On Swiddens, Swiddeners and the Passions of Those who Study Them

I stop in the midst of writing an academic treatise on swidden agriculture globally. The paper is full of rationality and reason, carefully constructed sentences, the making of valid statements, supported by believable evidence. Yet, bubbling beneath this rational superficiality is a passion that I know is not mine alone. I question the source of this bubbling passion shared by many of us who have done long term research among shifting cultivators.

Is it simply our love for the people among whom we worked and who shared their lives so graciously with us? Perhaps, but I do not feel the same overpowering love of the total system when I think of my work in the Pacific Northwest among loggers and bureaucrats or my earlier study of cognition among Native Americans at Chemawa Indian School. I could imagine that these are too familiar, that my passion comes from ‘otherness’, from the exotic. But I find that neither do I feel such passion about my work on health, population, and agriculture in the [more alien] Sultanate of Oman. Yet still I cared about all these people as well.

Perhaps it is the close link between the people in swidden systems and their environment, their dependence on it and love of it, its central role in their world view and way of life. Perhaps being with people who live so close to nature brings the researcher closer as well. I think of the studies of the beneficial effects of being in and around nature (by Patricia Shanley or Qing Li). Certainly, I was more ‘in nature’, more directly dependent upon it, while living among shifting cultivators than in other contexts of daily life. Whether we had meat for dinner depended directly on someone’s hunting success; the vegetables we had depended on what was in season and what someone had the time to harvest (only rice and cassava leaves during the lean times).

Or is it our appreciation of the complexity of the system, our passion further fueled by our dismay that others fail to recognize and value it? I think of the knowledge required to select a forest area to clear, one that will be sufficiently fertile to produce a good rice crop; the understanding of animals’ patterns of behavior needed to protect fields from pests, conduct a successful hunt, avoid over-harvesting a species; the knowledge of edible plants and their seasons, ensuring a reliable and varied diet most of the year; the variety of products—fibers, foods, medicines, timber, firewood—available from the different stages of forest regrowth, as the swidden turns, year by year, back to beautiful and lush forest.  The common emphasis in development circles on ‘poverty alleviation’ totally misses these wonders among ‘the poor’.

Or is it the aspect of unpredictability, the wildness, of such systems—both human and ecological? A swiddener in Borneo, the system I know best, awakes each morning and considers what to do that day, depending on the time of year, the weather, his/her inclinations: Should I go to the ricefield and weed? Or perhaps go out fishing? Should I take a walk in the forest and harvest some of those durian that I saw fruiting yesterday? Or shall I participate in my neighbour’s work party on her ricefield? The course of the day is rarely pre-set—granting each person a kind of autonomy and freedom we rarely have in more ‘civilized’ contexts. I appreciated this freedom from expectations about what exactly I would do on any particular day. Such freedom may not be characteristic of other systems; I’ve found Bornean systems to be special in their acceptance of personal autonomy, their appreciation of individual strengths and acceptance of corresponding weaknesses.

The wildness of the environment continues to draw me to it as well: the beauty, the complexity, the lushness of the foliage. I remember fondly my own delight, sitting in a canoe, or paddling beneath overhanging branches reflected in the waters around me; my amazement when I realized how quickly the tropical foliage took over when left alone; my wonder at the diversity of plants and animals that populated the forest.

I suppose all these experiences and perceptions contribute to my own passion. I wonder if these are the same factors that produce the passion I also see in others…

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