silvicultural Models and Elusive Particularities	p. 257
Development Regimes and Historical Processes	p. 264
Conclusion	p. 272
Rethinking Governmentality	p. 272
Environment Development, and Statemaking	p. 277
Note on Primary Sources	p. 285
Select Bibliography	p. 290
Index	p. 325
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