Forests of Pleasure and Pain: Gendered practices of labor and livelihood in the forests of the Kumaon Himalayas,India

This article examines the dominant gender and environment discourse in India and argues that, so far, analyses of gender and environment have pursued a utilitarian and mechanistic understanding of the nature-society relationship. By focusing on gendered practices of livelihood, narrated memories, and oral accounts of embodied pain and pleasure in the forests of the Kumaon Himalayas, India, the author discusses the conceptual limitations that inform this discourse and argues for a culturally and geographically embedded understanding of nature-society relationships. It is argued that places of nature are not just biophysical entities, isolated from local, regional, and global relations of power, but are dialectically constituted by local politics of place, history, and ecology and are constitutive of social relations. In Kumaon, the identities of women are constituted through, always entwined with, everyday practices in the forest, and culturally specific notions of proper behavior, 'good mothers,' and 'dutiful wives' are mapped in the overlapping domains of village and forests. Such a view of the nature-society dynamic, it is argued, is critical for a grounded and locally meaningful understanding of how gendered relations are operationalized in nature and for insights into thinking about policy issues.     

National Frontiers,Great World Frontiers,and the Shadow of Frederick Jackson Turner

WILLIAM H. MCNEILL. The Great Frontier: Freedom and Hierarchy in Modern Times. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983. Pp. 79. $13.95 (US).     

Aboriginal Histories,Aboriginal Myths: An Introduction

The article reopens the issue of the supposed absence of historical consciousness among traditionally oriented Aborigines, and reviews Hill's and Turner's attempts to define the difference between myth and history. It then discusses some narratives of colonisation from Western New South Wales, and re-analyses some Aboriginal stories about Captain Cook.     

Mississippian Plazas,Performances, and Portable Histories

Although plazas have a lengthy and variable history in southeastern North America, by the Mississippian period (ca. 1000–1500 CE), they had assumed some degree of conformity: they were square to rectangular in shape, anchored the approximate center of a settlement, often had additional inclusions such as public buildings or earthen monuments, and were the arenas of secular and religious public activities. We suggest that the importance of these architectural features to Mississippian life ways can be attributed to two characteristics that are widely shared with other cultures that also employed plazas as a form of axis mundi. First, their construction represents an event that arrests temporality and draws attention to their pivotal role in synchronizing ritual life. Second, their relatively open architecture confers them a relational flexibility that allows for the linkage of a wide variety of spaces, things, and beings. A quantitative and qualitative study of 35 Mississippian plazas demonstrates discrepancies from a linear relationship between plaza size and site size that may be related to variation in the kinds of performances that were conducted in these public places at different types of settlements. Despite this variation, the ubiquity of plazas suggests that they were pivotal to the founding of Mississippian places, and may have been important for reestablishing a sense of cosmological order for migrating communities.     

Local Histories,Global Markets: Cocoa and Class in Upland Sulawesi

Research and policy concerning the Southeast Asian uplands have generally focused on issues of cultural diversity, conservation and community resource management. This article argues for a reorientation of analysis to highlight the increasingly uneven access to land, labour and capital stemming from processes of agrarian differentiation in upland settings. It draws upon contrasting case studies from two areas of Central Sulawesi to explore the processes through which differentiation occurs, and the role of local histories of agriculture and settlement in shaping farmers’ responses to new market opportunities. Smallholders have enthusiastically abandoned their diversified farming systems to invest their land and labour in a new global crop, cocoa, thereby stimulating a set of changes in resource access and social relations that they did not anticipate. The concept of agency drawn from a culturally oriented political economy guides the analysis of struggles over livelihoods, land entitlements, and the reconfiguration of community, as well as the grounds on which new collective visions emerge.     

Talking of Human Rights: Histories,Heritages, and Human Remains

While the rhetoric of human rights is now globally pervasive, the reality of rights implementation patently lags behind and violations continue to escalate worldwide. An examination of recent books demonstrates that rights talk occupies an increasingly central place in all subfields of anthropology. Problematically, anthropologists are excessively invoking “human rights” to imply a higher order of magnitude for the cases they study than if those cases were framed in terms of other rights and claims. Labeling everything a fundamental human right is detrimental to both ethics and accuracy, especially in the face of acknowledged differences in cultural and historical contexts.     

Situating Political Agronomy: The Knowledge Politics of Hybrid Rice in India and Uganda

The emergence of ‘political agronomy’ — a research agenda that interrogates the knowledge politics through which agronomic debates are constructed, shaped and contested — has added a new and important tool for the analysis of agricultural research and policy making in development contexts. This article seeks to advance the scope of political agronomy by providing an enhanced framework to link the analysis of agronomic knowledge production to the study of new agricultural technologies in practice. Using case studies of hybrid rice promotion in southern India and western Uganda, the article illustrates the power relations and unanticipated outcomes that accompanied the translation of agronomic research into agrarian settings characterized by pronounced social polarization and marked environmental transformations. These case studies affirm how the starkly uneven outcomes of technological change refract back into the politics of agronomic research and extension as both researchers and policy makers react to the unintended impacts of previous interventions when designing future agendas.