Agrarian Environments questions the dichotomoies that have structured earlier analyses of environmental processes in India and offers a new way of looking at the relationship between agrarian transformation and environmental change. The contributors claim that attempts to explain environmental conflicts in terms of the local versus the global, indigenous versus outsiders, women versus men, or the community versus the market or state obscure vital dynamics of mobilization and organization that critically influence thought and policy.

Order from Amazon.com

Reviews:

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST 30 (3): 454-455 AUG 2003
JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES 39 (3): 211-212 FEB 2003
DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE 34 (1): 194-194 JAN 2003
ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 7 (2): 337-338 APR 2002 [below]:

Agrarian Environments, an anthology of historical and anthropological studies of environmental change in India, offers readers not only cutting-edge environmental scholarship about the subcontinent, but a coherent and thoughtful critique of standard conceptual frameworks in environmental studies. While this fine collection should appeal to those who study the developing world, its challenges to common analytical distinctions such as those between agrarian and environmental, and state and community, also should engage readers with a broader interest in the theoretical basis of environmental studies. The editors' introduction provides a coherent overview of the analytic focus of the collection, which was to reveal through empirical analysis the ways that typical analytic categories in environmental studies have failed to provide a meaningful view of environmental issues. Included among their targets are polarizing categories that have become a staple of literature on the developing world: feminine vs. masculine treatments of nature, indigenous vs. Western knowledge about and views of the environment, and state vs. community. While acknowledging the political appeal of such polarities, the editors challenge the broad applicability of those categories and note that they carry the danger of hiding significant underlying contradictions. As a basis for sound environmental decisions, they argue, such work is dangerously deceptive.

The quality of the individual essays offered here is uniformly high, as each author incorporates a thoughtful analysis of the issues raised by the editors. As such, the volume is coherent in a way that many edited collections are not, despite differences in methodology. Two examples give a flavor of the volume a whole. Sumit Guha's "Economic Rents and Natural Resources: Commons and Conflicts in Premodern India," is a historical piece that critically re-evaluates the assumption that indigenous, small communities by their nature had a sustainable and harmonious approach to environmental management. Cecile Jackson's and Molly Chattopadhyay are among those who take a more anthropological view in "Identities and Livelihoods: Gender, Ethnicity, and Nature in a South Bihar Village," an essay that critiques the women-as-natural-environmental-stewards view, demonstrafing the complex dynamics of gender and ethnicity in the process of building environmental relations in one village. Despite differences in approach, all the essays stress the importance of empiricism to inform theory.

One small, but nagging, critique of this volume is that not all essays succeed equally well in making a strong argument from the detail of empirical, thick description. The unevenness here points to a larger question concerning the editors' reformulation of the conceptual terrain of environmental studies. While questioning categories is an essential critical practice, and the volume certainly demonstrates the necessity of doing so, the largely negative lessons of many of the essays (i.e. that conventional categories are inappropriate) may leave some readers wondering whether any theoretical basis can serve the study of agrarian environments. The volume offers a strong and much needed critique of oversimplified analyses. It remains an open issue for the scholarly community at large to find a balance between the powerful appeal of theory and the crucial importance of empirical findings.

[Author Affiliation] Suzanne Moon is an assistant professor in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at the Pennsylvania State University. She currently is writing a manuscript on technological change in rice agriculture in the Netherlands East Indies.

JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 29 (1): 179-182 OCT 2001 [below]:

This volume edited by Agrawal and Sivaramakrishnan provides a stimulating and conceptually sophisticated critique of romanticized populist discourse on indigenous communities, women and environmental/agrarian management. Comprised of an introduction, ten historically informed and geographically grounded essays, and a set of two ‘reflections’, the book has a strong empirical underpinning and is organized around three interlocking themes. The broadest and most multifaceted of these uses the contexts of resource allocation and environmental conflict to explore how varying socio-political identities are articulated in different historical, ecological and cultural contexts. Taking note of recent developments in both development thinking and political ecology, the book highlights the heterogeneity of interests that characterize most local communities and questions simplistic assumptions about their supposedly innate effectiveness as natural resource managers and promoters of development. While acknowledging the role of populist narratives in ‘rallying support’ and shifting attention towards marginal social groups and the differentiated nature of environmental degradation, a number of contributors caution against their tendency to promote simplistic opposed dichotomies such as ‘woman–man’, ‘indigenous– Western/scientific’, ‘community–state’ and ‘local–global’. At the same time, they warn against the tendency for activists and policy-makers to identify simplified groupings such as ‘woman’ and ‘community’ with the natural(ized) environment, arguing that this reduces ‘complicated social and historical dynamics and the fraught nature of social identities to mere caricatures’ (p.9) and limits the possibility of developing new theoretical insights. Agrarian environments, meanwhile, are viewed as home not to harmonious and self-sufficient communities (the ‘exoticized indigene’ or ‘essentialized natural woman’) but to complex and politically fragmented social formations ‘that reflect the diversity and flux of their landscapes’ (p.10).

A second theme represents a desire to highlight and clarify the ‘blurred boundaries’ and interdependence between agrarian and so-called natural environments which have often been treated as geographically and functionally separate entities, to the detriment of both. Emphasizing how environmentalism has tended to separate nature from rural and agricultural production, the contributors argue for a more nuanced and dialectical understanding of the relationship between environmental and agrarian change. A third organizing theme seeks to correct the flawed historicism of India’s environmental history, highlighting the re-construction of past environmental relations in accordance with current utopian aspirations and emphasizing the need ‘to explore the dynamic relationship between history and current moments’ (p. 14). The first chapter, by Haripriya Rangan, picks up this theme and sets the tone for the rest of the book by illustrating how romanticized populist narratives of pre-colonial ecological harmony and moral economy have been employed ‘to eulogize the passing of simple and self-sufficient peasant lifeways’ (p.23) upon contact with the British colonial state’s imposition of ‘western patriarchy’, ‘scientific forestry’ and ‘capitalist maldevelopment’. Building on a growing body of work that contests images of British environmental policy in India as both monolithic and uniform, she demonstrates how ‘ecological transformations in Uttarakhand during British rule reveal a complex landscape repeatedly inscribed and incompletely erased by social actions’ (p.24). She also highlights the key role that stylized representations of the colonial state play ‘in transforming narratives of environmental change into powerful and compelling myths’ (p.24).

The other four historically-oriented chapters, by Baker, Saberwal, Zook and Guha, expand upon these issues of representation, and further explore the interdependence as well as the conflicting and shifting priorities of state-community relations. J. Mark Baker’s chapter illustrates how in Kangra, the British imposed European models of property ownership and ideas of village community derived from the Indo-Gangetic plains but ironically created new ‘traditions’ of land management that are now represented as belonging to a traditional pre-colonial past. He also highlights the interlinked nature of Kangra’s agrarian and forest environments, and demonstrates how colonial agricultural and forest policies represented the outcome of protracted struggles over land use and income between the Revenue and Forest Departments. Vasant K. Saberwal builds upon the themes of misrepresentation and contested colonial policy-making by showing how the Revenue Department’s opposition to the Forest Department’s conservation initiatives encouraged the latter to adopt a ‘highly alarmist position with regard to the environmental impact of unregulated use of forest lands’ (p.69).

Darren Zook’s fascinating chapter examines discourses on famine, produced for political purposes by colonial officers as well as their Indian critics. While the anti- British nationalists represented famine as new problem, created by ‘the indifference and cruelty of foreign rule’ (p.111), the British viewed it as evidence of India’s susceptibility to natural disaster and need for agricultural development and effective famine relief programmes. Consequently, what began as a political struggle to attribute responsibility for India’s famines ended up creating a discourse on India as a povertyridden land of famine, unable to fend for itself. Sumit Guha’s chapter elaborates on the theme of a romanticized pre-colonial golden age, focusing primarily on a critique of the widely-held populist assumption that pre-modern villagers possessed a strong conservation ethic. Using detailed historical evidence to challenge the idea of homogeneous and uniform village communities, he emphasizes the hierarchical nature of pre-modern Indian society and points to the ways in which environmental and agrarian resources were frequently appropriated by the most powerful social groups. Taking a more contemporary view on state permeability, Jenny Springer’s essay focuses on the role of village extension workers in Tamil Nadu as both transmitters and objects of development, and investigates the ambiguous position that they occupy between the villagers that they are assigned to and the government department that they represent. Resonating with the contemporary as well as the historically-oriented chapters, she criticizes oppositional categories such as scientific versus indigenous and state versus community, drawing attention instead to the importance of local agency and the dangers of assuming that ‘states’ or ‘communities’ are either coherent, unified or autonomous.

The remaining four essays have contemporary themes, and use detailed empirical data on agrarian and environmental resources to deconstruct simplistic and romanticized visions of community from the perspective of gender, caste and village. The excellent chapters by Cecile Jackson and Molly Chattopadhyay on Jharkhand, and by Shubra Gururani on Kumaon, both criticize the populist tendency to romanticize rural India as a ‘model of equality and unity’, and argue for the need to deconstruct homogenizing generalizations about villages, communities, women and tribes. In illustrating the highly politicized nature of resource use and the way in which it is frequently contested on the basis of class and caste, they emphasize the need to examine locally-based relations of hierarchy, dominance and inequality. They also highlight the differentiated nature of ‘women’ as a category, and explore eco-feminist discourse about women as environmental guardians and possessors of highly developed agro-ecological knowledges.

Jackson and Chattopadhyay’s research in Phulchi village shows that although tribal and dalit women participate in agricultural and forest-based labour, they have limited input into environmental decision-making, and are perceived by men to have little agricultural and silvicultural knowledge (although women’s views on this matter are hardly mentioned). The wealthier-caste Hindu Bhumihar women, meanwhile, are subject to social restrictions on their mobility which prevent them from undertaking field-based agricultural or forest-based labour. Consequently, generalized narratives ‘about women as active agriculturalists and as environmental managers, carers, and defenders have little application to their lives’ (p.163). In a similar vein, Gururani’s research illustrates that although Panchayat forests are managed by village councils, social restrictions prevent women from participating in their management. She also shows how in spite of hill women’s extensive forest-based work, men regard them as incapable of understanding how to promote forest regeneration, and blame them for the degradation of reserved forests. Again, women’s views about this situation go unrecorded, but the chapter nevertheless strikes a blow to eco-feminist romanticizations of women’s ecological knowledge, environmental stewardship and special link with nature. In a similar vein, Jackson and Chattopadhyay find little support for eco-populist discourse about adivasi sacralization of nature, as tribals are concerned far less with environmental harmony than they are with land and forest entitlements. Indeed, they criticize such narratives as ‘caricatures of adivasi lives, distortions of actors’ own perceptions of their struggles, and as appropriations that make use of adivasis in the project of urban academics and activists seeking an authentic and indigenous critique of development’ (p.151).

With his focus on pastoralism in Rajasthan, Paul Robbins continues the examination of simplistically understood concepts of ‘community’, ‘village’ and ‘gender’ and identifies the region’s strong agrarian-environmental linkages. Highlighting the diverse and divided nature of pastoral communities and practices, he sees community more as a ‘process’ than a static social structure. At the same time, he challenges the assumption that villages are inherently cohesive and questions their use as a base for promoting ‘community-based’ or participatory development. Vinay Gidwani builds upon these themes, but turns his attention to the evolution of caste dominance over time. Focusing primarily on the Patel caste in Central Gujarat, he charts their rise to and decline from economic supremacy alongside changing agrarianenvironmental relations in Matar sub-district. Finding existing economic polarization models inadequate to explain the Patels’ changing fortunes, Gidwani goes on to identify four ‘agrarian environmental’ factors that account for social flux in Matar and could be used to analyse agrarian change elsewhere. The last section of the book, ‘Reflections’, presents the views of two scholars on the themes investigated in the preceding chapters but makes a rather odd conclusion to the volume. Although learned and interesting, David Ludden’s very broad overview of South Asian agrarian environments does little to draw together the themes of individual essays, and may have been more useful as an introductory section for readers with limited background knowledge about India. Ajay Skaria’s essay, by contrast, is extremely focused, but the fascinating theoretical linkages that he makes between environments and modernity are made unnecessarily inaccessible by the density of his argument and impenetrability of his prose.

Probably the book’s greatest strength is its use of rich, place-specific empirical research to highlight the interconnectedness of agrarian and ‘natural’ environments and to challenge romanticized and homogenized notions of ‘community’, ‘women’ and ‘indigenous’. Its determined emphasis on historical and geographical perspectives enables it to avoid the pitfalls of theoretical generalization and proves extremely valuable for examining the fluidity of environmental discourse and identity creation. Indeed, all of the essays provide refreshing illustrations of the value of carefully conducted field and archive-based research, and make convincing cases for the need to discard convenient bifurcating classifications when examining agrarian systems and environmental resource use. Significantly, they also maintain a high degree of political astuteness in their recognition of the differential impacts of environmental policymaking, as well as a strong practical orientation in their efforts to caution against the use of categories such as ‘community’ as a foundation on which to build development programmes. As Gururani argues, ‘decentralization, community-based management, or co-management will not yield results unless these efforts are responsive to local histories and landscapes in which these practices are located’ (p.189).

Although a more detailed introductory exploration into the roots of populist narratives (notably their linkages to a perception of environmental and development crisis coupled with a shift to post-materialist values and post-modernist celebration of ‘cultural difference’) may have allowed broader conceptual linkages to be made between chapters and with Ajay Skaria’s concluding essay, the volume nevertheless displays a high degree of theoretical sophistication. Although its language may prove difficult in places for undergraduate students, the volume is likely to be of great interest and value to anyone with an interest in South Asian studies, development, environmental issues, gender or community-based resource management.

Sarah Jewitt, Lecturer in Geography, School of Oriental and African Studies, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H OXG.

JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES 61 (1): 282-283 FEB 2002 [below]:

This anthology originated as a series of innovative conference papers on environmental studies brought together in the intellectual framework of Yale University's Program in Agrarian Studies. The literatures of agrarian and environmental studies have suffered as a result of self-segregation, and the editors suggest that authors in the future must consider both field and forest in order to draw a comprehensive and comprehensible picture of rural India. The contributions provide a closer focus on the interesting issues raised in the subtitle, leaving the introduction to map the theoretical change which makes this volume so valuable.

Most of the contributors identify and seek to correct a dualism that has emerged in the literature of environmental studies, which itself was a response to the circumscriptions of agrarian studies. The contributors and editors cumulatively report this dualism as a series of binaries: colonizer-colonized, masculine-feminine, modern-- primordial (or primitive), institution-community, manmade-natural. Cecile Jackson and Molly Chattopadhyay use gender as a means to problematize several of these binaries at once, and Jenny Springer in particular provides a detailed view of how and why transactions at the local level deconstruct and reconstitute imaginary boundaries between "state" and "society."

Many of the contributors address the discourse of development, although this volume is not and does not aspire to be activist literature in the sense of Vandana Shiva's work, for example. J. Mark Baker, Shubhra Gururani, Springer, and Darren C. Zook do not recommend programs of action but suggest that development efforts are transformed by the officials carrying them out and by the persons who are to be "developed." State economists, NGO analysts, and "community" advocates have reproduced the "cathexis of the natural" in colonial discourse, to follow Ajay Skaria's phrase; such reiteration adds tremendously to the discursive reality of the natural as permanently separate from cultivated land, as in need of economic and civilizational progress, and as a model for locally-regulated, self-sustaining resource management.

Most importantly, this volume questions the self-segregation of agrarian and environmental studies based on arbitrary topographical or mode of production boundaries. While anthropological literature has striven to differentiate and measure "pastoralism" and "nomadism," and at the same time literature on "peasants" has elaborated in detail the social relations of cultivation, this volume contends that human thoughts and actions regularly defy the analytical frameworks scholars have built with this vocabulary. In this sense the book signals, or should signal, a watershed in how scholars understand the social production of food, circulation and accumulation of capital, and subaltern imaginings-whether the "hybrid histories" of Skaria (pp. 275-76) or the uncertain, contradictory narratives of Zook (pp. 127-28). Environmental studies, having made "boundaries between an autonomous nature that supposedly stands outside of human endeavor, and a human agency that is presumed to construct all landscapes," and despite having been "predicated on a critique of scholarship and politics," must now "demonstrate the pervasive links between the agrarian and the environmental ... to treat one independently of the other is to fail to understand either" (pp. 1-2).

If the agrarian environment serves to map "this hybrid domain in rural India" (p. 5), then how is one to conceptualize the urban? David Ludden provides a wealth of statistical information relating to the rapid and massive urbanization of the five major nation-states of the subcontinent, and notes that "despite recent acceleration [of urbanization], environmental change has been synonymous with agrarian history, forever" (p. 260). The remainder of this volume does not pick up Ludden's challenge, even though plentiful historical evidence could illustrate urban-environmental interaction. The expansion of existing urban areas and the creation of quite large cities ex nihilo, of which examples abound even before the twentieth century, trigger a long list of environmental changes: urban land generally is no longer used for food production; adequate water and food supplies must be diverted to urban populations; pollutants from industrial areas affect plants and animals in the vicinity of cities; human and animal wastes from densely populated urban areas must be transported from streets and residences to less populated zones. The economic or topographic boundary between urban and non-urban is as nebulous as that between agrarian and environmental; the long history of suburban market-gardening in south Asia, for example, continues to cloud the distinction which many analysts carelessly draw.

Agrarian Environments makes a pathbreaking theoretical contribution and must not be held responsible for failing to add urban studies to its formulation. However, its call to scholars in agrarian and environmental studies must be extended to those in urban studies in order to fulfill the theoretical potential raised in the volume.