Bitter Shade: The Ecological Challenge of Human Consciousness 9780300258073

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Yale Agrarian Studies Series James C. Scott, Series Editor

The Agrarian Studies Series at Yale University Press seeks to publish outstanding and original interdisciplinary work on agriculture and rural society—for any period, in any location. Works of daring that question existing paradigms and fill abstract categories with the lived experience of rural people are especially encouraged. James C. Scott, Series Editor James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed Steve Striffler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia Michael R. Dove, The Banana Tree at the Gate: A History of Marginal Peoples and Global Markets in Borneo Edwin C. Hagenstein, Sara M. Gregg, and Brian Donahue, eds., American Georgics: Writings on Farming, Culture, and the Land Timothy Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight Brian Gareau, From Precaution to Profit: Contemporary Challenges to Environmental Protection in the Montreal Protocol Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and Gopa Samanta, Dancing with the River: People and Life on the Chars of South Asia Alon Tal, All the Trees of the Forest: Israel’s Woodlands from the Bible to the Present Felix Wemheuer, Famine Politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union Jenny Leigh Smith, Works in Progress: Plans and Realities on Soviet Farms, 1930–1963 Graeme Auld, Constructing Private Governance: The Rise and Evolution of Forest, Coffee, and Fisheries Certification Jess Gilbert, Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal Jessica Barnes and Michael R. Dove, eds., Climate Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives on Climate Change

Shafqat Hussain, Remoteness and Modernity: Transformation and Continuity in Northern Pakistan Edward Dallam Melillo, Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the Chile-California Connection Devra I. Jarvis, Toby Hodgkin, Anthony H. D. Brown, John Tuxill, Isabel López Noriega, Melinda Smale, and Bhuwon Sthapit, Crop Genetic Diversity in the Field and on the Farm: Principles and Applications in Research Practices Nancy J. Jacobs, Birders of Africa: History of a Network Catherine A. Corson, Corridors of Power: The Politics of U.S. Environmental Aid to Madagascar Kathryn M. de Luna, Collecting Food, Cultivating People: Subsistence and Society in Central Africa Through the Seventeenth Century Carl Death, The Green State in Africa James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the First Civilizations Loka Ashwood, For-Profit Democracy: Why the Government Is Losing the Trust of Rural America Jonah Steinberg, A Garland of Bones: Child Runaways in India Hannah Holleman, Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of “Green” Capitalism Johnhenry Gonzalez, Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti Christian C. Lentz, Contested Territory: Ðiên Biên Phú and the Making of Northwest Vietnam Dan Allosso, Peppermint Kings: A Rural American History

For a complete list of titles in the Yale Agrarian Studies Series, visit yalebooks.com/agrarian.

Bitter Shade The Ecological Challenge of Human Consciousness

Michael R. Dove

new haven and london

Published with assistance from the Council on Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University. Copyright © 2021 by Michael R. Dove. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Epigraph: W. S. Merwin, “The Last One,” from The Essential W. S. Merwin, edited by Michael Wiegers, copyright © 1967 by W. S. Merwin, reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company LLC on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org; and from The Second Four Books of Poems, by W. S. Merwin, copyright © 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1993 by W. S. Merwin, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Ehrhardt MT type by IDS Infotech Ltd. Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-0-300-25174-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) Library of Congress Control Number: 2020938736 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Dedicated to the memory of Jonathan S. Dove and Timothy L. Dove

Well in the morning they cut the last one. Like the others the last one fell into its shadow. It fell into its shadow on the water. They took it away its shadow stayed on the water. W. S. Merwin, “The Last One”

Contents

Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii introduction. Nonhumans and the Paradox of the Human 1 chapter 1. Pig-Humans and Human-Pigs: Perspectivism in Dayak Myth and Ritual 32 chapter 2. Environmental Uncertainty and Augural Contingency 50 chapter 3. A Non-Western Panopticon: The Yogyakarta Sultanate and Merapi Volcano 73 chapter 4. “Bitter Shade”: Signs and Things in Pakistani Agro-Forestry 92 chapter 5. Culture, Agriculture, and Politics of Rice in Java 110 chapter 6. Historic Parting of the Wild from the Civilized in Pakistan 131 chapter 7. Ritual, Myth, and the Rise of “Greedy Rice” 146 chapter 8. Weedy Signs of Intent and Error 166 epilogue. Seeing “Life Itself ” 193

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Appendix: Principles of Augural Interpretation 203 Notes 207 References 237 Credits 279 Index 281

Preface

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or as long as humans have been human, the encounter with the nonhuman has been a source of ontological anxiety—contradicting and challenging notions of what it means to be human, at the same time offering potential insight into how to live in a world of both human and nonhuman actors. This book argues that such encounters offer a way to distance ourselves from parochial and distinctly human concerns, thereby widening our ecological perspective. To escape the human is, in part, to escape conscious self-awareness, which for millennia has been seen as a uniquely human strength, and also a weakness. Building on the work of Gregory Bateson, this book argues that the consciousness that makes humans distinctive also hinders our ability to understand and live well within the broader ecological webs that sustain us. Such ecological insight depends upon distancing ourselves from narrow, goal-directed, conscious, purposive thinking. The aim of the book is to demonstrate various traditions of thought that escape the conscious purpose of human actors and thereby achieve some measure of ecological insight. Gregory Bateson was one of the most influential modern commentators on the wide incapacity of modern society to cope intelligently and sustainably with the environment. He called this disability a “curious twist” in human cognition that blinds us to the reality of our own environment, as described in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972:434): “On the one hand, we have the systemic nature of the individual human being, the systemic nature of the culture in which he lives, and the systemic nature of the

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biological, ecological systems around him; and, on the other hand, the curious twist in the systemic nature of the individual man whereby consciousness is, almost of necessity, blinded to the systemic nature of the man himself.” Bateson viewed human consciousness as a sort of “curse,” an assessment that runs against the grain of centuries of thinking, dating back to the classical era, lauding consciousness as the distinguishing mark of human identity. But he also identifies a number of dimensions of human conduct that appear to be less susceptible to this curse, including religion, music, the arts, and so on. That is, Bateson suggests that humanity evolved with a self-destructive linear consciousness and with a less conscious, nonlinear capacity to mitigate this destruction. Integral to this latter capacity is something that we might generally gloss as thinking of things as other than they are. This book draws on case studies from South Asia and Southeast Asia— Pakistan and Indonesia—to show how a variety of local resource management practices and associated systems of knowledge “sidestep” human consciousness. Common to all of them are three related principles: perspectivism (seeing oneself from outside oneself); metamorphosis (becoming something that one is not); and mimesis (copying something that one is not). This search for the perspective afforded by distance is graphically illustrated in the Bornean folktale with which I begin the introduction to this volume. In this tale, a hunter follows a wounded pig into the forest and eventually comes to the village of the pigs, where pigs live a life that appears to the hunter and to the pigs themselves to be just like that of humans. Eventually the hunter leaves the pig village and returns to his own world, aware, first, that he had been in the world of the pigs and, second, that what he perceives as pigs in his world are human-like subjects in their own. His travel between human and pig worlds is a perfect illustration of the age-old human effort to investigate the perspective of the nonhuman and, thereby, interrogate what human-ness means. This Bornean tale exemplifies how many traditional, non-Western societies have grappled with Bateson’s “curious twist,” in this case by leaving the human world for a place from which one can look back upon it. The tale can be read as a folk example of nonhumanist thinking, which pervaded the world long before the current post-human turn in academia. In the subsequent chapter, I continue my analysis of human-pig relationships, focusing on the related Bornean belief that spirits sometimes see humans as wild pigs

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and hunt them. Imagining this peril adds to the tribespeoples’ removed perspective on their everyday reality and decision-making. The central dynamic in these beliefs is a mimetic relationship between human and pig, or self and other. Inherent to this mimesis is both sameness and difference, and it is, precisely for this reason, illuminating. When I first began studying pig-human relations in Borneo nearly fifty years ago, I discussed my findings with the eminent British social anthropologist Raymond Firth, who cited in comparison the example of a society in which it is believed that the excrement of the gods becomes the food of humans, just as the food of humans also becomes excrement. As with the belief that spirits hunt humans as pigs, just as humans hunt pigs themselves, such beliefs turn everyday reality upside down and thereby de-naturalize it. In subsequent chapters in this volume, I examine analogous cases involving relationships between a royal court and its spirit counterpart in Java, and between objects and their shadows in Pakistan. In both cases, the “other” offers a source of insight not otherwise available. In the next two chapters, I examine the mimetic pairs of barbarism versus civilization in Java, as manifested in swidden—commonly but misleadingly known as “slash-and-burn agriculture” or “shifting cultivation”—versus wet rice, or irrigated, agriculture, and civilization versus the wild in the subcontinent in ancient times and modern times. In each case the mimetic “other” is integral to the conception of one’s own identity and reality. In the final pair of chapters, I examine in Indonesia the relation between archaic tubers and modern grains, and the relation between weeds and cultigens. Here, the agronomically disparaged “others” serve to valorize ascendant crops and cropping systems at the same time as they offer a position from which to trouble this ascendancy. In the concluding epilogue, I discuss the mimetic principles that are central to each of these cases and how this mimesis is a source of insight that escapes the “curious twist” that Bateson attributes to human consciousness. The title of this volume, Bitter Shade, comes from one of the most unexpected examples of a mimetic relationship, that between an object and its shadow (chapter 4). My study of it began with an interview that I had with a farmer in Pakistan’s Punjab province, who, when describing the impact of a Persian lilac tree (Melia azedarach L.) on proximate food crops, explained that it has “bitter shade.” My subsequent study of this domain of Pakistani farmer knowledge revealed a complex body of beliefs regarding trees and shade, objects and shadows. Scrutiny of the difference between objects and

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shadows is, in fact, an age-old pedagogical device, at least as old as Plato’s cave of shadows. It is not just the separation between object and shadow, but the difference between them, which affords a unique perspective on the object. The study of shadow is a way of distancing oneself from the object, a way of seeing it from afar, a type of perspectivism. It is a way of escaping from and troubling the immediate, proximate, and matter-of-fact apprehension of reality that Bateson saw as otherwise so constraining. I situate this study within two vibrant and related academic currents: the “ontological turn” and the “animal turn.” Work in these fields has many implications for our understanding of the world, one of which is methodological. Thus, Martin Holbraad and Morten Pedersen (2017:ix–x) maintain that the ontological turn is fundamentally concerned not with the “ ‘really real’ nature of the world,” but rather with the “technology of ethnographic description”; and Alan Smart (2014:14) suggests that multispecies ethnography, in the “animal turn,” heralds a return to fine-grained, materialistic research and writing: “An insistence on the utility of fieldwork in illuminating the interaction between different species links us back to the pre-postmodern moment in anthropology when animals and plants were central elements of ethnographic research, when cattle, coral gardens, rice cultivation, and so on were thoroughly embedded and attended to in almost every major anthropological monograph.” There is much in the current volume on cattle, gardens, and rice. The book brings to bear on these topics a wide range of data, from ethnography, surveys, the chronicles of royal courts, ancient literary texts, and contemporary media accounts. These data are gathered from very different ethnographic regions—inner and outer Indonesia, and South Asia and Southeast Asia—that nonetheless share with each other a deep history, which makes for nuanced and compelling comparisons. The societies studied are not radically different “others,” presented as foils to Western modes of being: they have been involved in complicated relations with global and state actors for centuries, and their ways of thinking are developed with and against these realities. In most cases, indeed, their ways of thinking, including about themselves, are contested by superordinate authorities. In consequence, a contest over ontology is central to the everyday lived experience of the community. Such communities, especially if they are politically or culturally marginal, are acutely aware of how they are seen by others—which is a quintessential perspectivist stance.

Acknowledgments

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he research and writing that contributed to this volume was supported by the National Science Foundation; the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations; the Winrock Institute, the East-West Center; the US Agency for International Development; and Yale University. The work in Indonesia was supported by Gadjah Mada University and the Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia (Indonesian Institute of Sciences); and the work in Pakistan was supported by the Inspector General of Forests. Earlier analyses of some of the material in this volume were published as noted in the credits at the back of the book. Much of the material in this volume was developed, presented, and discussed in my advanced seminar in Yale’s School of the Environment, “Disaster, Degradation, Dystopia: Social Science Approaches to Environmental Perturbation and Change,” during the spring semesters of 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2019. The students in these classes were wonderful interlocutors for my efforts to develop the themes in this book. I have been ably assisted in my library research for this volume by several exceptional research assistants: Paul Burow, Evan Singer, and Jenna Musco. With administrative and financial matters, I have relied upon the industry of my administrative assistant, Julie Cohen. For meticulous preparation of figures and tables, patient liaising with Yale University Press, and close-grained copyediting, I am indebted to Heather Salome, Elizabeth Sylvia, and Kate Davis, respectively. Finally, I am indebted to Jean E. Thomson Black and James C. Scott for their sterling direction of the Yale

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Agrarian Studies Series at Yale University Press and for their generous invitation to publish, again, in it. None of the aforementioned people or organizations necessarily agree with anything said in this volume, however, for which I am alone responsible.

Bitter Shade

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Introduction Nonhumans and the Paradox of the Human

The Journey to the Pig Village There is a body of myth in Borneo concerning travel between the world of humans and the world of pigs.1 The common elements in these myths are as follows:2 A man finds that wild pigs are raiding his swidden, so he lies in wait and wounds one of the raiding pigs with his spear. He tracks the wounded pig through the forest until he comes to a strange longhouse, whose chief is seriously ill. The hunter realizes that the chief is really the wounded pig—he can see his spear still embedded in the chief, but the pig villagers cannot—so he is able to cure the chief by pulling out the spear and is rewarded with the hand of the chief ’s daughter in marriage.3 The chief ’s daughter bears the human hunter a child and also teaches him how to divine the future by reading pigs’ livers, and then he decides to return to his own human world.4 A number of the inhabitants of the pig village accompany him, but when they cross the magic pool or stream between the human and pig worlds, they change back to pig form. The hunter returns to his world without mishap, but the pig villagers accompanying him are seen as pigs and so killed by the hunter’s fellow villagers.

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These myths, regarding the different ontological worlds of humans and nonhumans, resonate with some of the most important theoretical developments today in anthropology and the other social sciences and humanities— the “ontological turn” and the “animal turn.” Beginning several decades ago, there was an efflorescence of anthropological studies of animals, as reviews of the burgeoning field show.5 Most of these were studies of humananimal relations and came to be called multi-species ethnography.6 At the same time, related scholarship began to be carried out that focused not on the relations between humans and nonhumans but on the ontological gulf between them, and this work came to be often called “post-humanist” or “ontological studies.”7 Philippe Descola (2013:xviii) writes, “Our object must be to make it clear that the project of understanding the relations that human beings establish between one another and with nonhumans cannot be based upon a cosmology and an ontology that are as closely bound as ours are to one particular context. To this end, we need first to show that the opposition between nature and culture is not as universal as it is claimed to be.” The Bornean Dayak myths of travel between human and animal worlds can be interpreted as indigenous contributions to this new scholarship, regarding the challenges, perils, and rewards of travel between human and nonhuman worlds.8 The Dayak myths speak to the challenge of efforts to exit human ontology and enter the ontology of nonhumans. The Dayak perspective is not, strictly speaking, a post-humanist one. The Dayak and other societies to be discussed in this volume have been involved in complex relations with state and global powers for centuries, if not millennia, but they have generally not had to deal directly with the problems posed by humanistic intellectual tradition in western Europe and North America. For this same reason, however, their experience offers a unique perspective on the problems of humanism. Whereas work in the ontological turn tends to focus on radical difference, and work in the animal turn focuses on how relations take place in spite of this difference, there is considerable overlap between the two fields.9 In either case, whereas some scholars insist that their purpose is to investigate nonhuman worlds, most, in keeping with millennia of thought, more modestly assert that the purpose in thinking about the nonhuman is to better think about what it means to be human.10 Eduardo Kohn (2013) writes that seeing the human from beyond the human does not merely “destabilize the taken for granted,” it can address a fundamental quandary of being human. He puts the problem as follows: “The self is always partially invisible

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to oneself in the sense that visibility requires objectification—secondness— and secondness misses something crucial about what a living self is.” Something is missed, Kohn argues, because of an inherent paradox in human cognition, which post-human studies alone can address: “An ethnographic focus not just on humans or only on animals but also on how humans and animals relate breaks open the circular closure that otherwise confines us when we seek to understand the distinctively human by means of that which is distinctive to humans.” In short, Kohn questions the validity of a study of the human by strictly human means.11 One of the foremost studies of this quandary in the modern era comes from Gregory Bateson, whose work is widely cited within the ontological and animal turns.12 Tim Ingold (2000:3) attributes his influential book The Perception of the Environment partly to Bateson’s insistence that the mind “is not limited by the skin.” In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, and also Mind and Nature, Bateson argued for a non-Cartesian study of the mind as something that exists neither in the head nor out there in the world, but rather in the relationship between the brain and world—hence the titles of these works.13 The obstacle in this relationship is the individual human consciousness, which was the focus of much of Bateson’s work: “A question of great scientific interest and perhaps grave importance is whether the information processed through consciousness is adequate and appropriate for the task of human adaptation. It may well be that consciousness contains systemic distortions of view which, when implemented by modern technology, become destructive of the balances between man, his society and his ecosystem.” Bateson distinguished consciousness from mind, seeing it as more limited because more linear and purposive: “If consciousness has feedback upon the remainder of mind, and if consciousness deals only with a skewed sample of the events of the total mind, then there must exist a systematic (that is, nonrandom) difference between the conscious views of self and the world, and the true nature of self and the world. . . . The cybernetic nature of self and the world tends to be imperceptible to consciousness, insofar as the contents of the ‘screen’ of consciousness are determined by considerations of purpose.” In particular, and damningly, there is a “curious twist” in the systemic nature of the human consciousness that necessarily blinds it to the systemic nature of the human himself or herself.14 This “curious twist” is the paradox, and curse, of human consciousness: it cannot comprehend itself.15 Roger Keesing (1974:371) wrote in a review of Steps to an Ecology of Mind shortly after its publication,

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“Consciousness and purposiveness are seen by Bateson as an evolutionary Pandora’s Box that, once opened, gave man power at the potential expense of wisdom. For rational thought is by its nature linear, selective, and distorting of the systemic connectedness of nature. Our ecological crisis is in part the culmination of this evolutionary drama.” Bateson impugns our faith in conscious purpose, the jewel in the crown of modern technological development, driven by his belief that the curse of consciousness was responsible for the modern environmental crisis.16 Writing just two years after the first Earth Day in 1970, Bateson (G. 1972:446) concluded that “Conscious man is now fully able to wreck himself and that environment—with the very best of conscious intentions.” Roy A. Rappaport (1984) famously applied Bateson’s work to show how a ritual system in Papua New Guinea maintained an ecological equilibrium among people, plants, and pigs. Rappaport argued that this equilibriummaintaining operation was not “cognized,” because consciousness was not up to the task of comprehending such ecological complexity. Gillison (2001:296) writes, “Rappaport treats consciousness as a malady for which ritual regulation is the cure in egalitarian societies.” Rappaport, following Bateson, recognizes the existence of a unique human ability to develop conscious designs for interacting with the world; but with Bateson he sees this as at least partly a weakness, not a strength. Both see the linear, deterministic structure that characterizes conscious design as at odds with reality. Bateson (G. 1972:445) warns, “If the total mind and the outer world do not, in general, have this lineal structure, then by forcing this structure upon them, we become blind to the cybernetic circularities of the self and the external world.” Rappaport did not offer a compelling answer to the question, How could a system of ritual regulation like the one he studied come into being? J. Stephen Lansing (1991, 2006) provides one of the most thorough attempts to answer this question in his study of inter-household and inter-community coordination of rice irrigation in Bali. There is an inherent conflict between the need to stagger rice planting and irrigating to minimize competition for scarce water, on the one hand, and on the other hand the need to synchronize farmer schedules to spread pest loads and thus predation as thinly as possible across the agricultural landscape. Lansing argues that the principles of this management system, embedded in community organizations and water temples, are not imposed from on high but are developed from the bottom up—which he terms “emergent complexity.” This management system is

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not the product of any single human mind or group of minds, seemingly evading Bateson’s paradox; which is perhaps illustrated by the fact that when green-revolution development planners unilaterally imposed a new management system, the whole agricultural system collapsed. The wider question here—how to distance ourselves from experience in order to make sense of it—has occupied scholars since the dawn of the Enlightenment. Bateson (G. 1972:453, 481) frequently refers to Immanuel Kant on the inherent limits of the human view of the limitless world. Kant (1781), who argued that we cannot draw on experience to understand experience, characterized the Enlightenment as affording a “way out” of this conundrum. In an essay in 1971, Michel Foucault identified this, essentially, as his own project: “What I am trying to do is grasp the implicit systems which determine our most familiar behaviour without our knowing it. I am trying to find their origin, to show their formation, the constraint they impose upon us; I am therefore trying to place myself at a distance from them and to show how one could escape.” But over a decade later, in appraising Kant and the Enlightenment, Foucault (1984:47) is more frank about the challenge: “It is true that we have to give up hope of ever acceding to a point of view that could give us access to any complete and definitive knowledge of what may constitute our historical limits. And from this point of view the theoretical and practical experience that we have of our limits and of the possibility of moving beyond them is always limited and determined; thus we are always in the position of beginning again.” Anthropology has been a part of this Enlightenment project; its own “way out” has traditionally involved cross-cultural study, a traversing of ontological distance and worlds, being “there” in another culture as opposed to “here” in our own—with the same goal of trying to attain an otherwise elusive perspective. Descola (2013:4–5) writes, “The innermost convictions that an anthropologist forges regarding the nature of social life and the human condition often result from a very particular ethnographic experience acquired while living among a few thousand individuals who have managed to instill in him doubts so deep concerning what he had previously taken for granted that his entire energy is then devoted to analyzing them in systematic fashion.” Michel Foucault (1984:49) characterizes the work of Kant and other Enlightenment scholars as especially concerned with the idea of human beings as subjects: “How are we constituted as subjects of our own knowledge? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power

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relations? How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions?” The concept of the self as subject has long been associated with what it means to be conscious, or self-conscious. It has long been thought, that is, that to be conscious means being conscious of oneself, as distinct from others. In the fourth century b.c.e., Aristotle defined human consciousness in terms of the ability to distinguish between self and other, an ability that is conferred by possession of language, which he saw as a uniquely human trait. As he wrote in Politics, in lines much quoted in the contemporary post-humanist literature, “Nature does nothing in vain; and man alone among the animals has speech. The voice indeed indicates the painful or pleasant, and hence is present in other animals as well; for their nature has come this far, that they have a perception of the painful and pleasant and signal these things to each other. But speech serves to reveal the advantageous and the harmful, and hence also the just and the unjust. For it is peculiar to man as compared to the other animals that he alone has a perception of good and bad and just and unjust and the other things of this sort; and community in these things is what makes a household and a city.”17 Thus, humans are distinguished by possession of language (logos), which enables the drawing of distinctions between good and bad, which lies at the heart of the distinction between human and nonhuman. This marked a turning point in classical thought, as humans and nonhumans— as in the Homerian epics—were previously seen to be more alike than different. Two millennia later, when Carl Linnaeus sought to classify humans visà-vis all other living things, in his Systema Naturae (1735), another work that figures prominently in the post-humanist literature, Aristotle’s point on consciousness of self is largely preserved.18 Thus, Linnaeus placed humans among other primates except for the capacity of humans to recognize themselves. His terminology for humans, Homo sapiens, literally means “man the knowing”; and by citing nosce te ipsum, “know yourself,” as the identifying characteristic of Homo sapiens, Linnaeus makes clear that what he is referring to is self-knowledge. Giorgio Agamben (2004:25–26) writes, “An analysis of the Introitus that opens the Systema leaves no doubt about the sense Linnaeus attributes to his maxim: man has no specific identity other than the ability to recognize himself. Yet to define the human not through any nota characteristica, but rather through his self-knowledge, means that man is the being which recognizes itself as such, that man is the animal that must recognize itself as human to be human.” The implication in

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Linnaeus, therefore, is that nonhumans cannot know themselves—as selves versus others—because they are not conscious. Within this Western intellectual tradition, there is a long history of animals playing a key role in the conception of the human self, in answering the question, Who or what are we? Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1836:361) wrote, S’il n’existoit point d’animaux, la nature de l’homme seroit encore plus incompréhensible (If animals did not exist, the nature of man would be even more incomprehensible). For this reason, Agamben suggests, discussion of the nature of human versus nonhuman is central to practically all intellectual inquiries: “It is as if determining the border between human and animal were not just one question among many discussed by philosophers and theologians, scientists and politicians, but rather a fundamental meta-physico-political operation in which alone something like ‘man’ can be decided upon and produced. . . . Perhaps not only theology and philosophy but also politics, ethics, and jurisprudence are drawn and suspended in the difference between man and animal.” Agamben, joining with Foucault (1997), sees discussion of this difference as central to modern biopolitics: “In our culture, the decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict, is that between the animality and the humanity of man. That is to say, in its origin Western politics is also biopolitics.”19 The role played by animals in some of the most arcane intellectual discussions is illustrated by the respective cats of Schrödinger and Derrida. The former, known throughout science as Schrödinger’s cat, was the creation of the Nobel Prize–winning Austrian physicist Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger. As a so-called “thought experiment” in quantum mechanics, Schrödinger imagines a cat placed in a sealed box with a source of radiation and a flask of poison, so arranged that the act of observing the cat determines whether it is alive or dead.20 Jacques Derrida turns the tables on both the cat and observer: his work from 2008, The Animal That Therefore I Am, begins with him contemplating his own naked body in front of the gaze of his pet cat, who in this case thus is the observer, not the observed. The interaction between the naked human and the cat—both unclothed— leads Derrida to suggest that animals do not know that they are naked, whereas Derrida does, and actually feels embarrassed even in front of his cat, and thus, he asserts, animals cannot be “naked” in the same way that humans can. To be aware of one’s own nakedness is to be self-conscious, and so the case of Derrida’s cat raises the question of consciousness as a human versus animal attribute. Derrida (2008:51) makes clear, however, that

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the cat is important for what it reflects back to him, asking, “Cannot this cat also be, deep within her eyes, my primary mirror?” Multi-species ethnography, in contrast, strives to be more than this: S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich (2010:552) write, “No longer, it seems, were animals simply ‘windows and mirrors’ . . . into and of symbolic concerns.” Consciousness and the Nonhuman Derrida’s work, like most of the work in the long intellectual tradition of using the nonhuman as a foil to think about the human, does not delve deeply into the animal “other.” Donna J. Haraway (2007:20) writes of his case, “With his cat, Derrida failed a simple obligation of companion species; he did not become curious about what the cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking, or perhaps making available to him in looking back at him that morning.” But perhaps Haraway is overly critical, for Derrida (2008:13) actually proposes a Linnaean “taxonomy of the point of view of animals,” after writing, “The pussycat follows me when I wake up, into the bathroom, asking for her breakfast, but she demands to leave that said bathroom as soon as it (or she) sees me naked, ready for everything and resolved to make her wait.” We might compare Derrida with Bateson (G. 2002:109), who also writes about his cat and is more obviously interested in its internal state: In front of me on the table is a sleeping cat. While I was dictating the last hundred words, the cat changed her position. She was sleeping on her right side, her head pointing more or less away from me, her ears in a position that did not suggest to me alertness, eyes closed, front feet curled up—a familiar arrangement of the body of a cat. While I spoke and, indeed, was watching the cat for behavior, the head turned toward me, the eyes remained closed, respiration changed a little, the ears moved into a half alert position; and it appeared, rightly or wrongly, that the cat was now still asleep but aware of my existence and aware, perhaps, that she was a part of the dictated material. This increase of attention happened before the cat was mentioned, that is, before I began to dictate the present paragraph. Now, with the cat fully mentioned, the head has gone down, the nose is between the front legs, the ears have stopped being alert. She has decided that her involvement in the conversation does not matter.

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Bateson then glosses this sequence in a very Derridean way as “manwatching-man’s-watching-cat-watching-man” (ibid.). In a defining moment of the Enlightenment, René Descartes drew a line between nature and culture, between matter and mind—the repudiation of which is a major point of departure for post-humanist scholarship.21 Descartes’s line actually facilitated the “way out” sought by Kant, since it created a conceptual space outside human experience from which to stand and look back at human experience; but it was based on a very definitive and influential line between human and animal. Descartes took special pains to differentiate the responsive behavior of animals from that of humans; the latter being guided by soul, conscience, and consciousness, and the former being guided by bodily mechanisms that he likened to those of machines. Most infamously, Descartes is widely quoted as saying that the cries of animals in their suffering mean “nothing more than the creaking of a wheel.” What he actually wrote in his Discourse on Method was as follows: “For we can indeed conceive of a machine so made that it utters words, and even that it utters words in connection with bodily actions that will cause some change in its organs—for example, if we touch it in a certain spot, it asks what we want to say to it, and if in another, it cries out that we are hurting it, and the like—but not that it arranges words in different ways to reply to the meaning of all that is said in its presence, as even the dullest men can do.” And further: “If there were such machines as had the organs and the shape of an ape, or some other animal without reason, we would have no way of recognizing that they were not in every way of the same nature as these animals; whereas if there were machines that resembled our bodies and imitated our actions as much as is morally possible, we would always have two very certain means of recognizing that they were not for all that true men.”22 The “two very certain means” referred to are lack of speech for communication and lack of the ability made possible by reason to act in diverse and novel circumstances. For Descartes, the cries of animals— which he encountered in the course of his own laboratory experiments on them—were of no consequence, because he regarded them as mechanicallike in origin. They did not signify the experience of pain, because he thought the animals were not self-aware, were not conscious.23 The Cartesian stance was troubled by some of the pioneering work in biology in the nineteenth century. Charles Darwin, in his Notebooks (1836–

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1844) and his The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), argued for the similarity between humans and animals. Around the same time, one of the founders of modern anthropology, Lewis Henry Morgan, wrote The American Beaver and His Works (1868), which extolled the intelligence of the beaver.24 Such work drew a riposte from Karl Marx (1990:284), who insisted that the work of beavers and other creatures at which we might marvel—like spiders and bees—do not show the mental planning that is characteristic of humans: “A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax.” That is, whereas bees can have designs—for building hives, for example—they cannot think about these designs the way a human can; it is consciousness that differentiates the two. The question of the self-consciousness of humans versus animals has dogged scholarship to the present day. Jacques Lacan (1977:305) elegantly restated the question in terms of capacity for pretense but not pretense of pretense: “An animal does not pretend to pretend. He does not make tracks whose deception lies in the fact that they will be taken as false, while being in fact true ones, ones, that is, that indicate his true trail. Nor does an animal cover up its tracks, which would be tantamount to making itself the subject of the signifier.”25 Derrida (2008:136) takes issue with Lacan’s position that the animal cannot do these things—he dedicates chapter 3 of his 2008 work to Lacan—but he does so on the novel grounds that neither can a human do these things: thus, “In this regard the human no more has the power to cover its tracks than does the so-called ‘animal.’ Radically to erase its traces.” Derrida cites as pivotal to his thinking about animals Jeremy Bentham’s famous question, cited by many post-humanist scholars and animal rights advocates, “Can they suffer?” This line comes at the end of a remarkable passage drawing a parallel between the rights of oppressed humans and the rights of animals:26 The day may come when the rest of animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the

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termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Haraway faults Derrida for ignoring the question whether knowledge of animals “outside the writing technologies” is possible, concluding, “Leaving this query unasked, he [Derrida] had nowhere else to go with his keen recognition of the gaze of his cat than to Jeremy Bentham’s question.” She deems that less important than the questions, “Can animals play? Or work? And even, can I learn to play with this cat? Can I, the philosopher, respond to an invitation or recognize one when it is offered?”27 But Derrida maintains that “the form of this question [of Bentham’s] changes everything.” It amounts to asking, “Can they not be able” to suffer, which is a position of nonpower and thus vulnerability.28 Little remarked in academic commentary on Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am is the fact that he discusses, and reproduces in its entirety in the notes section, the Universal Declaration of Animal Rights (1989) from the International League of Animal Rights.29 Although Laura A. Ogden, Billy Hall, and Kimiko Tanita (2013:8) maintain that “the animal welfare and rights movements in the United States and Europe have propelled the animal turn in the academy, and multi-species ethnography more specifically,” these movements receive relatively little attention in the posthumanist literature.30 The “South American Primitive,” largely referring to the indigenous tribes of the Amazon, receives far more attention than legislation to protect chimpanzees in North America, for example.31 Scholarly inattention to animal welfare and rights issues is curious, since the question of animal consciousness is central to the projects of both post-humanist scholars and rights activists: Bentham’s question—Do they suffer?—is really the question, Do they have consciousness? Bentham’s question is about more than animal suffering, therefore, it is about whether humans have not just a monopoly on suffering but a monopoly on consciousness. There is an emerging literature on these questions regarding the nonhuman. Scholars are asking how animals feel; they are asking about animal

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self-recognition; they are ascribing a capacity for self-consciousness to animals that was not heretofore recognized; and they are asking questions about animal agency.32 Scholars are reappraising the intellectual capacity of some animals and asking what human biases have gotten in the way of appreciating this capacity and how it can best be studied.33 For example, Ingold (1988), following Michel de Montaigne (1993), criticizes the premise not that animals are less conscious, but that humans are more conscious.34 In a study much cited in the post-humanist literature, “What is it like to be a bat,” the philosopher Thomas Nagel asserts that “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism. We may call this the subjective character of experience.” He assumes that bats do have conscious experience, which means that, indeed, “there is something that it is like to be a bat.” Because of differences in our perceptual biology—for example, humans do not have sonar—however, we can imagine “what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves” but not “what it is like for a bat to be a bat.”35 The challenge, Nagel concludes, is to develop a “new method–an objective phenomenology,” whose “goal would be to describe, at least in part, the subjective character of experiences in a form comprehensible to beings incapable of having those experiences.”36 Although anthropologists like Signe Howell (1996b) believe that the historic culture-boundedness of concepts of nature and culture makes such description impossible, many posthumanist scholars have taken up this challenge. A pioneering and today heavily cited contribution to such a phenomenology was Jakob von Uexküll’s A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, first published in 1934. Uexküll, based on his studies of ticks and other insects and sea creatures, argued that every organism has its own umwelt—in his “Translator’s Introduction,” Joseph D. O’Neil (Uexküll 2010:35) calls this “environment”—its own perceptual world, which is unique to it, but which is susceptible to our study. Uexküll positions his work as a direct challenge to Descartes’s mechanical vision of the nonhuman. Thus, on the first page and in the first line of his text, Uexküll (ibid.:45) describes the attack of a tick on his prey, and then states: “We ask a simple question: Is the tick a machine or a machine operator? Is it a mere object or a subject?” His concept of the nonhuman umwelt and subjectivity and his interest in its implications for human subjectivity are extremely influential in post-humanist scholarship. In The Open, from 2004, Agamben titles chapter 11 “Tick,” in celebration of Uexküll’s favorite subject.37

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One of the contemporary works that comes closest to matching Uexküll’s fine-grained analysis of the nonhuman umwelt is Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think (2013). Although he less directly takes on Descartes than does Uexküll, Kohn believes that an anthropology beyond the human must move beyond Cartesian divides: “The most productive way to overcome this dualism is not to do away with representation, or simply project human kinds of representation elsewhere, but to radically rethink what it is that we take representation to be. This involves reconsidering who in this world represents, as well as what it is that counts as representation.” Kohn believes that human and nonhuman alike are engaged in representation and that both depend upon semiosis, the creation and interpretation of signs: “What we share with nonhuman living creatures, then, is not our embodiment, as certain strains of phenomenological approaches would hold, but the fact that we all live with, and through, signs.” Semiosis permeates and constitutes the biotic world, which makes multi-species relations both possible and comprehensible.38 His study of the way that humans and nonhumans alike depend upon signs in the rain forest of Ecuador is an illuminating example of an effort to get at nonhuman thought and so trouble the divide between human and nonhuman. These studies break decisively with past work in not interpreting multi-species relations as analogues of human relations.39 Work in the ontological turn and multi-species ethnography has focused largely on animals. Kay E. Lewis-Jones (2016:1) writes, “Plants have all too often been relegated to the margins—their diversity and vitality obscured within generic terms such as ‘habitat,’ ‘landscape,’ or ‘agriculture.’ ” The implication is that plants are too far removed from us to trouble our ontology in the same way that animals can. A cat staring at Derrida is disconcerting in a way that a potted geranium is not. This is in keeping with traditional biases in anthropology, which have looked for cultural meaning in fauna but not flora. Raymond Firth (1930–1931, 4:393) wrote, “It is a feature of Polynesian totemism that the natural species concerned are generally animals, either land or marine, and that plants, though occasionally included in the list, never predominate. The reason for this preference for animals, it seems to me, lies in the fact that the behavior of the totem is usually held to give an indication as to the actions or intentions of the god concerned. Plants, because of their immobility, are not of much interest from this point of view, and the

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tendency is then for the more mobile species, endowed with locomotion and versatility of movement, and often other striking characteristics in the matter of shape, color, ferocity, or peculiar cries, to be represented in greater measure in the list of media which serve as outlet for the supernatural beings.” Matthew Hall traces this fauna-versus-flora bias, which is not that of anthropology alone, to the views of Plato and Aristotle: they rendered plants as “radically different” from animals and placed them at the very bottom of the hierarchy of life, where they existed solely for the use of human beings. In contrast, Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus saw plants as “volitional, minded, intentional creatures that clearly demonstrate their own autonomy and purpose in life.”40 The views of Theophrastus were largely lost for two millennia, but some scholars now herald a “plant turn” toward the “vegetative point of view,” even raising questions of plant agency, as part of the wider ontological and animal turns.41 One of the most systematic efforts to describe what this might look like is Roy F. Ellen’s (2016) survey of the field of ethnobotany and its “disjunctions of approach that could arguably be said to be ontological.” Ethnobotany was an exception to the faunal bias. In the formalization of the “ethnoscientific” study of non-Western views of the natural world beginning in the mid-twentieth century, the focus was almost entirely on plants: ethnobotany became hugely important, whereas ethnozoology was almost an afterthought. Early efforts in the “plant turn” include Sarah Ives’s (2014a, 2014b) work on “charismatic plants” and cultural history and identity in South Africa. Kohn’s book How Forests Think has already been mentioned. In one compelling passage, he discusses the impact on a monkey of the noise of a falling palm tree—although his analysis is not really about the tree, nor is the book really about the forest, given that his principal framework for understanding it is the hunt.42 Equally influential is the work of a group of scholars on mushrooms in the Pacific Northwest and East Asia: although, as they take pains to point out, mushrooms are not exactly plants.43 In the mushroom literature, and also in a nascent literature on trees, some scholars are beginning to raise questions about plant communication that may further disrupt the focus on fauna. The title of the much-discussed The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate (2015), by the forester Peter Wohlleben, points toward where this field may be heading, as does Gary P. Nabhan who asks what it means to be a tree, and John Hartigan, Jr., who asks how to interview a plant.44

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Metaphor For much of its history, some of the most important anthropological work on the human-nonhuman divide was prompted by matter-of-fact statements by ethnographic subjects collapsing the distinction. Perhaps the most famous of these is the statement recorded by E. E. Evans-Pritchard among the Nuer of the Sudan that “twins are birds.” This case is cited by Firth (1966:1) when he writes of “statements by some ‘primitive’ people to the effect that certain things can be both themselves and something else,” which are “improbable but apparently firmly held assertions,” but “which still seem to demand explanation, if possible.” Evans-Pritchard concluded that the association by the Nuer of twins with birds “may be regarded as metaphorical,” and metaphors have dominated the framing of these discussions in the years since.45 Even a half century of increasing valorization of indigenous knowledge of the natural environment has not moved anthropologists away from such metaphorical interpretations. Paul Nadasdy writes, based on his own work with native hunters in the North American Arctic and Subarctic, focusing on the conception of hunting as a reciprocal exchange between the hunter and the hunted, “We have tended to treat northern hunters’ conceptions of animals and human—animal relations as ‘cultural constructions,’ implying that they are purely symbolic or metaphorical, rather than real.” He adds, “Very few Euro-American scholars are willing to accept the proposition that animals might qualify as conscious actors capable of engaging in social relations with humans. As a result, Euro-American anthropologists—even those familiar with aboriginal theories of humananimal relations—have been reluctant to expand their own analytic concept of society to include animals, much less sentient spiritually powerful ones. Yet this is precisely what the study of human-animal relations among northern hunting peoples calls for.”46 This tendency to treat hunter-hunted relations as an idiom as opposed to a set of social practices is deeply ingrained.47 Although Ingold (2000:51) agrees with Nadasdy that for northern hunters, “Organisms are not just like persons, they are persons,” Nadasdy (2007:26) claims that Ingold is still unable to completely forgo a metaphoric interpretation of hunter-hunted relations. Nurit Bird-David (1990), who pioneered the study of hunter-gatherer relations with nature as reciprocating, like an ancestor, versus giving, like a parent, also described these views as metaphors.

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Bateson elides this debate—Are prey persons or just like persons?— with his own approach to metaphor, which he illustrates by contrasting two syllogisms. Syllogisms, logical formulas dating back to Aristotle, typically contain a major premise, followed by a minor premise, followed by a conclusion. Bateson (G. 1991:240) first presents what is known as the “syllogism in Barbara”:48 Men die; Socrates is a man; Socrates will die. This is perhaps the most widely cited example of a syllogism: it represents reasoning from the general to the specific, the deduction of the conclusion from the first and second premises. It is correct, logical, valid—but Bateson questions how useful a guide it is in the real world. Against the classical “syllogism in Barbara,” Bateson (ibid.) offers what is known as the “syllogism in grass”: Grass dies; Men die; Men are grass. This second syllogism is not logical; its conclusion is guilty of the fault known as “affirming the consequence”: the category of grass does not contain humans, nor does the category of humans contain grass. Nevertheless, Bateson maintains that the syllogism in grass is a truer guide to the nature of the world. Whereas the distinction between member and category in the syllogism in Barbara holds in language, he argues that it is the metaphoric equivalence of grass and humans in the syllogism in grass—which is Bateson’s quintessential example of a metaphoric relation—that holds for the real world.49 As he writes, “Whether you approve or disapprove of poetry, dream, and psychosis, the generalization remains that biological data make sense—are connected together— by syllogisms in grass. The whole of animal behavior, the whole of repetitive anatomy, and the whole of biological evolution—each of these vast realms is within itself linked together by syllogisms in grass, whether the logicians like it or not.”50 The utility that Bateson claims for the illogical syllogism in grass is reflected in the equally illogical biblical simile (Isaiah 40), “All men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field.” Bateson calls the syllogism in grass an example of “abduction,” following the work of C. S. Peirce. Bateson adopts the term to refer to “the pattern that

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connects,” a “domain that has more to do with the kind of formal, or structural, relations that obtain among seemingly disparate phenomena.”51 That is, abduction refers to similar patterns in dissimilar phenomena or similarity in difference.52 As he writes, “We are so accustomed to the universe in which we live and to our puny methods of thinking about it that we can hardly see that it is, for example, surprising that abduction is possible, that it is possible to describe some event or thing (for example, a man shaving in a mirror) and then to look around the world for other cases to fit the same rules that we devised for our description.”53 Abduction, metaphor, the syllogism in grass— these are Bateson’s principal subjects of study. Indeed, at times he glossed his life-long study of human ecology as the study of the syllogism in grass.54 There is ethnographic evidence that supports the validity of Bateson’s esoteric discussion of syllogisms. Throughout Southeast Asia, the source of the pig-human stories with which I began this introduction, there are strong, traditional ritual proscriptions against certain discursive treatments of animals. This is typically glossed in the ethnographic literature as proscriptions against mockery of animals.55 Specific cases in Borneo include calling an animal an inappropriate name, or attributing inappropriate behavior to an animal, as in saying that lice dance or rats sing.56 Another case from Borneo involves dressing up—as other than itself—a monkey or a dog or other animal.57 Referring to these beliefs, Eva Marie Kershaw and Roger Kershaw (2006:189) suggest that “Borneo societies hold a common ideological position on the dignity of animals at least: that is, as sentient beings entitled not to be ridiculed or rejected by the (seemingly) more intelligent, (on the whole) more powerful, species of homo sapiens.” But what is proscribed is not random hilarity but very specific types of references to nonhumans, which suggests that more is involved than their dignity. Mockery seems to involve some sort of discursive or metaphorical manipulation of animal identity (see my chapter 1). Such proscriptions make sense in societies in which Bateson’s syllogism in grass operates. Many of the traditional societies discussed in this volume hold or once held deeply felt metaphors of converging human-nonhuman identity, premised on a plastic idea of animal identity. Mockery, in contrast, is premised on a static, singular animal identity; it does not work otherwise. If an alternate identity is mockingly constructed for a pig, for example, the pig will no longer be “available” for the metaphor “a person is a pig.” Bateson’s syllogism in grass does not work, thus, if people are mockingly dressed up as grass.

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Perspectivism, Metamorphosis, and Mimesis The idea of achieving insight into the natural world by distancing ourselves from it has figured prominently in much contemporary thinking about the environment. The quintessential example of this involves the distant image of Earth acquired via early space travel. Many of those concerned about environmental degradation hoped that this view of Earth as a small place, all alone in the vastness of space, would heighten consciousness of the need for better environmental stewardship. However, Ingold maintains that the global vision made possible by this distant view of the planet has actually conceptually distanced us from it: “I am suggesting that the notion of the global environment, far from marking humanity’s reintegration into the world, signals the culmination of a process of separation.”58 Paradoxically, Ingold continues, this global vision has made humanity feel less dependent upon the Earth: “It implies that human beings can launch their interventions from a platform above the world, as though they could live on or off the environment, but are not destined to live within it.” Far from providing the solution to Earth’s environmental crisis, Ingold concludes, this global vision of the planet from space has made it more difficult to tackle: “There is good reason to believe . . . that many of these [environmental] problems have their source in that very alienation of humanity from the world of which the notion of the global environment is a conspicuous expression.”59 A different sort of journey away from the self, to attain perspective, is afforded by “perspectivism.” This consists of looking at the world, including our human selves, through the eyes of the nonhuman “other.” The canonical work on perspectivism is by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998:470), based on his analysis of Amazonian society: “Animals and spirits see themselves as humans: they perceive themselves as (or become) anthropomorphic beings when they are in their own houses or villages and they experience their own habits and characteristics in the form of culture—they see their food as human food (jaguars see blood as manioc beer, vultures see the maggots in rotting meat as grilled fish, etc.), they see their bodily attributes (fur, feathers, claws, beaks, etc.) as body decorations or cultural instruments, they see their social system as organized in the same way as human institutions are (with chiefs, shamans, ceremonies, exogamous moieties, etc.).” Perspectivism is based, and this is also Descola’s (2013:129) definition of “animism,” on “the attribution by humans to nonhumans of an interior-

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ity identical to their own.60 Whereas Western science assumes similar external realities but different internal ones for humans versus nonhumans, Viveiros de Castro argues that Amazonian societies assume similar interiorities because they are not hobbled by the Western intellectual tradition of denying consciousness to the nonhuman, and thus they do not divide human and nonhuman worlds. As academic scholarship over the past half century has increasingly questioned the nature-culture divide, our appreciation of an Amazonian cosmology that mixes the two has increased: “Not only would Amerindians put a wide berth between themselves and the Great Cartesian Divide which separated humanity from animality, but their views anticipate the fundamental lessons of ecology which we are only now in a position to assimilate. . . . We stress that they extend such predicates [of humanity] far beyond the frontiers of their own species in a demonstration of “ecosophic” knowledge . . . which we should emulate in as far as limits of our objectivism permit.”61 Viveiros de Castro’s analysis of Amerindian perspectivism has had an enormous impact on post-humanist ethnography—as Lucas Bessire and David Bond (2014:442) write, “The ontological turn, in many ways, is premised on a story about the South American Primitive”—but it has also drawn criticism.62 Bessire and Bond (ibid.:447), for example, question the focus of perspectivist approaches on the exotic: “The resulting awe of alterity holds up only so long as the ground of ontology is kept clean. Coca-Cola cans, shotguns, soccer balls, evangelical icons, petrochemical pollution, trinkets for tourists, and T-shirts from Grand Rapids—to name a few of the things we have encountered in far-flung Indigenous villages—are brushed aside, as the dreams of dogs and chants of elders come to stand in for the most pressing form of material becoming.” To the same end, Paul Kockelman invokes poet Wallace Stevens’s (1923:108–10) poem on human lack of perspective and spiritual poverty in Haddam, Connecticut: O thin men of Haddam, Why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see how the blackbird Walks around the feet Of the women about you? In thereby justifying his own scholarly focus on “non-indigenous domestic fowls” instead of “golden birds” in Guatemala, Kockelman writes, “Anthropologists and critical theorists alike, as well as NGOs and ecotourists, have all

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too often been the ‘thin men of Haddam,’ focused as they are on cock fights and commodities, companion species and the agency of ants, cyborgs and homo sacer, spirits and shamans, symbols and shifters, self-narratives and spectacle, panopticons and penises, endangered avifauna and biodiversity.”63 A number of critics argue that the perspectivist focus on the exotic undermines the capability to grapple with the real issues faced by indigenous peoples.64 Bessire and Bond (2014:446) write, “In such ways, ontological anthropology is incapable of accounting for those disruptive beings and things that travel between ontologies. Today, it is not only pollution but also logging, mining, agriculture, and oil extraction that routinely impinge on the premier sites of ontology.” This has contributed, Alcida Rita Ramos (2012:449) argues, to moving anthropology away from its critical stance toward political-economic hegemonies:65 “There is a subtle reconfiguration of anthropological practice, away from a problem-oriented ethnography to what Matei Candea (2007) celebrates as the ‘bounded field-site’ of ontology. In such ways, the ontological solution to the crisis of critique is to avoid it altogether.” Scholars of such diverse fields as race, sexuality, and disability have argued that the focus on the nonhuman has elided prior and more fundamental questions regarding the “contested and fractional” definition of the human itself (Gossett 2015).66 These critiques notwithstanding, perspectivism—which is a wider phenomenon than the Amazonian case of Viveiros de Castro, albeit currently popularized by his work—opens up the conceptual space of a reverse perspective, which is about not how we see others, but how others see us. Some of the work in perspectivism focuses on how animals view other animals, as in the research by Mary Stoddard and Richard Prum on how birds appear to each other.67 In his pioneering work on spiders and flies, Uexküll (2010:158–59) argues that spiders weave webs that are “a faithful rendering of the primal image of the fly”; it is because the webs are “fly-like” that they can catch flies. By observing the spider observing the fly, thus, we can gain insight into the umwelt of the fly, as well as the spider. Kohn takes this a step further and shows how human beings apply this insight into one animal’s view of another. For example, the Runa of the Ecuadoran Amazon protect their fields from marauding parrots by constructing scarecrows that look not like their own view of the parrots’ main predator, a raptor, but that—by trial and error over many centuries—look like what they imagine the parrots’ view of the raptor to be. Kohn (2013:89) notes that to the extent that these scarecrows are effective, “We can know something of what it is

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like to be a parakeet, and we know this by the effects that our guesses at how parakeets think can have on them.” Sometimes humans take on, in effect, the role of the scarecrow. Rane Willerslev (2004:641) describes how the Siberian elk hunter disguises himself as an elk, focusing not on how the elk appears to him but rather on how he—his mimicry—appears to the elk, through a process of “optical oscillation.”68 Human attention to how we appear to the animal “other” is even more important when the animal in question is not something that we want to eat, but rather something that might want to eat us. Kohn writes, “How other kinds of beings see us matters,” especially if it is a jaguar.69 This matters not only because the jaguar can threaten us, however; it matters because in the return gaze of the jaguar, in this mutual encounter, “We become something new.” Kohn suggests that when we see the natural world through the eyes of forest creatures, “we are stepping out of our bodies into those of other beings, and in doing so, we see a different world from the subjective, I, point of view of another kind of embodiment. We are able, for a moment, to live in a different nature.”70 Similarly, Derrida (2008:12) asks, “What does this bottomless gaze offer to my sight . . . when that truth allows me to see and be seen through the eyes of the other.” And his answer is, “As with every bottomless gaze, as with the eyes of the other, the gaze called ‘animal’ offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human: the unhuman and the ahuman, the ends of man, that is to say, the border crossing from which vantage man dares to announce himself to himself, thereby calling himself by the name that he believes he gives himself ” (ibid.). In short, when we see ourselves through the eyes of the animal other, we not only see “something that it is like to be that organism,” but we are standing in another world and seeing from that perspective the limits of our own world.71 Perspectivist encounters are not limited to human and nonhuman. W. E. B. Du Bois (2018:3) developed the concept of “double consciousness” to describe the way that African Americans have been obliged by American society to attend to the way that they are seen by white people. He writes that American society is “A world which yields him [the African American] no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this doubleconsciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring

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ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” Du Bois is not alone in his assertion that subaltern peoples are often obliged to make a study of the way that they are viewed by superordinate groups; another example is Keith Basso’s (1979) study of Apache knowledge of how they are seen by whites.72 In my own work with the communities discussed in this volume, more than once I was initially greeted by elders saying, “We are stupid, we know nothing, please help us to develop”—which was clearly a prophylactic discourse, informed by past experience with outsiders, designed to anticipate, mimic, and thereby neutralize biased views of villagers. Holbraad and Pedersen (2017:293–94) write, “The politics of ontology is the politics of how persons and things could alter from themselves.” One of the great examples of such alteration in literature, which is cited by a number of contributors to debates in post-humanist, multi-species ethnography, is Franz Kafka’s (2016) short novel written in 1915, The Metamorphosis. The protagonist is a young salesman, Gregor, who oversleeps, wakes up, only to find that he is a bug. The rest of the story is devoted to how he accommodates to his body and how he deals with the horrified reaction of his family, until his eventual demise. This idea of horrific human-to-animal transformation is ancient. It is found in Homer, in which the sorceress Circe turns Odysseus’s men into pigs. It is prominent in Ovid’s (2018) stories of gods turning humans into animals, Metamorphoses—which is sometimes alternately titled Stories of Changing Forms—and is introduced by Ovid with these words: “My intention is to tell of bodies changed to different forms.” In historic times, a widespread example of metamorphosis is the werewolf, which Agamben (1998:104–11) interprets as belief in a “state of exception.” Common today in non-Western societies are beliefs that shamans can traverse the human-nonhuman boundary by changing themselves into animals.73 If perspectivism is a conceptual journey from the world of humans to the world of nonhumans and back, then metamorphosis is a bodily, corporeal journey. It is, as has been said of Kafka’s story, the literalization of a metaphor.74 Kafka’s story illustrates the challenges of this journey. Whereas The Metamorphosis problematizes the human reality of the salesman Gregor, it does not begin to penetrate the nonhuman reality of Gregor-as-bug. Echoing the earlier point by Nagel, Kafka’s story is about what it is like for Gregor to be a bug, but not what it is like for a bug to be a bug. Instead, the animals in this story, as elsewhere in Kafka’s fiction, serve as “mirrors in which the

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human is reflected back to itself in an oppressive and unflattering guise.”75 Kafka makes no attempt to get at the animals’ inner lives; indeed his stories illustrate how elusive such a goal would be. As Margot Norris writes, “In spite of their imaginative reach into the realm of animal ontology, Kafka’s animal fictions do expose limits in human ability to ‘think ourselves into the being of another.’ ” Indeed, Kafka’s writings illustrate the inherent contradiction in using human consciousness to get at the consciousness of the nonhuman: “Kafka’s fictions of the animal oblige us to see how the very vehicle for imagining animal thought is itself untenable, unsuitable, and impossible for the very ‘knowledge’ it is asked to convey.”76 One approach to this contradiction involves a phenomenological study of the animal other. Recognizing the difficulty of accessing animal subjectivity via the human mind, and rejecting lab-based methods—see Uexküll’s (2010:139) disdain of maze-based experiments by American experimental biologists—some scholars believe that the solution is to try to “become the animal,” which has something in common with the earlier-discussed hunting strategies of traditional peoples. Donald R. Griffin (1976) early on proposed using the anthropological technique of participant observation to study animal consciousness; and primatologists like Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Mary Galdikas actually used such techniques in their studies of great apes in Africa and Southeast Asia, work that goes almost unmentioned in the multi-species ethnography literature.77 What is today called “ethnoprimatology” focuses on study of the human-ape interface.78 Seen as radically new are efforts by the artist Thomas Thwaites—GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human, which focuses more on the exteriority of the animal—and the veterinarian Charles Foster—Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide, which focuses more on the animals’ inner lives. Both works attempt a sort of perspectivism through personal immersion: Thwaites tries to get at an animal’s physical experience of the world, and Foster attempts to get at how animals view and think about the world.79 Most metamorphoses—and that of Kafka’s Gregor is the exception that proves the rule—invoke some kind of mimetic relationship between the human and animal involved.80 Any discussion of mimesis begins with Walter Benjamin’s (1978:333) essay “On the Mimetic Faculty,” originally written in 1933, in which he writes, “Nature produces similarities; one need only think of mimicry. The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man’s. His gift for seeing similarity is nothing but a rudiment of the once

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powerful compulsion to become similar and to behave mimetically. There is perhaps not a single one of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a decisive role.” Much of Kohn’s (2013:169) study of the Runa is concerned with mimesis, as in the construction of scarecrows that mimic the parrots’ view of raptors, but also in the way that hunters hunt by “harnessing the forms that attract animals,” much like Uexküll’s spiders. In these and other examples, the Runa must distance themselves from their own vision of reality in order to study and then mimic that of the animal “other.” Michael Taussig’s 1993 work Mimesis and Alterity, which he states was inspired by Benjamin’s essay, focuses on the role that the mimetic faculty played in colonial era encounters between colonizer and colonized.81 Kohn (2013:165) finds a similar explanation for why the infamous system of rubber extraction in the nineteenth-century Amazon was so successful: “The rubber boom economy was able to exist and grow because it united a series of partially overlapping forms, such as predatory chains, plant and animal spatial configurations, and hydrographic networks, by linking the similarities these share. The result was that all these more basic regularities came to be part of an overarching form—an exploitative political-economic structure whose grasp was very difficult to escape.” The vast network of rubber trees, native trappers, middlemen, and coastal barons was mimetic—the term Kohn uses is “isomorphic”—of the natural ecology. Whereas Kohn is interested in the similarities or regularities that underpin mimetic relationships such as this, Taussig is more interested in the “slippage” that is also part of mimesis. Taussig (1993:38) writes, “Sentience takes us outside ourselves” [here paraphrasing Benjamin]—“no proposition could be more fundamental to understanding the visceral bond connecting perceiver to perceived in the operation of mimesis.” Taussig is suggesting that the very similarities and dissimilarities of a mimetic relationship have a distancing effect; they show the “other” in a novel light. Such distancing is central to my interest, in the chapters to follow, in mimetic relations between humans and nonhumans, civilization and barbarism, mundane and divine worlds, and culture and nature. Structure of Volume Kant, as noted earlier, saw the Enlightenment as offering a place to stand from which to objectively view and critically assess modern life. But

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awareness of the ontological limits imposed by our daily lives, and a desire to transcend them, is not confined to Enlightenment-era western Europeans.82 Alf Hornborg (2001:135) writes regarding the studies of perspectivism in the Amazon, “What is remarkable about these cosmologies, from a modern vantage-point, is the extent to which Amazonians have acknowledged the limitations of their own, human powers of perception, and the empathy with which they have imagined other species’ ways of viewing the world.” One of the clearest examples of this acknowledgment, one that is found around the world, is the belief in ritualistic means—shamanistic performances, trances, dreams, and ingestion of psychoactive drugs—to investigate realities beyond the everyday. This is an acknowledgment that without these means, we are trapped by our everyday realities. These ritual means typically involve the nonhuman world—nature, spirits, flora, and fauna. As noted earlier, Western thinkers have long drawn on the nonhuman to think about the nature of the human. Uexküll (2010) carried this a step further, suggesting that the study of the nonhuman umwelt can help us to transcend our own umwelt, to escape our own reality: “Only the knowledge that everything in Nature is created according to its meaning and that all environments are composed into the world-score opens up a path leading out of the confines of one’s own environment. Blowing up our environmental space by millions of light-years does not lift us beyond ourselves, but what certainly does is the knowledge that, beyond our personal environment, the environments of our human and animal brethren are secured in an all-encompassing plan.” Transcending the confines of one’s own environment is part of the agenda of the ontological and animal turns; as Kohn (2013:10) writes, “An anthropology beyond the human is perforce an ontological one. That is, taking nonhumans seriously makes it impossible to confine our anthropological inquiries to an epistemological concern for how it is that humans, at some particular time or in some particular place, go about making sense of them.” Emile Durkheim (1965) famously described the challenge of using our own intellect to study our own intellect as the social determination of concepts. Maurice Bloch (1977:281), summarizing Durkheim’s argument, writes, “If we believe in the social determination of concepts . . . this leaves the actors with no language to talk about their society and so change it, since they can only talk within it.” Bloch (1977) believed that history offers the language to do this; he suggests that the past allows people in the present to

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talk about, to assess, the present.83 In this volume, I regard the nonhuman as playing the same role that history plays for Bloch: it enables us to think about the human in a way that is otherwise impossible. I also grant Bloch’s point on history: the case studies in this volume are as much about the past as the present, and in some cases, as in chapter 7 for example, there is a very explicit consideration of how the past—archaic crops—places the present in perspective. Following this introduction, I begin the book with two chapters that deal directly with perspectivist beliefs and the role played in them by the spirit world. The two case studies both come from Borneo, from the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan, from the Kantu’ Dayak. Chapter 1, “Pig-Humans and Human-Pigs: Perspectivism in Dayak Ritual,” examines the earlier-mentioned body of myths regarding humans and pigs who travel between their respective villages, transform into the “other” in the process, and face attendant dangers as well as rewards. The fragile boundary between human and pig identities is reflected in the traditional belief that spirits may perceive humans as pigs and so hunt and kill them. Dayak address this threat by sacrificing domestic pigs in their stead, the logic of which is underpinned by the shared dualistic natures of humans and pigs: pigs can be both wild and domesticated, and humans can be both their domestic selves and—in the eyes of spirits—wild pigs. Pig-human substitutions and transformations are a form of mimesis. Omens from the spirit world that foretell good or ill events are mimetic, as is the ritual theater by which ill omens are neutralized. Human understanding and strategic manipulation of these mimetic relations is ontological in character, recognizing the existence of multiple realities. Mimesis helps the Dayak to see that the way they view themselves may not be the way others view them; and it depicts awareness of other views— other ontologies—as literally a matter of life or death. The focus of chapter 2, “Environmental Uncertainty and Augural Contingency,” is the omen-taking by which the Dayak ascertain if spirits are seeing them as wild pigs. The Dayak have a complex sign system based on the behavior of jungle birds, which warns them of potentially perilous collisions between their everyday reality and that of the spirits. The context for most Dayak bird augury is agriculture and its success or failure. The environmental variables that determine agricultural success are not empirically linked to any bird omen, nor is the character or heeding of any omen correlated with agricultural outcomes; the meaning of augural signs is thus

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completely arbitrary, like the roll of dice. The history of omen-taking is associated with rice cultivation, in particular its precarity: the uncertainty of rice cultivation is mimetically reflected in the uncertainty of omen-taking. This augural system falls into the ethnographic category of practices like the poison oracle of the Azande of northern Central Africa, a means of constructing contingency as a valuable cultural resource.84 The relationship between Dayak bird omens and the Dayak agricultural environment is mimetic, which is also the focus of the next two chapters of the volume. Chapter 3, “A Non-Western Panopticon: The Yogyakarta Sultanate and Merapi Volcano,” examines an ancient South Asian and Southeast Asian cosmology of rule, based on the “mandala.” According to this concept, earthly harmony is achieved by replicating the macrocosm of the universe in the microcosm of the earthly kingdom. Unexplored in the literature on mandala kingdoms, however, are the implications of this concept for state surveillance. This is illustrated by the Yogyakarta Sultanate in Central Java, which was historically structured along mandala lines. Lying at the foot of Merapi volcano, the lowland court is thought to have a spirit counterpart in the crater of the volcano. Perturbation in the sultanate—political misdeeds, for example—is thought to result in perturbation in the spirit world of the volcano. Belief in this linkage between mundane and spirit worlds is reflected in close surveillance of volcanic activity by the Yogyakarta court and also by the national government. This surveillance calls to mind Bentham’s concept of the panopticon prison. The concept of the mandala and derivative ideas, like that of seeking insight from mountains and mirrors, are—like the panopticon itself—essentially perspectivist in character and give people a valuable perspective on living in a hazardous environment like Merapi volcano. The spirit world on Merapi volcano stands in a mimetic relationship to the everyday world of the Central Javanese, so that what transpires in one also visits the other. Chapter 4, “ ‘Bitter Shade’: Signs and Things in Pakistani Agro-Forestry,” is about a similar mimetic relationship, a relationship between objects and their shadows, between things and their signs. The focus of this chapter is Pakistani farmers’ concept of sayah, which loosely translates as “shade.” The roots of the concept of shade in Western intellectual traditions extends back to Plato’s parable of the cave, the lesson of which pivots on the difference between shadows and reality. The difference between object and shadow has figured prominently in the subsequent historical development of diverse fields ranging from astronomy to child psychology. Pakistani

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farmers conceive of tree shade not as an absence of something, light, but rather as the presence of something—having size, density, temperature, and taste. Knowledge of all of these dimensions of shade is used to manage treecrop interaction, based on humoral principles balancing properties of hot and cold, wet and dry, bitter and sweet. The relation between shadow and tree is mimetic and approximate: it is the character of the tree that is important to interaction with proximate crops; the appearance of the shadow alone can be deceiving. There is an ancient and worldwide theatrical tradition—for example, in shadow-puppet plays—of drawing insight from the slippage between shadow and object, between sign and thing. The difference between shadow and object is another means of attaining perspective on reality through removal from it. The next two chapters continue the discussion of mimetic relationships, focusing on that between the civilized and uncivilized sides of a single social system. The subject of chapter 5, “Culture, Agriculture, and Politics of Rice in Java,” is the cultural-ecological divide between swidden and wetrice fields that has long dominated the Southeast Asian landscape. The region’s two principal systems of food-crop agriculture in the modern era are the cultivation of rice in irrigated fields and the cultivation of rice and diverse other cultigens in forest swiddens. Although dependence on irrigation infrastructure was long thought to lead to the development of the state, the causal arrow was reversed in the case of Java: there, it was the state’s need for an extractable agricultural product, and the dense and sedentary population to produce it, that led to the development of infrastructure for irrigation. Swidden agriculture, which yields higher returns to labor but whose returns are less readily extracted by a centralized political authority, was pushed beyond the boundaries of the lowland states to upland forests. The difference between these two agricultural technologies—swidden and irrigation—in their legibility to the state underpinned a wider cultural differentiation between forested and open lands, upland and lowland, barbarism and civilization. Nonetheless, in some respects the Javanese saw the two as opposite poles in a single overarching cultural-ecological system. The lowland agrarian states saw clearly where their vested interests lay, however, which explains the long history of state deprecation of swiddens and forests and valorization of irrigated rice cultivation and, indeed, of rice itself. The colonial powers were also quick to identify the logic of these agro-ecological systems and insinuate themselves into favorable positions within them. Insight into these agro-ecological systems, whether by colonial or postcolonial

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authorities, serves political ends, which are cloaked in appeals to cultural values. Paradoxically, those with the most encompassing vision of the agricultural landscape also have engaged in the greatest obfuscation of its dynamics. A dualistic system of environmental relations is also the subject of chapter 6, “Historic Parting of the Wild from the Civilized in Pakistan.” This case study involves another dualism, like that of swidden and wet rice, but one so ancient that it has evolved over time. The modern Hindi and Urdu term jangal means “dense forest,” but the ancient Sanskrit term from which it derives, jangala, referred to the arid, open savanna landscape of western India, which was culturally differentiated from the anupa wet forests of eastern India. The jangala was identified in Vedic literature as the ordained land of the Brahman Arya, in contrast to the anupa of the non-Brahman barbarians. The ancient jangala referred to land cleared of forest, whereas the modern jangal refers to uncleared land. There are other differences beyond the vegetative: whereas the jangala encompassed both wild and domestic space, the jangal is strictly the home of the wild; whereas the ancient jangala encompassed all that was civilized, the modern jangal excludes all that is civilized. The jangala encompassed both nature and culture, but the modern jangal is strictly the abode of nature. The encompassing of both wild and domestic within the ancient jangala supports the work of scholars like William Cronon (1996), who see the Western dichotomy between society and wilderness as a product of modernity. Our concepts of nature are neither fixed nor independent of nature: nature and concepts of nature co-evolve— which speaks to Gregory Bateson’s views of the inescapable relationship between nature and culture. The next two chapters delve further into insights afforded by a long temporal perspective, as in the evolution of jangala to jangal. Chapter 7, “Ritual, Myth, and the Rise of ‘Greedy Rice,’ ” focuses on the ritual conservation of archaic cultigens. Contemporary food-crop agriculture in the region is heavily focused on rice. But tribal mythology, supported by archaeological evidence, suggests that much grain cultivation was preceded by the cultivation of tubers, in particular taro. The evidence also suggests that among grains, the cultivation of rice was preceded by the cultivation of non-rice grains, in particular Job’s tears (Coix lacryma-jobi L.) and foxtail millet (Setaria italica [L.] P. Beauvois). Myth and ritual depict this process of agricultural change as a contest, as political in effect; and indeed, the history of the development of rice cultivation—especially irrigated cultivation—cannot be told without

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reference to the rise of central states, which favored rice cultivation as easy to control and tax. State ideologies disparage systems of food-crop production that are less amenable to state control as primitive, as reflected in folk mythology that depicts the earlier forms of cultivation, for example of tubers, as demanding less knowledge. The native mythology and ritual thus represent the terms of a historical contest over rice cultivation that played out over the centuries. The “constitutive absence” of long-gone crops in contemporary myth and ritual affords people a perspective on the present, showing its apparent inevitability as historically contingent (Kohn 2013:24). This exemplifies, as Bateson (G. 1972:446–47) suggests, the capacity for “correctives” like ritual and religion to escape the confines of “conscious purpose.” Agrarian history is also the focus of chapter 8, “Weedy Signs of Intent and Error.” The subjects are two plants that occur in pioneering successions on open land: Imperata cylindrica, a grass, and Chromolaena odorata, a shrub. Farmers regard the two plants as benign or malign depending upon how well they match desired fallow-period vegetative cover: if similar they are welcomed, if dissimilar they are not. Government officials, due to their commitment to plantation agriculture and a general aversion to the practice of leaving land fallow, hold a negative view of both plants, seeing them as “weeds.” Government authorities generally attribute the origins of the two plants to the accidental outcomes of bad native land-use practices, rejecting out of hand the idea that the plants might play a positive role in these practices. For their part, many farmers attribute the origins of Imperata and Chromolaena to intentional, self-interested dissemination by state actors; their view is in effect a political-ecological one. Governments actors take an apolitical view, going to great lengths to assert that there is no divergence in interests between the state and its citizens. The stories regarding the origins of these weedy plants, with the creative license of folktales, afford rural peoples a measure of perspective on and insight into wider environmental processes and transformations. In the epilogue to the volume, “Seeing ‘Life Itself,’ ” I draw some conclusions, beginning with a comparison between Claude Lévi-Strauss’s story of Amazonian natives who drown captives to see if they are human, and my story of hunters who journey to the pig village to probe their own humanity. The latter story is self-reflexive and thus perspectivist in a way the former one is not. Key to this perspectivism is the relationship between sign and thing, which is the subject of much of the material in this volume. These are mimetic relations, in which one thing is similar but not identical to another.

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There is “slippage,” and this becomes a source of insight when comparing the self and the “other.” The mythic journey to the village of the pig people can be compared to the first trip into space and the view of Earth afforded thereby: the space trip does not actually distance us from ourselves as much as the mythic trip does. The journey from human reality to pig reality reprises an ancient “reversal” in roles, from hunter to hunted, which has been an important wellspring of metaphoric thinking. The universal human value of being able to look back at ourselves from a different place was noted by Wittgenstein, who also noted the difficulty of doing so—a dilemma of the human consciousness, which the material in this volume seeks to address.

chapter 1

Pig-Humans and Human-Pigs Perspectivism in Dayak Myth and Ritual “Look at Pork alone. There’s a subject! If you want a subject, look at Pork!” “True, sir. Many a moral for the young . . . might be deduced from that text.” —charles dickens, great expectations

Introduction: Pig Villages and Animal Studies Most studies of human-nonhuman perspectivism have come out of South America; a few have come from other parts of the world, but little has come out of Southeast Asia although there is ample relevant ethnographic material in this region. For example, Southeast Asia is well known for traditional beliefs in human-animal transformations, especially involving humans and tigers.1 This chapter focuses on belief in less well known transformations involving humans and pigs. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987:237) have emphasized the importance of such beliefs to anthropological theory, writing, “We believe in the existence of very special becomings—animal traversing human beings and sweeping them away, affecting the animal no less than the human.” They draw on the pioneering work of Lévi-Strauss, who compiled in his four-volume Mythologiques (1964–1971) a vast amount of South American mythology on this subject. Human-animal transformation is an ancient subject of interest: in my introduction I noted that Ovid places such transformations squarely in the center of human history; and humanpig transformation in particular—involving Odysseus’s men at the hands of the sorceress Circe—figures in the Homeric tales. There is a body of mythology in Borneo, as well as other parts of both insular and mainland Southeast Asia, involving the commingled prehistory of people and pigs, which focuses on their respective transformations—

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from pig to human and human to pig—in one another’s eyes.2 These beliefs are often expressed in the form of a story about a journey between the world of people and the world of pigs, as recounted at the beginning of my introduction. The principles expressed in this story of the journey between worlds are as follows: • the manifest reality of the everyday world of humans tells only part of the story; • this is evident from the existence of other nonhuman worlds; • the worlds of humans and nonhumans are bounded, yet there is a possibility for passing between them; • such passage is perilous but also contains the possibility for the inhabitants of the two worlds to engage in social relations, mutual succor, and enlightenment. The central point of this body of mythology is that the world of the pigs is both same and “other.” Under the right circumstances, wild pigs can appear to humans as humans—and as will be discussed here, under the right circumstances humans can appear to spirits as wild pigs. What are seen as swidden pests in one context are seen in another context as fellow beings— as subjects—with their own lives and needs, who are given succor when needed. The illness of the pig chief results from being hunted by humans, just as human illness results from being hunted by spirits. The worlds of humans and pigs are separate; an ontological boundary lies between them, yet what happens in one can affect what happens in the other. The boundary between human and animal in these myths is thus unstable, porous, mimetic, and complicated—embodying both perils and rewards. Hunting pigs, eating pigs, and fearing pigs—all are powerful ethnic markers in the Indo-Malay region.3 Indeed, makan babi, “eating pork,” is a common and derogatory ethnic label for non-Muslim ethnic minorities in the region. For the Dayak, however, not only do they eat pork but their spirits do so as well, in that they eat humans in the guise of wild pigs. It is significant, therefore, that the characters in some versions of the pig-village myth are Malays and thus Muslims.4 In some of these cases the story encompasses the origin of the pork taboo for such groups,5 and in all cases, the myth asserts a hybrid human-pig ancestor for today’s Muslims. Some scholars have interpreted this as an example of ethnic one-upmanship. But it may be more productive to read these myths as accounts of historical relations between pagan and Muslim communities—namely, between pig-eaters and

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non-pig-eaters—as well as between human and animal communities. As Kershaw and Kershaw (2006:190) write, “Far more fundamental, in the light of intermixing and identity-switching, is the point that animals are raised, in the folk ideology that may be inferred, to an arguable parity of moral status with humans.” The Dayak myths of the journey to the pig village fit into a global tradition of such stories. Regarding northern latitudes, Ingold (2000:123) writes, “A common theme of stories all around the circumpolar North is of how a traveler, having lost his or her bearings in the human world, strays or is lured into the abode of a certain animal, whereupon the latter stands revealed in its inner being. For the traveller, this is a dangerous, indeed potentially fatal predicament. One may never make it back to the company of humankind. . . . The very sight of it casts a pall of uncertainty over his existential status as a human being.” And regarding South America, Viveiros de Castro (1998:483) writes, “The typical ‘supernatural’ situation in an Amerindian world is the meeting in the forest between a man—always on his own—and a being which is seen at first merely as an animal or a person, then reveals itself as a spirit or a dead person and speaks to the man. . . . These encounters can be lethal for the interlocutor who, overpowered by the nonhuman subjectivity, passes over to its side, transforming himself into a being of the same species as the speaker: dead, spirit or animal.” The comments by both Viveiros de Castro and Ingold point to something—which also is central to the Bornean myths—that is often given short shrift in discussions of perspectivism: the journey between human and nonhuman worlds is highly problematic; it is inherently perilous, which is the price of the insight it affords. Julie Velásquez Runk, Chindio Peña Ismare, and Toño Peña Conquista (2019:33) write, “We have witnessed a prominent scientific and almost unquestioned popular discourse on the transformation of people into animals in indigenous ontologies.” Drawing on data on human-nonhuman transformations from the Wounaan of Panama, they question this “ready mutability between human and animal reality” (ibid.). The Bornean case analyzed here similarly points to the exceptional nature of this mutability and the extraordinary circumstances that make it possible. In the mid-twentieth century there were several different efflorescences of work in human-animal studies. First came ethology, the biological study of animal behavior, and the contentious implications of this for the understanding of human behavior, especially aggression, by scholars like Konrad

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Lorenz, Robert Ardrey, Desmond Morris, and Niko Tinbergen.6 For their work in this field, Tinbergen, Lorenz, and Karl von Frisch shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1973. This work clearly influenced Bateson’s (G. 1972) approach to ecological anthropology, which also encompassed work with dolphins.7 A second, distinct area of study, more focused on human-nonhuman relations, was that of pioneering ecological anthropologists like Rappaport (1984) and Marvin Harris (1966), whose respective works on pig-human relations in New Guinea and cow-human relations in India built on earlier work like that of Evans-Pritchard on cattle herding (1940). Their counter-intuitive efforts to show the ecological wisdom of otherwise puzzling ritual practices provoked years of debate. Later and equally influential studies by Clifford Geertz (1973) on cockfighting and Robert Darnton (1984) on cat killing looked for not ecological but cultural insight from exotic or aberrant human-animal relations. The third major cluster of animal studies, all within anthropology, focused on the question of the symbolic versus material dimensions of human beliefs and practices regarding animals—also addressed by Rappaport and Harris—much of it stimulated by LéviStrauss’s (1963) famous assertion that the animals that figure prominently in human belief systems are “good to think” not “good to eat.”8 These studies delved deeply into native systems for classifying animals.9 To illustrate the subjective, contingent nature of classification, many scholars cite the faunal taxonomy that Jorge Luis Borges (1964:103) purported to take from an ancient Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge: “On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into: (a) those that belong to the emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken the flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.”

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Foucault (1973:xv) claims that this single passage from Borges was the inspiration for his pioneering work The Order of Things, crediting it with “breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other.” The literature on human-animal relations in Southeast Asia in particular is robust. Specific to the region is a relevant older literature on natural history, including canonical works by Georg Eberhard Rumphius (2011), Alfred Russel Wallace (2000), and I. H. Burkill (1966). In more recent times, there is historical work on livestock and charismatic fauna, biodiversity conservation, and analyses of folk zoological classification.10 Most of the data for this analysis come from Borneo, with supplementary data on other parts of the region, including Java and the Malay Peninsula. Within Borneo, the focus is on the Dayak tribespeople, and on one tribal grouping in particular, the Ibanic-speaking Kantu’ of West Kalimantan (fig. 1.1). Most Dayak communities have today, and have had for centuries, composite economies. Throughout most of the twentieth century, these economies consisted of swidden-based production for subsistence purposes, coupled with commodity production or forest-product gathering for market. The primary subsistence crops were dry rice and a wide variety of non-rice cultigens, including a second cereal, maize, several different cucurbits, and a number of different tubers, including cassava and sweet potato and, to a lesser extent, taro. Rice was and is the primary starch staple and the focus of each meal, supplemented with one or more of the non-rice cultigens as a relish. When the rice crop failed to meet subsistence requirements (as it might several years in ten), the market crops were sold to buy rice; if that failed, then cassava and other tubers became the famine-period starch staple. Subsistence needs aside, a number of additional plants, including Job’s tears and foxtail millet, were cultivated in small amounts primarily for ritual purposes (see my chapter 7). This was not a “primordial” system of cultivation. This farming system, though fitting the traditional imagined archetype for upland Southeast Asia, was but one moment in a long sequence of changes. In the nineteenth century the Dayak got caught up in the exploitation of the native rubbers for the global trade.11 Then at the beginning of the twentieth century, they adopted the exotic Para rubber (Hevea brasiliensis). In the mid-twentieth

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Fig. 1.1. Territory of the Kantu’ in West Kalimantan, Indonesia.

century, cultivation of an old commodity in the region, black pepper, was introduced into the Bornean interior and vied for a time with Para rubber. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, Suharto’s “New Order” military dictatorship introduced industrial logging and transmigration into the interior on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Even this impact was subsequently eclipsed at the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the

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twenty-first by the explosion in cultivation of oil palm—both on huge estates and also smallholdings—which resulted in massive changes, especially for the land-extensive swidden cultivation. I will organize the rest of the analysis in this chapter as follows: I will begin with a discussion of the belief that the spirits see humans as wild pigs, a threatening prospect that is addressed by ritual sacrifice to the spirits of pigs in place of people. The appropriateness of pigs for this purpose is due to their dualistic nature: they can be wild or domesticated, just as people can have alternate natures—humans in their own eyes or wild pigs in the eyes of the spirits. The shift from one to the other—from human to pig—is signaled by certain omen animals, each of which has a distinctive transformative character in appearance or voice. Such omens can have onerous consequences, so the Dayak have a mechanism for annulling them by means of a ritual in which the ill omen is theatrically staged and, thereby, dismissed as an artifice. Pig-Human Relations in Borneo The central problematic in human and pig identity, for the Kantu’ and other Ibanic people of West Kalimantan, is articulated in the system of divining the future from the sight, sound, and behavior of a number of different omen animals (see my chapter 2). Divination was formerly central to the cosmologies of most tribal Bornean peoples. The Kantu’ were first taught how to practice augury, according to their oral history, by a halfhuman and half-spirit people who lived with the Kantu’ in the distant past. These culture-givers taught the Kantu’ that if they see or hear an omen on their right, they must neither work nor travel, because this is a sign that the person is at risk of being seen by the spirits as a wild pig (jani’ kampong, “pig of the tall forest”) and being hunted as such.12 This same principle is explicitly addressed in a shaman’s chant to the spirits in southeastern Borneo: “Don’t come and see us wrongly, Don’t come and recognize us falsely.”13 Thus, peril lies in misidentification. Taussig (1993:130) has written, “All mysterious misfortune is alteric.” The Dayak cases share this alteric dimension with the perspectivism described by Viveiros de Castro and others, but there is one significant difference: whereas Viveiros de Castro’s material is all about how a threatening animal such as a jaguar sees the human, the focus in the Dayak case is on how the spirits see the human as animal, namely, a wild pig. Both cases involve the gaze of a nonhuman other, but in Viveiros

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de Castro’s Amerindian case the other is an animal, and in the Dayak case it is a spirit.14 The spirits’ perception of humans as wild pigs is central to disease etiology. Ill-health may have various causes, but the Kantu’ usually attribute severe ill-health to a spirit hunting the ill person, to whom he or she has appeared as a wild pig. In such cases, only a shaman—who alone can directly perceive what is taking place15—can counter this confounding of human and pig identity. Typically, the household of the ill person must sponsor a curing ritual in which a shaman sacrifices to the spirits a domestic pig (jani’ laman, “yard-pig”), to take the place of the ailing human-as-pig.16 A domestic pig—never a feral one—is selected, caught, trussed up, and then killed by a spear-thrust to the throat. After being killed, the pig’s carcass is butchered and divided into two portions—one portion to be eaten by the Kantu’, and a second to be eaten by the spirits. This latter portion is accompanied by plates of glutinous rice, foxtail millet, Job’s tears, and other ingredients specific to sacrificial offerings. The spirits are then summoned to partake of the offering, from their homes on distant mountaintops, by oral invocation and beating of drums and gongs (fig. 1.2). In addition, the shaman will read the sacrificed pig’s liver, by hieromancy, for further insight into the illness (fig. 1.3).17 Since the premise of the curing ritual is the initial confounding of human and pig identities, to be remedied by substituting the sacrificial pig for the invalid human, the reading of the pig liver represents in effect the indirect reading of the state of the invalid.18 Finally, the shaman rubs the invalid’s body with pig tusks, the human-as-pig thus employing its natural weapons, its tusks, to defend itself against the spirits.19 Outside of curing rituals, there are other occasions upon which domestic pigs are sacrificed to the spirits. At any one of a number of important junctures during the rice year, but especially at planting and harvest times, domestic pigs may be sacrificed: again, only domestic pigs can thus be sacrificed, and such sacrifices are made in supplication of a bountiful harvest from the spirits. The Kantu’ believe that if they sacrifice one or more pigs to the spirits in a given year, then that year they will reap a relatively good harvest.20 The Kantu’ say that any day they sacrifice a pig to the spirits is an ari bahaiya, “dangerous day,” because summoning the spirits from their distant abodes to consume the pig brings them into close contact with humans. The day is most dangerous not for those present at the ritual sacrifice, however,

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Fig. 1.2. Beating gongs to summon spirits to a sacrifice.

but for anyone leaving on a trip or going to their fields. Those attending the sacrifice are afforded a measure of protection from the spirits by the sacrifice itself, because it presents the spirits with something to consume in place of humans; whereas those who put themselves in the way of the spirits without a sacrifice being present are bereft of this protection.21 The Kantu’ say that they are also imperiled if the sacrifice is incorrectly carried out.22 Thus, the killing of a domestic pig in any part of a rice field other than its ritual center (lapik benih, place of the seed), or with a weapon other than a spear, or by striking anywhere except in the throat, or while it is running free, constitutes a serious ritual delict.23 Any of these errors make the killing of the pig appear less like the sacrifice of a domestic pig and more like the hunting of a wild one, and they depict the human, not the spirit, as the hunter. The pig sacrifice is essentially a theatrical effort to confound two ontological orders, to trick the spirits into thinking that they are engaged in hunting humans, and this performance is confounded if the humans themselves appear to be hunting.24

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Fig. 1.3. Hieromancy—reading a pig’s liver for insights into the past, present, and future.

Why Pigs? Borneo hosts two different pig species: a domesticated variety of Sus scrofa, and a feral bearded pig, Sus barbatus. Sus scrofa spread through the region as one of three domesticated animals (the others being chickens and dogs) in the original Austronesian culture. It also ran wild in Sumatra and Java, but not in Borneo, where the only feral pig is Sus barbatus.25 Pigs were long the largest and most valued domesticated animal of the Kantu’ and other Dayak; and wild pigs were one of the two most important game animals—the other being the sambar deer, Cervus unicolor. Although the bearded pig is a true forest denizen, it does not hesitate to invade agricultural fields.26 Wild

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pigs are an important swidden pest, therefore, but since almost all of those taken by hunters are shot or trapped in or near swiddens, pig predation is viewed with some equanimity. Whether caring for domesticated pigs at the longhouse or hunting feral ones in the swiddens, thus, the Dayak have been used to daily, intimate association with them. Today, although deforestation, increasing population densities, and Islamicization of some groups have made it politically contentious to raise domestic pigs in some districts, wild pig populations have persisted if not indeed expanded.27 Some scholars of Bornean mythology concerning pigs have sought their origin in similarities between human society and pig society. For example, Kershaw and Kershaw (2006:188) note that bearded pigs move in groups and appear to have social organization, just as people do. As a swidden pest, the wild pig eats foods that humans are growing for themselves; and as a domesticate, pigs eat leftover food from human meals. Carlos Fausto (2007:500) has offered a similar explanation of native Amazonian beliefs regarding the white-lipped peccary (Tayassu pecari), saying that their “traits seem to combine most of what Amerindians take to be characteristically human.” Fausto (ibid.:507) writes, “[The peccary] offers a model for the generic human condition itself: they are not purely predators but mortals who are preyed upon and defend themselves bravely, live in groups, eat manioc, and possess a chief. Like humans, they are gregarious (signaling their capacity to produce kinship), socially organized in herds (signaling their recognition of asymmetric relations other than devouring), and cosmologically ambivalent, positioned halfway between prey and predator.” There is a shared existential element to the food quest of pigs and people. According to a Kantu’ homily, Sigi’ perut kitai té nyuruh kitai parai, “It is our stomachs that cause us to die.” They say that if they did not have to travel and work in the food quest and could remain safely at home in the longhouse, then they would not expose themselves to the myriad hazards and accidents that shorten their lives. This applies to pigs as well, since it is the attraction of swidden food crops that is responsible for the deaths of almost all wild pigs taken by hunters. Indeed, whereas some pigs are thought to move in and out of the Kantu’ territory on a seasonal basis, as they follow the annual fruiting cycles of the forest trees, others are thought to live in the territory year-round, and they are called by the Kantu’ jani’ ubi, or “cassava pigs,” after one of their favorite swidden foods. The link between food and mortality is equally close for the domestic pigs, who are neither penned or

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tethered, but kept in the vicinity of the longhouse—where they will eventually be slaughtered—by daily meals of food scraps. The Dayak belief that they are consumed, as pigs, by the spirits, adds to this parallelism: as Descola (2013:289) writes, “An animist subject can be sure of only one thing: he eats and will be eaten.” Fausto (2007:507) calls the Amazonian peccary “cosmologically ambivalent” because it is “positioned halfway between prey and predator.”28 The same could be said of the Bornean pig. First, it straddles the line between wild and domesticated. The Kantu’ place the wild boar in the category of jelu, “animal or creature,” whereas they place the domesticated pig in the category of jelu piara, “cared-for animal.” This wild-versus-domestic dimension of pigs is unique: there is no other creature in Borneo that is represented by both domestic and feral species.29 As noted earlier, one of the most important distinctions made by the Kantu’ between wild and domestic pigs involves the manner of their killing. Wild pigs can be hunted, killed, and eaten at any time without ritual restriction,30 but they cannot be sacrificed; that is reserved for domestic pigs (and chickens).31 Conversely, domestic pigs must be killed in a manner in keeping with the rules of sacrifice.32 This distinction between types of pigs is important because of the associated distinction between types of people. Just as pigs can be either wild or domestic, so too can people be either wild pigs, in the eyes of the spirits, or nonwild humans, in their own eyes. And just as people cannot sacrifice but only hunt wild pigs, so can they sacrifice domestic pigs in place of their hunted wild pig selves as perceived by the spirits. Just as Amazonian peccaries embody a distinction between prey and predator, thus, so do Bornean tribespeople embody in themselves a distinction between prey of spirits and predator of pigs. Rane Willerslev, Piers Vitebsky, and Anatoly Alekseyev (2015:1) are taken not with the difference between the hunt and the sacrifice, but with the similarity: based on their comparative study of hunters and reindeer herders in the Siberian Northeast, they write, “Both express the same logic, by which sacrifice functions as an ideal hunt.” They suggest that the domestication of reindeer may have been “a side effect of the playing out of tensions in the cosmology of hunting” (ibid.:19). Whereas Willerslev, Vitebsky, and Alekseyev are comparing hunting and herding peoples, Dayak groups like the Kantu’ are both hunters of wild pigs and keepers of domestic pigs, and they place great emphasis upon distinguishing the two activities. Nevertheless,

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the fact that the sacrificial pig must be killed by a spear, the traditional hunting weapon of choice, supports the game-to-livestock thesis here as well.

Bebali’, “Changing” Form The pig village myths, and the belief that spirits hunt humans-aspigs, involve people taking on the guise of pigs and vice versa; they demonstrate that a mimetic facility is an integral part of human-pig history. The ever-present possibility of this transformation taking place—the possibility for spirits to see people as wild pigs—lies at the heart of human frailty and indeed mortality. A number of different omens can warn people of this imminent transformation. The animals and other phenomena that can convey this warning are characterized by a multi-vocality in sound or appearance. The most common and most important omen creatures are seven named species of forest birds, which are said to be the sons-in-law of the major deity Singalang Burong: the nenak, or white-rumped shama (Copsychus malabaricus Scopoli); ketupung, or rufous piculet (Sasia abnormis Temminck); beragai, or scarlet-rumped trogon (Harpactes duvauceli Temminck); papau, or Diard’s trogon (Harpactes diardii Temminck); memuas, or banded kingfisher (Lacedo pulchella melanops); kutok, or maroon woodpecker (Blythipicus rubiginosus Swainson); and bejampong, or crested jay (Platylophus galericulatus Cuvier). The Kantu’ say that each one of these birds has more than one call; and one call in each case is the jai’, “bad” one, which signals the perilous transformation of person to pig in the eyes of the spirits. When one of these omen birds switches from its good to its bad call, the Kantu’ call this bebali’, “to alter, change, transform, redo” (Sutlive and Sutlive 1994:10). There are other omen creatures besides these seven birds, which are said to be servants of the other major deity, Pulang Gana. The eponymous call of the kijang, or barking deer (Cervulus muntjac), sounds, as its name implies, remarkably like a dog’s bark. This bark is also called bebali’, and it is a serious ill omen. Another omen creature is the ingkat, or western tarsier (Cephalopachus bancanus [Horsfield]): its ability to rotate its eyes and head seemingly 180 degrees, from facing forward to backward, is also called bebali’ and it is also an ill omen.33 Yet another ill omen comes from the kuai, a spiny-backed chameleon (Agamidae, possibly Bronchocela cristatella?), which can bebali’, or change the color of its skin to match its surroundings. In each case, the omen-giving status of the creature is based on its ability to

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bebali’, or transform. These are physical transformations: the one forest creature that is capable of an ontological transformation, the bearded pig, is the only large forest creature that is not recognized by the Kantu’ as an omen animal. The act of transformation is perilous to human beings. For example, the Kantu’ say that it is dangerous to watch a chameleon changing color. The act of bebali’, or transformation, is a perilous moment because it signals that a shift in everyday ontological reality is taking place, from one that is safe for humans to one that is not safe for humans, from a reality in which humans are humans to one in which they are pigs. The bebali’ on the part of the omen creatures—the chameleon changing color, for example—signifies this bebali’ in everyday reality. In the event of a particularly foreboding act of bebali’ on the part of an omen creature, the Kantu’ may attempt counter-measures. They will sometimes try to forestall or reverse such an ontological transformation by enacting a counter-transformation, returning to a safe reality, through the temusi’ ritual. For example, if a mouse deer, or pelandok (Tragulus spp.), is seen entering a swidden during planting time, this is an extremely ill omen, which suggests a threat to the swidden and its owners. If it or another equally ill omen is encountered early in the swidden cycle, the swidden might be abandoned; but by the time of planting, this would be very costly. Instead, the swidden owner and fellow members of the longhouse may perform the temusi’ ritual. The temusi’ ritual consists in, first, making a facsimile of a mouse deer from rice flour and water. Then two actors will commence the ritual performance, along the following lines: First actor: points to facsimile of mouse-deer, and says to second person, “What is that thing? It looks to me like a mouse-deer. It will be the death of us, encountering an omen like that.” Second actor: replies to first person, “It is not a mouse-deer, it is only rice-flour. It is of no consequence.” Another very ill omen is when the end of a rainbow, or merajus, is seen to touch part of the longhouse, which warns of an imminent danger to its inhabitants.34 This is so inauspicious as to raise the question whether the longhouse should be abandoned, but again, this would be a very costly response. So a possible response in this case is also to perform the temusi’ ritual. Members of

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Fig. 1.4. The temusi’ ritual to abrogate the ill effects of a rainbow.

the longhouse will first string up parallel lines of colored string on the longhouse verandah (fig. 1.4). The ritual performance then follows along lines similar to those involving the mouse deer, thus: First actor: points to the colored strings, and asks of a second person, “What is that ill omen that looks like a rainbow?” Second actor: replies to first person, “No, don’t worry, it’s only lengths of colored string.” As Taussig (1993:127) writes of such mimetic displays, “There would seem to be in this world . . . a deeply puzzling capacity for copying and hence deception in which the ‘original’ and the ‘copy’ fight it out for

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ontological preeminence—for a claim to power over the perceptual fidelity, epistemic certainty, and very life of humans.”35 The temusi’ ritual counters an act of bebali’ by an omen animal by itself staging an act of bebali’. The ritual addresses the specter of a shift to inauspicious reality, and attempts to counter it with the suggestion of an alternative, more favorable reality. The temusi’ ritual is premised on the existence of multiple realities, therefore, and its purpose is to discursively argue for the one desired by the actors performing the ritual. I call them “actors” because the temusi’ is clearly theatrical in character. The participants, the actors, are engaging and playing with alternate realities and alternate roles.36 In the literature on perspectivism and human-animal relations, some scholars have made much of Bateson’s writings on playful behavior.37 Bateson (G. 1972:179) saw play as important because it depends upon not just communication but meta-communication, “exchanging signals which would carry the message, ‘this is play.’ ” As Basso (1979:37) writes, expanding on Bateson, “Play is characterized by a paradox of the Russellian, or Epimedes, type, consisting in a negative statement that contains within it an implicit negative metastatement. . . . Accordingly, acts of play may be defined as those which are modeled on acts that are ‘not play,’ but which are understood not to communicate what would be communicated by these acts if they were performed unplayfully.” As Bateson (G. 1972:180) himself notes, the message of play is, “ ‘These actions, in which we now engage, do not denote what would be denoted by those actions which these actions denote.’ The playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite.”38 The temusi’ ritual is a further elaboration on the concept of play as discussed by Bateson. It is not play itself, but it employs the concept of play to some of the ends discussed by Bateson and Basso. The point of the ritual is to publicly state that the ill omen does not denote what would otherwise be denoted by it. The message of the temusi’ ritual is that the ill omen is play and the ritual is the reality. The temusi’ turns the ill omen into play, so that it does not communicate what would be communicated if it were nonplay; it discursively turns the work of the spirits into play. If ordinary play represents meta-communication to playful ends, according to Bateson, then the temusi’ ritual is meta-miscommunication: it is an effort to deploy play to strategic, political ends vis-à-vis the spirits. Is the play of the temusi’ ritual the same as mockery? The ubiquitous proscriptions against jocular references to animals, as something other than

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what they are, were mentioned in my introduction. The temusi’ ritual looks, at first blush, like mockery. To mold a facsimile of a mouse deer from rice flour, and then to stage a debate as to whether it really is a mouse deer or not, seems like precisely the sort of manipulation of animal realities that is proscribed. The difference lies in intent. The intent of the ritual is to seriously assert that the presence of this omen creature does not denote what would normally be denoted by it, with serious implications at stake; whereas mockery, as in dressing a monkey up as some other being, is to humorously assert that an animal does not denote what it would otherwise denote, to no purpose except amusement. Cultural institutions like the temusi’ ritual help to explain the prohibitions against mockery, as discussed in the introduction. The temusi’ ritual stakes out a powerful discursive position above and beyond the circumstances of the ill omen, from which the actors in the ritual can strategically observe the multiple coexisting realities that make omens good versus bad, and inevitable versus manipulable. Kohn (2013:141) has argued that among the Runa of Ecuador, there is a difference in dominance between the perspective of humans and that of spirits, with the latter having more “weight.” Among the Dayak, the reality of the spirits is similarly the dominant one. The purpose of the temusi’ ritual is to employ play or theater to reverse the dominance of the spirit reality over the human one, making the latter the operant one. This illustrates the validity of Bateson’s insights into play, and also the fact that these insights are availed not only by anthropologists but also by their interlocutors. Conclusions: Reciprocal Mirroring In his canonical work on perspectivism, Viveiros de Castro (1998) emphasizes the importance to prey—including humans—of understanding how they are perceived by predators, for example, the jaguar. Such understanding obviously has practical as well as theoretical significance. Willerslev (2004) has taken perspectivism to task for not addressing “the concreteness of everyday perceptual experience” or the “context of hunters’ actual perceptual engagement with prey.” Based on his study of perspectivism among Siberian Yukaghir hunters, he argues that it has a practical side, which he calls “ ‘mimesis,’ or what might be more appropriately characterized as ‘mimetic empathy.’ ” This mimetic practice gives to the hunter “a ‘double perspective’ whereby he can assume the animal’s point of view but still remain a human hunter who chases and kills the prey.” Of most importance, this

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double perspective enables the hunter to see himself as his prey, the elk, sees him: “The hunter does not just see the elk walking towards him, he also sees himself from the ‘outside,’ as if he himself were the elk—that is, he adopts towards himself the kind of perspective that the Other (as subject) has on him (as object).” Willerslev suggests that this “reciprocal mirroring” contributes to the hunter’s success. That is, by seeing himself as his prey sees him, the hunter is better able to outsmart or outmaneuver the prey.39 Rajindra K. Puri (2005) has studied an analogous but more complicated circumstance among the hunting-gathering Penan of eastern Borneo. Their favorite game is the bearded pig, and one technique for hunting them involves imitating the pig-tailed macaque (Macaca nemestrina). When macaques feed on fruits in the forest canopy, they litter the forest floor beneath them with fallen or discarded fruit. This provides an easy meal for the pigs, which follow troops of macaques through the forest for this purpose. Thus, the Penan apply, following Willerslev, a type of reciprocal mirroring at one remove, based not on how the pigs see the Penan but on how the pigs see the macaques.40 The effort by prey to adopt the perspective of predators has universal value. Indeed, the predator’s view of prey seems to be central to the dynamics of many ontological relationships. It obviously holds in the Bornean case, as the Dayak have elaborated a cosmology based on how they are perceived as prey by the spirits.

chapter 2

Environmental Uncertainty and Augural Contingency “To read what was never written.” Such reading is the most ancient: reading before all languages, from the entrails, the stars, or dances. —walter benjamin, reflections: essays, aphorisms, autobiographical writings

Introduction: Birds as Signs In a meeting between a number of Kantu’ Dayak elders and the local subdistrict head during Suharto’s “New Order” regime, the subdistrict head made a ninety-minute speech directing the Kantu’ to stop making swiddens and start making irrigated rice fields instead, whereupon a prominent headman and shaman responded, “Don’t tell us how to make wet-rice fields, rather tell us which omen birds are best for swiddening. Instead of telling us useless things, tell us which bird omens are the best.” There was an ontological dimension to both the pitch for wet rice and the critique. The subdistrict head, a military officer who hailed from Java, reimagined the local agricultural landscape in terms of the Javanese wet-rice tradition and found its current state wanting in comparison. The local headman or shaman explicitly rejected that tradition in favor of a local one in which agricultural fortunes and progress were governed by local spirits, not the distant practices of another ethnic group in a very different landscape. Just as the subdistrict head invoked an ontology in which he and not the other was expert, so too did the headman or shaman. The Kantu’ headman or shaman asserted an equivalence between omen-taking and agricultural development as types of knowledge production. Chapter 1 focused on the traditional belief among Dayak peoples in Borneo that the spirits may see them—may see human beings—as wild pigs and

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try to hunt and kill them. The transformation of humans into pigs in the eyes of the spirits is forewarned by transformative behavior on the part of omen animals. The most important source of these auguries are seven species of omen birds.1 Reading the behavior of these omen birds, taking auguries from them, was traditionally the central dimension of human-spirit relations. As Tom Harrisson (1960:24) writes, “It is only a mild falsification to imply that the basic relationship between man and his universe over nine-and-a-half tenths of Borneo is set in a loose framework of a fairly elaborate applied ornithology.” The Dayak see the birds and other omen animals as intermediaries between humans and spirits, whose role is to express the will of the spirits. The seven omen birds, as first listed in chapter 1, vary in age and hence in authority.2 In ascending order they are the white-rumped shama, the rufous piculet, the scarlet-rumped trogon, Diard’s trogon, the banded kingfisher, the maroon woodpecker, and the crested jay.3 Out of over 630 different species of birds recorded in Borneo, the question arises, Why are these seven species alone recognized as omen birds, with considerable consistency across the island? In their global survey of birds as signs, Felice S. Wyndham and Karen E. Park (2018) explain the “biocultural salience” of certain species over others: “It is the common-enough but not too common birds that show up most in sign relationships with people.” Their survey also reveals that bird vocalization is “the most common sign vehicle.” In the (formerly) dense jungles of Borneo, dramatic appearance by a bird is not salient, but a dramatic call—echoed by the structure of the forest canopy—is. In his field guide to the birds of Borneo, Quenten Phillipps (2014:234) suggests that “Omen birds were usually common birds with distinctive calls.”4 Several of them—the rufous piculet, scarlet-rumped trogon, and maroon woodpecker—prefer or at least tolerate disturbed forest, thus frequenting the vicinity of humans.5 Several have calls marked as loud, frequent, and evocative; and in most, if not all, cases they are marked for having multiple different calls.6 Wyndham and Park assert that there is generally something strange about “signifying birds,” writing, “From a semiotic perspective, power gathers in things that transgress boundaries.” They cite the “prototypical example” of owls: “They combine a salient voice, human-like visage, strange swiveling neck, nocturnal habit, and sensory powers beyond what people are capable of, leading us to speculate that breaking categorical boundaries is key to making a bird an effective sign-vehicle.”7 The analysis in the last chapter suggests that their point can be pushed further, however: in the Bornean case, the birds and other creatures that serve as omen animals

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do so not just because they break categorical boundaries, but because, with their transformative (bebali’) capacities, they break ontological boundaries— which is the fissure that poses the greatest threat to humans. The logic of the augural system is rooted in the belief that ordinary people cannot communicate with the spirits, although shamans sometimes can. This lack of comprehension rests entirely on the side of humans. Kohn (2013) has shown among the Runa of Ecuador that there is a privileged hierarchy to trans-being communication. Just as Runa spirits can understand humans but not the reverse, so can Bornean spirits understand Dayak but not the other way around. Kohn writes, “In the same way that people can understand their dogs, animal masters [spirits] can readily understand the speech of humans; the Runa need only talk to them. . . . Under normal circumstances, however, humans cannot readily understand animal masters.” Within this power-laden hierarchy, communication down is easy, therefore, but communication up is possible only via ritual, psychotropic drugs, or metaphor: “ ‘Higher’ beings can readily do this [communicate] vis-à-vis lower ones, as is evident by the fact that people can understand dog ‘talk’ or that spirits can hear the supplications of people. ‘Lower’ ones, however, can only see the world from the perspective of higher beings via privileged vehicles of communication, such as hallucinogens, which can permit contact among souls of beings inhabiting different realms. Without special vehicles of communication, such as hallucinogens, lower beings understand higher ones only through metaphor, that is, through an idiom that establishes connections at the same time that it differentiates.”8 In the Bornean case, similarly, shamans can employ ritual means to communicate with the spirits, but ordinary people in ordinary circumstances must rely on metaphor, or signs, in the form of the omen birds and other animals. Dayak augural beliefs comprise an elaborate semiotic system. Following Charles S. Peirce (1992), a sign is anything that stands for something to something. In the present case, the seven omen birds are the signs, and the objects that they stand for are the messages that the signs convey to the Dayak from the spirits; the interpretants that the signs stand to are the consequent ways that the Dayak alter their behavior in response to the signs, for example by turning around on a trail and returning to the longhouse instead of proceeding to their swidden for a day’s work. Reading meaning into the calls or behavior of birds—which have been termed “heterospecific alarm calls” or “trans-species pidgin”—has ancient

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provenance.9 There are records throughout history of humans finding meaning in the sight and sound of birds.The terms “augury” and “augur” have roots in Latin, which refer back to the practice of divination from birds in ancient Rome and Greece.10 The most famous examples of augury from classical times era are found in Homer, as in the following passage from The Iliad, when the Trojans sought to cross a trench to burn the boats of the Aegeans:11 “As they were urgent to cross, a bird had appeared to them, an eagle, flying high and holding to the left of the people and carrying in its talons a gigantic snake, bloody, alive still and breaching; it had not forgotten its warcraft yet, for writhing back it struck the eagle that held it by chest and neck, so that the eagle let it drop groundward on pain of the bite, and dashed it down in the midst of the battle and itself, screaming high, winged away down the wind’s blast.” The impact of these beliefs on Western societies has been long-lived: evidence of belief in the portentous behavior of birds was still abundant in the Middle Ages, as well as in the Elizabethan era in Europe.12 Augury from birds often plays a role in Shakespeare’s plays, as in Hamlet, act 5, scene 2: before he goes to duel Laertes, Hamlet says, “We defy augury: there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” In his sixteenth-century paean to the dignity and intelligence of the nonhuman, Michel de Montaigne (1993:34) lamented the loss of former beliefs in the ability of birds to—selfconsciously—foretell the future: “Of all the omens of former times, the most ancient and the most certain were those drawn from the flight of birds. We have nothing corresponding to that, nothing as wonderful. The beating of the birds’ wings, from which consequences were drawn about the future, show rule and order: only some very special means could produce so noble an activity: to attribute so great an effect entirely to some ordinance of Nature, without any understanding, agreement and thought on the part of the creatures which perform it, is to be taken in by words; such an opinion is evidently false.” Folk beliefs in bird omens persisted into the contemporary era in England.13 Brian Kimberling (2013) argues that birds play this role yet, in the guise of ecological indicators (cf. Keck 2020 on birds as “sentinels” for human viruses): “The ancient wisdom of fretting obsessively over bird behavior has obtained the vindication of modern science. When, where and whether they appear is, absolutely, a portent. The spotted owl is a bioindicator, a species that can be used to monitor the condition of an ecosystem. In other words, bioindicator is just modern parlance for omen.” Kimberling argues that it is the long human history of reading the world through birds that

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makes them especially available for this role: “We can’t escape trying to see the future through birds. Too many canaries were deployed to detect gas leaks in coal mines, too many ravens launched from ships to find land—bird anxiety is an essential component of the human predicament.” Whereas many scholars have pointed to the long history of human attention to birds, few have tried to explain the origins of this relationship, although many have questioned it: as A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1951:17) asked, “Why all these birds?” Wyndham and Park (2018:540) ask why birds are especially good for “knowing things with” and suggest that folk explanations most often reference the visual powers of birds, including their nocturnal sight and, especially, their farsightedness when they fly aloft. The latter point is suggestive, given what contemporary critical scholarship tells us about how surveillance above the Earth—namely, aerial mapping, GIS, and the view of the Earth from space (see my introduction)—is privileged out of proportion to what it can actually tell us. There is a considerable anthropological literature on birds. This literature includes studies of symbolism, ranging from Evans-Pritchard’s (1937) long-debated assertion that the Azande believe that “twins are birds,” to Geertz’s (1973) “thick” and equally debated study of the Balinese cockfight.14 Birds figure prominently in studies of ethnozoology, as in Ralph Bulmer’s (1967) famous study of the cassowary, Gregory Forth’s (2004) study of the classification of birds on Flores in eastern Indonesia, and Shepard Krech’s (2009) study of the role of birds in Native American religious belief in the southeastern United States.15 Birds have also figured prominently in the development of the anthropology of the senses, in particular sound. A pioneering contribution to this field was Steven Feld’s (1990) study of “sound and sentiment” among the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, in which he argues that because bird calls are believed to come from the spirit world, they influence the entire spectrum of Kaluli speech and song that deal with that world.16 Rudge (2019a) builds on Feld’s work in a study of emotional entanglement through music and birdsong among the Patek of Peninsular Malaysia. A current focus of much study are “mutualistic” relationships between people and birds, including the relationship between Xhosa livestock herders and whistling birds in South Africa, and the honeyguide birds of Tanzania, who are employed by Hadza hunter-gatherers to find bees’ nests.17 Almost from the inception of the discipline, divination of all sorts, not only from birds, has attracted the attention of anthropologists, in the belief

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that divination systems articulate and thus illustrate central cultural values for their practitioners.18 The earliest work in this canon is the still-much-cited study of Zande divination by Evans-Pritchard (1937), centered on the “aleatory” mechanism of a chicken brought by means of poison to the knife’s edge between life and death.19 A raft of modern work illustrates the lasting attraction of this topic, including Eugene L. Mendonsa’s (1982) study of the generational politics of divination in Ghana, Barbara Tedlock’s (1982) analysis of Mayan timekeeping and divination, Philip M. Peek’s (1991) collection on the communicative process in African systems of divination, Martin Holbraad’s (2012) study of the concept of truth in Cuban divination, Katherine Swancutt’s (2012) analysis of damnation and innovation in Mongolian divination, Lisa Raphals’s (2013) comparative study of the semiotics of divination in ancient Greece and China, Richard Werbner’s (2015) sociolinguistic study of divining séances in Botswana, and Farouk Yahya’s (2015) analysis of divination in Malay illustrated manuscripts. New directions in anthropological work on divination include archaeological study of the development of state power and manipulation of bone divination in China, and analysis of the divide between diagnosis and prediction in systems of divination.20 Based on newer scholarship on knowledge production, similarities between divination and scientific thinking are being reexamined, as in Susan Reynolds Whyte, Michael Whyte, and David Kyaddondo’s (2018) comparison of how discovery and uncertainty are handled in divination and HIV testing in Uganda, and in Francesca Rochberg’s (2016) argument that ancient Babylonian celestial divination, motivated by a desire to establish both norms and abnormalities, was inherently scientific. This new scholarship in particular echoes a point made by Foucault (1973:32) a half century ago: “Divination is not a rival form of knowledge; it is part of the main body of knowledge itself.” The modern study of divination from birds has nowhere been more extensive than on the island of Borneo. The practice of augury in Borneo has received at least passing mention from nearly every natural scientist or ethnographer to visit the island since the nineteenth century.21 The idea that human behavior might be directed by such a seemingly fanciful system caught the imagination of many foreign observers. The apparent lack of connection between the system and empirical reality added to the curiosity and often indignation with which it was viewed. In-depth ethnographic descriptions and analyses of augury include those by Harrisson (1960), Erik Jensen (1974), Anthony Richards (1972), Benedict Sandin (1980), and Clifford Sather

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(1985). Victor T. King (1977) and Peter Metcalf (1976) debated whether augural interpretation is fixed or subject to individual interpretation. Kershaw and Kershaw (2007) have recently synthesized the literature on augury in the Malaysian and Bruneian parts of the island. J. Derek Freeman (1960:97), whose work among the Iban in the 1950s set the standards for contemporary ethnography in Borneo, carried out the most important analytical study of augury to date, concluding that it has a sociopsychological explanation: “This leads me to an hypothesis—basically sociological—concerning augury. . . . Human behaviour is essentially purposive. In augury, as in other comparable systems of divination, we have, I would suggest, an extension of this notion of purpose to animal species, so that their behaviour in the presence of man and in respect of man is treated as though it were purposive in human terms. This attitude, I would contend, is one which would arise naturally from primitive man’s experience as a member of society: the kind of thinking found in augury is fundamentally an extension of the way in which man thinks about his fellows.” Thus, Freeman sees the Iban as thinking about birds the way that they think about people; he sees them as likening birds to people. Although Freeman’s thesis of psychological projection is wide of the mark, his focus on the purposiveness of human behavior gets close to the heart of the matter: namely, the system of augural beliefs addresses the problem of purposive, deterministic thinking in human affairs—humanity’s fatal flaw according to Bateson, as discussed in my introduction. Augural beliefs address the challenge of the human predilection for determinism in an environment— the tropical rain forest—whose great complexity and uncertainty are better suited to contingent thinking. Dayak Bird Augury Omens reveal to the Dayak the implications of their everyday behavior in another ontological realm, that of the spirits. In the most dire cases, the omens tell the Dayak that they are being perceived and hunted as wild pigs by the spirits. Omens can be observed in all spheres of life, including travel, litigation, and ceremony; but the Dayak are especially alert to them during swidden cultivation. Omens are observed during most of the stages of the swidden cycle, and typically they are honored by proscription of work on the day received: as the Kantu’ say, “Just as the Christians proscribe work on Sundays, so do we

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proscribe work for omens.” The most important omens are those received during the first stage of the cycle, selection of the proposed swidden site— the stage when the most environmentally consequential decisions of the entire cycle are made. This stage of the swidden cycle, called beburong, “to take birds or omens,” or ninga tanah, “to listen to the earth,” consists of traversing the section of forest that is proposed for a new swidden and seeking favorable bird omens. Two separate, sequential omens are sought: first, the pun burong, “stem omen,” and second, the pun nyuror, “stem that gives off roots.” Seeking auspicious omens may take from a few days to a few weeks, after which clearing of the forest for the swidden can begin (fig. 2.1).22 The character of the auguries received at this time—burong badas, “good birds,” versus burong jai’, “bad birds”—is considered to be a major determinant of the ultimate success or failure of the swidden. Accordingly, if a sufficiently ill omen is received, the site may be rejected for farming that year. The practice of augury is exceedingly complex. Interpretation of the augural message from an omen bird is minimally based on its species and rank in the hierarchy of omen birds, the character of its flight, the type and number of its calls, the direction of its call or flight relative to the observer, its order within a sequence of messages from other omen birds, the time and place observed, the length of time it was sought before being seen or heard, the activity for which it was sought, and the character of the household seeking it. A summary of the rules of augural interpretation for a single omen bird is presented in the appendix.23 The augural rules are not applied equally in all types of swiddens. Augury is practiced in its most complete form in the umai pun, “stem swidden,” in which each household plants its padi pun, “stem rice,” a variety believed to be of supernatural origin. The practice of augury is likely to be more attenuated in any other swidden that a household cultivates in a given year: they may accept less favorable omens in a nonstem swidden than they would in their stem swidden. One common method in such cases, called beburong besi, “to take omens from the iron,” differs from normal omentaking in that they begin to clear the forest in the absence of an auspicious bird omen, by accepting the iron in the duko’ brush sword as the omen.24 In umai paiya’ swampland swiddens, the Kantu’ may completely dispense with site selection augury, although they would still honor unsolicited omens by halting work on the day observed. All households do not practice augury the same way (table 2.1). Augury is performed by each household on its own, usually by its eldest male

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Fig. 2.1. Awaiting a good omen.

table 2.1

INTER-HOUSEHOLD VARIATION IN HONORING OMENS

% of households taking the same omen bird in one or more swiddens in the same year: For first/stem omen: For second/root omen:

51% took the white-rumped shama 44% took the rufous piculet

member, whose interpretation of omens is personal and idiosyncratic.25 The Kantu’ say, Utai to’ ngau bidik kitai, “This thing is a matter of our own fortune.” Each person builds up over his lifetime a personal and distinctive relationship with each of the omen birds.26 The way that one interprets omens also can vary according to ongoing changes in the composition and fortune of the household. For example, the Kantu’ say that the meaning of certain omens, for good or ill—such as the bacar trill of the rufous piculet, one of three different calls identified by the Kantu’ for this bird—can vary depending upon whether there are elders living in the household. In addition, certain omens signify a reversal of the household’s prior swidden fortunes.27 For example, if household members hear the bacar trill of the rufous piculet when selecting a swidden site, they must abandon that site; but if they have

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never gotten a good harvest of rice, then the bacar call is auspicious and they can retain that site. It is quite possible, thus, for two augurers to assign completely opposing meanings to the same omen. Freeman (1960:90) writes, “Despite a general acceptance of the meaning of augural signs it is not unusual, therefore, for the recommendations of one augur to differ from those of another.” Nor is there any attempt to coordinate augury among different households: as the Kantu’ say, Burong nadai tau’ sekuntsi, “Omens cannot be shared.” If an auspicious omen became known to a neighboring household, the latter might want to join in taking it; but such sharing could abrogate the auspiciousness of the omen and make it difficult for the first household to obtain that omen again in future years. As a result, among the Kantu’ each household keeps its omens secret from other households. The variation in interpretation of the augural rules does not mean that auguries do not have a coercive effect on behavior.28 Through most of the twentieth century the Kantu’, for example, honored important omens, especially those observed during swidden site selection, saying that if they heard an omen and did not honor it, Nadai isi’ asai agi’, “There is no feeling left.” The anomie attendant upon such rule-breaking suggests that it represents a violation of deeply felt beliefs, which is to be avoided whenever possible. Thus, one year Gayan, the elder of a Kantu’ household, in his first day of omen-taking at the planned site of a swidden, heard a Diard’s trogon. After discussing the meaning of the omen with elders in the longhouse, he decided to abandon the site for that year and select another. The Kantu’ can also find less onerous ways to honor unfavorable omens, however. When Guyak, the elder of another Kantu’ household, was seeking omens at the site of one of his planned swiddens during the same year, he too heard a Diard’s trogon. Instead of rejecting the entire belah, “section,” of forest and selecting another, however, he rejected just that part of the section where he had heard the trogon, moved to another part, and continued his omen-taking and site preparation. While Guyak’s response to the ill omen appears to represent a compromise of sorts, the fact that he deemed it necessary reflects the coercive nature of omens. The coercive character also is reflected in the practice, on important occasions after favorable omens have been secured, of beating drums or gongs to forestall the subsequent hearing of unfavorable omens (fig. 2.2).29 Freeman (1970:89) writes of this practice, “Whenever a group of Iban are engaged in an undertaking of consequence . . . , they take care to

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Fig. 2.2. Beating gongs to avoid hearing ill omens.

see that certain of their number—usually two or three girls—are equipped with brass gongs which are beaten without cease until the business in hand is concluded. . . . Its purpose is to forestall any possibility of an accidentally encountered omen bird causing the entire venture to be abandoned. Such behaviour may seem flagrantly inconsistent, but in such cases it is usual for at least one auspicious omen to have been obtained in advance, and always for a series of propitiatory offerings to have been presented to the gods. The attitude is rather that of a man, who having taken good counsel, and every possible safeguard, decides—for better or for worse—to shut his ears to all further admonition.” Augury and the Environment Omen-taking in the swidden cycle is intended to foretell swidden success or failure, which raises the question whether omens are related to relevant environmental variables. A number of different environmental variables can affect the success of swidden agriculture in the Bornean rain forests: principal among these are the amount and timing of annual rainfall; the magnitude and timing of riv-

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erine flooding; and the types, location, and severity of pest outbreaks. The impact of these variables also varies with the type of swidden that is being made. For example, swiddens cut from primary forest will yield very good harvests in a year with a drought of sufficient length to thoroughly dry and burn the massive felled timber. Otherwise, such swiddens are likely to burn and yield poorly. Similarly, swiddens cut in the riverine flood zones will yield well, because of the rich alluvial soils, as long as there is only minimal flooding. But if flooding submerges the rice plants for more than a few days, these swiddens will fail, and only the specialized swampland swiddens will survive. Because these critical environmental variables—rainfall, flooding, and pest outbreaks—are not constant from one year to the next, the swidden type that is best suited to environmental conditions will not be the same from one year to the next. It is difficult to predict these environmental variables, so it also is difficult to predict which type of swidden will be favored in any given year. Nor is it possible to base a prediction of future conditions upon past conditions. There is no evidence of cyclical patterns in rainfall or flooding in Kalimantan—outside of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) pattern—and thus anticipation of a flood or a drought based on past conditions is as likely to be wrong as right. Accordingly, the best strategy is to prepare neither for a year with a flood or drought nor a year without a flood or drought, but for an average year in which a flood or drought may or may not occur—which is in fact what most households do. The best way for a household with multiple swiddens to do that is to distribute its swiddens between the flood zone and the nonflood zone and between primary forest and secondary forest. The challenge of matching swidden type and location with annual environmental fluctuations is reflected in the fact that, at the time of my original study of the Kantu’, most households did not reap sufficient swidden rice for their needs. For example, during one year in which I gathered detailed production and consumption data for one Kantu’ longhouse, 63 percent of households reaped harvests insufficient for their own needs, with average shortfalls of 21 percent, although the total longhouse harvest slightly exceeded the total longhouse rice requirements.30 This level of failure is common for swidden systems in Borneo (table 2.2). At the very point at which Dayak farmers make the most critical decisions of the entire swidden cycle, regarding swidden type and location, and in the absence of certain knowledge about future rainfall, flooding, or pest

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table 2.2 Group: Kantu’ Iban Land Dayak Ma’anyan Mualang

RATES OF SWIDDEN HARVEST FAILURE IN BORNEO

Location: West Kalimantan Sarawak Sarawak South Kalimantan West Kalimantan

Harvest failure rate:* 63% 68% 72% 76% 57%

Source: Dove 1985b Freeman 1970 Grijpstra 1976 Hudson 1967 Drake 1982

* Percentage of households that did not reap a harvest sufficient for one year’s needs

outbreaks that could inform these decisions, they take omens from the augural birds. This raises the question whether there is any linkage between the omen birds and these critical agro-ecological variables. But any analysis of linkages between the behavior of omen birds and these variables is rendered moot by the rules of augural interpretation, which scramble any possible linkage to the environment. For example, all omen birds have more than one type of call, and the meaning of an omen varies according to which call is heard. Thus, the normal call of the rufous piculet (ketupung) is auspicious, but its variant trill (bacar) is inauspicious, yet there appears to be no systematic agroecological significance to this variation.31 Similarly, there is great augural— but there can be no environmental—significance attached to whether one or more calls of the rufous piculet or other omen bird is heard. Equally important to interpretation, and equally irrelevant from an agro-ecological point of view, is whether the call is heard—or the bird is seen—to the observer’s right or left. Augural interpretation is subject to an extravagant number and variety of such rules and caveats,32 all of which appear to be without any agro-ecological significance. The lack of any such linkage of omens to the everyday world was noted by Harrisson (1960:23), writing of another Dayak group, the Kayan: “Nor do the Kayans use as omen birds . . . any that have anything actually ‘to do’ in fact with the operations (house building, marriage, canoe journeys, rice planting, etc.) which these birds powerfully influence and not infrequently decide.” Forth (2004) reached a similar decision regarding bird omens in Flores in eastern Indonesia.33 The arbitrariness of augury from an agro-ecological standpoint is most clearly illustrated in the performance of betenong kempang, “to divine from the kempang tree,” a type of augury that the Kantu’ sometimes practice as an alternative to seeking bird omens at a prospective swidden site. It con-

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Fig. 2.3. The augural practice, betenong kempang, “to divine from the kempang tree.”

sists in cutting a pole from the kempang tree (Artocarpus elasticus Reinw. ex Bl.) and measuring and marking one’s depa’, “arms-breadth,” on it. The augurer then cuts some of the underbrush on the site, after which he or she remeasures his or her arms-breadth against the kempang pole (fig. 2.3). If this measurement exceeds the initial one—indicating that the pole has “shrunk”—this augurs ill for the proposed site; but if the measurement falls short of the initial mark—if the pole has “grown”—this augurs well. This procedure is susceptible to unconscious influence on the part of the augurer,34 but there is no indication that it tells the augurer anything about the agro-ecological character of the site during the coming year. Harold C. Conklin (1975:46–47) describes a remarkably similar procedure among the Hanunóo of Mindoro in the Philippines, pana¯had, which he says is the most common type of swidden location augury: “At the proposed site, a small patch is cleared from which a 50-centimeter-long stake is cut and split at one end. Into this is stuck one extremity of a pliable vine measured exactly for one maximum arm span. The free end of the vine is then wound tightly about the stake and secured to the bottom which is then stuck into the ground with the following words: ‘If this site will work out well, may my testing vine grow longer; if crops will be destroyed by disease, or my body

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will be weakened by illness, may (the vine) grow shorter.’ Should there be favorable dream omens that night, the site is revisited the next day and the vine remeasured. A noticeable increase in length is a propitious sign. If it is even the least bit shorter, however, the site must be abandoned.” The rules of augury are not equally honored in all swiddens at all times, but whether they are honored or not does not appear to affect swidden success. As noted earlier, the augural rules prescribe that two separate, sequential omens should be sought in every swidden: first the pun burong, “stem omen,” and then the pun nyuror, “stem that gives off roots.” The rules prescribe that, because the first omen is believed to “select” the second, the second must be “elder” to the first. For example, the first omen can come from a whiterumped shama and the second from a rufous piculet, but not the other way around. In practice, however, the proper age-order is achieved less than 50 percent of the time. But there is no observable association between correct or incorrect age-order of the first “stem” and second “root” omens and the success of the swidden harvest as measured against a longhouse mean (table 2.3). The augural rules also prescribe that the “temperature” of the omen bird must balance that of the swidden environment in which it is taken. The Kantu’ accord “hot” or “cold” properties to the different omen birds, and they believe that the auspiciousness of a given omen varies according to whether the “heat” or “coolness” of the bird in question mitigates or exacerbates the “heat” or “coolness” of the swidden site involved. Thus, the white-rumped shama and youngest of the omen birds is considered to be “cool” and thus is deemed auspicious in dry, highland swiddens, whose heat it would mitigate, but inauspicious in wet flood zone swiddens, whose coldness it would exacerbate. Precisely the reverse is the case with the

table 2.3

HONORING OF AGE ORDER OF 1ST AND

2ND OMENS, AND SWIDDEN SUCCESS

Age of second omen relative to first omen: [Less correct More correct] Younger Same Older Swidden harvest: < mean Swidden harvest: > mean Total

71% 29% 100%

52% 48% 100%

62% 38% 100%

This association is not statistically significant. For n = 31 swiddens, X2 = .06 and P < .975.

environmental uncertainty, augural contingency table 2.4

65

HONORING CORRECT FIT OF BIRD “HEAT” TO ENVIRONMENT, AND SWIDDEN SUCCESS

Relation of heat/coolness of omen to wetness/dryness of swidden:* [Less correct

Swidden harvest: < mean Swidden harvest: > mean Total

More correct]

Exacerbates

Neutral

Mitigates

60% 40% 100%

65% 35% 100%

58% 42% 100%

*The “cool” shama offsets the heat above the flood zone but exacerbates the coolness within it; the neutral piculet is acceptable in either zone; all other birds—because “hot”—are exacerbating above the zone and offsetting within it. This association is not statistically significant. For n = 54 swiddens, X2 = .22 and P < .75.

scarlet-rumped trogon, which is deemed “hot.” In practice, this rule also is violated more often than not; but again, there is no association between swidden success and the match of omen bird “heat” to swidden environment (table 2.4). The Kantu’ recognize that omens are not the sole determinants of swidden success. Freeman (1960:81) quotes an augurer as saying, “Even though one hears a good augury ten times over, the harvest will not be an outstanding one without sufficient work.” Similarly, the Kantu’ say only that good omens will ensure a better harvest than will be obtained by households who did not obtain good omens. A bad omen, conversely, will give one a poorer harvest than others obtain.35 The enhanced swidden fortune that the Kantu’ expect as a result of good omens is relative, therefore, and is seen as ultimately constrained by the general agro-ecological conditions prevailing in a given year. Another constraint is good swidden practices: for example, the Kantu’ say that good omens are of no avail if they do not plant their rice at the proper time. History of Augury and Subsistence Risk The system of augural belief is not timeless; it has a history. The modern practice of augury is focused on the swidden rice cycle— swidden activities, especially the initial selection of the site of a new swidden, are most susceptible to circumscription by good versus ill omens. In

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Bornean mythology, the origins of augury are often linked to the origins of rice cultivation. Edwin H. Gomes (1911:278–300) recounts a tale from the Iban—who are closely related to the Kantu’—of a time when the Iban subsisted on only wild forest fruits and cultivated tubers. This ended when a young Iban was taught by Singalang Burong—one of the paramount deities for the Iban as well as the Kantu’—to plant rice and observe bird omens. In mythology, therefore, the knowledge of augury and rice agriculture co-developed. The evidence suggests that the cultivation of rice in Borneo was preceded by the cultivation of certain non-rice grains—Setaria italica, or foxtail millet, and Job’s tears—and tubers, especially Colocasia esculenta, or taro (see my chapter 7). The historic transition to rice as the subsistence staple may not have led to greater certainty in agricultural production; indeed it may have resulted in just the opposite. Considerable evidence suggests that the cultivation of rice is attended by greater uncertainty than was the archaic cultivation of non-rice grains and, especially, tubers (see my chapters 5 and 7). This process of agricultural evolution was driven by a variety of factors, therefore, but a reduction in “precarity” was not necessarily one of them. Accordingly, the system of augural beliefs may have co-developed with the cultivation of rice as a cultural mechanism for addressing this increase in precarity.36 The thesis that augury reflects and expresses the high degree of uncertainty of rice cultivation is supported by the relative absence of augural practices among Bornean groups with less precarious subsistence bases. Elaborate augural beliefs and practices have historically been associated with the Dayak, a term that encompasses the many tribal, animist or Christian, traditional swidden rice cultivators of Borneo. Ethnic Chinese, large numbers of whom in the colonial era came to the island to work in mines, on plantations, and in other capitalist enterprises, but many of whom eventually became smallholder agriculturalists, typically did not practice augury. Native ethnic Malays, living along the island’s coasts and major rivers, practicing trading, fishing, and small-scale irrigated rice agriculture, also did not possess the augural complex. Indeed, in the modern era the Muslim Malays often deploy “listening to birds” as a derisive ethnic marker for the Dayak. The Punan and Penan, traditional hunter-gatherers, ethnically distinct from the Dayak, appear to have adopted augural beliefs relatively recently. Charles Hose and William McDougall (1902:195) observed that the Punan at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century

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were then in the process of adopting augury from the Dayak, which was about the same time that they were beginning to adopt the practice of swidden cultivation of rice. Traditional Penan or Punan divination focused on their own domain of precarity, the prowess of their hunting dogs.37 Among the Dayak groups who practiced the most elaborate forms of augury, the twentieth century brought changes to the system. The Kantu’ say that they formerly observed omens even during such relatively inconsequential stages as mandok, “re-burning,” of poorly burned swiddens, and nambak, “transplanting,” of swamp rice seedlings. But by the last quarter of the twentieth century, the Kantu’ said that the only swidden stages in which they really paid attention to omens were—in addition to the initial stage of site selection—nebas, “slashing,” and nebang, “felling.” The coercive power of omens was said to have formerly been so great that only a tuai burong, “omen expert,” had the power to abrogate ill omens, but this office did not survive into the modern era. Instead, today anyone can abrogate the impact of inauspicious omens by performing the temusi’ ritual described in chapter 1, or a begela’, “offering ceremony,” in which chickens or pigs are sacrificed to the spirits, which is said to be a modern innovation. This historic attenuation of augural practices took place at the same time as a lessening in dependence on the swidden cultivation of rice. One important historical development was the swampland cultivation of rice, which reportedly took place early in the twentieth century.38 Swampland swiddens, which are considered by the Kantu’ to be a type of swidden, as reflected in their term for it, umai paiya’, “swamp swidden,” are a hybrid type of cultivation, positioned midway between swiddens and irrigated terraces. On the one hand, like normal swiddens, they are not permanent fields, as a fallow is incorporated into the cycle; and a brush-sword, adze, and fire are used to clear vegetation from the land. Like irrigated fields, on the other hand, the swamp swiddens are planted with flood-tolerant rice varieties; the rice plants are first grown from seed in nurseries and then transplanted (fig. 2.4.); there is some rudimentary water management; and the soil may be worked with a hoe or brush-sword before planting. The agro-ecological dynamics of swampland swiddens are quite different from those of normal dryland swiddens, as is the level and nature of their risk. Two of the principal hazards in dryland swiddens—the failure to obtain a thorough burn and prolonged inundation by floodwaters—pose no threat at all in swampland swiddens. The vegetative cover on most of

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Fig. 2.4. Kantu’ family transplanting rice seedlings into a swamp swidden.

the swampland in the Kantu’ territory, by virtue of relatively frequent cropping, is grassland. In the absence of a dry spell to burn the grasses, they are simply slashed and mulched into the swamp soil. As for floodwaters, the special rice varieties that are planted in the swampland swiddens are resistant to water stress by virtue of their unusually deep roots, so they can survive most normal inundations. Thus, the selection of a site for a swampland swidden is less problematic than selection of a site for a dryland swidden: there are fewer critical variables to consider and there are fewer chances of failure due to incorrect selection. Not only are swamp swiddens less risky, the rewards are greater: among the Kantu’, the yield per hectare in swamp swiddens averages two to three times as much as yields in dryland swiddens. Compared with dryland swiddens, the practice of augury is markedly diminished in the swampland swiddens. Either beburong besi, “taking omens from iron”—the practice referred to earlier in which a person starts slashing the swidden even in the absence of a good omen—or no omen-taking at all, is done in about one-third of all swiddens, most of which are made in swampland. Whereas omens are taken from birds in over 90 percent of swiddens made on dryland, the comparable figure for swiddens made in swampland is just 13 percent (table 2.5).

environmental uncertainty, augural contingency table 2.5

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INCIDENCE OF OMEN-TAKING IN DRYLAND VS. SWAMPLAND

Drainage:

Less thorough ↕ More thorough

None Iron as omen Omen birds Total

Swampland

Dryland

69% 18% 13% 100%

4.5% 4.5% 91% 100%

This association is statistically significant. For n = 135 omens, X2 = 150.9 and P < .001.

A second, equally if not more important development during the twentieth century, which lessened Dayak vulnerability to the vagaries of swidden rice agriculture, was export crop production. Beginning early in the twentieth century, Para rubber (Hevea brasiliensis), an exotic transplanted from the Amazon, became a mainstay of the Dayak economy, fulfilling market needs while swidden rice fulfilled subsistence food needs. Not atypical was the pattern at the Kantu’ longhouse Tikul Batu, where the average household had four to five rubber groves, each approximately one hectare in size and containing between two hundred and four hundred trees, and worked largely during slack times in the swidden cycle (fig. 2.5). Part-time rubber tapping helped buffer the Dayak household economy against unpredictable environmental perturbations to the swidden cycle, just as the swidden cultivation of rice helped buffer the household economy against price fluctuations in the international rubber market. The ability to buy rice in the market when necessary by tapping rubber considerably mitigated the riskiness of swidden rice production. The Kantu’ explicitly categorize rubber production as lying outside the sphere of human activity governed by ill omens and relations with the spirit world. Indeed, on a day that is proscribed for work in the swiddens by an ill omen, rubber tapping is regarded as the default economic activity that one can turn to instead. Rubber is considered, therefore, as an alternative to the spiritual-ecological tumult of the rice swidden. There is also some precarity to rubber production, based on cyclic global fluctuations in market prices, but it is completely distinct from the environmental precarity of the rice swiddens. Because rubber leavens the risks of the swidden system, its development may help to explain the gradual attenuation of augural practices within the swidden system as the twentieth century progressed.

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Fig. 2.5. Kantu’ family member stirring coagulant into latex newly tapped from rubber trees.

It is not clear that the most recent commodity development in Borneo, that of oil palm (Elaeis guineensis Jacq.), will follow the pattern of rubber. The governmental emphasis on developing palm oil in large corporate estates, associated land-grabbing by elites, and dependence upon centralized processing mills, all mean that oil palm has tended to add to, not subtract from, the precarity of the Dayak farmer.39 Conclusions: Augury and Contingency Dayak augury belongs to a wider set of beliefs and practices involving the cultural manufacture of uncertainty or randomness.40 The most famous such example in anthropology is the earlier-mentioned Zande poison oracle, in which poison is administered to a chicken, with its subsequent death versus survival being interpreted as a sign from the divine.41 The Zande oracular process was carefully structured to produce random outcomes. As Eitan Wilf (2013) writes, “Although individuals do not explicitly treat the poison oracle as a randomizer but, rather, assign it mystical properties . . . the administration of poison to fowls does, in fact, amount to the production of a randomizer.” The randomizing character is reflected in the

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extraordinary care taken to prevent any empirical bias from creeping into the system. Thus, larger chickens are given larger doses of poison, and smaller ones smaller doses, in order to make the outcome as “discriminating” as possible.42 A poison oracle that simply killed all small fowl and preserved all large ones would not serve. The poison’s powers of discrimination are further tested by requiring the poison to first kill one fowl and then spare a second. A poison oracle that simply killed—or failed to kill—a number of fowls in a row would, again, not be seen as efficacious. Wilf writes, “A poison that systematically kills all fowls or has no effect on any of them is tantamount to a die that falls on one face time and again: It is not a proper randomizer in that, all things being equal, it is not [here citing the Oxford English Dictionary] ‘governed by or involving equal chances for each of the actual or hypothetical members of a population’: its outcomes are known in advance.”43 What the Azande in effect constructed, therefore, was a poison oracle whose decisions could not be predicted from external factors, whose decisions were unpredictable. In most systems of ritual divination, it is precisely the absence of any empirical basis for predicting outcomes that confers supernatural authority on the system.44 This clearly characterizes the Dayak case, since any systematic agro-ecological information that the birds might convey is negated by the investment of meaning in such nonsystematic phenomena as the sight or sound of an omen bird on the right versus left. We are used to thinking of deterministic outcomes as cultural products, but not contingent ones; but Wilf (2013:614) points out that contingency can be a valuable cultural resource, and it can be produced as such:45 “Contingency or ‘uncertainty of occurrence’ need not always be something that individuals strive to minimize when attempting to implement their intentions in the world.” Cultural meaning can be found not only in determinism but in indeterminism, in contingency.46 An example of construction of contingency in contemporary life is the lottery, which Peter Stone (2011) describes as a mechanism for keeping reason out of decision-making. He states the lottery principle as follows: “Decision-making by lottery is therefore justified whenever it is important that bad reasons be kept out of the decision.” This seems consistent with the analyses of divination among the Azande and the Kantu’, but Stone argues that the principles involved are not the same: “The use of a lottery as a means of divination—a technique for discerning the will of God or some other higher power . . . fits poorly with the lottery principle. The reason for this is that random selection as a

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means of divination does not, properly speaking, count as the use of a lottery qua lottery.” As Stone continues, “the sanitizing effect of a process independent of reasons—thus plays no role when lotteries are used for religious purposes. Lotteries are not desirable on this score by virtue of the unpredictability that uniquely characterizes them. Instead, lotteries become a form of uncertainty avoidance.”47 This part of Stone’s analysis is not supported by ethnographic accounts of divination, however, as among the Azande and Kantu’, divination is clearly structured not to avoid uncertainty but certainty, in effect to create uncertainty. The contingency that is constructed in the Dayak system of augury reflects the reality of their human ecology; it reflects the complexity of the tropical forest vis-à-vis Dayak resources to understand it. Augural articulation of contingency—the investing of meaning in the flight or call of birds to the left versus right, for example—is a metaphor for the reality that some of the dynamics of this environment lie beyond the capacity of human comprehension and are, thus, up to chance.48 Bird augury is thus a metaphoric statement of the limits to human understanding of this environment. The cultural construction of contingency in the Dayak case is thus mimetic in character. The environment and Dayak agriculture are influenced by chance variables beyond human ken. The omens give meaning to the ontological rift between the everyday agricultural world of the Dayak on the one hand, and on the other hand the reality of the spirit world insofar as it represents the reality of the tropical forest. The issues involved are serious ones for the Dayak. The anecdote with which this chapter opened, involving the public meeting with the government’s subdistrict head, demonstrates that for the Dayak at that time and place, there was literally no better way for the government to demonstrate its legitimacy than to address how best to manage this ontological divide.

chapter 3

A Non-Western Panopticon The Yogyakarta Sultanate and Merapi Volcano

Introduction: Mandala Kingdoms and the Panopticon in Java The last chapter examined how Bornean ritual involving bird augury enables people to step out of themselves, enables them to obtain a perspective on themselves from outside themselves. This next chapter examines another way of achieving this through a similar process of mimesis, within the traditional Yogyakarta Sultanate in Central Java. The intermingling of political and cosmological geographies was a characteristic feature of many traditional Southeast Asian kingdoms. Stanley J. Tambiah (1977:69) coined the term “galactic polity” for such geographies, to “represent the design of traditional Southeast Asian kingdoms, a design that coded in a composite way cosmological, topographical, and politicoeconomic features.” Throughout much of Southeast Asia, the term traditionally applied to this conception of state power and territory is “mandala.” Whereas this term means “the world” in modern Javanese, it derives from Sanskrit, in which it literally means “circular, round,” but it also can refer to a territory, including “the circle of a king’s near and distant neighbors (with whom he must maintain political and diplomatic relations).”1 The term is used in this latter sense in Vedic-era political treatises like the Arthashastra to discuss the geography of the state and its friends and enemies.2 The mandala kingdom is conceived of as an earthbound copy of the divine realm. Walter Benjamin (1978:333, 334) believes that the principle of similarity or mimesis involved once played a central role in the organization

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of human society: “the sphere of life that formerly seemed to be governed by the law of similarity was comprehensive; it ruled both microcosm and macrocosm. . . . For clearly the observable world of modern man contains only minimal residues of the magical correspondences and analogies that were familiar to ancient peoples.” Benjamin is alluding here to the most important principle of the mandala kingdom: the earthly kingdom is not an exact replica of the cosmos; there is a scalar difference. The term “microcosm” literally means “cosmos in miniature”: “Human nature or experience considered as representing the counterpart in miniature of divine or universal nature (opposed to macrocosm); the human individual in general, or one person in particular, regarded as the representation in miniature of the world or universe.”3 The mandala kingdom is a microcosm of the cosmos, and the capital is a microcosm of that, as has been observed in the Yogyakarta palace.4 Robert Heine-Geldern (1942) suggests that this principle of a correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm has its origins in the Near East in the third or fourth millennium b.c.e. It is based on the idea that parallelism between the two is the key to harmony on both the earth and in the wider cosmos.5 Timothy Behrend (1989) writes, “Harmony between the two worlds [human and divine] assured the stability of both; a skewing of their alignment would cause disruption in both spheres, with destruction occurring in the small.” In addition to harmony, the “homology” between the two worlds confers power on the earthly kingdom.6 Replicating the structure of the cosmos is, thus, a way to claim cosmic authority and apply it to earthly ends.7 Political application of the mandala concept involves not just structuring the kingdom as a homology of the universe, but structuring different parts of the kingdom as homologies of one another. Thus, the following correspondences hold: Earthly domain : Cosmos :: Mandala capital : Outlying districts Tambiah (1977:76) writes, “although the constituent political units differed in size, each lesser unit was a reproduction and imitation of the larger.” Following the principles of the mandala, establishing equivalence between center and periphery promotes harmony, which underpins political authority. Establishing equivalence to successively distant zones of the kingdom is integral to asserting royal authority over them.8 As these homologous or mimetic relations expand, their political character progressively changes. A characteristic feature of mandala kingdoms

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is a diminishing potency of power from center to periphery, which is likened to the light of a torch radiating outward with decreasing intensity, its reach and strength determined by the power of the center.9 This geography of rule is typically conceived of as concentric rings, three in number, radiating out from a strong center to an intermediate zone and then to a weak periphery, expressing graphically the diminishment in royal authority as it radiates out from the center (Tambiah 1977:74). For example, Soemarsaid Moertono (1981:112) finds three territorial categories identified in the fourteenth-century Javanese kingdom of Majapahit and also three in the succeeding kingdom of Mataram; and Lansing finds three in contemporary Bali (table 3.1). The mimetic character of these relations is explicitly discussed in a passage in the “Na¯gara-Keˇrta¯gama,” the fourteenth-century court chronicle of Majapahit (chapter 4, canto 17, stanza 3):10 The whole expanse of Yawa land [Java] is to be compared with one town in the Prince’s reign. • By thousands [are counted] the people’s dwelling places, to be compared with manors of Royal servants, surrounding the body of the Royal compound. • All kinds of foreign islands; to be compared with them are the cultivated lands’ area, made happy and quiet. • Of the aspect of the parks, then, are the forests and mountains, all of them set foot on by Him, without feeling anxiety. Academic studies of mandala kingdoms have focused on their symbolic, religious, and cosmological dimensions. With a few exceptions, little attention has been paid to the political implications of the mimetic relation between table 3.1

MANDALA CORRESPONDENCES IN JAVA AND BALI

Inner circle of mandala Majapahit (14th century) Java Mataram (16th–19th centuries)

Nagara agung, Core region

Bali (20th century)

Terraced hillock

Intermediate circle of mandala Regions and islands outside Java Mantjanegara, Foreign and coastal regions Gunung Agung, Central volcano

Outer circle of mandala Countries beyond Tanah sabrang, Lands across the sea Cosmic mountain

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human and divine worlds, microcosm and macrocosm, and inner and outer rings of the mandala kingdom.11 This includes the production of knowledge needed for rule. The mandala correspondences between center and periphery have implications for the way that state knowledge is produced. However, limited attention has been paid to the norms and rules governing information gathering in traditional, premodern states. Foucault’s work on governance offers tools to explore this topic, although there is disagreement regarding the applicability of his thinking to non-Western contexts. Foucault (1991:87) himself says that his subject, the “art of government,” dates back only to the beginning of the sixteenth century in western Europe. A number of scholars have suggested that Foucault’s grid of intelligibility does not hold across cultures, and others have argued that it is particularly unsuited to transnational locales.12 Noting the “absent Orient” in Foucault, Michael Dutton (2003:109, 89) has specifically argued that it would be difficult to construct a work on government like Foucault’s grounded in an Asian tradition of governance. These misgivings have not kept scholars from making the attempt, however. This includes studies of mechanisms of discipline and resistance in Asian factories by Aihwa Ong (1987) and Lisa Rofel (1992). Equally important have been studies of governmentality in natural resource management in Asia, including agriculture, forestry, and development.13 These applications of Foucault have also drawn criticism.14 Lansing (2003) uses Valeri’s research from eastern Indonesia to illustrate an alternative to Foucault’s genealogy of power. Others have faulted Foucaultian scholars in Asia for too little engagement with politics, as part of a wider failure by social scientists to take on politically sensitive subjects, for example in Indonesia under Suharto’s “New Order” regime.15 Tony Day (2002:90) writes of the aversion to contemporary politics in this body of work, “Michel Foucault’s thinking has been taken up with the greatest enthusiasm and skill in anthropological studies of Southeast Asia that examine gender in the context of power relations, or attempt to understand the origins of colonial domination, or construct “genealogies” leading back from present discourses into the Southeast Asian past.” Tania M. Li (2007a:277–78) echoes this point: “The reluctance of scholars exploring governmental rationalities to conduct empirical studies of particular junctures introduces an odd inconsistency in their work: an interest in politics as a hypothetical possibility that is not carried into an interest in politics as a concrete practice”; although Kaushik Ghosh (2006:526) argues that even Li’s “version of governmentality makes invisible the memories and contemporary acts of coercion.”

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One aspect of Foucault’s work that is potentially most relevant to Asian governance but least studied concerns Bentham’s “panopticon.” Jeremy Bentham’s late-eighteenth-century concept of the panopticon has become a ubiquitous model for thinking about state surveillance of citizens. The central principle of the panopticon, which was initially proposed as a design for prisons, is that it promotes not merely surveillance of state subjects but selfsurveillance. Foucault (1995:205) sees this disciplinary technology for the supervision of inmates as having much wider relevance and applicability: “The Panopticon . . . must be understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men.” Thanks in part to Foucault’s analyses of the panopticon, the concept is popularly used today to refer to state institutions of surveillance and discipline all over the world. Bentham wrote in England in the late eighteenth century, and Foucault (1995:87) regarded the principles of surveillance and discipline that he worked on as answers to problems of government that exploded in Europe in the early sixteenth century. The panopticon thus seem to be a product of a particular time and place of state development. But Elaine Jeffreys and Gary Sigley (2009:5) argue that during the period of which Foucault writes, western Europe was not isolated, including from its Asian colonies: “The period that Foucault (1991) attributes to the growth and expansion of governmentality is largely coextensive with the processes of colonial expansion and administration, hence the government of subjects at home and abroad was and continues to be intertwined.” This means that the possibility that colonial rule affected colonizers as well as colonized cannot be discounted. Bernard S. Cohn and Nicholas B. Dirks (1988:229) write, “Part of our task is to propose the extent to which the European experience of state formation was predicated on its own colonial experience, and in turn how nationalism as response to colonial experience reproduced (though with crucial differences) the European experience.” In short, the European development of institutions like the panopticon at home cannot be separated from Europe’s experience of colonial rule abroad. A significant fraction of the nearly three hundred thousand human deaths due to volcanic eruption over the past five centuries worldwide occurred on the island of Java.16 There are 129 volcanoes in Indonesia, and the most active of these is Gunung Merapi in central Java (fig. 3.1). Gunung means “mountain” in Javanese, Indonesian, and Malay; mer comes from the

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Fig. 3.1. Merapi volcano, with grasslands in foreground and to left.

Hindu or Buddhist or Jain term for the sacred Mount Meru at the center of the universe, and api means “fire”—thus gunung merapi translates as “the sacred fire mountain.” Historical records show that Merapi has had at least two dozen major eruptions with human casualties since 1006. However, since all but one of those recorded eruptions took place in the last one-third of this period (that is, since 1672), the poorer records from earlier times probably disguise a much higher toll. The deadliest eruption in historic times occurred in 1672, leaving a reported 3,000 people dead. An explosive eruption in 2010 caused 385 deaths, and an eruption of superheated gases in 1994 killed 64 people, 43 of whom lived in the village of Turgo, the primary field site for this study. Twenty kilometers to the south of Merapi volcano lies the kraton, “residence of the king,” or palace of Yogyakarta, the origins of which date to the breaking up of the Mataram Sultanate by the Dutch in 1755, and where a ruling sultan, Hamengkubuwono X—the official governor of the province of Central Java—still sits to this day. The volcano looms large in the cosmological beliefs of the Yogyakarta court. The palace is located on a direct line between Merapi volcano and the Java Sea to the south.17 To safeguard its standing with the spirits of the volcano and the sea, to this day the court

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makes regular offerings to them.18 Every year on the twenty-ninth day of the seventh month (Rajab) of the Islamic calendar, the Yogyakarta palace makes labuhan jumengan, “offerings,” to Mount Merapi, and also to Mount Lawu to the east, and on the shore of the southern coast at Parangtritis. In addition, once every thirty-five-day cycle in the Javanese calendar, the sultan’s spirit reportedly visits the mahkam, “grave,” on Merapi’s southern slope of Séh Jumadil Kubra, who is both a volcanic spirit and a Muslim saint.19 An important dimension of the relationship between Merapi and the Yogyakarta kraton is the belief in a spirit palace inside the crater of Merapi volcano, a spirit world that mirrors the world of humans. It is believed that there is a correspondence between phenomena in this spirit world and phenomena in the everyday life of the Javanese. Perturbations of the volcano are attributed to perturbations in human society, so the volcano affords a sort of privileged optic into sociopolitical dynamics. Analysis of this mimetic correspondence between real and spirit worlds represents another mechanism by which human society can obtain a “removed” perspective on itself. The first section of this chapter examines the cosmology and geography of rule in the Yogyakarta court: the “vertical” orientation of the court, and the role that Merapi volcano plays in its ritual and politics; the spirit court that is believed to reside inside Merapi’s crater, and its mimetic relationship to everyday Javanese society; and monitoring of Merapi by both the Yogyakarta court and the national government. The second section of the chapter focuses on the concept of the panopticon and its relevance to the Yogyakarta court: the question of Orient-Occident separation during the colonial era; European fantasies regarding Oriental rule; and actual mimetic models of rule, represented by the Yogyakarta Sultanate and Merapi. Cosmology and Geography of Rule The directionality of the mandala cosmology is key to understanding the relationship between Merapi volcano and the Yogyakarta court. Both divine and earthly power flow out from the center of the mandala kingdom, whereas spiritual and political allegiance flow in. Contrary to this flow and thus literally treasonous were any relations perpendicular to it, as between two vassal districts. Tambiah (1977:80) writes, “The king was strongly suspicious of the possible collusion between provincial governors and rulers against his own person and powers, and therefore treated unauthorized visiting

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among the latter as treason. In theory, the king was safe only when these rulers and officials had dyadic relations solely with him as the radial center of the network.” In the case of the historic East Indies, these politically sanctioned dyadic relations generally ran along vertical, north-south axes, as dictated by geology. In both Java and Bali, the great inland irrigated rice kingdoms were built in the floodplains at the foot of volcanos, in most cases at the foot of watersheds that flowed from volcanos either north to the Java Sea or south to the Indian Ocean. The volcanos periodically spread layers of ash on the countryside, which rejuvenates its soils; they furnish the lowlands with waters and nutrient-rich silt for agriculture; and they also furnish hunting and grazing grounds, and both timber and nontimber forest products. There is a downside to the proximity to volcanos: periodic eruptions—with frequency and geographic reach varying inversely—send superheated gases, pyroclastic mudflows, lava, and ash clouds out over the countryside. But proximity to volcanos was sufficiently beneficial, on balance, so that all state development in the interiors of Java and Bali took place around them.20 Given this particular geology and geography, the irrigated rice states of Java and Bali were structured according to principles of vertical integration and horizontal opposition.21 The imperative for a lowland kingdom was to control water resources and rice production from the headwaters of the volcano to the sea, thus from top to bottom of one great watershed on the volcanic slopes, and to oppose those kingdoms that controlled watersheds to the east or west. This did not mean that oppositional politics was absent from the vertical dimensions, however: Geertz (1980:21) writes, “Politics, in this up-down dimension, consisted of an unremitting effort on the part of the lords situated farther down toward the coast to control (domesticate is perhaps a better word) those situated farther up toward the mountains, and the equally unremitting efforts of those farther up toward the mountains to remain effectively independent and to undercut the power of those directly below them.”22 These directional dimensions of rule are visible in the Yogyakarta court. Stuart Robson (2003) writes that the Yogyakarta palace is aligned along two axes, one running from the peak of Merapi volcano to the southern ocean, and the other running east-west.23 According to Behrend (1989:177), the “cosmic metaphor” applies only to the north-south axis: “Instead of laying out an entire model, the kraton reproduces the [mandala] macrocosm schematically and in only one axis, the north-south ceremonial axis.”24 Whereas to the east and west of the Yogyakarta court there would

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have been rival kingdoms, along the north-south axis there would have been only subordinate and superordinate elements of the same kingdom. The north-south axis was cosmological as well as political, because to the north of Yogyakarta lay Merapi volcano. Mimetic principles were integral to the cosmology of the historic kingdoms of Java. Concentric circles of authority, radiating out from the center to the periphery, each more distant and more loosely governed, were conceived of as mirroring one another. In the case of the Yogyakarta court, to the north and up the flanks of Merapi volcano, its gradually diminishing power meets not another earthly state but the waxing power of the volcano. To use the Javanese metaphor, the light from the “torch” of Yogyakarta meets the light from the “torch” of Merapi. The relation between the two forces is not oppositional, however, but mimetic, as reflected in the belief that there is a world within the crater of Merapi that is parallel to, or a replica of, or a miniature of that of the Javanese themselves. According to the court chronicle of the Mataram Sultanate (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries), the Babad Tanah Jawi (The Clearing of Java), human settlement of the island drove all of its spirits into the volcanoes and other marginal places, where they remain to this day.25 This includes Merapi volcano, the baureksa, “spirits,” of which are believed to have their own spirit court. The villagers on Merapi’s slopes say that the crater world is ruled by Séh Jumadil Kubra, the earlier-mentioned Muslim spirit-saint.26 Humans are called to this spirit court—through death—when it has a need for labor, just as a Javanese ruler would call upon his populace for labor. As this suggests, in many respects the life of the spirits in Merapi’s crater is thought to mimic the everyday life of the Javanese. For example, the Javanese believe that house-cleaning and house-building are scheduled in the Merapi palace during each Bulan Sura’, the first moon of the Islamic calendar, and the dirt and waste produced by these activities are manifested in the ejection of what are perceived by the Javanese as ash, gas clouds, and lahar—a mudflow of ash and water.27 Some of the volcano’s eruptions are said to represent the sallying forth of the inhabitants of the spirit palace in a pawe, “procession,” headed by another of the volcano’s foremost spirits, Kerto Dimejo, riding in a carriage. The river gorges on the volcano’s flanks, which eruptions typically follow, are believed to be the streets that the volcano’s spirits travel along.28 Life in the spirit world of Merapi does not just resemble the everyday life of the Javanese; the two are thought to be causally linked. In particular,

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perturbation in the one is thought to result in a corresponding perturbation in the other. In the wake of a deadly eruption of Merapi in 1994, for example, Gembong, a prominent ritual expert in Yogyakarta, stated, “Dalam pandangan spiritualnya, bencana alam gunung meletus dan angin ribut seperti yang terjadi sampai Selasa lalu, merupakan replika atau miniatur alam semesta atau jagat raya terhadap manusia.” (From a spiritual perspective, natural disasters like volcanic eruptions and wind-storms such as took place last Tuesday [November 22, 1994], represent, in replica or miniature, humanity’s place in the universe or macrocosm.) Gembong’s comment explicitly illustrates the scalar dimension of mandala cosmologies: Eruption : Distress of Humanity : : Merapi : Universe Gembong went on to predict that this ledakan gunung, “explosion of the mountain,” would be followed by a ledakan politik, “explosion in [real world] politics.”29 Volcanic activity on Merapi, thus, is thought to reflect and portend corresponding events in the everyday world of the Javanese. This mimetic relationship between Merapi volcano and the Javanese has political dimensions. In Java and, indeed, throughout Southeast Asia, there is an ancient tradition of linking events like the 1994 eruption of Merapi to perturbations in the sociopolitical realm, because of what they signify about the ruler’s mandate to rule.30 The principle involved, based again on the mandala correspondence between human and divine realms, is that if the ruler is strong and just, there will be no such perturbations; if there is harmony in the microcosmic human realm, then there will be harmony in the macrocosmic divine realm. The history of Java is replete with claimed examples of this: the first recorded eruption of Merapi, in 1006, has been credited with toppling the eleventh-century Hindu kingdom of Mataram.31 Amungkurat, king of the later Muslim Mataram Sultanate, fell from power in 1677 following a series of such perturbations. As described in the Babad Tanah Jawi: “Sun and moon eclipses occurred frequently; rain was falling out of season; a comet was seen every night. Ash-rain and earthquakes [occurred]. Many omens were seen. There were signs that the kingdom was facing ruin.”32 Michael Adas (1979:140) notes that the revolt of the Yogyakarta prince, Dipanagara, against the Dutch in 1825–1830 was preceded by “famine, cholera epidemics, and volcanic eruptions.” Sartono Kartodirdjo (1966:66–67, 166–68) suggests that the 1888 peasant revolt against the Dutch in Banten, Northwest Java, was influenced by human and cattle epidemics, earthquakes, and the eruption of Krakatau in 1883.33 Ward Keeler

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(1988:98) links the 1965–1966 communal violence on Bali to the eruption of that island’s Gunung Agung volcano in 1963. And during the years following Merapi’s 1994 eruption, Indonesia was shaken by financial, political, and environmental crises, which culminated in the collapse of Suharto’s three-decade-long reign, all in accordance with the predictions made in the wake of the eruption.34 In subsequent years, eruptions of Merapi have been popularly attributed to the injustice of the central government toward its citizens.35 Due to the political as well as physical threat of volcanic activity, the Javanese have for millennia closely monitored it. One of the highest villages on the southern slopes of Merapi volcano is Kinarejo, known as the desa kraton, or “palace village,” home to the juru kunci, “key master,” or caretaker appointed by the Yogyakarta court to coordinate its ceremonial activities on the volcano. The then-incumbent in this office perished in the 2010 eruption, the brunt of which was borne by Kinarejo. The Yogyakarta court is not alone in taking an interest in Merapi, however: the national government, based in the distant capital of Jakarta, also demonstrates a keen interest in it. This interest was pronounced during the thirty-three-year “New Order” regime (1965–1998) of the late dictator Suharto, who hailed from Central Java himself. He took a personal interest in the Yogyakarta court’s ceremonies on Merapi, often contributing financial and other resources to them. At the same time there was bureaucratic interest in Merapi through the guise of the Vulcanology Service. Tracing its origin to colonial Dutch interest, stimulated by the 1883 eruption of Krakatau and the 1919 eruption of Kelud, and benefiting from considerable international assistance in the twentieth century, the Vulcanology Service is a world-class institution devoted to studying Merapi and Indonesia’s other volcanos, monitoring their activity, and disseminating warnings to the public.36 Merapi, one of the world’s most active and dangerous volcanos, and situated in a politically and demographically important part of the country, has drawn a considerable share of the attention of the Vulcanology Service. Beginning in the 1920s, it has built posts on its flanks and established monitoring stations all around the crater. The service has mapped out the zone judged unsafe for human habitation, with subrankings from 1 to 3, from most to least dangerous. The Vulcanology Service also developed a ranking system for the day-to-day condition of the volcano, which is routinely publicized in the environs of the volcano. From least to most dangerous, this consists of, in increasing magnitude of threat:

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Aktif Normal, “Normally Active”; Waspada Merapi, “On Guard [for] Merapi”; Siap Merapi, “Prepared [for] Merapi; and Awas Merapi, “Beware Merapi.”37 When eruptions are imminent or ongoing, the Vulcanology Service issues daily, well-publicized press releases on the state of the volcano, drawing data from its monitoring stations on Merapi’s slopes, for example: “Kemarin, tidak terjadi gempa vulkanik, gempa low frequency, maupun gempa tremor. Hanya terjadi gempa fase banyak 2 kali dan guguran lava 88 kali.” (Yesterday, there were no volcanic earthquakes, low frequency earthquakes, or earth tremors. There were only 2 multi-phase earthquakes and 88 discharges of lava.)38 The Vulcanology Service represents the apogee of the Indonesian state’s powers of scientific surveillance. Its press releases emphasize the civil government’s understanding of and thus authority over the volcano, and their use of an esoteric, scientific language emphasizes the exclusivity of this knowledge.39 But this very exercise of attention tells us something more. Day (2002:107, 109) disagrees with scholars who posit a rupture between old cosmologies and new ideologies in contemporary Java, arguing that we cannot ignore “the very old and still-unfolding history of cosmologies”— like those that link secular microcosm to sacred macrocosm. The state’s great investment in volcanic research and monitoring appears incommensurate with the annual toll in life and property on the mountain, compared with the much greater toll nationwide from more mundane threats from, for example, malnutrition, infant mortality, or natural perturbations like flooding. There is something special about volcanic hazard on Merapi: death and destruction on its slopes are “privileged” in a way that death and destruction elsewhere are not, including at the often unhealthy transmigration sites to which evacuees from Merapi are sent to remove them from harm’s way.40 Human casualties on Merapi are privileged because they stand in a mimetic relationship to the nation. As the ritual expert Gembong said in the wake of the 1994 eruption, when disaster strikes the villagers on its slopes, this represents a microcosm to the macrocosm of the universe. The tiny human population living on Merapi’s slopes is a part standing in for the whole; and its welfare is important precisely for that reason. Its welfare reflects on the moral probity of both the proximate Yogyakarta court and the distant national government in Jakarta.41

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The significance of Merapi to the national government is illuminated by the case of Turgo. The primary field site for the research reported on here, Turgo, in the subdistrict of Pakem, a hamlet of 150-odd households, was for many years one of the highest remaining villages on the southern slope of Merapi, lying over six hundred meters above sea level and approximately eight kilometers from the summit and crater of Merapi. In 1978, in the wake of an eruption of hot gases and ash, the government tried but failed to resettle the villagers of Turgo, who insisted on remaining in their village. Finally, the government agreed to allow them to continue to live in Turgo on the condition that their village would be officially dihapus, “erased,” from government maps. Turgo is a problem for the national government because its proximity to the crater makes the likelihood of human casualties due to volcanic activity relatively high. And indeed, in the eruption of 1994, there were dozens of casualties in Turgo. Insofar as Merapi stands in a mimetic relationship to the nation, as microcosm to macrocosm, this represents a constant risk of troubling symbolism for the national government as well as the Yogyakarta court. However, the officially visible village represented more of a threat than the erased and officially invisible village. Unlike Agamben’s (1998) concept of homo sacer, “sacred man,” the paradoxical and vulnerable individual who exists in law only as an exile from it, the erasure of Turgo was intended not to increase the vulnerability of its people to state violence, but rather to render their vulnerability to natural hazard less threatening to the state. Panopticon in the West and East The cosmology and geography of rule on Merapi volcano is in part about the construction of knowledge of divine and earthly worlds, of Merapi and Javanese society; it is in part about how such knowledge is constructed; it is in part about surveillance. Much of the contemporary thinking about state surveillance is informed by Bentham’s model of the panopticon, as described in the title of his 1791 publication, “Panopticon; or, the Inspection-House: Containing The Idea of a New Principle of Construction applicable to any Sort of Establishment, in which Persons of any Description are to be kept under Inspection; and in particular to Penitentiary-Houses, Prisons, Houses of Industry, Work-Houses,

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Poor-Houses, Manufactories, Mad-Houses, Lazarettos, Hospitals, and Schools.” Bentham describes the panopticon as “a proposed form of prison of circular shape having cells built round and fully exposed towards a central ‘well,’ whence the warders could at all times observe the prisoners.” This ideal prison was designed so as to make prisoners think that they would always be under observation by warders, although they could never observe the warders themselves or other prisoners. In the title of his work, Bentham suggested that the principles of the panopticon could be applied to “Persons of any Description” in “any Sort of Establishment.” Foucault concurs; he sees this promotion of a state of permanent visibility and thus vulnerability as a ubiquitous characteristic of modernity, characterizing not just prisons but hospitals, schools, factories, asylums, and so on. Bentham’s thesis was that by promoting the suspicion of constant observation, the panopticon would reduce the cost of actual observation by the institutional authorities. Part of the effort of surveillance of the citizenry is thereby lifted from the state and placed on the shoulders of the citizens themselves. This not only spares the state some expense, it is more effective, and therein lies the real political power of the panopticon. As articulated in the work of Foucault more generally, power works more thoroughly when it is assumed by subjects themselves into their everyday practices than when it is exercised at the point of a gun. The more external power “tends to the non-corporal . . . the more constant, profound and permanent are its effects.”42 Foucault addresses his study of state surveillance and governance to the case of western European history. As Martha Kaplan (1995) writes, “Foucault begins Discipline and Punish (1995) with a contrast between power over death versus power over life, instantiated by public executions versus prison timetables. He contrasts traditional, ritual, costly, violent forms of power with panopticism, a subtle, calculated technology and economy of subjection. The contrast is seen as part of a European historical trajectory.” However, Kaplan questions Foucault’s implicit premise that the history of Europe is completely distinct from the rest of the world. To begin with, she points out that there was a “a colonial dimension to the history of European panopticist discourse.” That is, the disciplinary mechanisms that European states developed for their own citizens were also deployed in their overseas colonies. Referring to Britain, for example, she writes, “At the very least, spectacle and capillary action, ritual and panopticon, coexist as technologies of power throughout the entire history of the colonial British.”43 In her own

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study of the panopticon in Maharashtra, India, Kaplan (1995:89) documents the construction of panopticon prisons under British colonial rule early in the nineteenth century.44 Kaplan (1995:94) argues not only that techniques of governance in Europe were applied in the colonies; she also argues that the experience of governing colonial populations must have affected the way that government developed in Europe: “In this model, we would insist that the history of European nations be read as a product of colonizing relations. The making of the European self happens not in Europe alone, but in relation to real and imagined others in the world, in the experience and creation of difference for purposes of control.” The impact of colonial rule on the colonizers as well as the colonized has been obscured by the colonial-era European imagination. Consider the infamous “poison tree,” or pohon upas, of the East Indies, Antiaris toxicaria Lesch.), which—used to poison blowpipe darts—struck fear into the hearts of the early Dutch colonizers. The resulting European obsession with the poison tree was widespreading and long-lasting, extending into literature and popular culture for centuries to come. The poison tree is mentioned in Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818, canto 4, 126), John Ruskin’s “Scythian Banquet Song” (1839:iv), Alexander S. Pushkin’s “The Upas Tree” (1828), and Erasmus Darwin’s poem Loves of the Plants (1789), among other notable places. The poison tree was welcomed into English language and literature, as Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell (1903:952) write, as “[a] customary metaphor to indicate some institution that the speaker wishes to condemn in a compendious manner.” The great impact of the poison tree on European popular culture derived less from the actual potency of the tree than what Europeans imagined it to be. This imaginative dimension is on display in the most widely read account of the poison tree, which was published in London in 1783 in a “penny dreadful” periodical, The London Magazine. This account, which purports to be based on personal study of the tree, and which has a penal dimension like the panopticon, runs in part as follows:45 I had procured a recommendation from an old Malayan priest to another priest, who lives on the nearest habitable spot to the tree, which is about fifteen or sixteen miles distant. The latter proved of great service to me on my undertaking, as that priest is employed by the Emperor to reside there, in order to prepare for eternity the souls of those who, for

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different crimes, are sentenced to approach the tree, and to procure the poison. Malefactors, who, for their crimes, are sentenced to die, are the only persons to fetch the poison; and this is the only chance they have of saving their lives. [ . . . ] The worthy old ecclesiastic has assured me, that during his residence there, for upwards of thirty years, he has dismissed above seven hundred criminals in the manner which I have described; and that scarcely two out of twenty returned. Every aspect of this account is completely imaginary, and every succeeding generation of scholars of the subject took pains to repudiate it. The poison tree grew along inhabited shorelines, not in the inaccessible interior; its sap was collected by tribal peoples who specialized in gathering forest products; and it moved along ancient trade and tribute networks that focused on products of the forests and seas. The fantastic imagery of The London Magazine’s account is a revealing example of a translation of East Indies society into a European vision of state surveillance, control, and punishment.46 The poison tree, thus, seems to have been a mirror in which Europeans saw a distorted version of themselves. The remarkable dissemination in Europe of the story of the poison tree as an instrument of state execution stands in marked contrast to the little attention paid to actual autochthonous state institutions for surveillance and discipline in Asia. Those studies that have been carried out focus on the institutions of colonial rule.47 Day (2002:92) writes, “The relationship between state formation and the control of knowledge has been studied as a Western phenomenon in colonial India and Indonesia as well as in the ‘imperial’ West more generally . . . , but the extent to which Southeast Asian states and social groups engaged in a similar kind of totalizing activity in colonial situations has not been examined.” Kaplan suggests that native and European institutions would not have been all that different, because of “the [universal] relationship between knowledge and power that Foucault reveals.” In the case of India, she argues that colonial data-gathering shows continuity with precolonial systems. Indeed, she suggests that the native Peshwa rulers who preceded the colonial British in Maharashtra were also panopticists, albeit not identical to their counterparts in Europe: “[W]e need not imagine that there is only one single form of panopticism.”48 Archaeologists have begun to write about evidence of panopticon-like surveillance in a number of ancient non-Western societies.49 As William M. Graves and Scott van Keuren (2011:7) write, “Considering the wealth of cultural

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diversity throughout time and space, the applicability of the Panopticon as a conceptual framework and social theory extends far beyond the historic and modern Western World.” A type of panopticism is inherent in the concept of the mandala kingdom, in particular in the way that it is structured in Central Java. There is a tradition in Java, and indeed throughout Southeast Asia, of looking to mountains for insight.50 From ancient times, Javanese have gone to mountains to fast and meditate. Mountains are places where one can, in effect, “see” better, more clearly. Hence the traditional Javanese belief that it is from mountains that the ratu adil, “just king,” will come to save the kingdom.51 The improved sight on mountains often involves reflection from mirrored surfaces. Villagers on the slopes of Merapi say that the water in the spirit palace is like a mirror, and if you look into it you can see your own intestines.52 The mirrored surface of the water in Merapi’s crater is thus a boundary between the human and spirit worlds, and when the Javanese gaze into it, they are gazing across the boundary between two different ontologies.53 The mirrored surface in Merapi’s crater has a distancing effect. Mirrors offer reversed images, which is reflected in age-old suspicion of their reflections, as in the dismissal of something as being produced by “smoke and mirrors.”54 The Merapi mirror exaggerates this difference because it does not simply reverse left and right, it reverses inside and outside. Foucault (1986:24) says of this effect, “The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror.” By showing me somewhere I am not, and by showing an image of myself— intestinal—that is otherwise unavailable, the mirror facilitates removal, it distances me from myself, in the same way as does the Dayak belief that spirits see them as pigs. The mirror reflection gets the viewer out of his or her own skin. The mirror is thus a type of perspectivism, like the panopticon itself, which transcends any difference between Orient and Occident. Conclusions: Mandala and Mimesis The concept of the mandala kingdom illustrates the application of the mimetic principle to governance, and also to knowledge production. The case of the Yogyakarta palace and Mount Merapi illustrates how mimesis

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gives knowledge about both the other and the self. The spirit court in Merapi mirrors lowland Javanese society, both figuratively—the activities of society are reflected in volcanic form—and literally, in the spirit mirror that reflects an inside-out version of the body. This casting of the familiar in unfamiliar guise is a type of perspectivism. The spirit replica in Merapi’s crater is physically and ontologically distant from the everyday world of the Javanese, and so it affords perspective on that world, as the Javanese contrast their own view of the world with the spirits’ view of that same world. This is not unlike the way that the panoptic prison works, as its prisoners must constantly ask themselves, “How do I look to the warder?” This is also not unlike the way that Dayak perspectivism works, as they must always ask themselves, “Am I being seen as a human or a wild pig?” The mimetic relationship between the volcano and Javanese society reframes a mortal environmental hazard in more familiar terms of everyday life. It “domesticates,” or naturalizes, an exotic hazard, explaining nonhuman phenomena beyond the ken of the Javanese—much like the tropical forest environment of the Dayak—in terms of comprehensible human activities. Over a time-scale of centuries and even millennia, this system of belief has contributed to the ability of the Javanese to live in the shadow of Merapi, tolerating the constant presence of existential hazard in a way that is incomprehensible to most outside observers, including officials in Indonesia’s government.55 This system of mimetic explanation is adaptive in a part of the world that is unusually subject to natural perturbations, due to its geology as well as climate and geography, which has produced what Adas (1979:97–98) calls “a heightened sensitivity among the Javanese to stability and tranquility and the disruptive effects of change.” Tambiah (1977:69) claims that the concept of the mandala applies to a wide variety of societies in Asia: “The evidence is quite clear that simpler mandala designs appear in tribal lineage-based segmentary societies practising slash-and-burn agriculture, and that the most elaborate designs are manifest in the more complex centralized polities of valley-based sedentary rice cultivators.” Tambiah’s point on the wider applicability of the mandala concept is supported by records from Java’s historic kingdoms. Thus, there are numerous references in court chronicles from the fourteenth century kingdom of Majapahit to “mandalas,” which is translated as “sacred ring communities,” living beyond court authority in the hills and subsisting by their own devices. As Theodore G. Th. Pigeaud (1960–1963, 4:390, 484–85) writes, “Perhaps the sacred-ring communities in the hilly woodland did not

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till terraced and artificially irrigated fields (sawah), adhering to the ancient ladang [swidden] husbandry on clearings in the forest.” In terms of their politics, economics, and beliefs, these sacred ring communities seem more like the tribal Dayak communities than the lowland Javanese courts, yet they apparently structured their cosmology along the lines of the mandala. The mimetic and perspectivist principles in the interpretation of volcanic hazard on Merapi transcend differences between state and tribal social organization, just as they transcend differences between Islamic and preIslamic beliefs.

chapter 4

“Bitter Shade” Signs and Things in Pakistani Agro-Forestry Look at the tree before sitting under its shadow. —pushto proverb

Introduction The last chapter was about the mimetic principle on which the mandala kingdom is based. Taussig (1993) argues that a key dimension of mimesis is differentiation, which in the case of mandala kingdoms is the difference between microcosm and macrocosm, human world and spirit world, periphery and center. This chapter is about another type of mimesis: that between an object and its shadow—and here too there is differentiation between like things. Farmers in the rainfed districts of Pakistan’s Punjab and North-West Frontier Province interpret the on-farm interaction between annual crops and trees in terms of sayah, “tree shade,” which is thought to have density, temperature, taste, and size. Farmers believe that the character of shade and its impact upon their crops varies by tree species and also by season and land type. They possess a complex system of beliefs about trees and tree-crop interactions, which contradicts government foresters’ beliefs that farmers are simply anti-tree. The farmers’ appraisal of trees in terms of their shade, and shadows in terms of their objects, represents another type of perspectivism. The most common references to shade in the Western scientific literature involve plants and relations among them. The response of one plant to shading by another plant is seen as a key, defining characteristic of the plant, as Fernando Valladares and Ülo Niinemets (2008:237) write: “The mini-

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mum light required for survival, shade tolerance, is a crucial life-history trait that plays a major role in plant community dynamics.” The asymmetry in this statement, in its emphasis on need for sun but tolerance of shade, in its emphasis on positive versus negative influences, respectively, is characteristic of the wider discourse of shade. The English word “shade” and the closely related word “shadow” share a common root in the Old English term “sceadu” and share a primary meaning of “comparative darkness,” with some interesting differences.1 Outside of symbolic or metaphoric usage, it is mostly trees that have shade, although everything can have a shadow—largely except for trees (for example, “tree shadows” is not common usage). Animate entities have shadows but generally do not cast shade; inanimate objects can have both. For example: a dog has a shadow, but we would not say that a dog casts shade. Shadows reference their object, which casts the shadow; whereas shade does not always do so, for example in the expression “Let’s find some shade to sit in.” Both shade and shadow have mostly negative connotations—including death, obscurity, and displeasure for shade, and death, gloom, and dark personality for shadow.2 This is reflected in popular usage: to be “a shadow of one’s former self ” is not a good thing. In contemporary urban American slang, “to throw shade on” is to express contempt.3 One of the most famous contemporary references to shade comes from a line in Robert Browning’s 1835 poem Paracelsus: “Measure your mind’s height by the shade it casts.” The sense of this line is that the heights that a great person achieves will necessarily be accompanied by equal depths—the shade. Although they are not popularly thought of as shadow events, that is what celestial eclipses—solar or lunar—are, and their widespread historic interpretation as foretellers of doom are another example of the negative connotations of shade and shadow. Freud and Jung used the term “shadow” to refer to humanity’s repressed, unconscious, dark side. In a similar vein, the literary scholar Robert Harrison (1992) labels forests the “shadow of civilization,” referring to the way that civilization projects its anxieties onto the forest. The title of James Ferguson’s (2006) book Global Shadows refers to those parts of the world that have not been touched by globalization and modernization. Focusing on semantics, Carol Gluck and Anna L. Tsing (2009) suggest that “security” and “indigenous” are “words with shadows.” The most common exceptions to the negative view of shade come from those parts of the world where it is in short supply: namely arid, treeless regions near the equator. Popular conceptions of the appreciation of shade in these regions are reflected in George

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Frideric Handel’s 1738 opera concerning the Persian king, Serse, or Xerxes, which contains fulsome praise of a plane tree (Platanus spp.): “Never was nature’s own shade more beloved or sweetly treasured than thine” (act 1, scene 1, Arioso, “Ombra mai fù”). The very different metaphoric loading of shade in these regions is reflected in an Arab proverb, which is invoked when a great sheikh dies and his protection is lost: “There is no more shade.” Intellectual engagement with the concept of shade, and its largely negative connotations, is ancient. Pliny the Elder (1938, 2:525) reports a belief that the absence of shade is associated with great human stature and age span, whereas the presence of shade is associated with just the opposite: “Onesicritus says that in parts of India where there are no shadows there are men five cubits and two spans high [approximately eight feet], and people live a hundred and thirty years, and do not grow old but die middle-aged.”4 This resonates with the enduring association of shade with death. The most influential classical reference to shade comes from Plato and his parable of the cave, which has been called “undoubtedly the best-known of Plato’s images in The Republic,” his foundational treatise on politics.5 Plato describes a group of captives in a cave, chained so that they must face a wall opposite to the entrance to the cave. Between the captives and the cave entrance there is a line of fire, in front of which people carry “props of all kinds . . . and statues and other creatures made of wood and stone and fashioned in all kinds of ways.”6 The shadows thrown by these objects onto the cave wall in front of the captives constitute the entirety of their perceived world. Plato extracts a number of lessons from this parable, most of which have to do with the relationship between ignorance and wisdom and the political obligations of the wise to minister to the unwise. But for the purpose of this chapter, what is most relevant is Plato’s use of the relationship between object and shadow to illustrate how our senses can deceive us into thinking that the unreal shadow is the real, and that the journey either from the unreal to the real or the reverse—from darkness into light or from light into darkness—can be difficult. Far less well known than Plato’s cave is the role of shadow in the historical development of many of the sciences. Roberto Casati (2003) discusses how many of the fundamental advances in astronomy, geography, and geometry—as well as development of perspective in art, along with innovations in other fields—were based on analysis of the relationship between objects and their shadows, in particular the fact that there is always a dis-

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tance between the two.7 As in Plato’s philosophical exercise, therefore, this relationship had pedagogical value in the natural sciences. New frontiers continue to be opened in study in the physical sciences of objects via their shadows, for example in nonlinear study of objects “around corners” (Laurenzis 2019); and the relationship between shadow and object has also assumed importance in other fields, as in child psychology. Beginning with the work of Jean Piaget early in the twentieth century, child psychologists have suggested that young children do not have a theory of shadows: instead they apply the same principles to shadows as to material objects.8 Casati (2003:156) delves into these differences between children and adults in his book-length review of shadows, but he ignores cultural and historical differences, commenting only in passing that “Shadows almost never appear in pictures from non-Western cultures.” Casati’s implication that non-Western cultures are less concerned with shadows is belied by other research, which often attests to rich shadow beliefs. For example, Descola (2013:248) cites Waldemar Bogoras (1904–1909:281) on the Chukchees of eastern Siberia: “Even the shadows on the wall constitute definite tribes and have their own country, where they live in huts and subsist by hunting.” And in Cambodia, Penny Edwards (2008:150) argues that the Khmer term mluap, “Shade or shadow,” has benign connotations, associated with protection, and lacks the sinister associations of its English equivalent. Jun’ichiro¯ Tanizaki (1977:30) devotes an entire work, In Praise of Shadows, to the thesis that traditional Eastern cultures have a different and greater appreciation of shadow, asking rhetorically, “Why should this propensity to seek beauty in darkness be so strong only in Orientals?9 The West too has known a time when there was no electricity, gas, or petroleum, and yet so far as I know the West has never been disposed to delight in shadows.”10 If study of non-Western concepts of shade is limited, this is even more true of nonhuman concepts of shade. Uexküll (2010:126) is, characteristically, alone in seeing this as an absence: “We still do not know how much of the subject’s [that is, an animal’s] own body carries over into its environment. Not even the question of the significance of the subject’s own shadow in its environment has been addressed experimentally.” In the first section of this chapter, I will present background on the politics of Pakistan’s countryside, forester-farmer tensions, and foresters’ critiques of farmer attitudes toward trees; farmers’ beliefs regarding the materiality of tree shade—its size, density, temperature, and taste; and farmers’ beliefs regarding the impact of shade on crops, and their practices

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for managing that impact. The next section examines key dimensions of the concept of shade that underlie these practices: a shadow always references and mimics something else, which it resembles in part but not whole; and the ancient role of shadows in theater is based on the idea that representation is more revealing than direct apprehension. In the concluding section, I return to the question, Why has the concept of shadow played such an important role, for so long, in human thought? The answer is that shadows represent a type of perspectivism, another mechanism for obtaining insight by means of displacement, removal, distancing. Tree Shade on Human Landscapes in Pakistan There are ancient traditions of thought regarding shade in both South Asia and Southeast Asia. Thus, the shadow of the infamous “poison tree” (Antiaris toxicaria) of the East Indies mentioned in chapter 3 is implicated in statements like the following by Rumphius (2011:399–400n15): “And under the strongest kinds [of poison trees] one will find the telltale sign of bird feathers, for the air around the tree is so tainted that if birds want to rest themselves on the branches, they soon become dizzy and fall down dead. . . . Everything perishes that is touched by its wind, and all animals avoid passing by, or the birds to fly over it. . . . And so it seems that death has pitched his tents near this tree.” There are far older beliefs on this subject in the subcontinent. According to the Vedic text the Laws of Manu, shade was regarded as pure within the Brahminic system of values, but there were some exceptions.11 According to the Yama Smrti, for example, study of Vedic teachings was proscribed under the shade of the ´slesma¯taka (Cordia latifolia); ´sa¯lmali, or silk cotton (Bombax ceiba L.); madhuka (Baslia latifolia); kovida¯ra (Bauhinia variegula); or kapitthaka (Feronia elepthantum).12 Belief in the materiality of shade is attested to by the ritual injunction in the Laws of Manu against stepping on the shadows of the exalted: “Let him not intentionally step on the shadow of (images of) the gods, of a Guru, of a king, of a Snâtaka [a Brahman who has finished his studies], of his teacher, of a reddish-brown animal, or of one who has been initiated to the performance of a Srauta sacrifice (Dîkshita).”13 Conversely, a belief persisted into the modern era that the shadows of Dalits were polluted and polluting.14 This study draws on data gathered in the barani, “rainfed,” tracts of the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province in Pakistan (fig. 4.1). This

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Fig. 4.1. Research area in Pakistan.

region is arid, receiving from as little as twenty to no more than one hundred centimeters of rain per year. Up until the early modern era, these lands were covered by a tropical thorn forest, “an open low forest in which thorny usually hard-wooded species predominate,” merging into dry subtropical evergreen forests in the hilly regions to the north and in the western part of the country.15 As recently as the seventeenth century, Mogul court records and European travelers documented the presence in these forests of Asian elephant, rhinoceros, and lion.16 Due to human activity in the colonial and postcolonial eras, all three of the aforementioned megafauna have since vanished from this territory, whose vegetation today ranges from a scrub preclimax at best to rocky wastes at the worst. The little forest that remains occurs in oasis-like formations: on mountaintops or in flood plains, where location or environmental hazard mitigate against human cultivation or settlement; in government or tribal reserves, where the threat of sanction minimizes exploitation; and in holy shrines and cemeteries, where the same effect is achieved by the fear of supernatural sanction.

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The Pakistan Forest Service traditionally had distinct relations with two different rural clienteles. From one clientele, the peasantry, the Forest Service extracted fees for approved use of forest resources—grazing cattle and gathering fuelwood—and fines and bribes for unapproved uses. For the other clientele, the principal landlords in each district, the service provided subsidized tree plantings on their lands, within a broader pattern of reciprocal economic and political ties between the government and the rural elite—the foresters being part of this elite themselves. The senior officers in the Forest Service all do formal degree training at the Pakistan Forest Institute in Peshawar, a prestigious institution modeled after the Indian forestry school in Dehra Dun. Once posted in Pakistan’s rural areas, forest officers command control of not only valuable natural resources—forests and grazing lands—but also important infrastructural resources, including offices and homes, staff and salaries, means of transportation and communication, and access to the other branches of government. These resources combine to make forest officers some of the most powerful political figures on the rural landscape, especially in Pakistan’s poorer and more remote rural districts. The foresters’ view of rural elites as the appropriate focus for material and technical expertise, and the rural poor as the appropriate focus for surveillance, was long associated with dogmatic beliefs in the antipathy of farmers toward trees.17 Most foresters would maintain that small farmers do not have trees on their farms, do not want them, and would not agree to plant them—they are not “tree-minded.” If presented with incontrovertible evidence of tree cultivation by small farmers, foresters would dismiss this as not “from the heart.”18 Central to these beliefs is the idea that small farmers and trees do not mix, and more generally that agriculture and silviculture do not mix. The only on-farm tree cultivation that foresters could envisage would be block planting of exotic species for market sale by landlords of large farms.19 The foresters’ beliefs regarding farmers’ lack of tree-mindedness are contradicted by field data.20 In a survey of farmers in the rainfed districts, 87 percent reported having trees on their farms, of which about half were planted and most of which were scattered about the farmland or located in the courtyard of the house or farmhouse—as opposed to being grouped in linear or block plantings.21 Two-thirds of the farmers surveyed expressed interest in Forest Service assistance to establish small plantings—meaning fewer than one thousand trees—of multi-purpose native species to meet

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“bitter shade” table 4.1 Lack of water 39%

OBSTACLES TO TREE CULTIVATION

Hard to protect

Impact on crops

Lack of seedlings

Pests and disease

Soil problems

None

38%

29%

11%

9%

8%

7%

These are the percentages of farm households that report each obstacle; households could report more than one obstacle.

household needs for fuel and timber. And the major reported obstacles to on-farm tree cultivation were not lack of interest or experience, but the typical challenges of the farming-forestry interface (table 4.1). Thus, whereas foresters saw the major obstacle to farm forestry as lack of motivation, the farmers themselves were focused on the normal farm forestry problems of water scarcity, protection from free-ranging cattle, and competition with annual crops. The historic degradation of Pakistan’s forest cover does not mean that trees have vanished from the countryside. Trees abound in all graveyards and religious shrines, where they provide shade for the pious and eternal blessings for the planter.22 Trees are found within the enclosed courtyards of every rural home, for which they provide shade, fodder, and fruit. The greatest numbers of trees are found on the farmlands themselves: in clusters around water holes and tanks, where Mogul rulers decreed the planting of banyan (Ficus bengalensis); around wells and Persian wheels, where they shade the circling oxen; and in hedgerows along field boundaries, where they provide protection from wind and livestock incursions and yield fuel and fodder. The number, species, location, and growth of on-farm trees are carefully managed in order to balance their perceived benefits against their perceived costs, in the latter case meaning deleterious effects on agricultural land and crops. This balance is typically articulated within the farmer discourse concerning sayah, “tree shade.” Farmers conceive of tree shade not as the absence of something—light— but rather as the presence of something associated with the tree. As Casati (2003:49) writes, shade has a perceptive aspect, a causal aspect, and also a material aspect. For Pakistani farmers, tree shade has five major characteristics: size, duration, density, temperature, and taste (table 4.2). Each characteristic is believed to vary with the tree species, and the impact of tree shade on food crops is believed to vary accordingly. The varying character of tree shade is

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table 4.2

CHARACTERISTICS OF TREE SHADE

Characteristics of tree shade

Range of variation

Cause of variation

Length and width Height Duration Density

Small–large Short–tall Brief–long Light–dark

Temperature Taste

Cold–hot Bitter–sweet

Species variation, lopping Species variation Location of tree in field Variation in: species, season, time of day Species variation Species variation

(Length of tree root) (Quality of tree litter)

Short–long, shallow–deep Few–many nutrients

Species variation Species variation

well expressed in the proverb of the Pushto-speaking tribes of the region: “Look at the tree before sitting under its shadow.”23 Although it is intended to be a metaphor about human social relations, it is nonetheless rooted in a belief that not all shade is alike; it varies with the tree that produces it. First, regarding size: Pakistani farmers are acutely conscious of the length and width of the area that is shadowed by a tree, and one of their motives for pruning is to reduce the height and width of a tree’s crown and thereby the extent of its shade. They favorably compare the natural shape of a tree like the Indian olive (Olea ferruginea Royle), slender and casting less shade, with one like the Persian lilac (Melia azedarach L.), broader and casting more shade. John L. Stewart (1869:140) says of the olive, “Its foliage looks more dense than it really is, and it gives a rather chequered shade”; but of the lilac, Abdul Hamid Khan (1965:28) observes that it has a “spreading crown.” In addition to length and width, some farmers assign another dimension to shade—height and vertical movement.24 Speaking of a tall tree such as the Persian lilac, they say that its shade cools as it descends from the tree’s top to the earth beneath. A final dimension, time, is also important. Farmers are very conscious of the duration of a tree’s daily shadow on the land, which varies principally according to the cardinal location of the tree vis-à-vis the land in question. Thus, farmers say that it is better to plant a tree at the edge of a field instead of the center, so that its shade will cover no part of the field for more than half the day—morning if it is on the eastern edge, afternoon if on the western.

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After size, the next most important dimension of shade is its density, meaning the depth and uniformity of its darkness. Even in the contemporary west, Casati (2003:44) says shade or shadows are not always treated as having just two dimensions.25 Pakistani farmers interpret shade density as the amount of sunlight that passes through the tree’s foliage. Farmers say, for example, that sissoo (Dalbergia sissoo Roxb.) and white mulberry trees (Morus alba Linn.) have especially dense shade because their leaves are thick and opaque. As a result, the amount of sunlight filtering through them is limited, and their shade is dark. There are also seasonal and diurnal dimensions to shade thickness. Farmers say that shade is thicker during the summer than during the winter, and they say that it is thicker at midday than during the morning or afternoon. Whatever its cause, farmers say that thick shade is generally bad for crops. A third dimension of tree shade is its temperature, which farmers say is perceptible to anyone standing under the tree. Thus, it feels cold under a sissoo or a siris tree (Albizia lebbek [L.] Benth.), whereas it feels hot under a tamarisk (Tamarix aphylla [L.] Karst.). Stewart (1869:92) says of the Tamarisk, “it furnishes a very insufficient guard from the sun.” Farmers attribute variation in shade temperature, in part, to variation in shade density. Thus, they say that thin-leaved trees such as the Indian jujube (Zizyphus mauritania Lam.) have hot shade, while thick-leaved trees such as the sissoo and white mulberry have cold shade.26 But the temperature of a tree’s shade is also associated with the temperature of the tree itself, which has a wider meaning, humoral in character, that the farmers apprehend indirectly. Thus, farmers say that the Indian olive is cold because it casts little shade—since shade is a crop-threatening and hence “hot” impact—and because its leaf litter enriches the soil, which is seen as a fertility-enhancing and hence “cool” impact. In contrast, mesquite (Prosopis juliflora [Swartz] DC) and babul (Acacia nilotica [L.] Willd. ex Del.) are said to be hot trees because they thrive not only in hot regions but in hot seasons as well, losing their leaves only during the cold season. Of most importance, any tree in whose shade crops fare poorly is said, by inference, to have hot shade.27 The temperature of a given tree’s shade does not vary with the season, although its value to the farmers may. Thus, farmers say that they stake their livestock under the hot shade of the Indian jujube in the winter but they put them under the cool shade of sissoo in the summer. The same principles are applied to tree products. Thus, farmers feed their livestock the leaves of the hot Indian jujube to counteract the cold of winter, and the leaves of the cold sissoo to counteract the heat of

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illness. The farmers themselves eat the leaves of the hot tamarisk to counteract the cold of sexual impotence.28 A fourth dimension of tree shade is taste—bitterness versus sweetness. The taste of shade cannot be perceived directly. Farmers infer it from other characteristics of the tree or from its effects on proximate crops. Thus, farmers say they know that the shade of the Persian lilac is bitter, because its sap, fruit, and even the crops growing under it all taste bitter. In contrast, the sweet taste of the Indian jujube’s sap indicates that its shade is sweet. The taste of a tree’s leaves may also indicate whether its shade is bitter or sweet. Taste extends even to the wood: farmers say that the bitterness of the wood of the neem tree (Azadirachta indica A. Juss.), which reflects its wellknown resistance to termites, means that it also has bitter shade.29 Finally, the shade of some trees is believed to affect spiritual health or fortune. The shade of the siris, for example, is widely believed to be unlucky because its leaves have a droopy or wilted appearance.30 Farmers say of the peepal (Ficus religiosa Linn.)—one or two large specimens of which customarily stand over village tanks or water holes and provide some of the widest, thickest, and most appreciated midday shade—that they fear to sit or even walk under that shade at night, out of fear of the spirits that they believe inhabit this tree.31 Farmers say that the impact of shade on crops is often but not always negative. They attribute these negative impacts to reduction in the amount of sunlight that reaches the crops and, especially, to exacerbation of undesirable soil conditions. Thus, farmers say that when the soil is overly wet after rainfall or irrigating, shade keeps it from drying out. Similarly, when the soil is overly cold and dry, shade keeps it from being warmed and energized. Farmers associate both conditions with lack of the soil strength and fertility needed for crop production. These impacts are believed to vary according to the type of land and the season of the year (fig. 4.2). Farmers say that shade’s augmentation of soil moisture has a negative impact on irrigated land because it aggravates problems with waterlogging; whereas on rainfed land, its de-energizing of the soil has a negative impact because it aggravates problems with soil fertility. Likewise, the cooling impact of shade on the soil is most harmful during the winter, whereas it is sometimes beneficial in the summer. To a limited extent, farmers also say, the impact of tree shade varies according to the type of crop planted under it. For example, particularly “hot” crops like the chili pepper (Capsicum spp.) are said to grow better than other crops under shade.

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Fig. 4.2. Impact of tree shade and roots on irrigated versus rainfed farms.

Shade generally refers to all of the effects of a tree on crops, but sometimes the effects of a tree’s shade and the effects of its roots are distinguished. Farmers believe that the impact of tree roots is always negative, unlike the impact of tree shade. Whereas shade makes the topsoil wet, roots make the subsurface soil dry. Farmers believe that a tree’s need to consume energy—nutrient matter—which is hot, must be offset with water taken up by its roots.32 But when tree roots take this water from the subsurface soil, the soil’s energy is negatively affected. This is said to be more true of shallow-rooted trees like the Persian lilac or white mulberry than more deep-rooted trees. Farmers say that if the soil can be sufficiently irrigated, however, this root impact can be neutralized or even transformed into a positive one. Consequently, they believe that the impact of roots is worse in rainfed lands than in irrigated ones. Indeed, some farmers with irrigated lands deny that tree roots have any deleterious effect whatsoever on crops. Since the major limiting factor in agriculture on irrigated lands is not lack

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of water but its overabundance, farmers tend to see the wetting impact of tree shade as worse on such lands than the drying impact of tree roots. For farmers with rainfed lands, on the other hand, the chief agricultural constraint is lack of water, so they tend to view the impact of tree roots as worse than that of tree shade.33 The farmers’ system for managing tree shade—in particular its humoral principles—has origins in a variety of regional intellectual traditions, including Ayurveda, which draws on classical Vedic sources, and Unani Tibb, or “Greco-Arabian medicine,” which draws on the classical works of Hippocrates and Galen, and especially the medieval works of Avicenna.34 In keeping with these traditions, the central management principle regarding shade involves balancing opposing qualities—hot and cold, wet and dry, bitter and sweet—to attain desired agricultural outcomes.35 The desired outcomes are to mitigate, or at least not exacerbate, the constraining properties of the land and season in which a farmer is working: too much wetness in irrigated land versus too much dryness in rainfed land; and too much cold in winter versus too much heat in summer. Therefore, farmers’ attitudes toward shade depend on the context. In most cases, a particular tree and its shade is neither absolutely good nor absolutely bad for crop production; rather it is good or bad on a particular type of land in a particular season. Farmers possess a variety of techniques for applying these management principles. One consists of planting those tree species believed to have more beneficial and less destructive shade, which varies according to local land types and uses. Another technique consists of choosing appropriate planting spacings and locations: spacing trees widely in order to prevent shade from adjoining trees overlapping and producing daylong coverage over crops underneath; planting trees along an east-west axis as opposed to a north-south axis in order to minimize the length of the shadow cast; and planting trees on the east side of the field in order to ensure that the field receives the warmth of the afternoon sun.36 A third management technique consists of removing any naturally grown and undesirable tree species from inappropriate locations on and around the fields. With mature trees, farmers employ two other management strategies. The first is watering proximate crops by hand, especially in rainfed lands, to offset the trees’ water uptake. The second and perhaps most important strategy is pruning, just before the planting of the winter crops.37 Farmers maintain that pruning not only increases the amount of sunlight reaching the crops but also adds to the energy and hence fertility of the soil because

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it reduces the amount of energy that the tree draws out of the soil. Some farmers also believe that pruning weakens the tree roots and further reduces their drain upon soil energy.38 Shade, Signs, and Theater Pakistani farmers believe in a wide variety of types of shade, which vary according to the trees that cast them. There is, thus, a fixed relationship between a particular type of shade and a particular type of tree. This relationship between shade and object is complex, and it has been the subject of long study throughout human history. As noted earlier, the physical and mathematical sciences have long examined the relationship between object and shadow to find out things indirectly that could not be found out directly. The fact that a shadow is removed from its source, the fact that shadow and object are separate but connected, has been useful in a number of different fields. Beginning at least a millennium ago, entire books were devoted to these various applications, focusing on the physical dimensions of the relationship between shadow and source—distance, size, and so on. Casati (2003:98) says that the “most important book on shadows ever written” was the eleventh-century The Exhaustive Treatise on Shadows by the great Arab scientist Al-Biruni. Casati (2003:189) suggests that shadows are essentially a form of mimicry. Walter Benjamin (1978:333) believes that mimicry is found in nature but that an intensified form of it also can be found in culture. He sees the mimetic faculty of humans as ancient, powerful, and all-pervasive. Peter Demetz (1978:xxi) writes that in studying mimesis Benjamin “seeks to close the gap between the universe of things and the universe of signs.” According to the logic of the earlier-cited Pushto proverb, “Look at the tree before sitting under its shadow,” we can only know the character of the shadow by first knowing the character of the tree. The implication is that we cannot tell the character of the shadow from the shadow itself; the shadow taken alone is deceptive. Pakistani farmers’ beliefs regarding shade follow the same logic: they know shade by knowing the tree. Shade varies as trees vary, but the shade does not necessarily reveal this. The tree tells us more than its shade does. The shade does not tell the whole story; it can be ambiguous, even misleading. Government foresters are completely misled by shade, since they mistakenly ascribe to the farmers a belief that all trees are bad for

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crops: the foresters fundamentally err in not recognizing that farmers differentiate among types of trees and types of shade. The misleading character of shade is explicit in Plato’s parable of the cave, which concerns the difference between the real and the unreal. The shadows in the cave are not reality, although they appear to be reality to the captives in the cave. These shadows are deceptive, therefore—as all shadows potentially are. Casati (2003:189) writes, “Shadows look like the objects that cast them,” but they are not those objects; and because of this likeness yet difference, shadows always have the potential to deceive. This potential, the possibility of being deceived by the unreal, is the point of Plato’s parable. It is the fundamental implication of the imperfect relationship of the shadow to the object, of the sign to the thing. The deception of the shadow is a deception of the visual, which is revealed by the nonvisual senses. In Plato’s cave, movement from the false reality of the shadows to the reality of the outside world is accompanied by physical pain: “Whenever anyone was freed and suddenly made to stand up, look around, and look up toward the light, it would be painful doing all this and because of the glare he would be unable to see the object whose shadow he saw before. . . . And if . . . someone were to drag him forcibly from there along the rough, steep uphill path and not let him go until he had hauled him out into the light of the sun, he would be in great pain and would complain about his being dragged along, and when he got to the light his eyes would be filled with the sun’s rays, and he would not be able to see even a single one of what he is now being told are real things. . . .”39 In short, physical pain marks the transition between, and thus the differentiation of, shadows and reality. Pakistani farmers similarly use multiple senses in their assessments of tree shade. They use sight but also sensation, heat versus coolness, and they use taste, bitter versus sweet, to assess shade. Thus, shadows decenter the visual; precisely because the visual can be deceiving, shadows can bring other senses into play. There is a hoary folk tradition that decouples sight from insight: this is the belief in the “blind seer,” the individual who can “see” precisely because he or she cannot see in the normal sense of the word. James Siegel analyzes a relationship between object and shadow that is not mimetic. He begins his 1979 book on Atjeh in North Sumatra, Shadow and Sound: The Historical Thought of a Sumatran People, by noting that the sultans of Atjeh all historically represented themselves as “the shadow of Allah in the world.”40 Citing the Islamist Ignaz Goldhizer, Siegel says that this phrase originates with the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad, for whom “The ‘shadow of God

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on earth’ is a metaphor for the government as a place of shelter to be compared with the shelter of shade in the desert but does not mean that the sultan is in any way an extension of God.” The government or Sultan is not the shadow of God, thus this shadow has no mimetic relation to its object: “The use of shadow here seems to designate not the sharing of qualities between shadow and that which casts it, however dim those qualities may be, but simply connection or association alone, without the preservation of qualities.”41 Siegel is interested in how this nonmimetic concept of shadow illuminates late-nineteenth-century Atjehnese secular and religious politics. He examines this question through analysis of the Atjehnese epic poem Hikajat Pòtjoet Moehamat, in particular a passage in which the eighteenth-century sultan Djuemalo¯j Alam causes a shadow to fall upon his adopted son, Prince Béntara Keumangan, killing him.42 The prince’s body bears bruise marks but no wounds, which initially confounds his followers, until they realize that this points toward action by the sultan himself: “It is because the black marks [bruises] cannot be attributed to a wound or disease that they are therefore read as signs of the king which by nature are sense-less. The shadow’s impression is, then, unintelligible up to the point where that unintelligibility is itself understood as the sign of the king.” Signs given by the ruler are different from those given by lesser mortals, in having no external empirical meaning. The sultan “is the producer of signs which are valid because their reference is to their issuer and not to an independent historical origin.”43 This passage in the Hikajat speaks to a unique sort of relation between object and shadow: “The shadow that falls over Béntara is caused by the sultan but does not reproduce his shape. His shadow is a mark that is taken as a signifier without anything signified.”44 In short, for the sultan, the nonsign-ness of his shadow is itself a sign, signifying his extraordinary status; because for ordinary folk, a shadow does reproduce shape and is, thus, a sign. The absence of any mimetic relationship between shadow and object is meaningful in the case of the sultan, precisely because there usually is such a relationship; if there were not, the story would make no sense. In the Western sense of object and shadow, the shadow is not a sign in Charles Peirce’s sense since it is not a product of semiotic interpretation; but in this Atjehnese case and perhaps in other folk systems of knowledge as well, the shadow is so produced and so is a sign.45 The Atjehnese Hikajat, Plato’s Republic, the Pushto proverb—all have a pedagogical or revelatory dimension, which centers on the difference, or

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“slippage,” between the object and its shadow. In the case of The Republic, Plato (2013:107) uses the simile of the theater to help explain this slippage: he writes that the arrangement of prisoners, fire, and objects whose shadows are projected by the fire is “just as puppeteers have a screen in front of the audience above which they present their entertainments.” Thus, whereas we today reference Plato for a discussion of shadows, he referenced the puppet theater. It is unclear if Plato is referencing a type of shadow theater or not, although the fact that he is invoking it to explain an alternate reality consisting only of shadows suggests that he may be. In any case, the use of shadows in theater is ancient, widespread, and indeed has flourished down to the present day.46 It merits asking what the basis is for this usage: what the enduring attraction and power of shadows in theatrical productions is: Why, instead of directly observing the puppet or actor, is separating the object from its shadow so desirable? These fundamental questions are surprisingly under-studied.47 The theater, acting, is a type of mimetic representation.48 Demetz (1978:xxi) writes that Benjamin’s work on mimesis shows “it is man’s mimetic faculty in the widest sense that brings together what seems split and divided.” Benjamin (1978:336) sees mimesis as granting insight into dimensions of life otherwise out of reach; it enables us to read “texts not written.” The use of shadow in theater is in effect a sort of “double mimesis.”49 In shadow puppet theater, for example, the shadows that the audience sees are cast by puppets that represent historic or mythical figures. Thus, the audience sees a representation of a representation. In his insightful comment on shadows in Javanese wayang theater, Keeler (1987:242) writes: The world of wayang is governed by the principles of spiritual power much more pervasively and demonstrably than is that of humans. It is a world of thought not so much removed in time as distinct in nature from ours. In this respect, it resembles the world of spirits (alam panglemunan), which exists coextensively with our environment or sphere (alam), but which is invisible to all but the most spiritually adept. Shadows cast upon a screen seem an apt representation of such a world. The insubstantiality of shadows, their lack of color, their varying degrees of clarity and size, and the dissimulation of any agent responsible for their movement and speech, all effect a realization of what is mysterious and imperceptible, but in a manifest, if still largely immaterial, form. Shad-

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ows, that is, illustrate with particular force the paradox of characters, voices, and power both present and absent in the world. They are slightly material traces of an invisible source. So they represent with peculiar aptness the Javanese conception of spiritual power: its subtle nature, and its equivocal but pervasive effects.

Conclusions: Shadows, Mimesis, and Insight Shadows represent a type of mimesis, marked by the separation of and difference between an object and its shadow. Much of the history of thinking about shadows focuses on this difference, this “slippage.” The differences between a tree and its shade, and the differences among various types of shade, lie at the heart of the Pakistani system of shade beliefs. According to these beliefs, although all tree shade may look alike, this is misleading, because all shade is not alike. The differences among shadows, and the trees that cast them, are meaningful. We may ask why Pakistani farmers articulate crop-tree interactions in terms of shade, when there are other ways of thinking about tree-crop interactions. Pakistan farmers are knowledgeable about the impact of tree roots on crops and indeed incorporate this into their conception of shade, so they could have used an underground rhizomatic network concept, like the one discussed by Tsing (2015) for mushrooms. Similarly, we may ask why Plato chose shadows to illustrate his philosophical exercise regarding the constraints on human perception and self-reflection. Postulating the existence of an “other” is an age-old mechanism of insight; and the shadow of an object is one such mechanism. Considering both a tree and its shadow is revealing in ways that considering either by itself is not. A shadow is an age-old pedagogical device for thinking about an alternative reality. It is another example of how insight is gained by looking back from another place; it is another example of how insight is gained through mimetic displacement, removal, and distancing.

chapter 5

Culture, Agriculture, and Politics of Rice in Java

W

hereas the last chapter concerned the relation between an object and its shadow, this chapter focuses on relations between two intertwined systems of agriculture: one dominant culturally, politically, economically, and the other its opposite in every way—in a sense its “shadow.” Introduction: The Swidden–Wet Rice Dichotomy The focus of this chapter is the dichotomy in Indonesia between ladang and sawah, which can be glossed as swidden and wet-rice agriculture. The swidden versus wet-rice dichotomy has been a key analytical construct in canonical modern studies of the region’s human ecology.1 This dichotomy is about more than agricultural technology, however. Analyzing the historic replacement in mainland Southeast Asia of lowland swidden systems by upland wet-rice ones, Richard A. O’Connor (1995), drawing on Anthony F. C. Wallace (1980:485), writes, “Agricultural choices are bundled into ethnic wholes that function as competing agro-cultural complexes. A pragmatic shift between complexes thus begins ritual adjustments that may end as an ethnic shift. What diffuses is a society-shaping complex, not just agricultural techniques.” O’Connor suggests that focusing on such complexes offers insight into the union of agricultural, ecological, and political histories: “Complexes not only reveal a heretofore unseen agricultural succession and facilitate regional comparison, but they open the mythic and ecological underpinnings of political evolution for analysis.” In order to

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study the historic succession of agro-cultural complexes in mainland Southeast Asia, O’Connor says that a regional approach is needed: “Case by case these shifts [in mainland SEA history] appear to be ethnic and political successions wherein the strong displace the weak, but seen together regionally the similarities suggest an agricultural change whereby an irrigated wet rice specialization from upland valleys displaced gardening and farming complexes native to the lowlands. Seeing this change requires a regional anthropology. . . . Yet many ethnographies naively treat their subjects as if they existed and were knowable apart from larger conditions and logical models.” O’Connor examines the replacement over time of swidden societies by wet-rice ones.2 I will join O’Connor in asking what drives this, but also how the two systems interrelate. As Tsing (2003:142) asks, referring to Geertz’s classic (1963) work Agricultural Involution, “Why are sawah (wet rice cultivation) and swidden (shifting cultivation) thought to be different ‘systems’?” Swidden and wet-rice are the two most widespread, historic modes of economic production and social reproduction in Southeast Asia: the former is forest fallow shifting cultivation, in which fields are termed swiddens— ladang in the Indo-Malay region; and the latter is permanent fallow-less cultivation, with rainfed, flooded, or gravity irrigation, hence the label “wet rice,” in which the fields are termed pond fields or sawah.3 A fundamental difference between the two agricultural systems is a reversal in valuation of the factors of production. The swidden system is generally characterized by scarce labor and abundant land, and so returns to the former are maximized; whereas the wet-rice system is generally characterized by abundant labor and scarce land, and so returns to the latter are maximized. Thus, the wetrice system exploits labor or human capital, and the swidden system exploits (forested) land or natural capital.4 Whereas the imperative in the swidden system is to minimize labor inputs per unit of crop yield, the imperative in the wet-rice system is to maximize yield outputs per unit of area.5 Swidden agriculture once was practiced all over Southeast Asia—as well as much of the rest of the world. However, state development, which promoted the development of wet rice for ease of extraction of surplus product and control of the producers, over time relegated swidden agriculture to the margins of rule, meaning the hills and mountains. As a result, by the twentieth century throughout Southeast Asia, wet rice and swiddens had become identified in hegemonic national discourses with, respectively, lowlands versus uplands, contemporary versus archaic technologies, and

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metropolitan civilization versus peripheral barbarism.6 The fact that the extractive economy and disciplining of population that supported the state were more suited to wet rice than swidden cultivation, and the fact that swidden cultivation came by default to characterize areas at the limits of state control, exerted a powerful influence on the topographical norms of the state. Southeast Asian states have characteristically demonstrated a strong bias in favor of wet rice and open lowland landscapes on the one hand, and against swiddens and upland forested landscapes on the other. The historic antipathy toward swidden versus wet rice became echoed in colonial and postcolonial development discourse.7 Central to this critique has been the view that swidden agriculture was, at best, a rational system of land use in the case of extremely low population-to-land ratios, but would inevitably become irrational given assumed pressures of expanding population on a fixed resource base. Anthropologists have long critiqued this narrow Malthusian calculus; and a series of canonical studies in the mid-twentieth century disproved the view of Southeast Asian swidden agriculture as a destructive system of natural resource use.8 In the face of this influential body of work, almost all scholars of swidden agriculture have since agreed that it is a sustainable adaptation to forest environments in which labor is scarcer than land, population-to-land balances allow for fallow periods long enough to restore forest cover between periods of cropping, and resource appropriation by external actors is minimal. Today swidden agriculture is still the focus of important research on fallow management and environmental change, the politics of upland-lowland relations, and the role of forest peoples in global trade.9 Although swidden agriculture continues to be important in Africa and Latin America, it is on the wane in most parts of Southeast Asia, which has prompted a spate of articles concerning its status in the region, asking what we still don’t know about it and what role it might still play in, for example, reducing farmer precarity and preserving biodiversity.10 There has also been a long-overdue attempt to recover the Western swidden heritage. The role that swidden played as one of the great shibboleths of colonial rule, one of the principal foci of enlightenment of the purportedly less rational colonized by the more rational colonizers, necessitated a certain amnesia regarding the long history of swidden in the colonizers’ own homelands in western Europe and North America. In North America, a swidden system that melded European and Native American practices persisted in the southern uplands well into the twentieth century.11 Swiddening was com-

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mon in Sweden in the mid-eighteenth century, when Carl Linnaeus carried out his insightful but long-forgotten study of it; it thrived in parts of France until the end of the nineteenth century; and pockets remained in Germany, Austria, and northern Russia until the mid-twentieth century.12 European swiddening may have survived longest in the less populated and less industrialized parts of Scandinavia.13 I will begin my analysis in this chapter with an examination of the place that wet rice, swiddens, and forests occupied in the political ecology of the precolonial Javanese kingdoms, in which the dichotomy between swidden and wet rice mapped onto a nested series of other oppositions: between the forests and the open lands, the uplands and the lowlands, the civilized and uncivilized zones, and the native and foreign. Following Eduardo Kohn, there is an isomorphic hierarchical pattern to these oppositions, which grants benefits to some while levying costs on others. The differences in self-interest between these hierarchical levels is reflected in the valorization of rice cultivation. Similar principles operated during the colonial Dutch era as well. I will conclude with a discussion of plant agency, the politics of agro-cultural dualism, and the dynamics of insight, self-interest, and sustainability. Swiddens, Wet Rice, Forests, and the State The early, inland, Hinduized kingdoms of Java were primarily agrarian in nature. Pigeaud (1960–1963, 3:467) writes that in the time of Majapahit in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, for example, the incomes of the court, the aristocracy, and the religious orders were all derived from agriculture—whether directly through the labor of bondsmen or indirectly through taxes on freemen. The system of agriculture that produced this income was intensive, much of it being wet-rice cultivation. The explicit interest of the state in intensive, permanent field agriculture is evident in this speech by Prince Wengker of the Majapahit court: “The principal of it; gagas [unirrigated permanent fields], sawahs [irrigated permanent fields], anything that is planted: that it may thrive, it must be guarded and treated with care. As much of the land as has been made into karaman [rural community] territory, should remain permanently so, without going to waste.”14 Irrigated agriculture requires capital investment and concentration of population, and it makes possible greater intensity of cultivation; all of which enhance a state’s control of an agricultural population and its ability to extract a portion

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of the agricultural produce. State involvement in constructing, maintaining, and exploiting water-control infrastructure represents not the product of this agricultural intensification, but its cause; just as the state’s concentration of population and capital investment are not necessitated by this intensification, but rather what makes it possible.15 This thesis is the reverse of the classic argument by Karl Wittfogel (1957) that development of irrigation necessitates the development of despotic, hydraulic states.16 Management of water was important in this political ecology, but management of people was perhaps even more important.17 The necessity for the state to control its population, in order to develop and maintain an intensive system of agriculture in such circumstances, is not widely understood. For example, N. C. van Setten van der Meer (1979:78) argues that the inhabitants of the early Javanese kingdoms depended for their welfare and prosperity on wet-rice cultivation, the provision and control of water for which depended on the state. But it would be more accurate to say that the welfare of the state depended on the exploitation of a populace involved in wet-rice agriculture. The causal relations between agricultural intensification, concentration of population, and state rule are often mis-stated. Benedict R. O’G. Anderson (1972:30) writes, “Only the concentration of large populations made possible by intensive rice cultivation could provide the economic surplus and reserve of manpower necessary for building monuments or armies.” Thus, he sees a causal sequence beginning with (1) wet-rice agriculture, which permits (2) the concentration of population, which leads to and represents (3) political power. However, Ester Boserup (1965) rejects this view of population growth and agricultural development, suggesting instead that a precondition for agricultural intensification is the growth and/or concentration of population.18 Anderson assumes agricultural intensification and uses it to explain population growth and the creation of political power; whereas Boserup assumes the existence of political power and uses it to explain the growth or concentration of population and thence the intensification of agriculture. The latter approach is more compatible with the Javanese concept of power. If we grant the priority of state control and concentration of population to agricultural intensification, then it explains why, as Anderson (1972:30, 41, 48) himself suggests, large dense populations are seen as a sign of power.19 The peasants upon whom this power depended were not without agency. They could, for example, flee to the territory of a ruler perceived as being

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less exacting. Adas (1981:231–32) writes, “Shifting to a new patron was both an effective peasant defense and a potent means of protest, for the act of severing a patron-client link in itself drew attention to the shortcomings or misdeeds which the defecting cultivators claimed had spurred their search for a new patron. It also represented a blow to the status and esteem and a real reduction in the power of the original lord.” Even into the nineteenth century, political power in rural Java rested on the control of agricultural labor, not agricultural land, and one of the principal threats to such power continued to be the possibility of this labor, as Onghokam (1978:118) writes, “fleeing to other territories or leaving the established order by opening land in the woods.”20 Against this threat, rulers used coercion, both to maintain existing populations of cultivators and to add populations from the territories of rival states defeated in battle.21 These battles over people are evidence of the association between political power and labor, as opposed to political power and land. Onghokam (ibid.) observed, for overburdened peasants in the nineteenth century, an alternative to flight to another ruler was flight to the forest. Up until the twentieth century, Java was still covered with vast wilderness areas beyond the authority of any lowland kings, to which the subject agricultural population periodically fled from the exactions of royal rule.22 Adas (1981:233) writes, “Although the sacrifices and risks for uprooted peasants were considerable, flight was a potent means of defense and protest.” Evidence of this flight, and its recognition by the state, is provided in court records of once-cultivated land lying unworked and abandoned. Indeed, Bertram J. O. Schrieke (1957:301) claims that such agricultural desertions were largely responsible for the tenth-century shift in population from Mataram in Central Java to the Brantas area of East Java. In their wilderness refuges, these peoples could subsist by practicing swidden agriculture. The return on labor is higher in a swidden than in a wet-rice field.23 Adding to the differential is the fact that the return from the wet-rice field would have been further reduced by the king’s taxes, in the case of freemen, or the share owed to the landlord or master, in the case of bondsmen. Moertono (1981:116, 126–27), citing G. P. Rouffaer (1931), notes that, under one widespread system of court taxation in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, the cultivator of wet rice retained only 40 percent of the harvest. In contrast, the harvests of those who fled to the forests would not have been diminished at all by state extraction.

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The two variables—political subjugation versus freedom, and intensive versus extensive agricultural practices—relate to one another as independent and dependent variables, respectively. That is, while the swidden cultivators in the forests were relatively free, their freedom was not based on the fact that they were swidden cultivators. Swidden cultivation did not foster political freedom, rather, freedom itself was what made swidden cultivation possible. Scholars of the relationship between state development and different types of agriculture have tended to ask whether swiddens can support state formation as well as wet rice.24 But the more fruitful question to ask is the opposite one: Why do centralized states typically promote wet rice and rarely if ever swiddens?25 Compared with intensive wet-rice cultivation, swidden cultivation is less easily exploited by a state apparatus because of its typically low population density, low capital inputs, and low output per unit of area; its diversity of crop species, and thus staggered harvest times; its high ratio of fallowed to cultivated land; and the high mobility of its practitioners. These characteristics do not rule out the possibility of state extraction, but they make it relatively less profitable than an agricultural system like wet rice. As disingenuously noted early in the nineteenth century by John Crawfurd (1820:346), the British resident governor in the court of Yogyakarta: “The first and lowest description of tillage is that which consists in taking a fugitive crop of rice from forest lands, by cutting down the trees and burning them along with the grass and underwood. In the languages of the western tribes, this is termed humah or ladang. It is only practiced in the least improved parts of the country, and in lands not yet appropriated. It, of course, implies the rudest beginnings of agricultural industry. The waste of labor in this mode of culture, and the precariousness of the returns, must be sufficiently obvious. Lands of this description no where yield rent [emphasis added].” Wherever agrarian states arose in ancient Java, therefore, they transformed extensive systems of agriculture into intensive wet-rice systems. Thus, the common argument that the character of swidden agriculture constrains the development of the state reverses the true causal relationship: the extent of development of the state constrains the practice of swidden agriculture. There is no evidence that the distribution of intensive and extensive systems of agriculture in historic Java—wet rice in the lowland kingdoms and swiddens in the forested mountains beyond rule—was purely a function of varying ecological conditions. The lowland environments that supported wet-rice cultivation would have supported swidden cultivation as

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well. There is no characteristic of lowland Java that would have been inimical to swidden agriculture; and it is likely that this was the autochthonous system of agriculture in all of the areas where wet-rice agriculture was eventually developed. The expansion of wet-rice fields in Java, at the expense of more extensive systems of cultivation, has been a relatively recent phenomenon. Geertz (1963:34) noted that most of Java’s wet-rice acreage has been developed since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Similarly, there is no characteristic of Java’s uplands that would have inhibited the practice of wet-rice agriculture there. On the contrary, since wet rice can be grown at higher elevations than dry rice, because fluctuations in temperature are moderated by the irrigation water, wet-rice cultivation would have been more adapted to Java’s highlands than swidden cultivation. Indeed, O’Connor (1995) argued that the systems of lowland wet-rice agriculture in mainland Southeast Asia were originally developed in the uplands. The reason that the great state development of wet rice occurred in Java’s lowlands not uplands is topographical: the great lowland rivers allowed for the development of systems of water management and agricultural governance not possible in the uplands. Wet-rice cultivation developed in Java’s lowlands not only because the environment made it possible there but also because the developing states made it necessary; and swidden agriculture persisted in Java’s uplands not because it was necessary there, but because the absence of state control made it possible. Thus, it was politics that likely reversed the ancient landscape posited by O’Connor, in which wet rice dominated the uplands and swidden dominated the lowlands. Not only did the upland forests contain people beyond the control of the early Javanese states, they contained people who were contesting this control, such as outlaws, bandits, and pretenders to the throne.26 The historic states responded to this threat both directly, by controlling the movement of their rural population, and indirectly, through conversion of the forest itself.27 Records such as the fourteenth-century Nāgara-Kěrtāgama of Majapahit make clear that a continuing concern of the court was to open up the forests for agriculture.28 Jan W. Christie (1991:30–31) lists dozens of royal grants made in the ninth and tenth centuries in Central and East Java to support conversion to wet rice of forest land, fallowed swidden land, and dry fields, in order to “to settle and stabilize territory bordering major road and river connections” and render them safe for travelers. In addition to being cleared for permanent agricultural fields, the forests were converted to grasslands for hunting, grazing, and thatch. There are records of courts

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assigning management of grasslands to nearby villages—which would have entailed periodic burning to prevent their reversion to forest—in exchange for exempting them from royal taxes and duties.29 The efforts of the early states to open up Java’s forests became embedded in Javanese identity and ideology, as reflected in the title of the Islamic court annals of Central Java, Babad Tanah Jawi: babad means not only “history” but also “to clear land by cutting growth.”30 Geertz (1960:23–24) writes, “To mbabad is to clear a tract of wilderness and turn it into a village complete with surrounding rice fields, to create a small island of human settlement amid a great sea of forest-dwelling spirits.”31 The role of wet rice in this process is reflected in the fact that mbabad is still used today to refer to the preparation of a rice field.32 Just as cleared land became associated with the rise of the Javanese states and their cultures, so too did the forest come to be associated with the opposite—uncivilized, uncontrollable, and fearful forces, such as the Hindu goddess Durga.33 As Karl L. Hutterer (1985:64) writes, “Populations engaging in permanent field agriculture have essentially ‘locked themselves out of the forest’ conceptually. This fact is quite easily demonstrated by the mythological conceptualization among such societies that the forest is dangerous and fearful, and by their practical reluctance to enter the jungle.” Just as the opening of the forest came to be associated with the rise of Javanese civilization, so did the reversal of this process come to be seen as the eternal, mortal threat to this civilization, as reflected in Javanese beliefs regarding Agni, the god of fire, who destroys the world and turns it into a vast forest.34 The swidden versus wet-rice opposition is imbricated in a number of other oppositions.35 One is between forest and nonforest. A second, related, opposition is the topographical one of upland versus lowland. Third, the opposition of upland forest to lowland nonforest maps onto a divide between court and tribal society, between civilization and barbarism.36 Fourth and finally, pervading all of these different oppositions is a fundamental one between nature and culture: wet rice, deforested regions, lowlands, and civilized society are all seen as culture; whereas swiddens, forests, uplands, and barbarism are all seen as part of nature.37 Anthony Christie (1978:148) suggests that these seeming oppositions actually constitute a unity: “My preoccupation . . . has been with the nature of the apparent oppositions in which Javanese, and indeed Indonesia culture is so rich. I stress the word apparent, for it is my contention that in the Javanese context, at least, we are dealing

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with wholes. . . .” Referring specifically to a mountain-to-sea opposition like that in Central Java, he writes (ibid.), “Reality, Indonesian reality, construes the situation as a totality which can be expressed as two parts, neither of which can exist without the other . . . [for example] the system of mountain/sea which are elements in a river system”—as in the unity of volcano and lowlands discussed in chapter 3.38 There is some evidence in Javanese culture to support Anthony Christie’s idea of cosmological opposites being united in an overarching whole. Kathy Foley (1987:68–69) describes the idealized, historic Javanese landscape as follows: “This is a kingdom with mountains behind, wet rice fields to the right, dry fields to the left, and a great port in front.” In the records of the early states, there is evidence that the idealized realm, although focused on lowland wet rice, incorporated some upland land uses.39 Jan Christie writes (1991:32), “The oldest term to be applied to Javanese settlements in the legal literature is wanua. . . . This territory appears to have been large, based perhaps upon the territorial requirements of mixed agricultural systems including swiddens. The formulas in the charters relating to wanua land include such phrases as, ‘the forests, swidden fields, and rivers, in the valleys and on the hills,’ ‘their valleys and mountains . . . their sawah [wet rice] and orchards,’ ‘their sawah, dry rice fields, marshes and orchards,’ and others in the same vein.” Further evidence of Javanese cultural belief in a unifying, overarching system is the concept of the mandala kingdom discussed in chapter 3. Thus, the Yogyakarta court and its spirit counterpart on Merapi volcano, whose fate it shares and which it engages in annual rituals, are examples of the unity of opposites, upland and lowland, spirit world and mundane world.40 Agro-Cultural Politics at the Landscape Level I earlier noted the nonagronomic variables in the rise of rice cultivation. Tsing (2012:146) writes, “The biological transformation of people and plants that accompanied intensive cereal agriculture is best understood . . . through the rising tide of hierarchical social arrangements—and the entanglement of the state.” Kohn (2013) offers a useful model for studying hierarchical relations in nature and culture. Citing the work of Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, Kohn (2013:162) suggests that there is an isomorphism between environmental

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and social patterns in Ecuadoran forests: “Da Cunha (1998:10–11) has highlighted a curious phenomenon in the Juruá River basin during the rubber boom period. A vast network of creditor-debt relations emerged, which assumed a nested self-similar repeating pattern across scale that was isomorphic with the river network.” Proximity to water is important for processing the native rubber (Hevea brasiliensis), and the rivers were also vital for both transporting the finished product and enforcing the debt peonage relations between tappers and patrons that characterized the industry in the nineteenth century. As a result, the network of rubber exploitation in the Amazon mapped closely onto the network of rivers. This isomorphism was not limited to rubber. Kohn (2013:169) says successful exploitation of any of the Amazon’s natural resources depends upon harnessing the isomorphism between environment and society: “If Amazonian household economies and broader national and even global ones attempt to capture bits of the living wealth that the forest houses—whether in the form of game, rubber, or other floristic products—they can only do so by accessing the conjunction of physical and biotic patternings in which this wealth is caught up. . . . [H]unters, for the most part, don’t hunt animals directly; they harness the forms that attract animals. In a similar fashion, estate owners, through debt peonage, and during certain periods even outright enslavement, collected forest products via the Runa [tribal group].” Efficient exploitation of natural resources, thus, involves not direct control but rather indirect manipulation of the natural and native systems of resource use.41 Kohn suggests that successful systems of natural resource exploitation unite overlapping natural and cultural forms at a higher emergent level; and he suggests that it is possible for the most astute participants in these hierarchies, like rubber bosses and native shamans, to understand this principle. One way of obtaining this insight is through hierarchical movement. Rubber bosses were necessarily mobile, traveling up and down rivers to buy and sell latex. Similarly, Kohn says, shamans travel downriver to get perspective on conditions upriver, which he terms “upframing.” Going downriver and thus up the hierarchy offers comparative insight; it shows that your homeplace is just one of many such places; and it thereby gives you a glimpse of a wider, more complex system that is composed of many other such places: “This formal hierarchical logic is what informed the Jaminaua shaman’s quest for apprenticeship downriver. By going downriver, he was able to see the particular river from which he hailed as just one instance of a broader, more general pattern. Through this process of ‘upframing,’ he was now privy to

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the view from a higher-order emergent level (a sort of ‘type’) that encompassed the individual rivers and their villages, which can here be understood as the lower order component parts (the ‘tokens’) of this system. These properties of a logical hierarchy, instantiated in an ecosystem, are what allowed this shaman to reposition himself within a sociopolitical hierarchy.” Points higher in the hierarchy of isomorphic nature and culture relations afford greater insight because they offer a view across more hierarchical levels. There is thus an inherent asymmetry in the distribution of knowledge within these hierarchies: those farther up—downriver in Kohn’s case—are inherently privileged by virtue of their position in the system. Those farther up can see relations across more levels than those farther down.42 To return to the case of Central Java, greatest theorizing across hierarchical levels should be possible in the lowland court—equal to downriver in Kohn’s case—which is located at the highest hierarchical position. A well-known simile, which dates from early Java and has origins in classical Indian sources, likens the relationship between the ruler and his people to the relationship between a lion or tiger and the forest.43 One version of this runs as follows:44 The whole populace can be likened to a forest and the king to a tiger, whose security lies in the denseness of the thicket. Should the forest ever become open, the lion would lose his regard, and his strength would be of no use; if he struggles he soon will be overpowered. So it is agreed that a king should love his people like the tiger the woods. This particular version emphasizes the issue of visibility; but others focus on the fact that the tiger needs the game in the forest just as the king needs the food produced by his people; and yet others emphasize mutual dependence—for example, if the tiger disappears, then so too does the forest.45 But regardless of the particular interpretation of the simile, in all cases it represents explicit theorizing across hierarchical levels. Thus, the ecological dynamics of the forest, at the lowest and simplest point in this hierarchy, is invoked to offer insight into the political dynamics of the kingdom at the highest and most complex level. At an even higher hierarchical level, the relationship between the native Javanese states and the colonial Dutch was likened to the relationship between the water buffalo and the tiger—the tiger now a symbol for the Dutch, not the native ruler—which were pitted against one another in fights staged by the lowland courts during the nineteenth

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century.46 Analogous cross-level theorizing can be found in the modern Yogyakarta court. It is acutely conscious of how volcanic activity at the bottom of the hierarchy—atop Mount Merapi—reflects on its mandate to rule in the eyes of the Javanese public, which is reflected in its close monitoring of volcanic activity and its adroit interpretation of volcanic events (see my chapter 3). The national government does something similar: conscious of how natural disasters like volcanic eruptions undercut public confidence in the civil state, the government devotes funds to a state-of-the-art volcanology service to monitor Merapi. A provocative example of difference in vision and self-interest across hierarchical levels is raised by the history of rice, which has come to dominate the region in spite of serious economic shortcomings. O’Connor (1995:986n) writes, “Rice advances across Southeast Asia as if it were addictive. Farmers slight root and tree crop staples to grow this better liked and more prestigious crop. . . . Is this well-reported craving just how rice tastes? Is it state-induced snobbery or a homeostatic response to, say, climate or diet? All of this argues for treating wet rice as a complex that has a life of its own, not just a crop that spreads by rational calculation.” O’Connor’s analysis raises two distinct questions: Why do states try to persuade farmers to cultivate rice, and why do farmers mostly seem eager to do so (see my chapter 7)? The answer to the first question, many scholars suggest, is the relative ease of extracting surplus product from rice cultivation to support state development.47 Tsing (2012:145–46) writes: The most curious thing about Near Eastern grain domestication is that through most of this area it has been perfectly easy to gather large quantities of wild wheat and barley without the hard work of cultivation. Even in the 1960s, large stands of wild grain made foraging simple. The story we tell ourselves about the “convenience” and “efficiency” of growing crops at home is just not true; cultivation almost everywhere requires more labour than foraging. There were probably many reasons—from religion to local scarcity—to try experiments in domestication; but what maintained and extended grain cultivation was the emergence of social hierarchies—and the rise of the state. Intensive cereal agriculture can do one thing better than other forms of subsistence: support elites. States institutionalise the confiscation of a share of the harvest. Across Eurasia, the rise of states and their specialised civilisations is associated with the spread of intensive cereal agriculture.

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The importance of susceptibility to extraction is reflected in the state ideologies of the region, which throughout history have extolled the high culture of grains. As Tsing (ibid.) continues, “states promoted [grain] agriculture through their symbols and armies.” The most mundane tools of bureaucratic governance also play a role: when modern Indonesia’s Central Bureau of Statistics surveys “food sovereignty” in each of the country’s provinces, it restricts itself to grains like rice, corn, soy—referred to by the administrative acronym of PAJALE, for padi, jagung, and kedelai (rice, maize, and soybeans)—ignoring nongrain staples like sago, cassava, and sweet potato, and thus awarding the lowest scores on food sovereignty to those provinces in eastern Indonesia, like Maluku and Papua, where these nongrain staples predominate (Laksono n.d.).48 As to the second question, why farmers want to cultivate rice, this is less easily explained: although the political economics of rice may be favorable at the level of the state or society, this is much less clear at the household level. Monica Janowski (1988:18) writes of the one Bornean tribal group that traditionally cultivated wet rice, the Kelabit, “It is clearly not, on a simple labourinput calorie-output basis, rational to be growing rice in the forest environment of Borneo. Roots, such as cassava, sweet potatoes and yams, and sago, require much less investment of labour for the calorie output achieved.”49 As a result, there is a puzzle. O’Connor (1995:985–86) notes, “More rice benefits the society, not necessarily the household. Surplus rice fosters the trade, population growth, and resource concentration that promote state power and societal expansion. In these respects specializing in wet rice is a better societal adaptation than the agricultures it replaced. Yet for farmers, if intensifying wet rice cuts into house gardening, this specialization lessens a household’s subsistence autonomy and security. . . . Given this cost we might expect the mainland’s established farmers to resist the agricultural change that their societies needed to compete with the newcomers. Were these farmers to win within their societies, their societies would lose within the region.” In short, O’Connor suggests that wet rice is such a bad deal for individual farm households that they could be expected to resist adopting it. Although resistance makes sense—a win—for the individual household, however, it does not make sense for the society, where it represents a loss. Wet rice is onerous and risky for the cultivator, but its ability to support dense populations and intensive agriculture—whose product can be readily extracted and stored, transported and traded—is attractive to centralized states; which explains why states are so committed to it and opposed to anything else.50

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There is, thus, an asymmetry in insight and self-interest in the wet-rice agro-cultural complex: if the household correctly assesses its own self-interest and rejects wet rice, this leads to failure on the part of the state; if the household fails to see its own self-interest or cannot act upon it and accepts wet rice, this leads to the state’s success. In order to secure its existence, the state needs to obscure this difference in self-interest. This is achieved through cultural means, including the hoary idea that all civilized people eat rice and that non-rice agriculture, for example tubers, is primitive (see my chapter 7). The power of this ideology is reflected in the “addiction” to rice observed by O’Connor. The colonial powers did nothing to counter this addiction; as Crawfurd (1820:358) observed, “Rice (Oryza sativa), as is sufficiently well known, constitutes the chief material of the food of the civilized people of the old world inhabiting the countries within the tropics, and of the improved tribes of the Indian islands with the rest.” Peasants could reject participation in wet-rice cultivation through flight into the upland forests from the lowland kingdoms. There are also other revealing examples of “escape” from the rice agro-cultural complex, other examples of what Graeme Barker and co-authors (2017:57) call “active resistance” to rice as a staple food. In the modern era, Tsing (1993:280) reports on a female shaman in the Meratus Mountains of southeastern Kalimantan who will not eat or cultivate rice: “Uma Adang is different. She sees as the distinguishing mark the fact that she does not eat rice. Symbolically and practically, rice is central to Meratus livelihood. Uma Adang positions herself outside the world rice consumption creates, to see beyond it. And, indeed, because she does not eat rice, she also does not plant, weed, harvest, thresh, pound, sun-dry, cook, or serve rice. These are time-consuming, identity-creating activities for almost all Meratus women.” The historic Banjar court, in the same region, also took a principled stand against the cultivation of rice.51 The people of Nagara Daha, one of Banjar’s royal compounds (kraton), reported early in the nineteenth century that their ancestors had taken a vow to never plant rice.52 They imported the rice that they needed, while exporting another starch staple, yams, which spoke to their status as a kingdom committed to living from trade as opposed to agriculture. The actions of both the Banjar court and the Meratus shaman were conscious efforts to avoid the entanglements associated with rice cultivation. It makes sense that these two actors in particular should possess such insight into the hegemony of the rice agro-cultural complex. Shamans often have such insight, indeed are defined by having such insight, Kohn

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(2013:165) calling them “experts at stepping into dominant points of view within a multinatural perspectival system of cosmic predation.”53 The Banjar traders obtained similar insight by dint of their involvement in trade across many hierarchical levels—from dealing with upriver tribal collectors of forest products to conducting political negotiations with the trading nations of Europe.54 Ambivalence of the Colonial Dutch Colonial Dutch rule involved a mixture of efforts to exploit or contest and replace the historic, hierarchical agro-ecological relationships of the East Indies. The global spice trade originally brought the Dutch and other colonial powers to the East Indies, seeking out historic trading entrepôts, like the Banjar kingdom in southeastern Kalimantan. This kingdom was based on exploiting an ancient hierarchical pattern in the region, wherein interior tribal peoples gathered forest products and delivered them to traders on the coast, who in turn sent them to various international markets—in earliest times to China, and then in the early modern era to western Europe. In the second millennium c.e., cash crops like pepper were introduced into this system, which were cultivated by swidden peoples in the interior. The Banjar kingdom maintained and guarded its powerful position in this hierarchical pattern by manipulating key hierarchical dynamics, notably by inhibiting direct contact between European traders and the interior producers. The Dutch initially participated in this trade on the same footing as the other trading powers in the region, but they quickly sought to dominate and monopolize the most valuable trading goods—pepper, and the other spices. At the same time they attempted to increase production and make the terms of trade more favorable to them and less favorable to the producers and middlemen. Their efforts undermined the terms of exchange and there by disrupted the hierarchical relations between traders, middlemen, and producers.55 In response, the Banjar court tried to obfuscate their own role in the hierarchy by hiding their capital from the Dutch, in much the same way as they had historically hidden the interior producers from the European traders. In their extremity the Banjar court even sought to dismantle the hierarchy entirely, by prohibiting the cultivation and trade of pepper. These actions, shrewdly calculated if ultimately unsuccessful, reflect the

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unusual vision afforded to the Banjar court by their position near the top of this hierarchy. Notwithstanding the fact that their initial contacts in the region were with robust, historic trading kingdoms, the colonial Dutch were committed to the idea that market-oriented commodity production was fundamentally alien to native traditions of production. As later articulated by Julius H. Boeke (1953) in his thesis of the “dual economy” of the East Indies, the indigenous, uncapitalized, subsistence-oriented agriculture was governed by irrational, Oriental principles of production; the production of export crops necessitated the introduction of an Occidental, estate-based system of production; and the two systems needed to be kept strictly separate. Much of the later colonial history of the East Indies can be interpreted as an effort to maintain a divide between the two systems of agricultural production, native and colonial. This was the unique contribution by the colonial Dutch to the historic system of hierarchical relations in the agro-cultural complex of the East Indies: dividing it into two parts, one native and one colonial, based not on a contest between upland and lowland but on a contest between East and West. An irony of the “dual economy” thesis was the extensive intermixture of native and colonial agriculture that actually occurred during Dutch rule. There were distinct sectors of colonial-run estates on the one hand, and on the other hand peasant wet rice and swiddens; but there were also many instances in which the divide was intentionally straddled by the Dutch. Early in the nineteenth century, straitened finances at home led the Dutch to make greater efforts to exploit the existing agro-ecology of the East Indies, particularly through the cultuurstelsel, or cultivation system (1830–1870). This was designed to promote greater production of export crops by requiring that 20 percent of village lands be devoted to export crops, to be paid to the government in lieu of taxes. In practice, this often entailed rotation of export and subsistence crops on the same village fields, one of the most widespread and long-lasting examples of which involved wet rice and sugarcane.56 As described by Geertz (1963), this pattern of intercropping “allowed the mills to operate in terms of a large-field system appropriate to plantation sugar and, simultaneously, the village to operate in terms of the small-field system appropriate to wet rice.” Wet rice, sugarcane, and dense populations all worked in combination, but the real beneficiaries were the sugar mills and the state, not the rice farmer. Although the cultuurstelsel system was formally abolished around 1870, in practice an obligatory rotation

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of wet rice and sugarcane persisted throughout the twentieth century. The imposition of sugar cultivation on Javanese wet-rice farmers was a chief reason for their historic “involution” instead of development.57 Another example of colonial and peasant intercropping involved the famous Deli tobacco system of North Sumatra. The Dutch planters discovered that they could grow tobacco in fallowed swidden fields, thus sparing themselves the huge cost of the initial clearing of the tropical forest. After their tobacco—and the swiddeners’ food crops—had exhausted the soil, they relied on the swiddeners’ practice of a forest fallow to restore the fertility of the land.58 By insinuating their tobacco crop into the local swidden cycle, therefore, they wrested an economic and ecological subsidy from it. By accessing this local agro-ecological pattern, they productively tied a local system of production into a higher hierarchical level, which they dominated and from which they profited. In terms of the way that the Dutch tobacco planters exploited existing trophic relations, this resembles the way that the nineteenth-century rubber boom reworked the Amazonian landscape: “The rubber boom economy was able to exist and grow because it united a series of partially overlapping forms, such as predatory chains, plant and animal spatial configurations, and hydrographic networks, by linking the similarities these share. The result was that all these more basic regularities came to be part of an overarching form—an exploitative political-economic structure whose grasp was very difficult to escape.”59 The greatest historical success inserting market commodities into swidden cycles in the East Indies was achieved by natives with rubber. Para rubber, Hevea brasiliensis, was introduced from South America to Southeast Asia in the 1870s, and within a generation it was being cultivated throughout the region. Initially cultivated only on colonial estates, by the first decade of the twentieth century, smallholders in Borneo and elsewhere, who had previously been active in gathering native forest rubbers for the global trade, were also planting it on their own initiative. The native smallholders did not emulate the colonial-estate model, however. Instead, they planted rubber in their fallowed swidden fields, much as the Dutch tobacco planters had done in Sumatra. Para rubber and swidden cultivation are complementary in the use of land and labor, which mitigates some of the risk of rice cultivation. The combination of rubber and swidden succeeded by amplifying existing hierarchical trophic patterns—the dispersed stands of the native latex-bearing trees in the forest—and by uniting existing, partially overlapping forms of forest rubber gathering and swiddens.60 This enabled the swidden-cum-rubber cultivators

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Fig. 5.1. Girls using a rubber mangle to express water from slabs of uncured rubber.

to overtake the market share of the colonial rubber plantations within one generation (fig. 5.1) The success of the smallholder swidden-rubber combination took the Dutch and other colonial powers in the region by surprise. Ignoring their own experience with Deli tobacco, the colonial authorities did not recognize that the smallholders’ success was based on harnessing existing ecological forms of forests, trees, and fields; instead, they attributed it to shortcuts in management and overexploitation. These perceived deficiencies in native rubber management were cited in support of an international campaign to limit smallholder production through constraints on planting and exorbitant taxes on marketed product, and by withholding resources to develop the smallholder sector, a policy that endures to the present day.61 In spite of all this, the smallholders’ hierarchical intertwining of local forest ecology, subsistence food cultivation, and cash-crop production was so successful that they have retained their dominance of this sector, in spite of government disinterest and outright opposition, down to the present. The swidden component of this smallholder rubber system was the bête noire of colonial agriculture. As the British resident John Crawfurd (1820:362, 360) observed early in the nineteenth century, whereas wet rice

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“may be considered to imply the highest improvement of the art of husbandry among these people . . . and is found only to prevail in the most improved parts of the Archipelago, and in lands of the happiest situation,” swiddens, “[t]he rudest, and probably the earliest practiced mode of cultivating rice . . . is followed only among the more savage tribes who want skill and industry to undertake the more difficult but productive modes.” Taking a similar view, the colonial Dutch referred to swidden agriculture as roofbouw, “exhaustive or robber agriculture” (Jansonius 1950:1245).62 The term “robber” reflected the Dutch belief that this system of agriculture flourished only at the cost of “robbing” the environment of an above-average amount of resources; thus, its productivity was based on “robbing” nutrients from nature. As with smallholder rubber, the Dutch did not see that swidden agriculture was harnessing existing ecological forms. They could not see this, or did not want to see this, because they could not benefit from it—although Freek Colombijn (1998) argues that the anti-swidden views of the Dutch also stemmed from their own polder tradition.63 The colonial state could not easily exploit swidden’s human-ecological dynamics for its own ends, as it could do with wet rice. The place of swiddens in the hierarchy of humanecological patterns in places like Kalimantan and Sumatra was inherently difficult for the colonial government to exploit, just as it had been in Java for the historic native kingdoms. The colonial animus toward both swidden and smallholder cultivation of export crops continued into the postcolonial era, in which a deprecatory distinction between wet rice in “Inner Indonesia” and swiddens in “Outer Indonesia” prevailed.64 Conclusions: Hierarchy, Inequity, and Insight In the passage cited at the beginning of this chapter from O’Connor (1995:986n), he “argues for treating wet rice as a complex that has a life of its own, not just a crop that spreads by rational calculation.” The idea of a plant having “a life of its own” appeals to scholars of the “plant turn.” Writing of boundary plants in Tanzania and western Cameroon, for example, Michael Sheridan (2016:40) characterizes rice as “agentive and privileged” because it “allows farmers to manipulate its genome to suit diverse ecological niches.” In the case of rice in Southeast Asia, however, given multiple efforts to manipulate it in different and competing directions, the agency of the plant itself looks less determinative. Rice culture in Southeast Asia developed along two distinct trajectories, one privileged and one not,

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owing not to genomic plasticity and destiny but rather to politics and culture. A salient, enduring theme of the Southeast Asian region is agro-cultural dualism. In the precolonial era, this took the form of a differentiation of lowland wet-rice states and upland swidden communities. In the colonial era, this took the form of a separation of European plantation-based commodity production from native subsistence food-crop agriculture. There has been a political dimension to this dualism: one part of it has been associated with central state authority, and the other has been associated with peoples at the margins. The discourse of difference has underpinned inequitable political-economic relations, giving a normative tone to this dualism. An important strategy of rule has involved disparagement of the agrocultural “other.” Importantly, this disparagement has been framed not in terms of politics, but in terms of culture. For perhaps a millennium, the hegemonic agricultural discourse in the region has been a discourse of what good and proper agriculture is, not what is good and proper for whom. The framing of this historic agro-cultural dualism has been mostly a project of centralized state authorities, not those at the margins. The privileged position of state authorities within agro-ecological hierarchies enabled them to see where their self-interest lay and to develop a cultural discourse to valorize it. This represented insight, but with limits: the historic Javanese kingdoms made some effort to articulate a vision of the overarching whole, but the colonial Dutch were much less successful in this regard, and neither was completely able to step outside of the larger systems in which they were enmeshed. Neither colonial nor precolonial authorities completely grasped the overall logic of the agro-cultural dualism with which they had to deal. This is reflected in the battles that both lost to communities at the margins—the competition from smallholders, the flight of peasant cultivators. Those at the bottom of the agro-ecological hierarchies—shamans, refugees, and others— were often able to accurately perceive their own self-interest, which illuminates the contradiction between real and ideal that lay at the heart of these agro-cultural dualisms. Not all participants were served equally well, and the agro-ecological realities were distorted to disguise this fact. This explains the extreme cultural valorizations of some agro-cultural systems in opposition to others.

chapter 6

Historic Parting of the Wild from the Civilized in Pakistan If the liberal order is like a garden, artificial and forever threatened by the forces of nature, preserving it requires a persistent, unending struggle against the vines and weeds that are constantly working to undermine it from within and overwhelm it from without. Today there are signs all around us that the jungle is growing back. —robert kagan, the jungle grows back: america and our imperiled world

Introduction: Evolution of Jangal, “Forest,” from Jangala, “Savanna” In the Vedic era in the subcontinent, 1500–500 b.c.e., there was a dichotomy between jangala, “savanna,” and anupa, “wet forest,” which resembles in many respects the swidden–wet rice dichotomy discussed in chapter 5. Because of the greater time depth of this South Asian case, it can shed light on how such dichotomies evolve over time, as jangala, savanna, became jangal, or jungle, as we know it today. Tracking the historical evolution from jangala to jangal, I demonstrate that both nature and concepts of nature are dynamic; I demonstrate how the two have co-evolved over the millennia. The historic change in the conception of jangala and jangal reveals a surprising amount of conceptual instability. This history suggests that as nature changes, so too do conceptions of nature.1 This view of environmental history is in line with Gregory Bateson’s (1972) thesis that we are not outside our ecology. The focus of this chapter, the “jungle,” holds a special place in the modern Western imagination. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it has two principal semantic domains: one is botanical, denoting a thick vegetative cover; but the other is sociological, denoting a wild, confused, conceptually tangled place, as reflected in its use as a term for hobo camps, most recently the refugee

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camp in Calais, France—the ultimate in “outsider” places—“theatres of insurgency” in Southeast Asia, or in such usages as “jungle primary,” meaning a primary in which candidates from all parties run against one another.2 Moreover, the two semantic domains have bled into one another, such that the vegetative referent “jungle” often has pejorative connotations. Thus, Hugh Raffles (2004:235) was unwilling to label his Amazonian fieldsite as “jungle,” as he tried instead to “make the Amazon normal and everyday, trying to relativize its exoticism, coerce it into forests and woods.” Other scholars have observed a similar process of domestication at work. Kelly Enright (2012) argues that over the past century, jungle has been transformed from “dangerous” to “endangered,” from a place that threatens us, to a place that we threaten. Coming full circle, the endangered—and thus domesticated—jungle is being reimagined yet again, by scholars who are trying to de-center the human. As Raffles himself admits, “I’ve come once more to love it [the Amazon] as a jungle, as a place of normal extremity, of real difference. I’m rediscovering the power of the jungle.” This place of “real difference” is powerful because it is nonhuman. Raffles continues: “Find a way through the treachery, guilt, and disappointments of the jungle and you find a way to come close to other beings without succumbing to the objectivism of science or a too-easy anthropomorphism. The power of the jungle is that it can never be tamed: once tamed, it’s no longer jungle.”3 These reversals in the meaning of “jungle” over the past century are not without historical precedent. Unremarked in the contemporary rethinking of the term “jungle” are its Anglo-Indian roots, and its even more distant Sanskrit roots. The Oxford English Dictionary (1999) notes these roots—modern as well as ancient—in the subcontinent and also the historic changes in meaning that they reflect, which is likened to the historic change in the meaning of the English term “forest”: Jungle, n. Etymology: < Hindi and Marathi jangal desert, waste, forest, Sanskrit jangala dry, dry ground, desert. The change in Anglo-Indian use may be compared to that in the historical meaning of the word forest in its passage from a waste or unenclosed tract to one covered with wild wood. In the transferred sense of jungle there is apparently a tendency to associate it with tangle. Thus, the Oxford English Dictionary posits a historic shift in meaning for both “jungle” and “forest” from terms that emphasize nonuse or waste, to terms that emphasize dense forest cover.

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In contemporary Urdu, as well as most local languages in Pakistan, the term jangal means “a wood; a forest; a jungle.”4 In classical Sanskrit, its etymological root, jangala, is defined as “arid, sparingly grown with trees and plants.”5 There is a major difference in meaning between the two terms: the ancient term denotes an open, arid savanna, whereas the modern one denotes a closed, tree-dominated cover. Francis Zimmermann suggests that this difference between jangal and jangala represents a mistake.6 In the preface to his remarkable 1987 book The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats, he writes, “An extraordinary misunderstanding [emphasis added] has overtaken the history of this word [jungle]. Jangala in Sanskrit meant ‘dry lands,’ what geographers would call ‘open’ vegetation cover, but in the eighteenth century the Hindi jangal and Anglo-Indian jungle came to denote the exact opposite, ‘tangled thickets,’ a luxuriant growth of grasses and lianas.” The purpose of his book, Zimmermann says, was to peel away the modern misconceptions of jungle and “reveal the jungle in its ancient sense,” through an exhaustive exegesis of the concept of jangala in the ancient Sanskrit texts.7 His interlocutors have critiqued a number of aspects of his research, but not his characterization of the shift in meaning between jangal and jangala. Arjun Appadurai (1988) writes, “Zimmermann opens our eyes to the differences between ‘jungle’ and ‘forest’ in ancient Indian thought and to the radical rupture [emphasis added] between our modern, Western conception of jungle (as a dank, luxuriant, moist place) and the ancient Indian category, which referred to a dry and austere natural setting, which was nevertheless ideal for human subsistence practices.” In short, the reversals in meaning of the English term “jungle” over the past century mirror a millennia-long reversal of meaning between Sanskrit jangala and Urdu or Hindi jangal. I will explore Zimmermann’s “misunderstanding” by analyzing the concept of, first, jangala, and then jangal; the balance between human and natural agency implicated in these two concepts; the implications of the analysis for current understanding of the nature-culture dichotomy; the empirical character of the ancient Vedic teachings, and the way that these teachings offer insight by transgressing boundaries and hierarchies. This analysis concerns the same region described in chapter 4: the barani, “rainfed,” region of contemporary Pakistan, comprising the Salt Range, Potwar Plateau, and the plains of the northern Punjab and southern North-West Frontier Province. This part of the subcontinent is today called—in both Pakistan and India—the Punjab, from the Persian for “five

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waters,” referring to the five rivers that here flow into the Indus: the Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej. This study region falls within the northwestern extent of the ancient Indo-Aryan homeland described in the Vedic texts analyzed by Zimmermann (1987:4–7 and map 1). This land was the original Āryāvarta, “abode of the noble ones,” the heartland of the Indo-Arya.8 The Vedic texts cited by Zimmermann hale from this place. Ancient Jangala, “Savanna”—Divinely Ordained The somewhat forbidding aspect of the countryside in this region today is diametrically opposed to its ancient aspect, which was seen as literally inviting. One of the key citations in Zimmermann’s analysis of the ancient concept of the jangala is taken from the Vedic text the Laws of Manu and concerns the king’s selection of a place to settle: “Let him [the king] take up residence in a jangala place, where cereals are abundant, where the Arya predominate and which is free from disorders.” The gist of this verse is that the king should settle in the jangala, “dry savanna lands,” and avoid the anupa, “wet forest lands.” Zimmermann maintains that this distinction between jangala and anupa is one of the most fundamental polarities in early Brahminic beliefs and in the doctrines of the Indian medical science of Ayurveda.9 Based on Zimmerman’s analysis of the Vedic texts, he characterizes jangala as located in the western part of the subcontinent, in the greater Indus River valley, not in that of the Ganges to the east. Furthermore, it is located in the central part of this plain, not in the mountains on its periphery. It has an arid climate, but with water—whether from wells or rainfall— its soils will support abundant fodder and food crops. It is salubrious for humans, unlike the malaria and fever belts in the eastern half of the subcontinent. The vegetative cover of the jangala is for the most part not closed forest, but rather open savanna. Of most importance, the jangala is pure and the home, the Āryāvarta, of the Arya—encompassing their settlements, fields, and pastures as well as their wastelands—whereas the anupa is impure and is the refuge into which the Arya drove the barbarians.10 Zimmermann suggests that early Aryan society did not simply approve of the environment of the jangala, but was partly responsible for it, in particular its distinctive vegetative cover. He writes, “Everywhere, the jungle is the product of the battle between the forest and the cultivated plain. It re-

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sults from the degradation of the one and the abandonment of the other.” That is, the savanna is neither closed forest nor open cultivated land; it is something in between; it is the product of “the overpasturing of livestock and the excessive exploitation of timber.”11 According to the Vedic texts, one definition of the jangala, of the land appropriate for Aryan settlement and the propagation of Brahminic culture and religion, is the presence of the subcontinent’s most ubiquitous ungulate, the Indian antelope (Antilope cervicapra), whose skin is “an instrument of sacrifice and a symbol of the Brahmin.”12 Zimmermann writes, “ ‘Country where the black antelope roams in its natural state (svabha¯vatas) should be recognized as suitable for sacrifice,’ say the Laws of Manu, ‘any other than that is barbarian country.’ ”13 The historic co-occurrence of the antelope and the jangala suggests that this savanna was well suited to supporting herbivores, including domesticated livestock. And indeed, Zimmermann suggests that the primary resource-use system that the Aryans pursued in the jangala was pastoralism, and that this played a role in the savannaization of the region.14 The Aryans would have used adzes and fire to initially open up the forest to hunt, obtain timber, and make agricultural fields and pastures for their livestock; and then grazing and burning would have kept it open. The thorn forests and dry deciduous forests of this part of the subcontinent are vulnerable to livestock.15 R. Misra (1980:146–47) maintains that once people have opened such forests, grazing alone helps to keep them open. But perhaps most important is the role played by fire in land management.16 Periodic burning retards the growth of woody species unpalatable to herbivores, destroys older and less nutritious grass, and stimulates the growth of new grass.17 Burning both destroys forest and inhibits its return. Zimmermann (1987:44) writes, “Brushfires and other phenomena, provoked essentially by the presence of man, bring about the degradation of the dry deciduous forest.” Zimmermann’s use of the term “degradation” implies a finality to this process, but savanna environments are characteristically unstable. Contemporary scholarship on savanna ecology demonstrates the ongoing role of fire in stabilizing savanna, in the absence of which many would spontaneously reforest.18 The central role of fire in maintaining this idealized Aryan landscape is reflected in culture and religion. The Vedic literature is filled with impassioned paeans to Agni, the god of sacrificial fire.19 The use of fire in Brahminic sacrifice cannot be separated from the use of fire in managing the

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anthropogenic savanna. In the Rgveda, the oldest of the classical Vedic texts, Agni is mentioned in ecological contexts as well as sacrificial ones: for example, “He [Agni] eats the woods as a King eats the rich.” Agni’s impact on vegetation also is mentioned: “On thy [Agni’s] way hitherward and hence let flowery Durva grass spring up.”20 Durva grass is Cynodon dactylon, Bahama or Bermuda grass, of which Burkill (1966:739) writes, “In some parts of the tropics it is the most important of all fodder grasses. Vast amounts of hay are made from it in Bengal.”21 Thus, this passage refers to the role that Agni fire plays in producing fodder for livestock. The role of fire in managing fodder grasses is attested to in otherwise enigmatic verses in the Rgveda about the reconstitutive powers of fire, as in this one: “Cool, Agni, and again refresh the spot which thou hast scorched and burnt.” This verse may be interpreted as referring to the growth of a fresh and thus more nutritious grass cover on burnt-over land. Even more explicitly: “O Agni guard the spots that cattle love” refers to the need for periodic burning to preserve the pastures favored by cattle against the succession to nongrassy vegetation that otherwise would occur, if the spot was not “guarded” against this.22 The elimination of nongrassy, ligneous vegetation— which is of no use to cattle—is explicit in verses such as, “And thou, O Agni, thou of Godlike nature, sparest the stones [soil?], while eating up the brushwood.”23 The relationship between burning and the desired growth of a more palatable grass cover throws light on the repeated use in the Rgveda of the metaphor of “barbering” to describe Agni’s impact:24 When through the forest, urged by wind, he spreads, verily Agni shears the hair of earth [that is, grasses and shrubs]. (from Book I, “Hymn LXV”) As when a barber shaves a beard, thou shavest earth when the wind blows on thy flame and fans it. (from Book X, “Hymn CXLII”) The Arya lived and worked within the jangala, which encompassed their settlements, fields, and pastures, as well as the lands not currently worked or inhabited. An important conceptual distinction within this domain was that of the village space versus the nonvillage space. Charles Malamoud (1996:75) characterizes this as the opposition of the grāma village to the aranya forest: “In Vedic India, and more generally in Brahminic India, this dichotomy is omnipresent. The entirety of the inhabitable world is di-

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vided between gra¯ma and aranya.” Note that Malamoud locates this opposition within the “inhabitable world,” thus, within the Aryan jangala zone; this does not bear upon the anupa territory of the barbarians. The gra¯ma versus aranya dichotomy is subsumed within the regional dichotomy between the jangala zone of the Arya in the western part of the subcontinent and the anupa zone of the barbarians in the east. Malamoud (ibid.:75) glosses one half of the gra¯ma-aranya divide as “forest,” but he notes that this term, which can even be applied to desert, is not primarily about vegetative cover: “One should note that the two zones of forest and village are generally distinguished from one another, less on the basis of their material features than on that of the religious and social significance attributed to each of them.” Zimmermann (1987:368) writes, “It [the forest] is not seen primarily from the point of view of its dense vegetation; rather, it represents life outside-the-world.” Malamoud (1996:76) states that the forest is really the village’s “other”: “Facing the village is the aranya. The word, traditionally translated as ‘forest,’ designates, in reality, the village’s other. . . . The village is here, the forest over there. Similarly, the forest is that towards which one heads when one leaves the village. Might we not, then, define this aranya as that which is external to the village? Its constant feature is that it is an empty, interstitial space.” Put otherwise, the village is domestic space and the forest is undomesticated space. Zimmermann makes a similar point in characterizing the village as sociologically full and the forest as sociologically empty. The socioreligious distinction between the two is, he says, bridged by the ecological content of jangala. Since the jangala savanna is ecologically unstable, since it is the product of an ongoing “battle between the forest and the cultivated plain,” the villages, fields, pastures, and forests that lie within it are not fixed. They may expand or contract, come or go, in accordance with the shifting dynamics of the savanna, as driven by both natural and cultural forces. By virtue of being an active zone of tension between society and nature, jangala does indeed mediate between the two, between village and forest.25 Modern Jangal—Popularly Feared Since the Vedic era, population growth, the development of strong central states in control of land-use practices, and the development of vast irrigation works during the colonial era—all have affected the environment of the region.26 These developments have also affected ways of thinking

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about this environment, especially regarding the relationship between society and environment or culture and nature. This is reflected in the shift in meaning from the ancient term jangala to the modern term jangal. Contemporary Pakistani farmers use the term jangal, in Urdu and in most regional languages, to refer to any distinct, contiguous block of trees. The prevalence of this usage is also reflected in the official name of the forest service, mahkamah junglot (office of forests)—junglot being the plural form of jangal. Thus, whereas jangala developed where the ancient forest was cleared, jangal is found where the modern forest has not been cleared. Forest does not constitute the complete extent of the semantic domain of modern jangal, however. The term transcends this vegetative referent, being widely used to refer to any undomesticated space, whether forested or not.27 Ann Grodzins Gold and Bhoju Ram Gujar (2002) write of Rajasthan, a region that also falls within the ancient jangala zone, “The semantic horizons of jangal, as it appears in our interview texts, may encompass both lushly wooded and arid, scrubby environments,” thus encompassing both forests and deserts. They add that “the span of meanings contained in jangal [range] from any uncultivated and uninhabited space to heavily forested areas,” the unifying characteristic being any place without humans or human labor.28 Gold and Gujar accept this wide span in meanings, correctly rejecting the idea that this is just an anachronism. Associated with the absence from the modern jangal of people and their work is a connotation of the “wild,” which reflects a fundamentally different relationship to society from that of the ancient jangala (fig. 6.1).29 Thus, the term jangal is used to distinguish between things that are domesticated and things that are not. For example, jungli is used to refer to feral varieties of plants and animals, as in jungli kikar, “wild kikar.”30 The jangala, in contrast, did not connote the “wild.” The Aryan pastoralists literally lived and worked within the jangala. The jangala contained their pastures, fields, and villages: it encompassed the entirety of their land-use cycle, including fallowed lands and wastelands. Thus, jangala encompassed both domestic space and wild space. In contrast, pastures, fields, and villages stand outside the modern jangal; they have been removed from the wild. Today, the wilddomestic dichotomy maps exactly onto that of jangal versus non-jangal space.31 A further dimension of this sundering of domestic and wild is differentiation of civilized and uncivilized space. The contemporary expression

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Fig. 6.1. The human ecologies of jangala versus jangal.

jungli log, for example, refers to rural peoples living beyond the norms and laws of the country. The most well-known example of this are dacoits, who ply their kidnapping and banditry from the shelter of the riverine forests of the lower Indus. In addition, the jangal is popularly thought to harbor not just those who are not of society, but those who are not of this life: the jangal is thought to be the abode of jin, “spirits.” For this reason, some farmers say that the jangal is “the place where one feels fear.” Again, this dimension of jangal contrasts with the jangala. Whereas modern society excludes the jangal, the ancient jangala encompassed society; it was coterminous with civilization. It was the other half of the Brahminic polarity, the wet tropical forest, anupa, that was feared. The Arya pushed the ancient barbarians out of the jangala; but the contemporary equivalent, the dacoits, are pushed into the jangal. The modern jangal does not mean the same thing as the ancient anupa, although it fills some of the same conceptual slots. The contemporary concept of jangal has lost the broad geographic referent that jangala versus anupa had—the arid savanna lands of the west versus the marshy lands of the east. As the ancient regional dichotomy between the

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jangala and the anupa was erased, the modern dichotomy between the jangal and the non-jangal expanded conceptually to cover some of the same territory. The ancient dichotomy between the gra¯ma village and the aranya forest has similarly expanded conceptually: whereas gra¯ma versus aranya once simply denoted the village versus the village “other,” now it maps onto the more complex opposition between civilized and uncivilized spaces. This historic removal of civilization from jangal has implications for the broader relationship between civilization and nature. All values of nature today are located in the jangal, as all values of culture are located outside of it. This contrasts with the ancient jangala, which encompassed the values of both nature and culture. A dichotomy between nature and culture existed in the ancient era, but it was distinct from the dichotomy that existed between the civilized world of the Arya and the uncivilized world of the barbarians. Today, in the opposition between jangal and non-jangal, these two ancient dichotomies are conflated: on the one side, culture and civilization; and on the other side, nature and barbarism. Thus, whereas the values of civilization once mediated between nature and culture, now they drive the opposition of culture to nature. What Brings Forests Back? Human agency is an important dimension of these discriminations between jangal and non-jangal, between jangala and anupa, nature and culture, civilization and barbarism. Zimmermann believes that natural agency played an important role in the development of the ancient jangala. To illustrate this, he cites Rudyard Kipling’s famous short story “Letting in the Jungle,”32 which tells how the jungle boy Mowgli took revenge for the mistreatment of his foster mother by the villagers of the Waingunga valley. With the assistance of the jungle’s “Eaters of Grass” (namely, elephant, deer, pig, and nilgai [Boselaphus tragocamelus]), the offending village was leveled, the inhabitants driven off, and the jungle “let in.” As this phrase suggests, the jungle had been previously “not let in,” had in fact been “kept out” of the village and its surrounding agricultural lands by the unceasing efforts of the villagers. When the villagers were driven away—a more serious blow than simply destroying the houses—the heretofore-checked natural succession of the tropical vegetation became unchecked. Kipling writes, “By the end of the rains there was the roaring jungle in full blast on the spot that had been under plough not

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six months before.”33 In Zimmermann’s analysis of the story (1987:43), “the abandoned land was literally transformed into savanna.” Kipling’s story, thus, is about upsetting a delicate balance between natural and cultural agency. In contrast, Zimmermann (ibid.:62) seems to see the transformation of forest to savanna as permanent, implying that cultivated fields could succeed to jangala, but jangala could not succeed to forest. He writes, “Who could forget in India the forests that have died out, and the dramatic expanse of wastelands, the lands once abandoned, the lands then desertified.” Not only does this seem to be the opposite of the message of Kipling’s story, but it overlooks the fact that the jangala is not forest; rather, it is an unstable ecotype located between field and forest. If natural succession could produce “roaring jungle” in less than one year in the dry deciduous forest zone of modern-day Madhya Pradesh—where Kipling sets his story—then, assuming that the villagers did not return, it would likely produce impenetrable bush forest on the site within a few years, young secondary forest in a decade or so, and mature secondary forest in several decades. In Zimmerman’s case, therefore, if permanent abandonment of the land initially resulted in open savanna, it should eventually lead to the return of a more closed forest cover.34 That is, abandonment alone should not produce permanent savanna, without some ongoing human intervention involving burning and grazing cattle.35 The ancient Aryans saw the jangala as a favorable environment— indeed, one divinely ordained—which was presented to them; they did not have to construct it, they only had to give thanks for it by prayer and sacrifice. The Vedic prescription for settlement in the savanna has already been cited: “Let him [the king] take up residence in a jangala place.”36 This prescription implies that the jangala is prior to human settlement and land use. There is no recognition here that Aryan land use was responsible for the transformation of the native Indian forest cover to jangala. The Vedic literature presents the distinction between jangala and anupa as one between the environment of civilization and the environment of barbarism, not as one between anthropogenic and natural environments. This literature presents the jangala as land that is chosen because it is good, not land that has been made good because it was chosen. The Aryans’ nonrecognition of their role in creating the jangala is reflected in their view of the relationship with the Indian antelope. Vedic teachings identified the proper range for Aryan settlement in the subcontinent as

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the range of the antelope, whose preferred habitat was the jangala, “savanna.” However, if the jangala was indeed anthropogenic in origin, then the actual relationship must have been the reverse of that implied. The Aryans did not follow the antelope; rather the antelope followed the Aryans. Zimmermann (1987:59) writes, “To a certain degree, the antelope followed rather than preceded the paths of the diffusion of the brahminic society and in this fashion came to occupy the entire area of the plains of India. History was responsible for completing the very remarkable taxonomic relationship originally introduced by nature between the specific zone of the antelope and that of the brahminic civilization.” Whereas initial Aryan settlement may have followed the antelope, therefore, as they expanded the range of the savanna in India the antelope would have started to follow the Arya. This is clearest where the range of the antelope extended beyond the climatic dry zone, following the extension of the savanna into wetter parts of the subcontinent as the result of forest clearing.37 George B. Schaller (1967:150) writes, “With the destruction of the forest cover, the animals [antelopes] readily adapted to wastelands and cultivation. The species has also penetrated the moist deciduous forests in Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, and other states apparently by following the slashand-burn cultivators and occupying the ephemeral field and village sites opened up by them.”38 Conclusions: Changing Nature and Changing Concepts of Nature This case study from the subcontinent offers a unique longue durée perspective on contemporary debates regarding our understanding of the wild and the civilized. According to the contemporary South Asian concept of jangal, the wild and the civilized are clearly distinct: the wild lies in the jangal, which lies outside the civilized.39 But according to the ancient concept of jangala, things are much more complicated: both the wild and the nonwild lie within the civilized world, within the jangala. Contemporary Western notions of nature and culture do not easily accommodate this ancient conceptual structure, which requires us to partially collapse our embedded dichotomies of civilized versus barbaric, and wild versus domesticated. The modern dichotomy of wild versus domestic lies at the heart of William Cronon’s famous 1996 critique of the idea of “wilderness”: “If we set too high a stock on wilderness, too many other corners of the earth be-

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come less than natural and too many other people become less than human, thereby giving us permission not to care much about their suffering or their fate.” The Vedic vision of the wild existing alongside the domestic, within not without society, exemplifies the sort of vision that Cronon is arguing for, and it supports his thesis that the modern idea of wilderness lying outside society is an historically contingent one. Cronon argues that the modern wilderness ideal is based on a historical invention, “the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history.”40 An apt illustration of his argument is the millennia-long process by which jangala became jangal. One of the most thorough recent critiques in anthropology of the Cartesian divide between nature and culture is Descola’s 2013 Beyond Nature and Culture. He writes, “It does seem probable that the values and meanings attached to the opposition between wild and domesticated belong to one particular historical trajectory and depend, in part, upon a characteristic feature of the process of transition to the Neolithic that began in the Fertile Crescent more than ten thousand years ago.” The particularity of that trajectory is attested to by the very different history in the subcontinent, which—although it wound up in a similar place in modern times, in the jangal—began in a very different place, the jangala. Descola suggests that the Western idea of nature—the nature of Aristotle, Descartes, Newton—would appear “altogether exotic” to a “hypothetical Jivaro or Chinese historian of science,” and a Vedic sage would have to be added to this list.41 Zimmermann writes, “Dryness, a flat terrain, sparse, scattered trees, mainly thorny ones: such are the physical features of the jungle given in the Sanskrit texts. They are not empirical observations, but norms.” Zimmermann emphasizes the sacred nature of the texts: “The Sanskrit treatises constitute an erudite or technical literature, but above all they were thought to be transcriptions of an authoritative word. They were normative texts that transcribed authentic, orthodox knowledge.” Zimmermann says the Arya placed recourse to these texts before empirical inquiry: “Of all that they saw around them, what was best to use? In making that choice, tradition was the law.” Zimmermann suggests that what developed in India was not the sort of natural history that is familiar to us from Western intellectual traditions: “The idea of a ‘science’ of Nature is altogether alien to India or, to be more precise, in India it is formulated in a radically different fashion.” He writes, “While the Greek and Latin naturalists observed and registered curious details and invented the model of knowledge called natural history,

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the Indian scholars, following a quite different path of reasoning, forged and created a thesaurus of names, and of semantic equivalences.”42 But Appadurai (1998:207) asks, if the Vedic teachings really had so little empirical content, how could they have persisted for four millennia? He asks if we should see these teachings not as nonscientific or prescientific, therefore, but rather as an alternative discourse? Zimmermann (1988:205, 202) himself grants that the Vedic scholar “was first of all a man of the soil” and that these teachings “simply systematized the facts of traditional observations.” Perhaps, as Zimmermann himself suggests, this is not a case of the absence of science but a case of producing and articulating science that was indeed “radically different.” A key distinction between the two intellectual traditions may be the Cartesian divide: whereas we believe we are outside nature looking in, the Vedic scholars believe that they are on the inside. The example commonly given of the nonempirical character of Zimmerman’s “thesaurus” is its inclusion side by side of both real and mythical creatures—for example, the kara¯la, or musk deer, on the one hand, and on the other hand the makara, or sea dragon.43 But consider this seeming anomaly in light of the fictional taxonomy of Borges (1964:103), which classifies fauna based on whether they belong to the emperor, are embalmed, trained, and so on (see my chapter 1). For Foucault (1973:xv), Borges’s taxonomy “disturbs and threatens with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other.” Accordingly, perhaps the Vedic “thesaurus” can be read as an effort to collapse distinctions between the wild and the civilized, nature and culture, observation and imagination. Consider the example of the antelope. According to the Vedic texts, the land where the antelope is found is suitable for settlement by the Arya. Regardless of whether the Arya followed the antelope or the antelope followed the Arya, the antelope is an empirical sign of savanna, which is its natural habitat. The ritual invoking of the antelope as a sign of the place of the Arya is, therefore, an example of insight across hierarchical levels.44 It invokes the ecological dynamics of the savanna to articulate the overarching politicalecological dynamic of Aryan society; it references the lowest and simplest point in the political ecological hierarchy, to offer insight into the dynamics of the society at the highest and most complex level. It is implicitly, as well, a metaphor: the “fit” of the antelope in the landscape is a metaphor for the “fit” of the Arya. The Arya and the antelope are alike in this sense: what is suitable for the one is suitable for the other. This metaphor is not inhibited

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by a divide between nature and culture. The antelope metaphor is an example of perspectivism, of Batesonian distancing. To assess the suitability of a landscape for their settlement, the Arya step out of themselves and look at it, not through their own eyes—with all of the cultural blinders that this would entail—but through the eyes of the antelope.

chapter 7

Ritual, Myth, and the Rise of “Greedy Rice” Wherever we discover symbolic forms, we are justified in inferring that in the past life of the people employing them, there were corresponding realities. —john f. mclennan, primitive marriage The vulgar tongues should be the most weighty witnesses concerning those ancient customs of the people that were in use at the time the languages were formed. —giambattista vico, the new science

T

he last chapter dealt with the evolving historical relationship between the domestic-wild dichotomy on the one hand, and on the other hand the civilized-uncivilized dichotomy. This next chapter also examines a displacement over time in values of civilization, to a culture of rice from a culture of non-rices. Introduction: Constituting the Past Through Ritual Over the past several decades, there has been an efflorescence of research on colonial era botany, including the privileged spaces of botanical gardens, where politics, knowledge production, and the imagination were all given special license.1 Whereas these gardens were unique and merit this attention, there were—and are—analogous spaces within native agricultural landscapes in the region, in which the everyday realities of agriculture were suspended so that different, more transcendent ends could be pursued. Within the principal swidden of a Kantu’ household, the umai pun, “stem swidden,” where they plant their sacred padi pun, “stem rice,” there is a special area called the lapik benih, “place of the seed rice,” where all of

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Fig. 7.1. Lapik benih, “place of the seed rice.”

the ritual involving that swidden is conducted (fig. 7.1). In and around the lapik benih, the Kantu’ plant several archaic cultigens, including Job’s tears (Coix lachryma-jobi L.) and foxtail millet (Setaria italica [L.] P. Beauvois), which are not used except in ritual. The use of these plants, to place contemporary agriculture in historical perspective, is the subject of this chapter. Anthropologists have begun to treat the agricultural field as a place of memory, meaning, and history, as part of a wider body of work on the importance of archaic cultigens.2 In plant histories, what is gone is as important as what remains. In his study of the forests of Ecuador, Kohn utilizes Terrence Deacon’s (2012) concept of “constitutive absence”: “Constitutive absence, according to Deacon, is not just found in the world of artifacts or humans. It is a kind of relation to that which is spatially or temporally not present that is crucial to biology and to any kind of self.” Semiotics is all about this relation between what is present and what is absent: “The constant play between presence and these different kinds of absences gives signs their life. It makes them more than the effect of that which came before them. It makes them images and intimations of something potentially possible.”3 Ritual plays a key role in constituting this absent past. Throughout upland Southeast Asia, plants are cultivated and revered that have great ritual

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importance but little or no economic importance, which has not gone unnoticed by some of the scholars of the region. For example, Jacques Barrau once asked of this practice, “Why, then [are archaic cultigens] still used and occasionally cultivated?” Little or no academic effort has been made to answer this question. One reason for this was the tendency of the colonial observers to date historical change from the point of colonization, treating the precolonial period as a time without history. As Barrau observed, “There was a tendency to assume that food-plant patterns found by Europeans . . . were representative of subsistence economies established in ancient times. Attention seldom was paid to the changes which may have occurred in the economic or cultivated flora of pre-European Oceania.”4 Of the little work that was done on this topic, much of it focused on linguistic data. In the mid-twentieth century, Conklin (1959a:300) pioneered a call for greater attention to the vernacular plant names of the Indo-Malay region, for the indirect evidence they could provide of the “pre-European spread of cultigens, weeds, and agricultural practices.” The idea that plant use in contemporary ritual contexts might also say something about agricultural history suggested itself to a number of observers.5 For example, Karl J. Pelzer (1945:7) writes, “The folklore and religious practices of many tribes in Borneo and Celebes who today grow cereals recall the time when these tribes had only root crops,” and Joseph E. Spencer (1966:114) writes, “In many areas where taro and yams were formerly staples, they bear vestiges of ritualism, though the main force of ritualism has been transferred to crops that have more recently become staples.” James J. Fox (1991:253, 256) uses data on plant names and the ritual contexts in which they are employed to draw inferences about agricultural prehistory in eastern Indonesia:6 “Although maize, sorghum and other food crops have created a more diverse subsistence basis, they have not altered the ritual focus of Rotinese agriculture on rice and millet. . . . Despite new and varied dry land cropping patterns in which a variety of European-introduced crops provide the major sources of present-day subsistence, the outer arc of the lesser Sundas retains a heritage embodied in its rituals that still focuses on rice and millet and, to a lesser extent, on Job’s tears and sorghum.” Kantu’ agriculture, as noted in chapter 2, has a dynamic history, constantly adapting to new market opportunities and to changing nonmarket needs. Many Dayak names for rice varieties allude to their origins in distant parts of Borneo, reflecting the fact that the subsistence agricultural sector has been subject to a great deal of diffusion, adoption, and innovation.7 The

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dynamic nature of this sector should also be evident from the fact that many of the staple crops of interior tribal people like the Dayak, such as maize (Zea mays subsp. mays) and sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas [L.] Lam.), in addition to the market crop rubber (Hevea brasiliensis [Willd. ex A.Juss.] Müll.Arg.), are introductions from the New World. Some of these introductions became so well integrated into the indigenous system of cultivation that they acquired their own origin myths.8 I will begin my analysis with a discussion of taro (Colocasia esculenta [L.] Schott), today a minor starch staple, including the cultural and archaeological evidence of its role as one of the earliest domesticates. This will be followed by an analysis of two grains, Job’s tears (Coix lachryma-jobi L.) and foxtail millet (Setaria italica [L.] P. Beauvois), which have only ritual importance today, but whose historic importance is suggested by ritual and linguistic data. This pre-rice history raises the question, Why has rice risen to such cultural and agricultural dominance, given that it can be challenging to grow in parts of the region? One thesis is that it is this very challenge that has made rice attractive. Proper study of this history is complicated by the absence of non-rice cultigens from colonial records, which may be partly explained by Europe’s own cultural valorization of grain versus tuber cultivation. These cultural variables cannot be divorced from the material interest of centralized states in promoting systems of agriculture that are most susceptible to surveillance and extraction. I conclude with a discussion of the use of the past as an escape from hegemonic ideologies of agricultural development. Trauma of the Prehistoric Tuber-Grain Transition One of the historically most important tubers of Southeast Asia, taro, is still grown throughout the region. The Kantu’ of West Kalimantan, for example, cultivate taro as a minor relish in swamp swiddens and in swampy, low-lying parts of dryland swiddens. It is less important to them as a food crop than either of their grain crops, rice and maize, or either of the other major root crops, sweet potato and cassava.9 Taro is distinguished in this agricultural system for its great diversity at the varietal level: the Kantu’ recognize seven different named varieties of taro, which is exceeded only by rice—forty-four varieties; bananas—twelve varieties; and sugarcane—ten varieties; but it exceeds, for example, cassava—four varieties; and sweet potato—one variety.

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Taro also is distinguished for its prominent role in mythology concerning the origins of culture and agriculture. Taro is associated in myth with a major deity of the Kantu’ and other Ibanic-speaking Dayak, Pulang Gana, believed to be the first human being who ever lived, who is known as the Kuasa Tanah, “Guardian of the Earth.” According to mythology, Pulang Gana originally subsisted by eating charcoal, like his nonhuman spirit ancestors, and then he nemu keladi, “found taro,” and began to eat that instead. It is only later in most versions of this mythological genealogy that rice is grown and eaten, when Pulang Gana becomes the Rajah Padi, “King of the Rice.” The myth of Pulang Gana can be read as a cultural statement about the relative antiquity of taro cultivation by the Dayak. The precedence of taro to the other tubers cultivated today, cassava and sweet potato, is suggested by the fact that the origin of these other tubers is merely attributed to the antu, “spirits”; whereas taro—alone among cultigens—is attributed to Pulang Gana, the first human being. The precedence of taro to rice is also reflected in the narrative structure of the myth itself. According to this structure, the acquisition of rice cultivation follows the acquisition of taro but does not necessarily replace it; the myth says nothing about abandoning or getting rid of taro. Georges Condominas (1986:40) and Pelzer (1945:8) similarly suggest that the agricultural rituals of the Mnong Gar and the Bontoc, respectively, reflect the historic precedence of taro to rice. The fact that the first food of the mythical ancestors of the Dayak is said to have been charcoal also suggests the historic precedence of tuber cultivation to grain cultivation. The material difference between a meal composed of numerous small grains and one composed of a few large tubers has implications for the cooking technologies that can be employed. One of the most efficient—and also digestibility-enhancing—methods for cooking numerous small grains is to boil or steam them in a water-filled container, which is the method employed by the contemporary Dayak for almost all consumption of rice.10 But tubers can just as easily be roasted in direct contact with the fire—as was still done in recent times among the Kantu’, for example, with perhaps half of the cassava that they eat. In historic and prehistoric times, before metal cooking vessels reached the interior tribes of Borneo, the practice of roasting tubers directly in the fire is likely to have been even more common.11 The period in their history when the Dayak subsisted on fire-blackened tubers has perhaps come to be remembered in myth as the period when they subsisted on charcoal.12 The developmental gap between eating roasted tubers and eating boiled grains is

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likely to be culturally marked in some manner: the elaboration of techniques for processing plant foods, although overlooked by many scholars, can rival the elaboration of agricultural techniques in its contribution to the intensification of subsistence systems.13 Pelzer (ibid.:6–7) suggests that the greater simplicity of preparation of tubers is itself an argument for their historic precedence. The historic precedence of tuber cultivation is also implied in the generational structure of the mythology concerning agriculture. According to Kantu’ myth, three generations after the birth of Pulang Gana, at a time when people were still eating charcoal and taro, Bui Nasi—which translates literally as “mouldy rice” and figuratively as “evil rice spirit”—was born: Bui Nasi did not want to eat charcoal, so he asked for nasi from his parents. They told him it would be the death of them if they were to provide him with nasi. But Bui Nasi said that he still wanted it. So his parents instructed him on how to cultivate the rice that would grow from their grave, and then they died. Three days later, Bui Nasi saw two shoots of rice at their grave, which he then weeded and guarded. This is said to have been the beginning of rice cultivation. The term used for “grave” in this story is not the expected Kantu’ term pendam, but the Malayic term kubur. In its active form, kubur translates not only as “to bury” but also as “to heap up soil, ridge (as sweet potatoes), build up vegetable or seed bed . . . for drainage.”14 This association between human burial and techniques of tuber cultivation also is suggested by a contemporary Iban prescription for filling graves so that they look like raised mounds, in effect like root-crop mounds.15 In this context, Bui Nasi’s burial of his parents to obtain grain can be likened to the burial of a tuberous plant for vegetative propagation; and this tuber mound can be seen as leading to the subsequent growth of the first grain plants. This complex of associations suggests that parents are to children as tubers are to grains—or as tuber cultivation is to grain cultivation (table 7.1). The generational dimension and tension of the Bui Nasi story may also be reflected in the use, among Kantu’ today, of the phrase tuai ubi, tuai keladi, “old tuber [or cassava], old taro” as an expression of disparagement for elders.16 The use of tubers in an expression of disparagement accords with the fact that less labor and less knowledge is required for the vegetative-based

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table 7.1

INTER-GENERATIONAL METAPHORS FOR AGRICULTURAL EVOLUTION

Parents : Children :: Tubers : Grains

reproduction of tubers than for the seed-based reproduction of grains. For example, one of the most critical pieces of knowledge in contemporary rice cultivation is the proper date for planting—and therefore harvesting—the rice. The proper dates are relatively narrow in range, and too much error in either direction can cause the rice crop to fail. The dates were traditionally calculated on the basis of a variety of esoteric phenomena, which can include the breeding cycles of certain animals, the phases of the moon, and the position of Orion and the Pleiades in the night sky. In contrast, in rootcrop cultivation, neither the date of planting nor the date of the harvest is critical: they can be varied at will without ill effect.17 Whereas root-crop cultivation is more “ignorant” than grain-crop cultivation, the latter is more “greedy” than the former. Annual grain crops generally place more demands on the land and produce lower yields than most root crops. As a result, land that is cropped in grains usually must be cropped for shorter periods, fallowed for longer periods, and more of it must be cultivated than land that is cropped in tubers. In taking so much more out of the land and in yielding so much less, grain production is thus “greedier” than tuber production.18 This is reflected in the myth of Bui Nasi, whose desire for rice comes at the cost of his parents’ lives.19 Dana Rappoport (2014) says that the consciousness that rice agriculture entails such weighty human sacrifice—which is pan-Indonesian—associates a “dysphoria” with this crop.20 Hunting is often associated with the tuber-grain transition in mythology. Among the Kantu’, for example, the story of the first acquisition of rice culture is told as follows, in a variant of a tale that is told all over Southeast Asia—and which resembles in structure the tale of the journey to the pig village in the introduction: Pulang Gana’s taro was suffering the predations of a porcupine. So he set a spear trap near his taro. The next morning he saw that the trap had been sprung. Seeing blood from the porcupine, he set to tracking it with three of his dogs. Pulang Gana tracked the porcupine until the following morning, when he came upon the longhouse of Rajah Swa.

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Eventually Rajah Swa gave his daughter in marriage to Pulang Gana and placed Pulang Gana in control of the success or failure of all rice swiddens. Thereafter, no farmer’s swidden would succeed unless he or she first informed Pulang Gana [by means of ritual offerings] of his or her intentions. This myth associates hunting with the era of tuber cultivation, which is set prior to the era of grain cultivation. Tubers tend to be less nutritious—in particular with respect to proteins—than cereals, and as a result, hunting is more necessary with tuber cultivation than with grain cultivation.21 Further, it is hunting that leads to the acquisition of grain cultivation: thus, it is the search for the proteins and other nutrients missing in the tuber-based diet that leads to the succession of tuber cultivation to grain cultivation. Thus, the succession is explained with reference to the protein deficiencies of tuber cultivation, deficiencies that are made up through cultivation of the more nutritious grains.22 Scholars have long argued that tubers and sago constituted the oldest crop complex in the region and that the trend of agricultural evolution was from tubers to grain.23 Among tubers, taro is seen as the most ancient, with some scholars viewing it as the oldest cultigen in the region.24 Tim Denham (2011:S390) cites archaeobotanical and paleoecological research to the effect that taro was likely exploited during the Pleistocene in Island Melanesia and in Borneo. Huw Barton (2009:673) suggests that this was the context for the arrival of rice: “It seems likely that rice and its associated systems of propagation were adopted by peoples already heavily engaged in their own systems of plant management, some of which may have already produced domesticates such as the greater yam Dioscorea alata, taro Colocasia esculenta, and bananas Musa spp.” This does not mean that rice is a newcomer to the region. The terms for taro and rice in the region are both proto-Austronesian (PAN), which argues for their common antiquity.25 Samantha E. Jones and co-authors (2013:1) point to archaeological evidence of rice in coastal lowland sites in Borneo from 5900–4300 b.p., but the developmental trajectory of rice since that time is not simple. Graeme Barker, Chris Hunt, and Jane Carlos (2011:70) cite evidence of rice cultivation in coastal Borneo from 6000 b.c.e. but suggest that it did not become a dominant or staple crop until the colonial era; they suggest that rice is an old crop but a recent staple.

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Many scholars echo this view of rice appearing early but facing difficulties. Waruno Mahdi (1994:438) writes, “A close to wild form of rice, unsuitable for equatorial latitudes, was probably already cultivated at a very early date—maybe 3000 b.c.e. or earlier—by Austronesians on the mainland and Taiwan. Between 2000 and 500 b.c.e., referred to as xpajəi, it was probably carried with various migrations, presumably over several routes, throughout the Philippine-Indonesia area, where, due to adverse local meteorological conditions, it was only cultivated on a small scale. Only much later, toward the end of the first millennium b.c.e., after variants better adapted to equatorial conditions were developed, could rice also begin to find large-scale use in insular Southeast Asia.” Similarly, Barton (2009:673) acknowledges that rice may have been introduced during the mid-Holocene, but he suggests that it did not become established until comparatively recently because it was unsuited to the rain forest: “It also seems likely that the transition toward the reliance on rice as a food staple after its mid-Holocene introduction was still occurring in recent prehistory. Even as late as the early twentieth century in parts of Southeast Asia where rice held center stage as a plant of social preeminence, this did not necessarily reflect its role in daily subsistence. Among many groups in interior Borneo, rice remained a relatively minor crop—supplementing other starchy staples, frequently roots that could be grown in greater quantity and that were considered more reliable come harvest.” Some scholars suggest that rice followed a curvilinear developmental path in the region. Peter Bellwood (1997:242–45) suggests that the early Austronesians practiced cereal cultivation, which they then largely replaced with tuber cultivation as they moved into Island Southeast Asia, except in Java and Bali, for climatic reasons. The archaeological record in western Borneo seems to show rice cultivation four thousand years ago and then its abandonment by two thousand years ago.26 The Iban historian Benedict Sandin (1967:23–25) recounts an oral history of one Iban group that cultivated rice but then lost it for seven generations due to a supernatural curse, during which they subsisted on yams, cassava, and sago, and then finally reacquired rice again.27 Contested Transition from Archaic Grains to Rice In the historic development of grain cultivation in Southeast Asia, rice seems to have been preceded by certain archaic grains, Job’s tears and foxtail millet. There are pockets of millet cultivation in the region today for use either as food or birdseed;28 the cultivation of Job’s tears, largely for

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ornamental use, is even rarer.29 Through most of the twentieth century, the Kantu’ grew small amounts of both grains in their swiddens, but not as staples or relishes. They occasionally use Job’s tears to brew liquor, and they sometimes use foxtail millet to make a special porridge to serve during feasts.30 But the most important use of these two archaic grains is in ritual, which speaks to their antiquity and former importance.31 A number of observers have associated the antiquity of Job’s tears with its distinctive contemporary ritual uses.32 In the modern era there are two times during the annual swidden cycle of the Kantu’ when exceptional status—incommensurate with economic importance—is accorded the two archaic, non-rice grains—Job’s tears and foxtail millet: the first is during planting, and the second is during harvest and post-harvest ceremonies. During planting, the Kantu’ traditionally honored a proscription against spacing Job’s tears and foxtail millet too closely together, for fear that they would engage in conversation that would frighten the spirit of the rice. Clifford Sather (1977:167) reported a proscription among the Saribas Iban against harvesting any Job’s tears before the rice harvest is completed.33 Similar beliefs about the potential for “conflict” between rice and the archaic non-rice grains are widespread in Southeast Asia.34 The necessity for these proscriptions, the assumption of the possibility for tension between the archaic grains and rice, suggests that the historic relationship among the grains was seen as a contest with winners and losers and injured parties.35 This reflects a view of sense, purpose, and agency in plants that has been missing in Western intellectual traditions for millennia.36 The importance of the archaic grains also can be seen during the harvest. Each year’s swidden harvest among the Kantu’ traditionally began with the ritual first harvest of the padi taun. This involved harvesting a handful of panicles from each of four crops: padi, “dry rice”; puloi, “glutinous rice”; lingkau lesit, “Job’s tears”; and jawa’, “foxtail millet.” In the use of the term padi taun for these four grains, padi clearly denotes grain and not just rice; and the qualifier taun, “year,” denotes annual crop as opposed to perennial trees or tuber crops. The harvested padi taun are used in the ceremonial feast that marks the end of the harvest and the end of that year’s swidden cycle, as well as in other such ceremonies. They constitute the obligatory components of the pegela’, “offering,” that is made to the spirits during all propitiatory ceremonies (fig. 7.2).

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Fig. 7.2. The pegela’, “offering,” made to the spirits during agricultural ceremonies.

The padi taun excludes lingkau keribang, “maize,” which is also an annual grain and shares sufficient other morphological characteristics with Job’s tears to share a lexical root as well. This exclusion seems to be a function of maize’s relatively recent addition to Kantu’ agriculture.37 It is noteworthy that the padi taun includes Job’s tears and foxtail millet with the glutinous and nonglutinous rices, given that the latter are the mainstay of the Kantu’ diet, while the former have virtually no dietary importance. Their inclusion is a statement about the general importance of the category of grain crops, and the former importance of the archaic grains within this category. There is also cultural evidence from elsewhere in the region regarding a similar temporal progression among the grains. For example, Jürg Schneider (1995:111) relates a myth from southwestern Sumatra, in which the gods first give humans millet, then Job’s tears, and finally rice. Condominas (1986:40) also cites ritual evidence for the historic precedence of Job’s tears to rice. It has long been suggested that early cereal cultivation in Southeast Asia was dominated by Job’s tears and various millets, before rice took hold.38 Even in contemporary centers of rice cultivation like Java, Peter Boomgaard (1989:92) writes, “It was believed around 1800 that either sorghum or millet, or both, had once been more important than rice in Java. However that may be, around 1800 their role must have been rather marginal.” There is consid-

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erable linguistic evidence for this thesis. Thus, regional names for some millets and Job’s tears are proto-Austronesian, suggesting their great antiquity.39 Moreover, the names for these archaic grains were also historic place names. Thomas S. Raffles (2010:67, 83) recounts Javan traditions of the bringing of civilization to Java by a prince of the Indian kingdom of Gujrat, who, finding that the staple food of its native inhabitants was a grain called jáwa-wut, named the island Núsa-Jáwa, or the “island of the Jáwa grain.” Jawa and jawawut are old Javanese terms for millet, likely deriving from the Sanskrit word for grain, yawa, or “yáva,” meaning barley or any other type of grain.40 Mahdi makes a similar point: “The nuclear Malay polity in the second century B.C.E. (judging from Valmiki’s Ramayana) until the second century C.E. . . . was known as Yavadvīpa, that is, ‘sorghum or millet island,’ which seems rather unusual if it had been a country engaged in the promotion of rice cultivation at the other end of the archipelago.” Mahdi goes on to observe, “Of decisive significance is that even in the third and fourth centuries C.E., the word for ‘grain’ that the Malays propagated in the Philippines was xzawaH, and not xpajəi.”41 The terms xzawaH, and xpajəi are proto-Austronesian terms for millet and rice, respectively, thus pointing to the precedence of the former.42 Some scholars have suggested that Job’s tears is the older of the two archaic grains, as also suggested by the Semai belief that Job’s tears is the mother of foxtail millet.43 Job’s tears is an appropriate candidate for one of the first grains to be domesticated and cultivated: it is rich in carbohydrates and starch; indeed, it is more nutritious than rice; and it grows wild in disturbed areas of the Southeast Asian forest.44 It is also a true multi-purpose plant, having value as food, medicine, fodder, ornamentation, and in ritual.45 In historic times, however, Job’s tears may have been more susceptible than millet to replacement by maize, which it morphologically resembles more than millet does.46 The overlapping of maize with the niche that Job’s tears occupied is reflected in the fact that Ibanic-speaking groups, among others in the region, use a common root for the two grains.47 Thus, the Ibanic term for Job’s tears is lingkau lesit, “shelled (non-rice) grain” and their term for maize is lingkau keribang, “biting (non-rice) grain.”48 Paradox of Rice: Fatal Attraction The argument that grain cultivation in Southeast Asia was preceded by tuber cultivation, and that among the grains rice was preceded by nonrice grains, historically de-centers the dominant pattern of rice cultivation in

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the modern era. It makes it appear much more contingent; and it raises a question as to why this development occurred in the first place, in light of recent research on the challenge of rice in equatorial latitudes. Much recent scholarship on the agricultural history of Southeast Asia points out that rice is a challenging crop for the region. Thus, Barton (2012) writes that rice “is an illogical crop to grow in a rain forest.” Brian Hayden (2011:8, 10) sees so many drawbacks to rice that he questions how and why it could have been domesticated in the first place: “It seems very unlikely that all the risk factors and the considerable labour required, including nonfamily labour at certain times, and the constant surveillance of fields for weeks before the harvests (Hanks 1972:80) would have made rice in its wild or initial domestication phases an attractive staple to be relied on for daily subsistence. . . . In sum, especially in the assumed core area of domestication, wild rice would have been one of the most labour-intensive foods available and a very poor candidate for augmenting basic subsistence needs.” O’Connor (1995:985–86) asks if monocropping of rice in irrigated fields, the historic bedrock of lowland Central Javanese agriculture, makes sense: “Is specializing in wet rice a ‘better’ adaptation than the agricultures it replaced? Assuming the winner is better in all respects obscures some complex tradeoffs. Specializing produces more rice but farmers already had rice surpluses. More rice is not necessarily a better subsistence. In fact, garden-farming’s multi-species diversity spreads environmental risk better than monocropping rice, and the quick-spoiling bulk of produce thwarts confiscation as no grain can. In this calculus, if households had the decision and knew the consequences—two big ‘ifs’—then garden-farming should have won. Why did history go the other way?” The drawbacks to rice are not in keeping with the pervasive cultural valorization that rice enjoys throughout the region. D. G. Coursey (1978:134) writes, “In much of Asia great civilizations have been grain-based. Rice especially has been closely linked philosophically with civilisation itself and afforded royal patronage and elements of sacrosanctity. Non-rice eaters are still normally regarded as poor and disadvantaged.”49 In Borneo, as Christine Helliwell (2001:46) writes, “To eat is by definition to eat rice; to ask if one has eaten is to ask if one has eaten rice; to ask what one has eaten is to ask what one has eaten as an accompanying side dish.” Among the Kantu’, the annual hunger season is defined as the period after the previous rice harvest has been exhausted and before the new rice harvest is ready, even if

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there is other food like maize and cassava to eat. The paradox of rice’s difficulty and veneration is exemplified by societies like the Ifugao of Northern Luzon in the Philippines, who have devoted their famous terraces to rice cultivation but who obtain more of their calories from the more banal cultivation of tubers in swiddens above the terraces.50 Some scholars have suggested that the cultural valorization of rice may simply be a question of aesthetics; but Barton’s (2009:674) counter-intuitive thesis is that it is the very difficulty of rice that is the attraction:51 Rice may have been attractive within such a system precisely for the reasons that make it seem to be such an illogical food crop within the rainforest. Variation in rice production creates and enhances a system of inequality as yield varies dramatically because of outside forces, such as climate, pests, and other natural causes, and is largely reliant on the available labor input (i.e., the time that can be freed up from other essential activities) that is necessary to increase one’s chances of success come harvest. . . . As a crop, rice, in a world of vegeculture with sago and yams, may have been favored initially not because of its ability to reduce the “risk” of going hungry or producing surpluses on a relatively dependable basis . . . but because its successful cultivation was inherently risky and prone to failure and, thus, uniquely, it became highly attractive as a playing piece in games of social competition between individuals. In short, Barton suggests that the attraction of rice lay in the very challenge of its cultivation, the possibility of failure and, consequently, the resultant socioeconomic differentiation among cultivators.52 As he observes, “The choice of rice growing in the tropical forest is not an economically sensible one . . . [;] the point of growing rice is rather to show exceptional ability. If they wanted only to survive, they could make sago or grow root crops.” This places a different perspective on the imperatives for domestication of rice. Hayden (2011: 21, 23) writes, “If we view rice as a luxury food, an ‘extra supplement,’ a non-essential surplus requiring unusual effort to acquire and only used and selectively grown for special occasions such as feasts, these observations bring into focus a number of other important characteristics. As an especially cherished food, rice would have had a special status which accords with the high emic value of rice in traditional communities in Southeast Asia as well as its supernatural characteristics and its association with wealth. . . . Initial domesticates would have been

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difficult-to-obtain luxury foods only used for special occasions and not used for daily subsistence.” From this perspective, rice is suddenly shifted from the realm of the mundane to that of the nonmundane, like the fabled spices of the East Indies; and one can look at the trade in rice as more akin to the ancient spice trade.53 Rice is represented as having a political history. Many of the aforementioned mythological, ritual, and cultural references depict the succession of crops and cropping systems as a contest:54 the crops are characterized as being “afraid,” as “conversing” or plotting with one another, as parent versus child, or ignorant versus greedy, and so on. This is a political vision of crop histories, of which Descola (2013:10) writes, “The use of social categories to define relations of proximity, symbiosis, or competition between natural species is particularly interesting here in that it largely extends to include the plant kingdom. Thus, big trees maintain a hostile relationship: they provoke one another in fratricidal duels to see which will be the first to give way. Hostile relations likewise prevail between bitter manioc and sweet manioc, with the former seeking to contaminate the latter with its toxicity. Palm trees, on the other hand, maintain more pacific relations of an avuncular or cousinhood type, depending on the degree of resemblance between the species.” The Dayak data on crop politics are evocative of what Helmreich (2009) calls “symbiopolitics,” an expansion of Foucault’s biopolitics beyond the human realm to encompass “the governance of relations among [all] entangled living things.” The Dayak data on political relations among crops also speak to the relationships between cultivators on the one hand, and on the other hand central political authorities. The archaic cultigens discussed here are poorly represented in the historic record. As noted by the leading historian of Indonesian agriculture, Boomgaard (1989:92): “If [the history of] rice is well documented, maize fairly well, and roots and tubers rather badly, virtually nothing is known about a number of minor cereals that must have been of some importance around 1800. I am referring to sorghum or cantel (Sorghum bicolor), foxtail millet or juawut (Setaria italica), and Job’s tears or jali (Coix lachryma-jobi L.). After 1825 these cereals are hardly ever mentioned in the literature or in the archival sources.” As for the issue of rice—especially wet rice—being difficult for cultivators and easy for the state, any discussion of this is absent from colonial sources. Nor is there discussion of the ease of tuber versus grain cultivation or the ease of swidden versus irrigated cultivation of rice. The colonial attitude on the issue of ease of production, from

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the native point of view, is illustrated by the editorializing by the otherwise astute Alfred Russel Wallace (2000:292) when visiting a sago-producing district in one part of the East Indies: “In ten days a man may produce food [sago flour] for the whole year. . . . The effect of this cheapness of food is decidedly prejudicial, for the inhabitants of the sago countries are never so well off as those where rice is cultivated.” This perspective was typical among colonial observers, and it affected the records that they left us of crops and crop production. Colonial records tell us a great deal about the self-interests of colonial actors, but they are less accurate guides to the lived realities of colonial subjects, whose own culture, mythology, and ritual may often be more reliable. David Henley (2004:115) disputes the thesis of pre-rice staples in Southeast Asia, based on his reading of the colonial, historical record, rejecting native sources of data: “In my view, it goes almost without saying that for the purposes of reconstructing long-term agricultural change, oral traditions like this mostly have little or no value. . . . Folkloric evidence lends itself dangerously well to selective deployment in support of a preconceived argument.” But colonial records also are vulnerable to the charge of “selective deployment,” since the colonial Dutch had a vested interest in promoting one vision of agriculture in the East Indies at the expense of all others. As Boomgaard (1995:49), the preeminent historian of Indonesia’s environment, writes, “A few words of caution are in order. In the first place, almost all data have been taken from writings by European observers. We depend, therefore, on their understanding of what they were told and on the accuracy with which they rendered their information. The possibility that not all of our observers meet these criteria cannot be excluded.” The neglect of non-rice crops and agriculture in the colonial record owes not just to colonial political economics, but also to Europe’s own agricultural tradition. Coursey (1978:135, 136), a pioneering scholar of Western attitudes toward grains versus tubers, claims that tuber cultivation was absent in the European agricultural tradition:55 “Vegetatively propagated crops were virtually unknown in European culture before the introduction of the potato from America in relatively modern times. . . . Throughout the entire culture history of modern Europe and these antecedent cultures [of the Mediterranean], grains, together with some leguminous pulses and animal products have been the major foods. The vegetable foods, grains, and pulses were all propagated from seed.” The dominance of Europe’s seed-based traditions was reflected in the disdain with which the introduction of the new world

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potato (Solanum tuberosum L.), destined for the tables of the poor, was greeted by European elites during the colonial era. The potato was seen as primitive food, “a thing representing mere subsistence.”56 It was seen as anti-social: Nancy Ries (2009:191–92) writes, “As juxtaposed to bread, deemed a representative of society and civilization through cooperation and division of labor, in the complex cycle from planting to baking and distribution—potato was cast as the master signifier of primitive social reproduction.”57 Michael Pollan (2001:200, 203) suggests that the potato posed an aesthetic challenge to grain-based cultures: “Potato growing looked nothing like agriculture, provided none of the Apollonian satisfactions of an orderly field of grain, no martial ranks of golden wheat ripening in the sun. . . . The potato came to signify the end of food being anything more than food—animal fuel. Bread, on the other hand, was as leavened with meaning as it was with air.”58 Coursey (1978) sees the lack of a tradition of tuber cultivation in western Europe as the basis for an antipathy to tubers in both policy and science: “The influence of the cultural background on scientific thinking is aptly demonstrated by the fact that, when the Food and Agriculture Organization was first formed, to deal primarily with the problems of food and agriculture in the developing world, it took as its motto Fiat Panis: ‘Let there be bread,’ and named its journal Ceres after the classical deity of corn [actually, grain], indicating dramatically the equation of grain and its product, bread, with food that exists in the European or European-influenced mind.” Coursey argues that the grain bias goes beyond a preference for grain cultivation to an active disparagement of vegetative propagation and, of most importance, the societies that rely upon this: “Because of the identification of the civilizations ancestral to those of Europe and most of Asia with grain it has often been tacitly assumed that any non-grain-using culture must be an inherently low one. . . . This view has interacted with, and been reinforced by, the social and racial prejudices that have built up during the recent centuries of western hegemony over the tropical world.” Coursey concludes, “The neglect of and opposition to root crops, from which these and other vegetatively propagated food crops of the tropical world have suffered, arises not primarily from rational grounds, but at least in part from prejudices of cultural-historical origin.”59 These prejudices are alive and well: the past half century has seen a continuing increase in importance in the global food supply of the major grains, of rice, wheat, maize, and a decrease in tubers such as yams, cassava, and sweet potatoes, and also in lesser grains such as millets, rye, sorghum.60

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Coursey (1978:138–39) suggests that the difference between grains and roots involves fundamental differences in the way that societies think about nature, culture, and the relationship between them: “The philosophies of peoples whose cultures revolve round a nutritional base provided by vegetatively propagated crops as the staple are inherently different from those who depend on the grain crop/animal husbandry complex. . . . [M]ajor cognitive and conceptual differences certainly exist, which have penetrated deeply into human culture and ways of thought.” A. G. Haudricourt (1969) was an early proponent of this thesis, suggesting that differences in staple crops are at the heart of differences in moralities, immanent versus transcendent, and ecologies, noninterventionist versus interventionist, between East and West, respectively. Deleuze and Guattari (1987:18) popularized Haudricourt’s work, describing a “rhizomatic model” that seemed to offer an alternative to orthodox Western thinking:61 The West has a special relation to the forest, and deforestation; the fields carved from the forest are populated with seed plants produced by cultivation based on species lineages of the arborescent type; animal raising, carried out on fallow fields, selects lineages forming an entire animal arborescence. The East presents a different figure: a relation to the steppe and the garden (or in some cases, the desert and the oasis), rather than forest and field; cultivation of tubers by fragmentation of the individual; a casting aside or bracketing of animal raising, which is confined to closed spaces or pushed out onto the steppes of the nomads. . . . Does not the East, Oceania in particular, offer something like a rhizomatic model opposed in every respect to the Western model of the tree? Their critique has been quite influential. Typical is Ingold’s (2000:140) comment: “I believe that a relational model, with the rhizome rather than the tree as its core image, better conveys the sense that so-called indigenous people have of themselves and of their place in the world.” Rhizome versus treeoriented works have proliferated within anthropology, although the arboreal versus rhizome bias persists in society at large.62 The idea that systems of agriculture are deeply imbricated with culture, and that the difference between vegetative and seed-based systems can therefore be profound, is unarguable and, indeed is reflected in much of the Dayak ritual and myth discussed earlier. But Deleuze and Guattari, along with Haudricourt and Coursey, overgeneralize the East-West difference, ignore how politics affects

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commitment to tubers versus grain, and ignore the historical transition from one to the other in the East. Dayak veneration of rice and disparagement of tubers echoes the wider valorization of grain cultivation. Monica Smith (2006:489) challenges the idea that elites self-consciously promoted this veneration to an unwitting native audience, writing, “To suggest that all of the ritual and social value of rice was nothing more than ‘false consciousness’ denies the power of individuals and households to affirm and create value systems.” But state promotion of the resource regimes that serve it need not be self-conscious.63 In any case, the Dayak are not completely captured by the values of the state. The Dayak remember the archaic grains and tubers in their myth and ritual; they narrate myth that is critical of the morality of rice cultivation—although they also echo hegemonic views of tuber cultivation as “ignorant”—and they zealously defended throughout the twentieth century the “fugitive” system of swidden agriculture so hated by the state.64 Conclusions: Ritual Escapes from Rice Mythical references to cultigens, as well as their use in contemporary ritual, offer potential insights into history that is otherwise ill-documented. In particular, the references to issues of knowledge and greed demonstrate that agricultural evolution is not just about agronomics and economics, it is also about culture and politics. The involvement of centralized political authority in the promotion of grain or rice cultivation is reflected in folkloric references to conflict among crops. In the context of cultural and political valorization of rice cultivation, ritual—which shows alternatives to rice—can resist hegemonic thought. Ritual also shows that agricultural evolution is complicated: retention of the old in the face of the new may reflect cultural ambivalence about the process. Ritually constructed memory of the past helps to show the contingency of the present. The Southeast Asian rice agro-cultural complex is an example of an institution that is so encompassing as to make it difficult to imagine an alternative. Bateson (G. 1972:447) speaks of religion as one of the “areas of human action which are not limited by narrow distortions of coupling through conscious purpose and where wisdom can obtain.” The sacred lapik benih, “place of the seed rice,” in the Dayak swidden is one such area; it offers a “way out.” The archaic plants in the lapik benih carve out a special territorial space, a space in the rice swidden that is not devoted to rice and, also, not

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devoted to the present.65 The archaic plants in the lapik benih gesture back to a prior, different time. The lapik benih reminds people that archaic systems of agriculture once were here but now are gone. Appadurai (1981:217, 218) views the past as a solution to the problem of the social determination of concepts: “Like all systems of norms, those concerning the past constitute a link between cultural concepts and social action. But unlike any other set of norms, this set is, necessarily, a code for societies to talk about themselves, and not only within themselves. This is so because the past is an intrinsically alternative mode of discourse to those other cultural modes of communication which can, and often do, assume an eternal present.” Crops and stories from their past offer the Dayak an alternate mode with which to address the hegemonic agrarian discourse of wet-rice agriculture. Kohn writes, “What one is as a semiotic self, then, is constitutively related to what one is not. One’s future emerges from and in relation to a specific geometry of absent histories. Living futures are always ‘indebted’ to the dead that surround them.” The archaic crops in the lapik benih remind the Dayak that what they are today is related to what they were—and also what they might yet be. The archaic crops in the lapik benih represent agricultural absences that make “them images and intimations of something potentially possible.”66

chapter 8

Weedy Signs of Intent and Error All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass. —isaiah 40:6–7

Introduction: Lowly Grasses and Despised Weeds This chapter, like chapter 7, is a study of native views and histories of plant origins; though these are set not in mythic prehistory, but in precolonial and colonial historic times. Also, this chapter is not about cultigens but noncultigens, in particular two “weedy” plants: Imperata cylindrica (L.) Beauv., a common perennial grass on open land in Indonesia, and Chromolaena odorata (L.) R. M. King & H. Robinson, a perennial shrub that is a common successor to Imperata. The new geological epoch of the Anthropocene has generated increased interest in such plants. As Tsing (2017:3) writes, “We live in a world of weeds—a world of human ecological disturbance that stretches around the planet. Yet scholars know too little about weeds, by which I mean the organisms that take over after human disturbance.”1 Reo and co-authors (2017) identify the need for more studies of how introduced invasive species fit into native cosmologies. In their study of invasive plants in South Africa, Comaroff and Comaroff (2005) ask, “How and why, to be more specific, do plants, especially foreign plants, become urgent affairs of state? And what might they disclose of the shifting relations among citizenship, community, and national integrity in an era of global capitalism?” In this chapter, I will refocus the Comaroffs’ question back on the plants, and I will problematize the question of plants “becoming urgent affairs.” I will suggest that the critical question is, How and why do plants become different sorts of affairs, with differing degrees of urgency, for different social actors?

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Plants like Imperata and Chromolaena are not usually placed on the center stage in human history, in which trees and forests are much more likely to figure.2 As Harrison (1992:ix) writes: However broadly or narrowly one wishes to define it, Western civilization literally cleared its space in the midst of forests. A sylvan fringe of darkness defined the limits of its cultivation, the margins of its cities, the boundaries of its institutional domain; but also the extravagance of its imagination. . . . The governing institutions of the West—religion, law, family, city—originally established themselves in opposition to the forests, which in this respect have been, from the beginning, the first and last victims of civic expansion. The influential critique of this forest fixation by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) was cited in chapter 7. Writing, “One of the most potent images in the intellectual history of the Western world has been that of the tree,” Deleuze and Guattari (ibid.:18) argue that this fixation is pernicious, preferring in its stead a non-Western model based not on trees but on roots or rhizomes.3 Truett (2010), one of the rare champions of grass, suggests that early hominid evolution in the African savanna has left us with an innate affinity for grassy environments, as manifested in such impoverished examples as suburban U.S. lawns and golf courses or even the allure of the western U.S. cowboy lifestyle. Grass is omnipresent: it covers 26 percent of the world’s land area, 70 percent of the world’s agricultural area, and contributes to the livelihoods of more than eight hundred million people.4 Scholarly attention to grasslands is not commensurate with this contemporary and evolutionary importance, however, which Truett (2010:16) attributes to the enduring influence that Clements’s (1916) theories of climax vegetation have had on conservation research and policy. In particular, the idea that grasslands represent an initial stage of succession in human-disturbed landscapes impacts state policy to this day, including conservation policy. Thus, the targeting of grasslands in an online map titled “Forest and Landscape Restoration” by the World Resources Institute (WRI) stimulated a vigorous debate in the journal Science, with critics accusing WRI of interpreting “ancient grassy ecosystems” as “human artifacts created and maintained by human-lit fires” (Veldman et al. 2015; Bond 2016a; DeWitt et al. 2016; Bond 2016b). The biblical epigraph to this chapter suggests that the sins of WRI and others in this regard may owe to more distant sources than Clements’s: there

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are numerous biblical passages that liken humans to grass, and in all cases the reference is deprecatory, if accurate: the reference is to human frailty and mortality. Negative attitudes toward grasses are exemplified in the term applied to some of them, including the subjects of this chapter, “weeds.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines “weed” as, first and foremost, “A herbaceous plant not valued for use or beauty, growing wild and rank, and regarded as cumbering the ground or hindering the growth of superior vegetation.” This is an ancient usage in the English language, extending back to the ninth century. As the Oxford English Dictionary indicates, “weed” refers to herbaceous plants; there is no historic application of the term to trees except as “Applied to a shrub or tree; esp. to a large tree, on account of its abundance in a district.” Unnoted in this definition, however, is what is arguably the most important characteristic of the “weed”: it is a subjective, and indeed often highly political term, which may represent much more of a judgment regarding the plant in question, and the people favorably disposed toward it, than an empirical observation. Both Imperata and Chromolaena are commonly referred to as “weeds.” When the Indonesian-based scientific organization SEAMEO BIOTROP was formed in 1968, it identified three priority plants for its tropical-weed research program: water hyacinth, Imperata cylindrica, and Chromolaena odorata.5 Scientists who study Chromolaena today in Indonesia typically still call it a “weed.”6 Indonesian farmers tend to be more circumspect in their terminology: they typically use the term rumput for Chromolaena, which can be translated as “grass” or “weed.”7 Baxter (1995), who believes that the virtues of Chromolaena have been overlooked, sums up the semantic quandary in the title of her article “Chromolaena odorata: Weed for the Killing or Shrub for the Tilling?”8 Attitudes toward Imperata in the academic and policy communities do not approach even this level of ambivalence, with few if any voices straying from its condemnation as a weed. “Weeds” are quintessential examples of “matter out of place,” as Douglas (1966) says of “dirt”; so their very presence raises a question as to how they got into this place that they are not supposed to be in. Accounts of origins by state actors tend to be impoverished: they generally blame the presence of Imperata and Chromolaena either on natural forces or on unspecified bad native land-management practices; in contrast to which native origin stories are richly detailed. Folk accounts of the origins of Imperata and

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Chromolaena in Indonesia assume human agency, typically on the part of a specific historic human actor, which is often the subject of great cultural elaboration. In these origin stories, the arrivals of Imperata and Chromolaena are not treated as isolated incidents; rather, the coming of these plants is always tied in to wider developments in society. They are treated as part of more sweeping historic changes in social and environmental relations; indeed, the coming of these plants is often interpreted as a marker of such changes. One plant, Imperata, is native to the region; the other, Chromolaena, is not; but both are the subjects of origin stories throughout the Indonesian archipelago. In the case of Imperata, a historic explosion in its extent in the archipelago was so striking to the local peoples that it was treated, albeit incorrectly, as the arrival of the species to these lands. These origin stories are about the coming of plants to places from which they had been previously absent—or, at least, not noticed; it is about their perceived movement. Ives (2014b:311) asks, “What role can anthropology play in theorizing ecological mobility?” In their study of the Anishinaabe in Northern Michigan, Reo and Ogden (2018) have examined emic understandings of in-migrating flora and fauna. One of the objectives of this chapter is, similarly, to examine folk theorizing of the arrival, or expansion, of Imperata and Chromolaena. McWilliam (2000:452) writes, “The arrival of a new species of plant tends to be noted quickly by local farmers, who are acutely conscious of their environment and its economic potential.” Such arrivals become commemorated in oral histories and taxonomies. Plant names, which not uncommonly address plant origins, can be especially revealing in this regard. For example, traditional rice varieties among the Kantu’ of West Kalimantan include many named after the manner of origin: padi belabok, “stealth rice,” is so named because the original handful of seed was taken by belabok, “stealth,” from the swiddens of another longhouse; padi Bugau and padi Singanan originated respectively with the Bugau, a Kantu’ subgroup, and with the Singanan, downriver Islamicized Dayak; and padi Lemanak, padi Nsana’, padi Rajang, and padi Sambas came from, respectively, the Lemanak, Nsana’, Rajang, and Sambas river systems, as much as 270 kilometers distant.9 Much has been written within anthropology on the difference versus similarity of native and scientific taxonomies for plants.10 More recent and comparative analyses examine the political dimensions of folk and scientific nomenclatures.11 In addition to its explicit tasks of classifying the living world in a way that can be understood by scholars around the globe,

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the Linnaean system of scientific nomenclature recognizes the scholar or scholars who originated the identification in each case. The person associated with the origin of the plant, in the sense of making it legible to science, has his or her name attached to it. In this respect, there is something analogous in the native system of naming to be examined here. When farmers in South Kalimantan call Chromolaena, kumpai Jepang, “Japanese grass,” because it appeared during the Japanese occupation in World War II, they too are naming the plant after the actors who made it known to them. Mukharji (2014:82) analyzes the dispute within India regarding whether or not a plant mentioned in the Ramayana for its miraculous medicinal properties is what we know today as Chromolaena. He is more interested in the dispute than in the historical facts of the case; he is less interested in what folk accounts like the Ramayana tell us about the past than what people think about the past (ibid.:82): “Instead of being caught up in barren disputes about true and false pasts, researchers can concentrate their attention on how particular imaginations of the past—whether called ‘fact’ or ‘fiction’—are configured and accessed through particular practices of the present and how they engender new possibilities for the future. In other words, what I am arguing for is an engagement with the historicity of plants, rather than their histories.” Like Mukharji, I am plumbing folk botanical histories for what they tell us about folk views of the past, but also for what they can offer in the way of historical data. In short, I am studying both history and historicity. I believe that historicity offers us insight into actual socioecological histories, which offer needed corrections to more conventional historical accounts that suffered, especially in the colonial era, from their own partisan dynamics. I will begin with an analysis of the folk histories of Imperata among two different groups: Ogan tribesmen in South Sumatra, and Central Javanese peasants; then I will compare their views to those of the national government. This will be followed by a similar analysis of Chromolaena among two other groups: the Banjarese of South Kalimantan, and the Bimanese of northwestern Sumbawa; and, again, their views will be compared with those of the national government. In the next section I will synthesize common themes in the view of these two plants among peasants and tribesmen on the one hand, and on the other hand central government authorities. I will conclude with a discussion of the politics of grasses, “cleansing” the landscape for study, and grass as a core metaphor.

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Fig. 8.1. Linnaeus’s drawing of Imperata cylindrica, initially named by him Lagurus cylindricus. (Permission of the Linnaean Society of London.)

Histories of Imperata Imperata is native to Southeast Asia and was an ancient part of the region’s human ecology (fig. 8.1). It is mentioned in the medieval court literature of Java.12 It was known to native societies long before then, given Wolff ’s (1994:516) belief that a common name for Imperata in the region is inherited from proto-Austronesian (PAN), which he attributes not to its utility but, erroneously, its disutility: “This plant has few uses but is so much a part of the everyday experience that we would expect to find reflexes of a name inherited from PAN.”

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There are many millions of hectares of grassland in Indonesia, much of which consists of Imperata. The existence of a small portion of these grasslands, on the peaks of the archipelago’s highest mountains, is due to climate.13 The existence of another small portion, at lower elevations, is due to the periodic disturbance of the vegetation by natural agency, such as volcanic activity (see my chapter 3), landslides, or flooding.14 However, the majority of the grasslands in Indonesia owe their existence to anthropogenic disturbance, especially by fire, and secondarily by grazing. Burning favors grasses over woody species, and it favors Imperata in particular. When burning or other disturbance is halted, Imperata is rapidly invaded and then shaded out by taller, ligneous species, including Chromolaena. When certain other sorts of disturbances are intensified, in particular grazing, Imperata succeeds to shorter, prostrate grasses. Views of Imperata vary greatly between farmers engaged in less versus more intensive agriculture. It is generally disliked in extensive systems of swidden agriculture, which involves cropping the land during a brief window between clearing the natural vegetation and then allowing it to spontaneously return, which is complicated by growth of Imperata. An example of the view of Imperata in such a system is that held by the Ogan, a tribal people of South Sumatra (fig. 8.2). In the last quarter of the twentieth century they still cultivated food crops in forest swiddens to meet their subsistence needs, while exploiting rubber, fruit, and hardwood trees to meet their market needs. Within this forest-based agro-ecological system, they view Imperata as a problem. They say that it competes so vigorously against their swidden cultigens that they are forced to weed up to three times before the harvest. In addition, they say, it drains the soil of its nutrients and prevents rainwater from entering it, making it keras, “hard.” On the other hand, the Ogan know that Imperata-covered land is not unarable; they see it cultivated by Javanese and Balinese farmers who, beginning in 1976, settled at the transmigration site of Batumarta in the middle of the Ogan territory. However, the Ogan still prefer open forest rather than grassland for their farms, saying that they are takut kerja, “afraid of the work,” of the latter.15 They note that few of them are skilled in using hoes, like the Javanese and Balinese, who use hoes to open up the Imperata grasslands at their transmigration site. Nor do the Ogan feed Imperata to their livestock or use it for roof thatch, both of which uses also are found among the nearby transmigrants.

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Fig. 8.2. The location of the grassland study sites within Indonesia.

The Ogan maintain that Imperata was not indigenous to their area, but was brought there by Vasco da Gama. According to Ogan oral history, after making landfall on Sumatra, Vasco da Gama and his crew made themselves huts on the shore in which to rest. They roofed these huts with thatch made from Imperata, which they had brought with them on board their ship. Some of the seed-laden flowers of the grass were mixed in with the thatch, however, and they were scattered from the Portuguese huts by the wind. Thus was Imperata initially spread in their land, say the Ogan. Imperata thatching is still common today among some Indonesian communities with a significant livestock component in their farming system, which requires large expanses of grazing lands, managed by fire, to encourage the growth of Imperata.16 In such farming systems, Imperata often is valued for thatching as well as livestock grazing, hence thatched roofs are a semiotic statement of affinity for the grass. Vasco da Gama never set foot on Sumatra, coming no closer to the island than India, which he first visited in 1498.17 Moreover, he was preceded to Asia by a number of other Europeans, some of whom actually did visit Sumatra, including Marco Polo and a succession of Franciscan friars and Italian merchants.18 The voyages of Vasco da Gama stand out from these others, however, in having different motivations and different consequences.

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Just nine years after Vasco da Gama returned from his first voyage to India, and based on information gathered during that voyage, King Manuel of Portugal dispatched Diogo Lopes de Sequeira to Malacca, with orders to establish a trading post. En route, he touched at Pidir on the coast of Sumatra, the first Portuguese to actually visit the island.19 Two years later, in 1511, Sumatra had another Portuguese visitor, Don Alfonso de Albuquerque, who was dispatched to the area with orders to take Malacca by force of arms, which he subsequently did. Thus began an era of conquest and colonization of the East Indies, including Sumatra, first by the Portuguese and then by the Dutch and English, and much later the Japanese. European colonization of the East Indies was initially prompted by desire to trade for spices, then to monopolize this trade, and ultimately to control the production of these and other commodities. The historical effect of these efforts on Sumatra, as on other islands, was expansion of export-crop agriculture and intensification of food-crop agriculture, presenting many new opportunities for the growth of shade-intolerant grasses such as Imperata. One example is the Dutch system of tobacco cultivation in Deli, in North Sumatra, which piggybacked on the native swidden cycle (see my chapter 5). The Dutch tobacco cultivators intensified the swidden cycle, shortening the fallow, as a result of which the fallow cover changed from forest to grass, in particular Imperata.20 A second example are the rubber plantations established by the Dutch throughout Sumatra, Java, and Kalimantan (see my chapter 5). The ecology of these plantations—clean-weeded ground beneath widely spaced trees—was very favorable to the growth of Imperata. Indeed, Imperata became a scourge of plantation rubber cultivation, and vast amounts of research were devoted to its extermination. The ecology of Sumatra’s precolonial, forest-based swidden systems of agriculture was much less favorable to the growth of Imperata. It is present in only small amounts in secondary forests, and in primary forests, where little sunlight reaches the forest floor, it is virtually absent. When either sort of forest, especially the former, is opened for swidden agriculture, Imperata may form part of the initial spontaneous succession of vegetation on the land, beginning during the cropping period and continuing with increased vigor during the subsequent fallow period. However, since traditional swidden agriculture is practiced so as to encourage reestablishment of the forest, the Imperata is not offered more than a brief “window” in which to grow before it is shaded out by ligneous species. This window is kept open longer among the contemporary Ogan, leading to greater problems with Imperata,

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because the government-mandated transmigration settlements have diminished their territory and, thereby, their fallow periods. In contrast to swidden agriculture, the colonial systems of agriculture not only opened the forest but kept it open, giving Imperata not just periodic but rather ongoing opportunities in which to grow. In this sense, the Europeans, beginning with the Portuguese, whose entry into Asia was led by Vasco da Gama, did “introduce” Imperata to Sumatra and the other islands of the archipelago. Moreover, in a modern-day reprisal of this story, the transmigrants from Java and Bali can be said to have reintroduced Imperata to Sumatra, since their settlement in the Ogan territory has enlarged the niche for the grass. The transmigrants’ familiarity with Imperata thereby reinforces a historic association of the grass with foreign visitors. The historic roots of the positive view of Imperata among Javanese and Balinese transmigrants in Sumatra can be seen among the Javanese living on the slopes of Merapi volcano in Central Java. Their ancestors were among those who fled the lowland wet-rice kingdoms for the upland forests (see my chapter 5); they practiced a form of swidden agriculture not unlike that of the Ogan, coupled with open-range grazing of cattle, until the end of the nineteenth century. When the Dutch classified Mount Merapi’s upper slopes as a state forest reserve late in the nineteenth century, native settlement and agriculture within it were prohibited.21 This greatly constricted the amount of arable land available to the local population, forcing them to develop a more intensive system of permanent cultivation on the volcano’s lower slopes, which they pursue to this day—although their staple foods of maize and tubers hearken back to their earlier history. The crucial step in this process of intensification was replacing the role of a biomass-restoring fallow period with the use of cattle manure. This entailed development of a more intensive system of animal husbandry, shifting from open-range grazing to stabling of cattle, fed upon fodder that is cut by hand and carried to them. Some of this fodder is supplied by fallowed fields in the vicinity of the villages, but most of it, especially during the dry season, when grass production on the volcano’s lower slopes drops, is cut high up on the mountain, between the upper edge of the state forest and the lower edge of the lava fields.22 The most important source of fodder on the upper slopes is Imperata. In one village, Turgo, on most days of the year fifty to sixty kilograms of Imperata are cut by each household and carried down the mountain to their waiting livestock, a round trip of two to six hours’ walk (fig. 8.3). The manure from these livestock is periodically spread

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Fig. 8.3. Javanese woman cutting grass for cattle in Imperata cylindrica grasslands on upper slopes of Merapi Volcano.

over the fields surrounding the village, which were planted largely in maize and tubers until a major eruption in 1994. The dislocations associated with this eruption—a sharp drop in population, disruption of social and governmental fabrics, and a sharp rise in the comparative market value of natural resources, due to a regional monetary crisis—precipitated a shift from production of maize and tubers for home consumption to production of fodder, milk, and cattle for market sale.23 The villagers do not simply exploit but actively manage the grasslands on the volcano’s upper slopes. One management technique is simply daily cutting, which keeps the Imperata in a more nutritious, depauperate state. As noted in chapter 6, farmers believe that grass, like human hair, grows

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back whenever it is cut. A second technique is periodic burning. This not only reduces woody competition to Imperata, but it stimulates the growth of new and more nutritious shoots. A third management tool consists of cutting back invading woody growth, which would quickly shade out the Imperata if left alone.24 Finally, before the 1994 eruption, they sometimes applied manure to encourage the growth of Imperata in stands located near the village, and even planted shoots of it in fields near the village. The Javanese believe that there is a spirit counterpart to the lowland palace of the Yogyakarta Sultanate inside the crater of Merapi (see my chapter 3). The villagers on Merapi maintain that the grasslands on its upper slopes are the property of the baureksa, “spirits,” of the volcano, who use them for the grazing of their horses and who prohibit their exploitation by humans.25 The penalty for violating this prohibition is said to be confiscation of the grass and possibly the abduction or death of the grass cutter. For these reasons, the villagers avoid the very highest stands of Imperata on the volcano. The spirits’ management of the grasslands mirrors the historic management of grasslands for hunting, grazing, and thatch by the lowland Javanese courts.26 This was reflected in the prominence of Imperata in Java’s historic landscape. For example, in 1883 it was reported that the predominant vegetation in the residency of Kedu, which comprised the basin lying between the volcanos Mount Merapi, Mount Merbabu, Mount Sindoro, and Mount Sumbing in Central Java, was Imperata.27 Just as the spirits proscribe exploitation of the volcanos’ grasslands by villagers, so did the historic courts proscribe exploitation by commoners of the lowland grasslands.28 The value of the grasslands to the historic courts is suggested by the use of Imperata in court literature as a symbol of the aristocracy, and by the historic prominence of Imperata in ritual.29 Some ritual usage has continued down to the present day: Imperata is still used in many domestic rituals in Central Java, for example being placed under the mat on which the bride and groom kneel during the marriage ceremony (fig. 8.4).30 This is exemplified by the Javanese riddle “Where is God?” Answer: “In the tip of a stalk of Imperata.”31 The answer refers to the use of Imperata stalks to sprinkle holy water during Hindu ceremonies in ancient Java.32 Menjangan, “rusa deer” (Cervus timorensis), formerly one of the most prized game animals in Java, were an important element in this historical grassland ecology. Deer are a symbol of the aristocracy: to this day, a mounted set of deer antlers is regarded as necessary ornamentation for the

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Fig. 8.4. Imperata cylindrica included in ritual paraphernalia for Javanese marriage.

house of any person of rank or wealth in the Central Javanese countryside. In addition, deer are still used in some of the rituals of the Central Javanese courts: for example, a deer’s head was laid in the foundation of a new kraton, “palace,” building in Solo, on June 21, 1985.33 Deer are not found on Merapi today, but they were common there until the early part of the twentieth century. One of the primary tools used in their hunt was fire, to flush the deer from cover or drive them in a particular direction. But most burning was done on a periodic basis, to eliminate brush, which could conceal the deer and check the speed of the hunters’ horses and dogs, and to stimulate the growth of new grass to attract deer to the area. Such burning created vast areas of grassland, but whenever it ceased the grasslands rapidly disappeared.34 Deer were associated with the creation of grasslands in historic Java, therefore, in a manner analogous to the relationship between the antelope and the jangala, discussed in chapter 6.35

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The upper slopes of Merapi volcano fall under the authority of the government forest department, which proscribes any human presence or activity in this zone. Over the years the forest department has tried many times to implement reforestation projects in these grasslands. These projects have all been frustrated by wildfires, however, which forest officers believe villagers set out of malice, joy, or ignorance.36 Government officials recognize that the villagers on Merapi’s slopes have legitimate needs for fodder for their livestock, especially in the dry season, and they have promoted a succession of programs to plant improved fodder grasses (rumput unggul) to address these needs. These programs have historically been quite unsuccessful, because they have not accounted for the competitive advantages of Imperata. Some of the improved grasses—for example, napier grass, Pennisetum purpureum—are no more nutritious than Imperata, and those that are generally require so many more capital and labor inputs that they offer no net benefit to the villagers.37 Imperata, which requires neither planting nor fertilizing, offers the villagers a cost-benefit ratio that is difficult to beat.38 A similar disjunction in views of Imperata between government and local villagers holds in the Ogan territory in South Sumatra, at the Batumarta transmigration site. According to official reports, 60 percent of this site was covered in Imperata at the time it was selected for a transmigration project, and at the time of this study, large portions of the site still lay under Imperata. Transmigration officials regard Imperata as not just useless but hazardous. They maintain that it saps the soil of nutrients, makes cultivation of the land impossible, and is worse than useless as cattle fodder, its high cellulose content being damaging to the digestive system of livestock. Project officials devote considerable resources to eliminating Imperata by spraying it with herbicides and ploughing it under with tractors, but with indifferent success. And where transmigration officials succeed in eradicating it, the Imperata is succeeded by prostrate grasses that are less susceptible to the use of herbicides and to tillage by the transmigrants.39 Transmigration officials do not see Imperata as a natural part of the environment. Like the Ogan, they have an origin story for it. They suggest that its abundance at the project site was originally due to the destructive swidden practices of the Ogan tribesmen; and they blame its persistence on failure of the transmigrants to get rid of it. Blaming the Ogan for the Imperata is wide of the mark, given the tribespeople’s antipathy toward it,

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Fig. 8.5. Javanese transmigrant children grazing cattle on Imperata cylindrica grasslands in South Sumatra.

because it plays no role within their farming system. In contrast, blaming the transmigrants for the Imperata is perhaps closer to the truth, since it does play a positive role within their farming system. Ironically, the transmigration officials’ negative view of Imperata is most closely shared by the native Ogan tribespeople. It is the Javanese and Balinese transmigrants who were supposed to introduce modern cultural and agricultural norms to this perceived backward region, whose attitudes toward Imperata differ most from those of the officials. For example, whereas officials maintain that Imperata destroys the fertility of the soil, the transmigrants maintain that it is the soil, not the grass, that is the determinant factor; if the soil is good, they say, then the Imperata will be luxuriant, and if the soil is poor, then the Imperata will be sparse. Regarding arability, whereas transmigration officials maintain that Imperata cannot be tilled by hand, the transmigrants say, “Pacul sekali, habis”—“Hoed once, it is gone.”40 Finally, whereas the transmigration officials maintain that Imperata is injurious to cattle, all transmigrants say that Imperata makes good fodder (fig. 8.5). During the annual dry season, when the improved grasses planted by project officials have died off, the transmigrants depend on Imperata— which tolerates drought well—to feed their cattle.41 Some of the transmi-

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grants gather Imperata that grows spontaneously on fallowed land, whereas others use fire to create dense stands of Imperata. The difference in perceptions of Imperata was aptly summed up in the words of one transmigrant: “Alang-alang hanya menjadi persoalan kalau dilihat petugas proyek”— “Imperata only becomes a problem [for the transmigrants] if it is seen by the project officials.” If this happens, the transmigrants say, the officials will accuse them of not working their land and threaten to take it away. Histories of Chromolaena The earliest references in the Indo-Malay region to Chromolaena, which is native to the New World, date from the 1920s; in many parts of Indonesia, it did not appear until after World War II.42 Its preferred habitat is grassland and other open areas, where its tolerance of sunlight, height, rapid rate of growth, and dense foliage make it very competitive.43 Within one to two years, any grasses in the vicinity of Chromolaena, including such competitive species as Imperata and Saccharum spontaneum, are shaded out.44 Some analysts attribute this competitiveness to the fact that Chromolaena’s roots are deeper than the more extensive but shallower root systems of Imperata and other grasses.45 But more recent research also cites another factor: as Odeyemi, Afolami, and Adigun (2013:80) write, “The shrub is reported to be highly allelopathic to nearby vegetation.”46 In the absence of continued disturbance, Chromolaena will eventually yield to more mature tree species as the land spontaneously reforests. Thus, like Imperata, Chromolaena is a pioneer plant that finds its niche on land that is in transition between an open state and a closed forest cover, with both plants responding competitively to fire. The main difference between Imperata and Chromolaena in this respect is that their niches respectively occur earlier and later during this transition, and they consequently relate to different actors— other plants, livestock, and farmers—in different ways. The Riam Kanan valley lies on the western slope of the Meratus Mountains in South Kalimantan. Its lowlands are covered in Imperata, which gives way to forest on the valley’s walls and at its head. Chromolaena grows extensively in the zone of transition between the Imperata and the forest, two to three hours’ walk from the lowland grasslands where the permanent settlements are located. These distant Chromolaena-covered lands are the site of one of the main two systems of agriculture practiced by the valley’s Banjarese

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table 8.1

SPATIAL PATTERNING OF BANJARESE LAND USE IN SOUTH KALIMANTAN

(Village center) Riverbanks

Ravines

Gardens Wet rice Rubber & fruit trees Dwellings

Grasslands

(Village periphery) Young forests Old forests

Rainfed rice Cattle

Swiddens Fallow land

Rattan, etc.

inhabitants; the other is located in the Imperata grasslands in the valley’s bottom (table 8.1). The Imperata-based system of agriculture, which is not unlike that of the Javanese and Balinese transmigrants in South Sumatra, consists of: (1) slashing the grass with machetes, (2) drying and burning it, (3) using cattledrawn ploughs—formerly handheld hoes—to turn the soil and break up and dry out the grass’s root system, (4) sowing the ground with dry rice and various secondary crops, (5) weeding the crops, and (6) harvesting them (fig. 8.6). This year-long cycle is repeated four to seven times and then the land is fallowed. The sign that the land must be fallowed is the replacement of Imperata by prostrate grasses, which are not as easy to till as Imperata. The sign that the land can be cultivated again, typically after three years of fallow, is the return of Imperata, which is thus taken as a sign of arability.47 This system of cultivation permits land to be cultivated up to 70 percent of the time, which is desirable on the land located closest to the settlements. There are economic dividends to cultivating such lands as often as possible and fallowing them as infrequently as possible. Another virtue of this system of grassland cultivation is the ability to replace some household labor with draft animals and hired workers.48 The system of cultivation carried out farther up the valley, based on a secondary forest succession dominated by Chromolaena, employs typical swidden agriculture techniques. The vegetation is cleared, dried, and burned; the field is planted, weeded, and harvested; and then the land is fallowed for at least several years. In direct contrast to the system of cultivation in the lowlands, it is the growth of Imperata that precipitates the fallow here; and it is the subsequent replacement of Imperata by a brushy succession dominated by Chromolaena that signifies that the land is once again cultivable. A key advantage of Chromolaena in this system is its ability to shade out the Imperata. This system does not require either the capital outlays or the human labor that the grassland-based system on the valley floor

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Fig. 8.6. Banjarese rice field made in Imperata cylindrica grasslands, with a field house in background.

does. It is much easier to clear a given area of Chromolaena than Imperata: the standard wage per hectare for clearing the former is only 40 percent of that paid for clearing the latter. The returns to labor in the Chromolaenabased system are higher than those in the system based on Imperata, and the returns per unit of area tend to be higher as well. The principal disadvantage of the Chromolaena-based system is its high demand for land, which is a function of the need for multiple-year fallows to allow the Chromolaena to reestablish itself after each cropping. This confines this system to the most distant parts of the village territory, two to three hours’ walk from the lowland settlements—which requires construction of substantial field houses— where the opportunity costs of fallow time are lowest.49 The respective

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advantages and disadvantages of the Chromolaena- and Imperata-based systems of cultivation lead villagers with more capital to practice the latter, while those with less capital practice the former.50 The Banjarese date the first appearance of Chromolaena in the region to World War II when, they say, it was sown from the air by Japanese airplanes. Hence, they call it kumpai Jepang, “Japanese grass.”51 The Japanese carried out this seeding, the Banjarese say, in order to eliminate Imperata from the region. Chromolaena can indeed compete successfully against Imperata, and the Japanese government of occupation, like the preceding colonial government and the succeeding national government, regarded Imperata as something needing to be eliminated, but there is no evidence that it ever sowed Chromolaena from airplanes for this purpose. Chromolaena, native to the New World, was in fact introduced into Southeast Asia early in the twentieth century for this very purpose, which may have made beliefs in Japan’s role more credible.52 The reference to the Japanese also raises questions about the impact of their wartime administration on Kalimantan’s agro-ecosystems, in particular in the Imperata grasslands. Native systems for managing Imperata and Chromolaena are likely to have been disrupted by Japanese rule—which is said to have been more effective than any regime before or since in extending its reach over natural resource production into the most remote parts of the archipelago—due to proscriptions against burning, structural reorganization of agriculture toward extraction of rice, and forcing the flight of people from the lowland regions under Japanese control to remote forested mountain areas. In 1815 one of the greatest volcanic eruptions in recorded history took place on Mount Tambora in the desolate, sparsely populated northwestern corner of Sumbawa.53 The eastern and especially southern slopes of Tambora are covered today by one of Indonesia’s most extensive true savannas (fig. 8.7). The western slope contains a mixture of grassland, brush, and woodland, whereas the northern slope is covered by a mixture of primary and secondary forest. Agricultural activity is concentrated on the northern and western slopes: on the northern slope, late in the twentieth century, the native Bimanese—named after the island’s Sultanate of Bima—still practiced a typical long-fallow system of swidden agriculture; and on the western slope, they practiced a shorter bush-fallow system. A system of permanent-field agriculture was also practiced in transmigration sites on the western slope. The difference between the northern and western swid-

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Fig. 8.7. Savanna on slopes of Mount Tambora.

den systems dramatically affects the Bimanese farmers’ view of Chromolaena and Imperata. In the long-fallow system of swidden cultivation on Tambora’s northern slope, the farmers regard Chromolaena as a weed and a constraint to swidden productivity. They say that they would like to crop their swiddens twice before fallowing them, thereby doubling the return on their labor clearing the forest; but the spontaneous growth of Chromolaena after the first year’s cropping is so vigorous that it makes this impossible. In the bushfallow system of swidden cultivation on Tambora’s western slope, in contrast, Chromolaena is regarded as the key to swidden productivity. Higher population densities have reduced the amount of forest on this slope, leaving most farmers with just two agricultural options: clearing Chromolaena or clearing Imperata. They recognize that it is possible to clear Imperata for cultivation, but they say that it is easier to clear Chromolaena; it can compete successfully against Imperata, it grows quickly, and it produces a lot of litter.54 Baxter (1995:7, 8) writes, citing the research on Chromolaena of Hubert de Foresta: “Dr. de Foresta says that in Indonesia, all small-scale farmers he interviewed said that they like Chromolaena, because they feel it is a soil fertilizer and use it as such. . . . He says the plant has been shown to

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be a good cover crop . . . and a good green manure, particularly for irrigated rice and cassava. . . . There are also strong indications that Chromolaena improves mineral fertility and organic matter content in soil.” Baxter (ibid.) concludes that Chromolaena is “one of the most promising improved-fallow species of this century.” McWilliam (2000:453n3, 457) concurs, suggesting that nitrogen-fixing activity on Chromolaena’s roots contributes to its capacity to thrive in poor soils, but he also mentions a possible downside from its suspected allelopathic properties: “The experience of many Timorese farmers, however, is that while Chromolaena is easy to clear and burn, thus reducing the time required for field preparation prior to planting, it also reduces the harvest yields of their staple maize crops. One possible effect here is that Chromolaena may have an allelopathic effect on maize and other crops, at least in the initial cultivation period.” The villagers on Tambora attribute the origins of Chromolaena to the central government in Jakarta. They date its first appearance on the volcano to the 1971 national elections, in which the political party that dominated Indonesia during the last three decades of the twentieth century, Golongan Karya, “Business Party,” scored its first electoral victory.55 Thus, the Bimanese name for Chromolaena is rumput Gol.Kar., “Business Party grass.” The farmers say that government helicopters sowed Chromolaena over their lands in an effort to get rid of the Imperata and raise the fertility of the soil. In support of this story, they note that Chromolaena can indeed suppress Imperata as well as contribute to soil fertility, and they point to periodic efforts by the government to get rid of Imperata, for example by spraying herbicides in plantation and transmigration projects on the slopes of Tambora. An association of Chromolaena with Gol.Kar. is also found in other parts of Indonesia. As McWilliam (2000:452) writes of Timor, “Chromolaena is a highly invasive perennial scrambling shrub that thrives in open grassland and disturbed soil. It grows rapidly and produces a dense mass of leaf matter that gradually shades out all other competition. This particular propensity of the plant gave rise to its common though facetious Indonesian name, ‘rumput golkar’ (Golkar grass), after the then ruling government party of Indonesia, which had a similar dampening effect on political competition.” A central policy imperative of the Golkar Party, self-identified as the partai pembangunan, “development party,” was the intensification, modernization, and improvement of Indonesian land use and agriculture. Crucial to the success of this policy, officials believed, was proscription of traditional land-use practices deemed destructive, and rehabilitation of the “waste-

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lands” they produced. The quintessential example of such wastelands was Imperata grassland, which drew more official ire than any other land cover during Suharto’s “New Order” regime. The ability of Chromolaena to succeed Imperata makes credible the belief on Tambora that it was spread by the government—although there is no evidence that it was.56 Most Indonesian government officials see Chromolaena as injurious to their development programs.57 In a game park that the government has developed on the southern slope of Tambora, officials maintain that Chromolaena shades out the short grasses on which the game feed. In government reforestation projects elsewhere on Tambora, officials claim that Chromolaena shades out their tree seedlings, and at some of these sites they have tried to get rid of it with herbicides. In all cases, the government’s efforts to deal with Chromolaena have been hampered by its lack of understanding of its role in the local agro-ecology. For example, on Tambora’s western slope, where Chromolaena is welcomed by the short-fallow swidden farmers, the farmers conserve it by burning it infrequently and timing all burns after flowering. In contrast, the local government has unsuccessfully tried to persuade farmers to burn their fields before the Chromolaena flowers and its seeds are scattered by the wind. Whereas the government has tried to promote practices to retard the growth of Chromolaena, therefore, the farmers’ practices are intended to promote its growth. Government officials are not aware of this conflict of purpose: they maintain that the Bimanese time their burns before the Chromolaena flowers out of regard for obscure meteorological variables. Given Chromolaena’s ability to outcompete Imperata, and given the government’s dogmatic anti-Imperata stance, its failure to embrace Chromolaena is striking. Folk Versus State Histories There are many similarities running through these histories of Imperata and Chromolaena, which suggest some recurring, underlying themes. A comparison of the case studies presented here demonstrates that farmer attitudes toward Imperata and Chromolaena vary according to the intensity of their agro-ecological system. Thus, farmers involved in systems of extensive swidden agriculture, whether employing long forest fallows or short bush fallows, view Imperata negatively; whereas those involved in systems of more intensive semipermanent cultivation, with brief grass fallows,

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view Imperata positively. In the most intensive systems of cultivation, with no fallow periods at all, Imperata is, again, viewed negatively. On the other hand, Chromolaena is viewed negatively in swidden systems based on a long forest fallow, positively in swidden systems based on a short bush fallow, and negatively in semipermanent systems based on brief grass fallows, and also negatively in the most intensive systems of continuous cultivation. In general, therefore, farmers’ attitudes toward Imperata and Chromolaena are a function of how closely each plant resembles the type of vegetation that is desired for the fallow period. Dissimilarity of either Imperata or Chromolaena to the desired fallow-period vegetation disrupts its timing, typically by prolonging it, which leads to a negative view of the plants, and the reverse is also true. In every case, farmers attribute the origins of Imperata and Chromolaena to supravillage political authorities. Thus, the origins of Imperata are attributed by the Ogan to the Portuguese and by the Javanese to the spirit kingdom of Merapi volcano; while the origins of Chromolaena are attributed by the Banjarese to the Japanese occupation and by the Bimanese to Indonesia’s long dominant national political party. The political authority cited in each case is not simply the first to have control over the area in question, but the first to have the massive impact on the environment that favors pioneering plants like Imperata and Chromolaena. Thus, Java’s historic agrarian kingdoms, with their focus on inland farming and forest clearing, are cited (see my chapter 5), while Sumatra’s historic coastal kingdoms, such as Srivijaya, with its focus on maritime trade, are not.58 In most parts of Sumatra, the European colonists were the first to have such a massive impact on the natural vegetation.59 In Kalimantan, on the other hand, where colonial plantation agriculture was less extensive than in Sumatra, the first external authority to have this sort of impact was the Japanese government of occupation. In remote, unpopulated, and resource-poor Sumbawa, the first external authority to intensively involve itself in transforming the environment was Suharto’s “New Order” government.60 In each case, native communities see the external political authority as rational and purposeful. In no case do farmers see the spread of either plant as an unintended consequence of government programs. A partial exception is the story of the seeds of Imperata blowing off of Vasco da Gama’s thatched roof, although the roof itself represents a practical and purposeful use of the plant. In all cases, the spread of Imperata and Chromolaena is attributed to a government program designed for that purpose, even when

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farmers do not share this purpose. For example, both the Banjarese who view Imperata as a valuable ground cover, and the Bimanese who view Chromolaena as a swidden pest, believe that governments introduced Chromolaena in order to eliminate Imperata. The fact that the government and the farmers are working at cross-purposes is not marked in these accounts: the farmers have a matter-of-fact attitude toward differences in agendas. Part of the conflict between farmers and government involves the practice of fallowing. Many farmers value Imperata and Chromolaena as fallowperiod vegetation, but Indonesia’s central government is antagonistic toward the very idea of fallowing. A goal of government agricultural planning is to intensify cultivation, in part by shortening or eliminating fallow periods, so as to maximize production per unit of land. The goal of many farmers, to maximize production per unit of labor through the use of fallow periods, is incomprehensible to many government officials, who do not view farmer labor as a scarce resource needing to be conserved.61 Imperata and Chromolaena have no positive role to play in the largescale, capital-intensive land-use schemes in which the central government is involved. Indeed, in commodity production on estates, pulpwood plantations, and now the burgeoning oil-palm plantations, Imperata and Chromolaena play a malign role, competing with the plant covers desired by the state and drawing its critical attention. As Baxter (1995:7) writes, “Welldocumented reports on the negative aspects of Chromolaena are few—and almost strictly limited to its effects in monoculture plantations of coconut, coffee, cotton, oil palm or in reforestation and large pastures.”62 The state regards Imperata and Chromolaena as problematic sociologically as well as agronomically. Land to which traditional adat, or “customary,” title is held by local peoples is routinely appropriated for the aforementioned state schemes, often by force. Government recognition of Imperata and Chromolaena as intentional fallow-period ground covers would amount to recognition of local land management, which would complicate state efforts of land appropriation. In contrast, denial of any role of Imperata and Chromolaena in land management supports classification of the land as “wasteland,” clearing the way for its appropriation. This political reality is reflected in the fact that, in contemporary Indonesia, as McWilliam (2000:458) writes, “There are effectively no government agencies that have responsibility for treating grasslands as grassland.” Finally, the failure to recognize local management of Imperata and Chromolaena is consistent with the role of the government as “improver in

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chief.”63 Central government attitudes toward Imperata and Chromolaena are, in part, about agency. Pioneering weedy species like Imperata and Chromolaena grow readily on their own—although human activity is important in opening the niche for them and then retarding succession to other plants. The lack of any need to directly plant Imperata and Chromolaena is inimical to the perceived agency of the state, which has assumed for itself the role of transformer of land uses and land covers. Conclusions: Weeds as Metaphors The political contest over grasslands is partly a contest over agency. Local farmers see Imperata and Chromolaena on the land and reckon that something must have happened to the landscape to create a space for them. Their identification of an agent, given a state-centric vision of massive landscape transformation, is invariably a historic statement. Farmers use their knowledge of the ecology of the two plants, and their beliefs about how central states behave, to historicize the presence of the two plants on the landscape. They construct folk mythologies about state ecologies that, although incorrect in their particulars, are correct in a structural sense. Whereas farmers see Imperata and Chromolaena as a sign of the past exercise of agency on the part of the state, the state sees the plants as a sign of the past exercise of agency on the part of farmers. Both the farmers and the state see the two plants as a sign of human agency, therefore, but whereas farmers are thinking of the state, the state is thinking of farmers. There is an associated difference in perception of intent: although state actors blame local communities for the spread of Imperata and Chromolaena, they do not see this as intentional. In contrast, local communities generally assert that the state’s role in the spread of these plants is an intentional one. State actors cannot imagine that local communities have an economic interest in Imperata or Chromolaena, because the state itself does not, and they cannot imagine that the farmers have a view different than the state’s. But farmers have no trouble in imagining that the state has an interest in these plants that is not shared by them. This is reflected in the names that local communities give to weeds, which explicitly associate them with wider political actors and projects. The folk theorizing regarding natural resource use is political: it assumes that different actors will have different self-interests, in contrast to which state actors assume shared interests. The folk

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weed histories represent a sort of “folk political ecology” (see Blaikie and Brookfield 1987). In contrast, state actors are oblivious to any role that the state and its politics may have played in the ecologies of these two plants. In recognizing the role of political factors in weed origins and movements, the folk accounts problematize the apolitical stance of the state. The folk accounts are correct in seeing the hand of the state in the ecology of grassland landscapes, but they are in error in seeing it as intentional. The policies of centralized states often have unintended consequences, and this is often the case in the proliferation of weedy species. Weeds, by definition, proliferate in the absence of centralized direction, which means that they fit poorly into state planning and, in consequence, offer an opportunity for more independent, local resource management. Ontological studies have been critiqued for being apolitical, in part by their confinement to fieldsites that have been “cleansed” (Bessire and Bond 2014:447). Weedy species, which represent things that are not supposed to be present in the first place, and are typically either disparaged or ignored, exemplify the sorts of things that scholars cleanse out of the picture. But scholars are not the only ones guilty of this sin. Consider the way that state authorities erase complex folk systems of grassland management in Indonesia. In contrast, the folk histories represent an effort to “uncleanse” these landscapes, by reintroducing history and politics. “Cleansing” is a subjective concept, because what needs to be cleansed— the “dirt” or the weeds—exists in the eye of the beholder. Cleansing the landscape is a tool wielded by different actors for different ends. This also applies to the political-ecological dynamics that “dirty” the landscape in the first place. Tsing (2017:3) correctly writes, “Weeds are creatures of human disturbance.” But disturbance, like weeds themselves, is in the eye of the beholder. What one observer sees as a weedy breakdown of order, harmony, design, another may see as a historic, intentional, managed landscape. Folk articulation of the state role in weed ecology is metaphoric, as in attributing the origin of Imperata in Sumatra to Vasco da Gama. The use of metaphor makes it possible to speak of the agency of the state in an almost Foucaultian manner, in which the state brings about certain outcomes without directly aiming at them. The stories of the Portuguese, the Japanese, and the government’s Golkar Party, all have the flavor of folktales, removed from everyday life, which impart general lessons about life. But the metaphoric capacity of weeds transcends the historic political ecology of Indonesian

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landscapes, as is reflected in the biblical use of weeds to express the essence of the human condition. This capacity is reflected, indeed, in Gregory Bateson’s syllogism of grass, as discussed in the introduction, which presents grass as the exemplary metaphor: Grass dies; Humans die; Humans are grass. What gives weeds this metaphoric capacity? They have some distinctive characteristics: they can be both desired and unwanted; they can be both anticipated and unbidden. In their appearance and disappearance, weeds often combine both human and natural agency. They have been commensal with humans since at least the dawn of agriculture some ten thousand years ago, if not indeed long before that. In short, weeds occupy a liminal space; and liminality is well suited to metaphoric construction, to efforts to see things in a different way. This metaphoric capacity is culturally constructed, since the concept of the weed is itself a cultural construction. This suggests that we construct nature in the way that we do, in part, so as to express ourselves metaphorically—another instance of Bateson’s imbrication of mind and nature.

Epilogue Seeing “Life Itself ”

I

n an essay called “Race and History” published nearly seven decades ago, Claude Lévi-Strauss illustrates the practice of “ethnocentricity” with the following anecdote: “In the Greater Antilles, some years after the discovery of America, whilst the Spanish were dispatching inquisitional commissions to investigate whether the natives had a soul or not, these very natives were busy drowning the white people they had captured in order to find out, after lengthy observation, whether or not the corpses were subject to putrefaction.” Thus, Lévi-Strauss concludes, when we try to deny the humanity of others, we are ourselves the most inhuman: “The barbarian is first of all the man who believes in barbarism.”1 This anecdote has attained “iconic status” in the post-humanist literature, dating from its prominence in Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s canonical 1998 essay “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” According to Viveiros de Castro, LéviStrauss’s point in presenting the anecdote was to demonstrate the humanity of savages by showing that they make the same distinctions we do: “The proof that they were true humans is that they considered that they alone were the true humans.” Viveiros de Castro himself draws a different lesson from the anecdote, namely that “the point of view creates the subject,” which conceptually opens up the possibility not merely of seeing drowned white men as unlike us, but of seeing living forest fauna as like us.2 According to Ramos, “This anecdote so excited Viveiros de Castro’s imagination as to lead him to later state that it ‘encapsulates the anthropological situation or event par excellence, expressing the quintessence of what our discipline is all

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about.’ ” For Ramos, the preoccupation with this anecdote reflects the fact that post-humanist scholarship “exceeds ethnographic good sense” and is “indifferent to the historical and political predicament of indigenous life in the modern world.”3 Lévi-Strauss’s anecdote is all about asking if the “other” is human or not. A very different set of questions is asked in the mythic journey to the village of the pig people with which I began this volume: namely, Are we human? Or are we animals? And what is the difference? These questions are self-referential in a way that the question in Lévi-Strauss’s anecdote is not. In his anecdote, we are looking at drowned people, but no one is looking back at us. There is no perspectivism, no distancing. In contrast, the journey to and from the pig village is all about perspective and distance. Much of the material in this volume grapples with how environmental relations are represented—what sign systems are used in their representation, what their semiosis is. Some of the signs analyzed here speak to the contingency of history: the ritual cultivation of archaic non-rice cultigens tells farmers that modern rice culture was not preordained; whereas the modern spread of rice agriculture, especially with irrigation, tells state authorities that pre-rice and pre-irrigation cultures were but way stations on the inevitable road to modernity. Other signs address human agency: both farmers and state officials see weedy landscapes as a sign of human activity, but whereas farmers see the state as the actor responsible, the state sees just the opposite. Local land-users read the history of such landscapes as evidence of the extraordinary reach of the state and its potential for landscape transformation; whereas the state again reads these landscapes as the opposite, as signs of the limits to the reach of the state—as signs that some local peoples, of a perceived idle and destructive bent, are resisting government development efforts. Swiddens to this day are, in the eyes of the state, a powerful sign of underdevelopment—like the cultivation of non-rice crops such as tubers or sago—and frustration of state rule. In contrast, wet rice is a sign to the Indonesian state of development, civilization, indeed, of citizenship. The perceived disorder of the swidden and order of the wet-rice field stand in for societal anarchy versus rationality. In the Vedic-era subcontinent, the anupa, the wet forest, as opposed to the jangala, the arid savanna, was not merely a place where kingly rule did not hold but a place where kingly rule should not

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hold; it was a place not divinely prescribed for the Arya. The savanna stood for the purity of the Arya, whereas the wet forest stood for its opposite. Every one of these relations between signs is in some sense a relationship between self and “other.” This is explicit in the case of jangala, savanna, versus anupa, forest, and also wet rice versus swidden, where the dichotomy with the “other” encompasses a pervasive distinction between civilized and uncivilized societies. In the case of the non-rice cultigens and the weedy plants, there is a similar distinction between rude and complex cultures, between developed versus undeveloped peoples. In the cases of Merapi volcano and the pig-humans, there is a dichotomy between human and spirit worlds. The relationships between self and “other” all involve a resemblance. In most cases, it is a resemblance between nature and culture, the oldest mimetic relation in world. Michael Taussig (1993:xiii) writes, “I call it the mimetic faculty, the nature that culture uses to create second nature, the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into and become Other.” As Taussig neglects to mention, this faculty also holds within nature. Jakob von Uexküll saw such mimesis as integral to all ecological harmony. In his famous study of the spider and the fly, he argues that the spider is taking up “certain motifs of the fly melody” in order to catch flies: “Surely, the spider’s web is configured in a fly-like way, because the spider is also flylike.” He continues, “It [the spider] determines the size of the mesh according to the size of the fly’s body. It measures the resistance of the threads it spins by the living power of the fly’s body in flight. . . . The most miraculous thing, however, is the fact that threads of the web are spun so finely that a fly’s eye with its crude visual elements cannot spot the web and the fly flies without warning to its doom.” This relationship can also be a mutual one. As Uexküll says of bees and flowers: Were the flower not beelike And were the bee not flowerlike, The consonance could never work. Thus, the bee learns how to be flower-like and the flower does the reverse.4 In human society, it is culture that does the work of imitating the “melody” of the other. Thus, it is Dayak culture that renders humans, in some sense, “pig-like” and pigs, in some sense, “human-like.” As Uexküll’s examples indicate, these mimetic relationships are ones of “like”: to be mimetic is not to be identical. As Taussig writes, “There is . . . a

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curiously unstable aspect intrinsic to this mimetic doubling . . . this copy which is not a copy.”5 Taussig is interested in the political implications of this “slippage”: “Once the mimetic has sprung into being, a terrifically ambiguous power is established; there is born the power to represent the world, yet that same power is a power to falsify, mask, and pose.”6 Taussig’s point is exemplified by some of the more theatrical cases analyzed here, as in the temusi’ ritual of the Dayak. The participants in this ritual are indeed exercising the mimetic power to falsify, by suggesting that an ill omen is not really an ill omen at all but is merely a similar-looking but innocuous phenomenon. The concept of the “other”—the undeveloped, the barbarian, the spirit, the animal, even Derrida’s cat—all contribute to the notion of the self. The “other” is revelatory of the self. There are a number of ways that this takes place, one of which involves simply the demonstration of a difference. Eduardo Kohn (2013:24) writes, “What one is as a semiotic self, then, is constitutively related to what one is not.” Consider the spirit mirror on Merapi volcano: all mirror images are distorted because reversed, but the image in the spirit mirror goes further by showing the insides, the otherwise unseen depths, of oneself. The reflection, by showing another side or dimension of the self, throws the self into question. A shadow poses the same question about its object. A shadow, in a tradition dating back to Plato, is seen as being related to its object, but not precisely so; and examination of this difference is thought to be revealing. The likening by Dayak of humans to pigs and vice versa gives insight into both human and nonhuman realms by denaturalizing them both, by making the pig world seem more human and the human world more pig-like. Both similarity and difference are integral to this insight: the mimetic elements must be similar enough to compare, but different enough to contrast. If the two elements are identical, there is no insight, indeed there is no mimesis. It is the mimetic exploitation of such difference in the context of similarity that makes it, as Walter Benjamin (1978:333) says, an age-old source of human insight. In all of the cases studied here, meaning is found in the difference, the slippage, between sign and object. The slippage between the biophysical ecology of Imperata grasslands and their cultural meaning is reflected in the vastly different things that they can mean to observers: thus, local farmers see the grasslands as evidence of the state, whereas state officials see them as evidence of the absence of the state. The savanna of the subcontinent—

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and its emblematic antelope—meant to the Aryans not the anthropogenic environment that they had created but the ritually pure environment that had been created for them. The eruptions of Merapi volcano are interpreted as a consequence not of geological instability but social instability, reflecting an inferred linkage between the harmonies of human and spirit worlds. The Dayak interpret the call and flight of omen birds not in terms of avifaunal behavior but in terms of warnings from the spirits; the Dayak see meaning where it is the lack of meaning that is actually meaningful. Insight stems, in part, from the fact that the relationship between self and other is marked by a return gaze.7 While people look at the barbarian “other,” for example, they imagine that the barbarians are looking back at them. This is explicit in the case of the spirits, whose gaze back upon us is explicitly anticipated, and feared. Taussig (1993:96–97) writes, “I cannot resist speculating that what enhances the mimetic faculty is a protean self with multiple images (read “souls”) of itself set in a natural environment whose animals, plants, and elements are spiritualized to the point that nature “speaks back” to humans, every material entity paired with an occasionally visible spirit double—a mimetic double!—of itself.” What the “other” sees is important because it is not what the self sees. This is most obvious in the case of the spirits who see the Dayak as wild pigs, but it holds in other cases as well. For example, swidden communities living beyond state control do not see the inevitable logic of wet-rice cultivation in the same way that the state does. The local inhabitants of Imperata and Chromolaena lands see the impact of state rule on the landscape in a way that the state chooses to not see. And the spirits on Merapi volcano see human failings in a way that human society cannot or will not. Philippe Descola (2013:255–56) sees this return gaze as integral to identity: “It is here that the theme of perspectivism developed by Viveiros de Castro acquires its full meaning. . . . Many indications suggest that identity is primarily defined through the point of view from which members of other collectives see oneself, for these are placed in the position of external observers.” In many of these cases, the relation between sign and object, or self and other, is a relation between different ontologies, as between the world of humans and the world of spirits in the cases of the Dayak bird omens or Merapi volcano. Belief in such relations affords insight into something not otherwise apprehendable. Thus, volcanic eruption is interpreted in Central Java as a critical commentary by the spirit world on problems in human society. Similarly, the bird omens of the Dayak differentiate between behaviors that Dayak

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should or should not engage in. In both cases, the signs communicate across an ontological difference between human and spirit worlds. These are signs of, in effect, a type of travel between ontologies, between worlds. This returns me to the two trips with which I began this book: the mythological trip of the Dayak to the village of the pig people, from which the normal human world is viewed; and Ingold’s analysis of the trip into space, from which the Earth is viewed. In the latter case, we are looking back at Earth but not at ourselves; our ontological underpinnings are untouched. In contrast, the former case involves an ontological shift: it shows how we might differently view both the “other,” the pigs, as well as how these others view us. In the second case, we are looking at our home, the Earth, from an unchanged vantage point; in the first case we are looking at the human world from the pig world. The equivalent to this would be a nonhuman alien looking at the Earth from space. In the first case we literally get out of our own skin as we become pigs; in the second case we do not, we are still ourselves. In the second case, we do not problematize our own ontology; in the first case we do. Troubled versus untroubled ontologies have implications for sustainable environmental relations, because of the importance of perspective. The Dayak attribute misfortune, even mortality, to failure to heed omens warning them of their transformation into the prey of the spirits. They attribute it, in short, to a failure of perspective. The perspective that the Dayak need is the ability to think about how spirits see them, the ability to think about not how they see the world but how the world sees them, the ability to step outside themselves. This entails a sort of distancing from the self. The point of Tim Ingold’s (2000:215) analysis of the image of the “blue planet” is that the distancing from our home afforded by this image is not helpful, just the opposite: “There is good reason to believe . . . that many of these [environmental] problems have their source in that very alienation of humanity from the world of which the notion of the global environment is a conspicuous expression.” The symbolic systems discussed in this volume contribute to a different sort of distancing, one that is not alienating, one that leads to self-reflexive, ethical behavior. Kohn (2013:133) writes, “Symbolic reference is distinctively human. That is, the symbolic is something that is (on this planet) unique to humans. The moral is also distinctively human, because to think morally and to act ethically requires symbolic reference. It requires the ability to momentarily distance ourselves from the world and our actions in it to reflect on our possible modes of future conduct—conduct that we can deem potentially good for others that are not

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us. This distancing is achieved through symbolic reference.” In short, the mimetic distancing achieved by the sign systems discussed here helps us, by looking back at ourselves, to think in ways that might not otherwise be possible about what behavior is moral or not; it helps us to think about what morality means in the context of environmental relations. There is a globally widespread folk belief that the devil casts neither a shadow nor a reflection in a mirror. Conversely, a reflection or shadow that exists by itself—for example, the legendary “shadow man”—is also associated with evil. The implication is that a reflection or shadow symbolizes a self-distancing and self-consciousness that is essential to human morality. No reflection and no shadow symbolize the opposite, an inability to see oneself from another place, a lack of critical self-awareness, which is more likely to lead to immoral, evil behavior. The presence or absence of a perspective on oneself is thus a sign of morality versus immorality. Kohn (ibid.:155–56) asks a fundamental question about the basis for mimetic relations between nature and culture: “From their ‘I’ perspectives all beings see the different natures they inhabit as cultural: a jaguar—as an ‘I’— sees peccary blood as the manioc beer that is the customary staple of the Runa diet, and spirits, according to this same logic, see the forest as an orchard. Why this echoing between cultural and natural, domestic and wild? And why should I be privy to it?” Why this echo between nature and culture? Gregory Bateson (1972:484–85) suggests that human beings have always taken “clues from the natural world around them and applied those clues in a sort of metaphoric way to the society in which they lived,” in “totemic” fashion. This is possible, he says, because nature has a systemic order, which is “appropriate” for helping us to understand ourselves (ibid.). But this just replaces Kohn’s question, Why an echo?, with the question, Why appropriate? Rane Willerslev does not answer this question, either, but he suggests that grappling with it is part of the human condition. In his analysis of Siberian elk hunters he writes, “This capacity to take on the appearance and viewpoint of another species is one of the key aspects of being a person.”8 That is, the shifting of identity back and forth between human and animal represents part of what it means to be human, it is characteristically human. The Dayak belief that someone who hunts wild pigs could also be perceived and hunted as a wild pig himself is of ancient provenance, as a challenge to the human concept of self in the world. Chris Knight and J. D. Lewis (2017:442) write, “Evolving hominins must also have been predator at one moment and prey the next. Anthropologists have focused productively

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on this archetypal example of the reversal principle, aware of how universally it shapes ritual and cosmology.” This is the archetypal example of others not seeing us as we see ourselves, and as we want to be seen, namely, not as prey. This is a reversal of perspectives, with mortal consequences, with which humans evolved. Humans have not been simply the passive objects of these reversals. We have also staged such reversals to our own advantage, as when hunters imitate animal calls when hunting, in some cases in effect acting like prey as opposed to predator. Knight and Lewis (2017:437) point to the significance of the fact that such calls are intentional “fakery,” suggesting that these faked communications between humans and animals became the basis for the development of metaphoric communication—which literally also involves fakery—among humans: “We suggest that the first vocally expressed metaphors may have been fake versions of animal cries—literal falsehoods whose significance was reversed by the fact that they were now uttered and interpreted within the signaler’s own group.” In short, Knight and Lewis suggest that human-animal relations—encompassing identification, unwelcome mis-identification, and intentionally faked mis-identification—served as the basis for human development of symbolic (that is, false) expression.9 Knight and Lewis’s emphasis on fakery in human-animal relations resonates with the material presented in this volume. Central to the story of the journey of the human hunter to the village of the pig people, or the perception of humans as pigs in the eyes of the spirits, is the fundamental fact of human consciousness of some sort of mis-apprehension, mistake, or error. The mythical and ritual trappings explain the basis for the mis-apprehension, but it is still a mis-apprehension: human and animal are not the same. This throws into question current behavioral approaches to human-animal relations, as in Charles Foster’s (2016) Being a Beast, in which he tries to “get at” what it is to be a badger, otter, deer, fox, or swift by living like one of them. This is very different from what is meant by fakery in Knight and Lewis or in this volume. In these latter cases, we cross the human-animal divide by metaphoric means. The metaphor itself testifies to the ineluctable division between human and animal. Ingold believes that the realization of humanity involves reaching beyond the natural world in which we dwell and to which we belong. This posits what he calls an “existential dilemma,” however, in that to know the desire to know our world drives us apart from it—and “drives the project of

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Western science and thought.”10 This is Bateson’s problem, the problem of thinking about ourselves as thinkers; it is the problem of consciousness that cannot comprehend itself. David J. Chalmers (1995) acknowledges this paradox, but he also raises what is perhaps a more interesting question, Why does consciousness even exist in the first place? To which I would add, Why should the awareness of the possibility of looking back at ourselves exist? Why do we think it might be possible to do this? Why do we think there would be something to see if we could look back? The lesson from the ethnographic material presented in this volume is that what we might thereby obtain is valuable perspective and insight. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1998:6e), preeminent in attacking the paradox of linguistic self-reference, addressed this quandary in an unpublished essay written early in the twentieth century: Nothing could be more remarkable than seeing someone who thinks himself unobserved engaged in some quite simple everyday activity. Let’s imagine a theatre, the curtain goes up & and we see someone alone in his room walking up and down, lighting a cigarette, seating himself etc. so that suddenly we are observing a human being from outside in a way that ordinarily we can never observe ourselves; as if we were watching a chapter from a biography with our own eyes,—surely this would be at once uncanny and wonderful. More wonderful than anything a playwright could cause to be acted or spoken on the stage. We should be seeing life itself.—But then we do see this every day & it makes not the slightest impression on us! True enough, but we do not see it from that point of view. Wittgenstein is thinking about how to attain a “remarkable” perspective on everyday life. He suggests the theater as one way of thinking about this, as I have done in this volume at various points. But he suggests that even better than seeing a performance on stage would be to see everyday “life itself ” in this fashion. Then he acknowledges that this cannot be done, because we lack the “point of view” that would make this possible. Wittgenstein can imagine a point of view that would give us this “uncanny and wonderful” observation, thus, even if he thinks its unattainable. This is the quandary, Gregory Bateson’s quandary, that I have pursued throughout this volume. The case studies from South Asia and Southeast Asia that I have presented show various points of view—ritual, cultural, historical—from which “life itself ” can sometimes be seen and sometimes

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not seen. These case studies, although they are culturally and historically embedded in the places and peoples from which they come, attest to universal human recognition of this quandary—which is a quandary of consciousness—and the effort, however imperfect, to resolve it.

Appendix Principles of Augural Interpretation

The basic rules for interpreting the omens borne by just a single one of the seven omen birds, the rufous piculet (Sasia abnormis Temminck), are as follows: In general, the “older” the bird within the ranking of the seven major omen birds, the more potent, “hot,” and negative its omen message. As the second-youngest bird, the omens conveyed by the rufous piculet are relatively positive. The rufous piculet has three distinct calls: a normal short call, termed ketupung; a loud cry, termed pangkas; and a trill, termed bacar. The first two are generally positive in meaning, while the third is very negative. The different calls do not carry equal weight: one ketupung call is said to equal three pangkas calls but only one bacar call. One ketupung call is almost invariably negative in meaning. This single cry—along with the bacar call, which it is said to be equal in potency— ranks among the worst possible omens in the Kantu’ universe. On the other hand, two or more calls have a very positive meaning. Some Kantu’ say that hearing one ketupung call and then seeing the bird is equivalent to hearing two calls, but others dispute this. Hearing the bacar call of the rufous piculet on the right is an extremely bad omen. The Kantu’ say “Bira’ aja, bekalih”—“Even [going to] defecate, [we would] turn back.” If heard when going to a cockfight, however, this omen would be positive. On the other hand, hearing the bacar on the left is a good omen, at least when traveling to distant places. Some people say that

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hearing multiple ketupung calls on the left is good, but on the right this is bad; whereas others maintain that just the opposite is true; and still others maintain that the left-right distinction is irrelevant in the case of the ketupung. In general, omens on the left have “soft” and “wet” connotations, while those on the right have “hard” and “dry” connotations. If a rufous piculet flies across one’s path to the right and then back across one’s path to the left, which is called rau’ antu padi, “crossing the rice spirit,” this is deemed a very good omen. It means that the recipient will obtain good harvests for the next three years, so long as no one else is told about the omen. Another promise of a good harvest is when a rufous piculet alights on a tree stump in one’s swidden. Whereas the bacar call is bad, two bacar calls (termed kikih) are considered to be good, especially if one is heard to the left and one to the right (termed kikih berapit, “scraping [the sound of the call] becoming close”). The hearing of one ketupung call on the left and one on the right (called burong berandau, “conversing birds”) is also deemed auspicious. The first omen obtained at an intended swidden site, the “stem omen,” is thought to select the second, the “stem that gives off roots.” The Kantu’ say that an omen bird can only select a bird senior to itself for this purpose. For example, the first omen can come from a white-rumped shama and the second from a rufous piculet, but not the other way around. Widely favored combinations for the first and second omens are, respectively, white-rumped shama and rufous piculet, or rufous piculet and scarlet-rumped trogon. If one hears the bacar call of the rufous piculet in the morning, it means that one’s swidden will burn well (Nunu ka’ alla’); but if one hears a bacar in the afternoon, it means that one’s rice will not ripen (Padi ka’ matak). If one hears the auspicious call of a rufous piculet on the first day one seeks omens—called ketupung turun s’ari, “rufous piculet gotten in a day”— one’s swidden will be invaded by weeds and one’s rice will not ripen—the implications being that the good omen was too easily obtained. If one seeks for a rufous piculet for seven days without success, on the other hand, this is considered to be the equivalent of having obtained the ketupung call as one’s omen and a good harvest can be expected. If one seeks the rufous piculet for ten days and finally hears it, then one can expect an especially good harvest. The significance of an omen varies with the type of work one is engaged in when hearing it. The calls of the rufous piculet are invested with meaning when, for example, felling the forest for a swidden but not when felling trees to make roof shingles. Nor is all swidden work alike in this regard: the

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Kantu’ pay less attention to the rufous piculet during mantun, “weeding,” than during ngetau, “harvesting,” because the welfare of the weeds gathered in weeding is of less concern to them than the welfare of the rice gathered during the harvest. A distinction also is made on pragmatic grounds between swidden stages in which large reciprocal labor groups are used and stages in which they are not: only the most serious omens are heeded in the former case, because of the magnitude of the labor loss entailed by halting work to honor omens. The Kantu’ accord “hot” or “cold” properties to some omen birds, and they interpret the auspiciousness of their omens according to whether these properties mitigate or exacerbate the “heat” or “coolness” of particular swidden sites. While the Kantu’ generally regard the bacar call of the rufous piculet as inappropriate for the “stem omen” for a new swidden, they say that it can be taken by—meaning that it foretells a good harvest for—someone who is poor, someone who has never reaped a good harvest before, or someone who has no elders still alive in his or her household.

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Notes

Introduction 1. Evans 1937; Bolang and Harrisson 1951; Nyandoh 1966; Sandin 1969; Kershaw and Kershaw 2006. 2. This follows Lévi-Strauss’s (1955) view of the various, different versions of a myth: “We define the myth as consisting of all its versions.” 3. Descola (2013:135) notes that in similar stories from around the world, the passage from human to nonhuman world is never entirely seamless; there is always an element in the story that points to the difference: “In many myths and anecdotes that tell of a human being’s stay among a people whose appearance and manners are altogether human, it is always some unexpected detail in the customs of his hosts that suddenly alerts the visitor to the animal nature of those who have welcomed him; a dish of rotting meat politely served reveals vulture-people, an oviparous birth indicates snakepeople, and a cannibalistic appetite points to jaguar-people.” In the case of the Bornean travel to the pig village, this detail is the fact that the hunter can see his spear sticking out of the village chief, whereas the villagers cannot. See the similar story involving reindeer hunters from the circumpolar north (Ingold 1986:251). 4. Hieromancy, reading the liver of sacrificed domestic pigs for signs from the spirits, was formerly a widespread practice in Southeast Asia. 5. Ingold 1988b; Willis 1990; Knight 2005; Gillespie and Collard 2015. Reviews of the burgeoning field include Mullin 1999; Russell 2010; Ogden, Hall, and Tanita 2013; Locke and Muenster 2015; and Galvin 2018. Other disciplines are joining the field: for historical studies see V. Anderson 2004, Raber 2013, Mikhail 2014, and Amato 2015. 6. Haraway 2007; Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Feinberg, Nason, and Sridharan 2013; Tsing 2015. 7. Viveiros de Castro 1998; Descola 2013; Kockelman 2013; Kohn 2013; Holbraad and Pedersen 2017.

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8. TallBear 2011; Graeber 2015. 9. Tsing 2018. 10. Ogden, Hall, and Tanita 2013:7. 11. Kohn 2013: 22–23, 211, 6. 12. Hornborg 2001; Whatmore 2002; Haraway 2007; Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Kohn 2013. 13. G. Bateson 1972, 1979. 14. Ibid.:440, 444, 434. More recently, see also Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick (2015:35): “For what becomes clear here is that our human orders of consciousness/modes of mind cannot exist outside the terms of a specific cosmogony. Therefore, human orders of consciousness/modes of mind cannot preexist the terms of the always already mythically chartered, genre-specific code of symbolic life/death, its ‘second set of instructions’ and thus its governing sociogenic principle.” 15. G. Bateson (1972:446–47) thought that self-comprehension was possible in the arts, poetry, music, the humanities, religion, contact with the natural world, and human love—“areas of human action which are not limited by the narrow distortions of coupling through conscious purpose and where wisdom can obtain.” Also see the work by E. Anderson (1996), a quarter of a century later, on the importance of religion and emotionally powerful cultural symbols in sustainable environmental relations. 16. Manghi 2002:x. 17. Aristotle 2013:4. 18. E.g., Descola 2013. 19. Agamben 2004:21, 22, 79–80. 20. Gribbin 1984. Researchers at Yale recently announced a resolution of this paradox, by postulating a way to predict the cat’s jump and save it from its doom (Minev 2019). 21. Bessire and Bond 2014:440. 22. Descartes 2007:46. 23. The mechanical interpretation endures, as in Baudrillard’s (1994:138) denial not of the animal’s conscious but of its unconscious: “Animals have no unconscious, this is well known. Without a doubt, they dream, but this is a conjecture of a bioelectrical order, and they lack language, which alone gives meaning to the dream by inscribing it in the symbolic order.” 24. Ingold 1988b:86. 25. Cited in Derrida 2008:129–30. Compare Bataille’s (1989) distinction of the nonhuman from the human by immanence, by lack of capacity for transcendence. 26. Bentham 2007. 27. Haraway 2007:21–22. 28. Derrida 2008:27, 28. 29. Ibid.:87. 30. But see Surrallés 2017. 31. Bessire and Bond 2014:442. 32. Safina 2015; Balcombe 2016; Hauser et al. 1995; Plotnik, Waal, and Reiss 2006; Reiss and Marino 2011; Griffin 1976; Godfrey-Smith 2016; Mitchell 2002; Hathaway 2013.

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33. Daston and Mitman 2005; Waal 2016; and see Lilly 1961, 1967. Also see Martinho and Kacelnik (2016) on evidence of abstract thought among animals. 34. Montaigne’s (1993) An Apology for Raymond Sebond, published in the late sixteenth century, is often cited in discussions of the Enlightenment debate about human-nonhuman differences. Ostensibly a defense of Sebond’s Natural Theology written to prove the nature and existence of God, it is instead largely Montaigne’s critique of the pretensions of human reason, which he illustrates by expounding at length on the virtues of the animal world—in terms of intelligence and morality—case by case and species by species. 35. Nagel winds up where Wittgenstein (1953:223) left off several decades earlier, when the latter wrote, “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” This statement is much debated, but Wittgenstein seems to be saying that because the life experience of a lion is so alien to us, even if it could speak and we could understand its words, we would not comprehend the message. 36. Nagel 1974:436, 438, 439, 449. 37. Insects have continued to enjoy attention, with prominent contributions to the post-humanist literature focusing on them (Mitchell 2002; Zerner 2010; Kosek 2010; H. Raffles 2010), as well as bacteria and viruses (e.g., Wolputte 2015). 38. Kohn 2013:41, 9, 137. 39. Descola 2013:250. 40. M. Hall 2011:71, 7–8; Lewis-Jones 2016:1. 41. Mendum 2009; Lewis-Jones 2016:1; Sheridan 2016:39. 42. Kohn 2013:31. 43. E.g., Tsing 2015; Hathaway 2013. Many contributors to the “plant turn” cite the work of Michael Pollan (2001), in which he attempts to take “a plant’s-eye view of the world.” 44. Nabhan 2018. Study of the nonhuman is also extending beyond the obviously animate world to things like rocks and stones (Povinelli 1995; Cohen 2015). 45. Evans-Pritchard 1956:80, 128, 129, 130; see also Isbell 1985. 46. Nadasdy 2007:26, 29. 47. Ibid.:26. 48. Syllogisms are given metonymic names—like “Barbara”—the vowels and consonants of which constitute a shorthand reference to the elements of the syllogism. 49. Roffman 2008:250; Borden 2017:91. 50. Bateson and Bateson 1987:27. 51. Roffman 2008:252. 52. G. Bateson is as interested in difference as similarity, and studies of each run as recurring themes through all of his work. 53. G. Bateson 2002:79, 133. 54. Borden 2017:91. 55. Needham 1964; see also Rudge 2019b. 56. Needham 1964:145. 57. Ibid.:146n13. 58. Contra Ingold, some argue that this distancing began long before space travel. Descola (2013:59–60) cites Panofsky (1991) on how the development of linear perspective

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in the first half of the fifteenth century contributed to a distancing from and confrontation between society and environment. 59. Ingold 2000:209, 215. For other critical analyses of the view of the Earth from space, see Sachs (1992); Zimmermann (1994); Cosgrove (1999); Manzo (2010); Lazier (2011); and Helmreich (2011). 60. Descola (2013:143) quotes Viveiros de Castro (1996:122) himself as saying that perspectivism is “an ethnoepistemological corollary of animism.” 61. Viveiros de Castro 1998:475; see also Willis 1990:6. 62. There is a much wider literature on perspective, including nonhuman perspective, beyond Viveiros de Castro’s work on this one Amazonian pattern. 63. Kockelman 2016:51, 85. 64. Ramos 2012:489; West 2016:110; Erazo and Jarrett 2018. 65. See Graeber 2015. 66. See also Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen 2015; Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp 2020. On the other hand, Sarah Ives (2014a:710) writes, “I argue that celebrations of multispecies belonging remain tied to complicated, contested, and sometimes violent biopolitics.” 67. Stoddard and Prum 2011. 68. See C. Scott 1996; Puri 2005. 69. Or a bear. For an example of how much the same principle is applied in the United States, see the National Park Service online guide for human encounters with bears, which focuses on how the bear perceives the human and how to manipulate this perception to your advantage (https://www.nps.gov/subjects/bears/safety.htm): “Identify yourself by talking calmly so the bear knows you are a human and not a prey animal. Remain still; stand your ground but slowly wave your arms. Help the bear recognize you as a human.” 70. Kohn 2013:1, 2, 126. 71. Nagel 1974:436. 72. This is not about seeing the world through the eyes of another, as famously put by Proust (2002): “The only true voyage of discovery . . . would be not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.” Du Bois was talking about seeing not the world but ourselves through the eyes of another—a critical distinction. 73. E.g., Hornborg 2001:134; Kohn 2013:214. 74. Driscoll 2016:193. 75. Norris 2010:20. 76. Ibid.:18, 30. 77. A notorious recent example is Timothy Treadwell’s immersive and ultimately fatal study of grizzly bears in Alaska, recounted in Werner Herzog’s 2005 film Grizzly Man. 78. Dore, Riley, and Fuentes 2017. 79. See Mikhail’s (2014) unusual use of historical research methods to try to get at the subjective experience of animals.

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80. There is a long tradition of study in biology of the evolutionary role of mimicry (e.g., butterflies producing tails that look like heads to confound predators). 81. For similar studies of mimesis in postcolonial situations, see Stoller (1995); Argenti (1998); and P. Kalshoven (2015). 82. See West (2016:110) on her New Guinean interlocutors: “This literature [on the ontological turn] articulates what my Gimi teachers, friends, critics, and collaborators and their ancestors have known for a long time, that humans are not the only agentive beings in the tropic cascades of life. . . . Gimi have always been ‘multi species ethnographers,’ as have many other indigenous groups.” 83. See Dumont 1977:7. 84. Evans-Pritchard 1937.

Chapter 1. Pig-Humans and Human-Pigs 1. Skeat 1967:160–63; Wessing 1986; Boomgaard 2001. Tigers were traditionally believed to have their own villages, much like the pig villages mentioned in the introduction, “where they live in houses, and act in every respect like human beings” (Skeat 1967:157). 2. Evans 1937; Bolang and Harrisson 1951; Nyandoh 1966; Sandin 1969; Kershaw and Kershaw 2006; Descola 2013:24. Also see Florida (2008:509–11) on the babi ngepet, or werepig, of contemporary Java, the villager who assumes the form of a monstrous pig every night to devour the crops and wealth of his fellow villagers. 3. See Rye 2000. Kohn (2007:9) points out that human-animal relations among the Runa of Ecuador are based not only on biological facts but also colonial and political ones. 4. Evans 1937; Nyandoh 1971. 5. Nyandoh 1966. 6. Burkhardt 2002. 7. See also Lilly 1961, 1967. 8. Lévi-Strauss (1963:73): “Above all, and seeing that it has been established, at least negatively, that the choice of certain animals is not explicable from a utilitarian point of view, why such a particular symbolism rather than any other?” Also see Douglas 1957; Leach 1964; Tambiah 1969. 9. See Bulmer 1967. 10. Boomgaard 2001; Boomgaard and Henley 2004; Zerner 1993; West 2006; Lowe 2006; McElwee 2016; Ellen 1993; Forth 2016. 11. Dove 2011. 12. Descola (2013:286) writes that hunters in both Siberia and Amazonia grapple with the violence of hunting and consuming animals—whose own status as subjects they recognize—by believing that their prey retaliate by making them ill or even by hunting and eating them, of which he writes, “Fair enough, perhaps: if to eat a person (not just an animal) is also to eat its soul, the reprisals seem perfectly equitable.” The Dayak arguably achieve the same end by analogy: as hunters of wild pigs themselves, their belief that the spirits see and hunt them as wild pigs seems similarly equitable.

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13. Tsing 1993:101. 14. Beliefs in which the pig is a central mediating theme in human-spirit relations abound around the world. For example, among the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, the wild pigs that humans hunt are the “reflections” of spirits, and the wild pigs that the spirits hunt are reflections of humans (Schieffelin 1976:100). 15. See Viveiros de Castro 1998:483; Kohn 2013:214. 16. Sacrifice, an old subject of interest within anthropology, and within Indonesian studies, is drawing renewed interest today, including from the perspective of humananimal relations (e.g., Hubert and Mauss 1964; Hoskins 1993; Howell 1996a; Shipton 2014; Ingold 1986; Govindrajan 2015). 17. See Hose and McDougall 1902:181. 18. In this example from the Kantu’, humans read pig livers in order to combat spirits hunting humans-as-pigs. The reverse happens in southeastern Borneo, where it is believed that the spirits read human livers for insight into whether they are really pigs and thus can be hunted (Tsing 1993:101). 19. Especially large and curved tusks of wild pigs are used for this purpose. The Kantu’ say that a man who kills a pig with such a tusk cannot share in its eating if he wants to use its tusk in either curing ceremonies or warfare. 20. Dayak sacrifice of pigs and chickens—and indeed similar practices among tribal peoples throughout Southeast Asia—appears to be an exception to Descola’s (2013:228) assertion that sacrifice, and the domestic animals that make it possible, are absent in animist societies, which is not the case here. 21. Days when the Kantu’ sacrifice chickens—which they do in the more common minor ceremonies—are not considered to be dangerous in the same way. Spirits that are summoned to eat chickens are not likely to mistakenly eat humans instead, because humans are never seen as chickens in the eyes of the spirits. 22. See Fausto (2007:507) on the use of different “cygenetic techniques” for killing enemy predators versus animal game in Amazonia. 23. In contrast, a wild pig, in keeping with the fact that it is not a sacrificial animal, can be killed in any of these proscribed manners. 24. There is one anomalous circumstance in which the Kantu’ also sacrifice domestic pigs. The Kantu’ say that historically they put to death anyone found guilty of incest, adultery, or premarital pregnancy, in order to appease the spirits who would be incensed by such behaviors. In the modern era, the Kantu’ instead kill domestic pigs belonging to the guilty parties. In the case of premarital pregnancy, the substitution of pig for human is especially explicit: if the man responsible for the pregnancy cannot be identified, then the pregnant woman’s household must provide a second pig to be recognized as the “father” of the pregnancy and killed as such. Unlike other pig sacrifices, the pigs sacrificed for sexual delicts are not butchered in the prescribed manner, no ancillary plates of rice and other ritual foods are prepared to accompany them, and the spirits are not summoned to consume them. Instead, the intact carcass of the pig is killed at the longhouse and then dragged from it and abandoned at any one of the sites—earth, water, fruit tree, durian tree, illipe-nut tree, bee tree, or rubber tree— thought to be tainted by the sexual delict in question. These pig sacrifices reflect an

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identification between humans and pigs, as in the case of the other sacrifices described; but the problem here is not that spirits see a human as a wild pig, and it does not represent the same sort of legerdemain by which a pig is substituted for a human. In this case, a human is supposed to be sacrificed to the spirits, and the substitution of a domestic pig represents an explicit political expediency. 25. Medway 1973; Bellwood 1997. 26. Medway 1977:147. 27. See Rye 1995. 28. See Douglas’s (1957) classic study on boundary-crossing animals among the Lele of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 29. Regarding the hard boundary between wild and domestic pigs, see Descola (2013:382–85) on the ontological reasons for the historic failure to domesticate any of the autochthonous animals of lowland South America. 30. See Tambiah (1969:440). The only restriction among the Kantu’, which pertains to sambar deer as well as wild pigs, is to share some portion of the meat with all other households in the longhouse, in recognition of the fact that these animals are likely to have eaten the crops in everyone’s swiddens, not just the hunter’s. 31. Descola (2013:229) notes that it is “familiarization” that makes domestic animals suitable to substitute for humans in sacrifice, which is lacking with wild animals unless they are first captured and tamed. 32. This echoes ancient Vedic teachings in the subcontinent, where the most important distinction between the animals of the village and the animals of the jungle was based on the fact that the former were sacrificeable and the latter were not (B. Smith 1991:535). 33. Wyndham and Park (2018:543) point that the swiveling neck of owls contributes to their global status as the “prototypical bird as sign.” 34. Rainbows are seen as ill omens around the world (Lévi-Strauss 1969:246; James 1988:59–60). 35. A famous example of the copying and deception described by Taussig and illustrated for the Kantu’ is the substitution of a cucumber for an ox in Nuer sacrifice (Evans-Pritchard 1956; see also Shipton 2014). Less well known but even more remarkable was the “substitute king” ritual from ancient Mesopotamia. In eighth- to first-century b.c.e. Assyria, when an eclipse or other event augured ill for the king, a “disposable person” was made king for a short period, to absorb the ill fate, and then executed (Parpola 2007, 2:xxii–xxxii). 36. There is a tradition in the region of seeing actors, in theater, as magically powerful (Pigeaud 1960–1963). 37. Hornborg 2001; Haraway 2007:239; Kohn 2007:15. 38. G. Bateson (2002:116) writes, “It may even be that the essence of play lies in a partial denial of the meanings that the actions would have had in other situations.” 39. Willerslev 2004:637, 647, 630, 641. 40. See Lewis (2009) on the direct imitation of wild pig vocalizations by BaYaka hunters in the Congo.

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1. Harrisson (1960:24) suggests that the role of birds in Bornean tribal custom, belief, and art may once have been eclipsed by other forest creatures—notably a centipede and a scorpion. 2. Less common omen creatures include the beruang, Malayan sun bear (Helarctos malayanus euryspilus Horsfield); ingkat, western tarsier (Tarsius bancanus borneanus Elliot); kenawang, red-headed krait (Bungarus flaviceps Reinhardt); kijang, barking deer (Muntiacus muntjak pleiharus Kohl brugge); kuai, spiny-backed chameleon (Agamidae, possibly Bronchocela cristatella); munsang, common palm civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus sabanus Thomas); pelandok, mouse deer (Tragulus spp.); remaung, leopard (likely Neofelis diardi); rusa’, sambhar deer (Cervus unicolor brookei Hose); and ulat buluh, hairy caterpillar. Other important sources of omens are kayu rebah, a falling tree; pungo’ rebah, a falling stump; merajus, rainbow; bintang andau, the sun and stars seen together in early morning; as well as dreams (see also Gomes 1911:161; Richards 1972:79–80) and the livers of domestic pigs (chapter 1). 3. See Richards 1972:64–65. Some Kantu’ add to this list the beriyak, tailor-bird (Orthotomus spp.), ranked below and younger than the white-rumped shama; and the lang burak mwa, white-faced eagle or Brahminy kite (Haliastur indus intermedius), ranked above and older than the maroon woodpecker. See Freeman (1960:78–79), V. King (1977:67), and Metcalf (1976:110–11) on the problematic status of the Brahminy kite as an omen bird. 4. See Freeman 1960:97. 5. Phillipps 2014:188, 206, 210. 6. Richards 1972:66; Phillipps 2014:234; see also Freeman 1960:83. The rufous piculet and maroon woodpecker both make the distinctive noises characteristic of woodpeckers; while the crested jay and banded kingfisher are noted for the abundance, volume, and distinctiveness of their calls; the white-rumped shama is known for the melody of its call, today being sought after by trappers for the songbird market; and both the white-rumped shama and maroon woodpecker are also known for the number and variety of their calls; in the former case this is due to the fact that the shama is a mimic, and in the latter case it is due to this woodpecker having a distinct call when foraging, another when flying, and so on (Delacour 1947:175, 234, 347; Glenister 1951:192; Holmes 1990:50, 58; Smythies 1981:201, 233, 244, 301–2, 426; Philips 2014:192, 206, 236, 284; see also Gomes 1911:153; Harrisson 1960:61). 7. Wyndham and Park 2018:535, 545, 541, 540, 543. 8. Kohn 2013:143–44, 149. 9. Jacobs 2015:6; Kohn 2013:144. 10. Oxford English Dictionary 1999. Some scholars argue that Greco-Roman augury has yet more ancient origins, in Mesopotamian cultures of the preceding millennium (D. Smith 2013). 11. Homer 1924, 12:200–207; see also Boraston 1911; Collins 2002. 12. E.g., Hutchinson 1974; see also Olina 2018. 13. Swann 1913. See also Skaife (2018) on the modern court-appointed “raven master” at the Tower of London, legend holding that if the ravens ever depart, the kingdom will fall.

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14. See Firth 1966. 15. See Jacobs (2016) on the reliance of colonial “birders” on vernacular knowledge in developing the ornithology of South Africa. 16. Gell (1995), in another innovative study from New Guinea, argues that its dense rainforests have produced an unusual relationship between speech sound and semantic meaning. Boraston (1911), in his study of the birds in Homer, noted how Homer employed in his texts the characteristic cries and calls of different species of birds. 17. Jacobs 2015; Isack and Reyer 1989; Wood et al. 2014. 18. Peek 1991. 19. Du Bois 2018:58. 20. Flad 2008; Zeitlyn 2012; Boyer 2020. 21. E.g., Low 1848; Hose and McDougall 1902; Geddes 1956. 22. See Freeman 1970:173. 23. Kershaw and Kershaw (1998, 2006, 2007) have jointly or separately published voluminous accounts of augural rules, their variation from one tribal group to another, and scholarly disputes regarding their interpretation. 24. Gomes (1911:155) describes an archaic and perhaps related practice wherein “if a piece of gold be hidden in the ground, the hearing of the proper omen birds may be dispensed with.” 25. The augural unit is normally the household. In cases of widespread illness in the longhouse, a senior male may perform augury on behalf of the longhouse as a whole. The only other exception is when the longhouse farms for the first time a tract of primary forest, when augury may be performed on a longhouse-wide basis in a ritual called ngali tanah, “digging the earth.” Among the Iban studied by Freeman (1970:73), a senior augurer initiates the augural stage of the swidden cycle, but each household carries out its own augury. 26. See Metcalf 1976:108. 27. See Sandin 1980:104–8. 28. This is contra Freeman’s (1960:79n) claim that the Dayak simply ignore omens or merely recollect them in post hoc explanation of swidden outcomes. 29. See Hose and McDougall 1902:176. There are similar mechanisms in systems of divination in other cultures: Gold (1999:270–72) writes that the howling of jackals has the power to override astrological obstacles in Rajasthan, India. 30. Traditionally there were strong longhouse institutions for transferring rice from harvest-surplus households to harvest-deficient households (Dove 1988:161–62), principally as payment in kind for swidden labor. Following the harvest mentioned in the text, more than 40 percent of the surplus rice in the longhouse was transferred to the rice-deficit households as payment for wage labor, with much of the remaining surplus being distributed under other arrangements. 31. See Freeman 1960:82–83. 32. Gomes (1911:159) writes, “The intricacies of the subject are great. The different combinations of these voices of nature are endless, and it is difficult to know in each special case whether the spirits intend to foretell good or bad fortune. It is not an unusual

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thing to see old men, industrious and sensible in ordinary matters of life, sitting down for hours discussing probable effect on their destiny of some special combination of omens.” 33. Collins (2002:21) writes that this was also true of bird omens in the ancient Greek epics: “There is no intrinsic or ‘normal’ connection between the decision of an army to advance and the appearance of an eagle or hawk in the sky.” 34. See Vogt and Hyman (1979) on the role of the unconscious in another form of divination, water witching. 35. Sandin 1980:119–20; Dove 1985b:88. 36. Another cultural form that developed at the same time as rice cultivation, longhouse organization (Barker et al. 2017:57), also may be thought of as a social mechanism for coping with agricultural precarity. 37. Puri 2005:245–49. 38. Dove 1980. 39. McCarthy, Gillespie, and Zen 2012; Cramb and McCarthy 2016; Potter 2016. 40. Other scholars have also interpreted divination as a randomizing mechanism. O. Moore (1957) suggests that the practice of scapulimancy—divination from the cracks in heated bones—among the Naskapi of Newfoundland had the effect of randomizing and thereby improving hunting strategies, by countering subjective biases. 41. Evans-Pritchard 1937. 42. Ibid.:295, 324. Similarly, in the ritual cockfight of the Balinese, the attachment of the fighting spurs is adjusted to compensate for differences in size or strength between the two cocks (Geertz 1973:13). 43. Wilf 2013:606, 299, 606. 44. Aubert 1959:7, 8. There are contrasting cases, however, in which political considerations have led to the development of systems of divination that minimize random outcomes and maximize desired ones. Thus, Flad (2008) describes a system of scapulimancy in third millennium b.c.e. China in which the diviners drilled holes into the bones beforehand to facilitate and control the pattern of cracking. 45. Wilf (2013) writes about the value of contingency in jazz music (see also Zimmerer 2016 on agriculture), but it has also been demonstrated in other venues, including submarine warfare—based on random number tables—and, more commonly, investment strategies—based on dollar-cost averaging (Malkiel 1990). 46. In addition to studying contingency, anthropologists are now studying “accident” as well (Peek 1991; Goldman 1993; Winkelman and Peel 2004). 47. Stone 2011:37, 42, 44. 48. This is explicitly articulated in southern India. Pandian (2009:166) writes, “Cultivators in the Cumbum valley routinely describe agriculture as a game of chance: yielding as unpredictably as a lottery ticket, a dice game, or a round of cards.”

Chapter 3. A Non-Western Panopticon 1. Horne 1974:361; Monier-Williams 1899:775. 2. Tambiah 1977:69. 3. Oxford English Dictionary 1999.

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4. E.g., Pigeaud 1960–1963, 3:9–15; Robson 2003; Wessing 2003. 5. Wheatley 1971; Tambiah 1977:72. 6. Behrend 1989:173, 174. 7. See Thongchai 1994. 8. See Bosker (2013) for analogous examples from China, whereby construction of replicas of distant places or things in the imperial center was thought to extend imperial dominance over them. 9. Tambiah 1977:74. See also Behrend 1989:181–82; B. Anderson 1990:35–36; Beatty 2012:184. 10. Pigeaud 1960–1963, 3:21. 11. Tambiah 1977; B. Anderson 1990. 12. E.g., Triantafillou and Nielsen 2001; Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Hanson 2007. 13. A. Gupta 1998; Sivaramakrishnan 1999; Agrawal 2005; Bryant 2002; Ghosh 2006; Li 2007a. See also Mitchell’s (2002) application of Foucault’s idea of discursive power to the Egyptian economy, and D. Moore’s (2005) non-Eurocentric reading of Foucault in modern Tanzania. 14. See Mathews’s (2011) argument that Foucaultian theory does not do justice to internal conflicts within the Mexican state in its relations with forest villages. 15. See Brigg 2002:422. See Siegel (2006) for an example of newly political postSuharto work. 16. Brown et al. 2017. 17. Wessing 2003:209. 18. A. Christie 1978:145. See Bigeon (1982) on the court’s ritual offerings to the South Sea. 19. Sèh Jumadil Kubra, one of the volcanic spirits most often mentioned by villagers on the slopes of Merapi, is also a key figure in the history and myth of the Islamicization of the island. Bruinessen (1994:318) argues that the name is a corruption of Najmuddin al-Kubra, a thirteenth-century Persian-speaking Central Asian mystic, who founded Kubrawiyya, a Sufi order that was influential in the early Islamicization of Java. Quite aside from his association with the spirit palace in the crater, thus, Sèh Jumadil Kubra is widely venerated as the oldest of the Javanese Muslim saints, who is thought to have lived as a hermit on Merapi and died there, with his putative grave a site of pilgrimage. 20. See Mohr 1944; Schrieke 1957: inset map; Geertz 1963:43, map 3. In the modern era, B. Anderson (1998:31) sees a shift from “a natural vertical universe arranged hierarchically from the Deity, or deities, down through kings, aristocrats, and peasants, to fauna and flora and the landscapes in which they were embedded,” to a “horizontal universe of visible and invisible beings from which volcanoes, demons, water buffalo, and divinities had vanished.” 21. Geertz 1980; see also Lansing 1991, 2006. 22. The dualism of culturally and politically distinct yet intertwined uplands and lowlands—the former beyond the control of the lowland state and the traditional source of threats to the state—broadly characterized historic Southeast Asian politics, culture, and religion—see chapter 5.

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23. See Pigeaud 1960–1963, 4: plan II. 24. Woodward (2011:236) disputes this analysis of the Yogyakarta palace, writing that “the Javanese kraton is not a replica of a cosmic mountain; nor is it arranged as a mandala or set of concentric circles. . . . The cosmic structure depicted in the Yogyakarta kraton is that of a Javanese variant of Islamic mysticism.” 25. Geertz 1960:23; Santoso 1979; see also Carpenter 1987. 26. See Bruinessen 1994; Schlehe 1996:396–97. 27. See Triyoga 1991. 28. Schlehe 2008:284. 29. Suara Merdeka 1994b. More recently, another Javanese spiritual expert explained this macro-micro link by saying that the rage of people treated unjustly is absorbed and expressed by nature in perturbations like Merapi’s eruptions (Schlehe 2008:292). 30. B. Anderson 1972; Adas 1979; Keeler 1988; Harwell 2000. As a newspaper article noted in the wake of the 1994 eruption, natural disasters as well as illness, and social unrest are all messages from God (Suara Merdeka 1994b). 31. Decker and Decker 1997; but see Coedès 1968:128. 32. Moertono 1981:74. 33. Other examples of volcanic eruptions occurring at key moments in Javanese dynastic politics are cited in Thomas Raffles’s (2010) compilation of court histories. 34. See Boer and Sanders (2002) on the far-reaching impacts of volcanic eruptions, and Blong (1982) on the relationship between natural disaster and the waxing and waning of local societies, focusing on the Enga of Papua New Guinea. 35. Schlehe 2008. 36. Chester 1993:292. 37. Note that “inactive” is not even listed as a possibility for Merapi. 38. Suara Merdeka 1994a. 39. See Keeler’s (1988:100) analysis of government embrace of the total solar eclipse in Java in 1983: “By means of language, the government embraced the eclipse, or attempted to embrace it, within its national project, and to make of it not a reflection upon the government, but yet another of that authority’s many expressions.” 40. Laksono (1988) argues that mortality rates on Merapi, the volcanic hazards notwithstanding, compare favorably with rates in the government’s often unhealthy transmigration sites. 41. See Wood’s (2008:42, 51) analysis of why volcanic hazard was anathema to colonial British rule, writing of the catastrophic eruption of Tambora volcano on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa in 1815: In The History of Java, Raffles relegates his narrative of Tambora to a lengthy footnote, as a natural curiosity that “may not be uninteresting” to his readers. . . . To have explored in detail the regional impact of ecological destruction, crop failure, famine, disease, death, homelessness, and enslavement within the British colonial domain that were a direct consequence of Tambora would have been to concede the vulnerability of his tropico-georgic paradise to volcanic disaster, and of the Southeast Asian economy to drastic short-term climate change.

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For [Thomas] Raffles in 1815, the Tambora event disrupted his representation of Southeast Asian climate as a monsoonal translation of benign, georgic stability. Java’s rich volcanic soil is celebrated in the main text of his History, while volcanism and the historical fact of cataclysmic volcanic episodes reside massively in the footnotes. 42. Foucault 1995:203. 43. See Mitchell 1991 on Egypt. 44. Kaplan 1995:85, 94, 93, 89. 45. Foersch 1783: 512–13. 46. Dove and Carpenter 2005. 47. E.g., Bayly 1993. 48. Kaplan 1995:87, 92, 94. See also Sheridan’s (2016) analysis of the role played by boundary plants in panopticon-like surveillance in Tanzania and western Cameroon. 49. Pierce and Matisziw 2018. 50. Boomgaard 2003. 51. P. Carey 1981; Kartodirdjo 1984. 52. See the artistic tradition in the Australasian region of depicting the intestinal organs and skeleton of humans and animals in so-called “x-ray” fashion (Kjellgren 2014). 53. The changing color of volcanic lakes in Flores in eastern Indonesia is said to predict the future (Frömming 2005:274–75). Scarborough (1993), in a Mayan example (cited in Lansing 2006:33), says that the reflective surface of mountain reservoirs “defines the tension between this world and the next.” 54. See Wittgenstein (1972, sect. 255:33e–34e): “If someone said that he doubted the existence of his hands, kept looking at them from all sides, tried to make sure it wasn’t ‘all done by mirrors,’ etc., we should be sure that we ought to call that doubting.” 55. Dove 2008b.

Chapter 4. “Bitter Shade” 1. Oxford English Dictionary 1999. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Work on the impact of diminished ultraviolet light on human stature, among tropical forest pygmies, may support Onesicritus’s thesis that shade and stature are inversely related (O’Dea 1994). 5. Emlyn-Jones and Preddy 2013:xi. 6. Plato 2013, bk. 7:107. 7. See Chen-Morris’s (2016) book on Kepler, Measuring Shadows. 8. Casati 2003:40, 204. The difference between children and adults in their theory of shadows is reflected in J. M. Barrie’s famous play and novel Peter Pan, in which Peter can separate his shadow from himself. The continued belief that children have a special relationship with shadows is reflected in the regular publishing of books for children on this topic (e.g., Cuevas and Smith 2017; Cali and Bloch 2017; O’Hara and O’Hara 2017).

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9. See Wong (2004) on the use by Singaporean architects of a native postcolonial aesthetics of shadow as opposed to platonic volume and plane. 10. Contra Tanizaki’s monolithic characterization of the culture of the antishadow West, see Bille’s (2019) analysis of a distinctive national culture of light—and thus dark—in Denmark. 11. Bühler 1988:192. 12. Kane 1974:400. See also Gruner (1930:185) on “trees of bad temperament.” 13. Bühler 1988:149. This passage in the Laws of Manu contains a rare reference to the shadows of animals. 14. Mendelsohn and Vicziany 1998:37. 15. Champion, Seth, and Khattak 1965:111. 16. Bernier 1891:374–82; Rao 1957:269; R. Gupta 1968:85. 17. Dove 1992. 18. This discursive dismissal of farmers apparently has deep roots in officialdom in the subcontinent. Gold and Gujar (2002:205) report a 1908 British settlement officer in Rajasthan criticizing farmers because tree culture is “not an ingrained passion” among them. 19. Whereas the farmers focus on the interaction among all of the elements of the landscape, thus, the foresters are focused on just a single element, the trees (see also Spooner 1987 for a similar difference in approach to Pakistan’s rangelands). 20. See Dove 1992. 21. Among the farmers interviewed, 74 percent and 60 percent reported scattered and courtyard plantings, respectively, whereas just 10 percent and 3 percent, respectively, reported linear and block plantings. 22. Proscriptions against tree felling in such places are strictly followed (see also Gold and Gujar 1989), which has led to them being seen as examples of the country’s historic vegetative cover (Chaghtai, Rana, and Khattak 1983; and Chaghtai, Sadiq, and Shah 1984). 23. Ahmed 1975:56. 24. See Casati 2003:44. 25. As Casati (2003:44) writes, “Grab a brick and hold it over a table beneath a lamp. The brick casts a shadow. Now lay the brick on the table. Does the brick still cast a shadow on the table? Maybe not: making a shadow seems to require some space and thus excludes contact between the brick and the table.” 26. This perceived difference in the temperature of shade is likely to be due not just to less sunlight beneath the tree, but also to more humidity (see Shankarnarayan, Harsh, and Kathju 1987:81). 27. Another reason for the “hot” reputation of Prosopis may be its widely documented allelopathic and invasive character, which poses a special challenge to proximate annual crops and other trees (Robbins 2003:190; Shackleton, Le Maitre, and Richardson 2015; Pasha et al. 2015; Simon and Peterson 2019). Gold (2013:182) reports a farmer in Indian Rajasthan saying of Prosopis, “Beneath it, in its shade, no grass or crops will grow. There is poison in its shade.” 28. See Watt 1889–1896, 6, pt. 3: 410.

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29. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) 1980, 2:114; Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) 1986:64. The leaf, bark, and fruit of the neem tree all have insecticidal properties (NAS 1980, 2:40; CSIR 1986:361), because of which some believe that its shade is healthy for people (Ahmed and Grainge 1986:205). According to Watt, “a popular belief exists that a leper can be cured if he can live exposed under a neem tree for 12 years” (1889–1896, 1:218). 30. See also Stewart 1869:55; Watt 1889–1896, 1:158. 31. See Haberman 2013. A complete account of the folk system for characterizing shade taste, temperature, density, and size would contain far more detail than can be discussed here. For example, in some cases the characterization of a particular tree’s shade is further differentiated at the subspecies level: Watt reports that one variety of Indian jujube is regarded by farmers as cold, while another variety is regarded as hot and sweet (1889–1896, 6, pt. 4: 369). In addition, field data and a review of the literature both show that the characterization of the shade of particular trees can vary among farmers from different areas, due to variation in environment and perhaps other factors as well. 32. Pakistani farmers conceptualize the impact of chemical fertilizers on their crops in a similar manner: namely, such fertilizers require the coolness of irrigation or rain in order to work effectively, in the absence of which they will burn the crops (see also Kurin 1983:289–91). 33. A minority of farmers identify another aspect of trees’ impact on crops: leaf and flower litter. This impact is thought to vary according to the availability of irrigation water to prevent the crops from being burned by the hot, nutrient-laden litter. Some of the ill effects of litter may also be due to shade: Stigter (1984:211) calls litter a “natural shading mulch.” Trees said to have the worst litter are the Persian lilac and babul (see also Singh and Lal 1969; Shankarnarayan, Harsh, and Kathju 1987:81.) The Indian olive, in contrast, is said to have good litter. 34. Bhishagratna 1963; Sharma and Dash 1976; Gruner 1930; Shah 1966. 35. See Kurin’s (1983) analysis for Pakistani food crops. 36. See Stigter 1984:207. 37. See Michie 1986:238. 38. An additional benefit of pruning is the contribution that the pruned branches make to household fuel and fodder supplies, especially in the winter when fuel supplies are under the greatest pressure because of high consumption, and fodder supplies are under the greatest pressure because of a lack of sources. 39. Plato 2013:109–11. 40. Winstedt (1945:135) wrote that all Muslim rulers in the archipelago were called “The Shadow of God on Earth.” 41. Siegel 1979:28, 29–30, 30. 42. Siegel 1979:188. The sultan actually shoots a branch off a tree and uses that to cast a shadow on the prince (Siegel 1979:188), which speaks not only to the unique qualities of the sultan’s own shadow, but also the ancient symbolism of tree shade as quintessential shade. The exact text in the Hikajat is as follows (Drewes 1979:243): The [sultan] aimed at a branch of a glumpang tree, and the Béntara was hit by the shadow (of the falling branch).

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notes to pages 107 – 112 He fell headlong; then people wanted to carry him away. Hastily he was taken up and laid down on a stretcher. It could be seen on the body of the Béntara how the poison took effect, with a pitch-black hue. According to some it was a fainting-fit, but others said that he had been struck by a curse.

43. Siegel 1979:31, 189, 30–31. 44. Ibid.:189. 45. I am grateful to a Yale University Press reviewer for drawing my attention to this point. 46. Sears (1996:5) suggests that the Javanese wayang theater dates from as early as the tenth century. 47. E.g., Sears 1996; but see Keeler 1987. 48. This mimetic element is also suggested by an archaic meaning of theater, “a circular basin of water” (Oxford English Dictionary 1999), which would have been one of the earliest sources of a mirror-like reflection. 49. An American example is the early-twentieth-century character in radio, film, and print called “The Shadow,” whose famous sign-off line—“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows”—fits well with the theme running through this chapter, that shadows are revealing (Street & Smith radio program, Detective Story Hour, 1930s).

Chapter 5. Culture, Agriculture, and Politics of Rice in Java 1. Geertz 1963; Burling 1965; see also Barrau 1965a. Also see the analogous and long-dominant valley-upland landscape model in the Andes (Zimmerer and Bell 2015). 2. O’Connor 1995: 986, 988, 968. 3. Conklin 1980. This dichotomy of swidden and wet rice has been criticized for oversimplifying a more complex continuum of practices and for ignoring hybrids as well as the existence of additional subsistence systems, such as the home garden (Mahmud 1992; Padoch, Harwell, and Susanto 1998). 4. In an exceptional case, Kirch (1994: 161) maintains that in parts of historic Polynesia irrigated cultivation was less labor intensive than dryland swidden cultivation. 5. Returns to area in wet rice typically surpass those of swidden (Dove 1985a), although there are exceptions (e.g., Condominas 1980:243). 6. Burling 1965. There is an irony in this historic relegation of swidden to the uplands, since O’Connor (1995:976) argues that its origins are in the lowlands and the uplands are the historic home of wet rice. 7. Dove 1983b. 8. Carneiro 2008; Izikowitz 1951; Condominas 1977; Conklin 1975; Geertz 1963; Freeman 1970. 9. Cairns 2007, 2015; J. Scott 2009; Dove 2011. 10. Padoch et al. 2010; Mertz et al. 2013; Vliet et al. 2013. 11. Otto and Anderson 1982.

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12. Sigaut 1979; Dove 2015. 13. Myllyntaus, Hares, and Kunnas 2002; Kunnas 2005. 14. Pigeaud 1960–1963, 3:103–4. 15. State control of irrigation in neighboring Bali has been the subject of considerable debate, with Geertz (1980) suggesting that the “theatre state” of Bali did not control irrigation but rather its aesthetics, and Lansing (2006) more plausibly suggesting that the coordination of the islandwide system of irrigation and its ritual was a bottomup “emergent property” of the system. 16. For another example that challenges Wittfogel, see Kirch (1994:320–21): “The evidence from Polynesia invites us to turn the ‘hydraulic’ hypothesis on its head,” because social stratification was historically associated with dryland, not irrigated agriculture. 17. Adas 1981:223; see also Tambiah 1977; Geertz 1980:24; Kathirithamby-Wells 1995:29. 18. See Schrieke 1955:233. 19. See Onghokam 1978: 115–16, 122–23. 20. See T. Raffles 2010, 1:129. 21. Pigeaud 1960–1963, 4:300–301. 22. Moertono 1981:75; Pigeaud 1960–1963, 4:471. 23. See Boserup 1965:28, 69. The superiority of irrigated cultivation is so infrequently questioned, and returns to labor versus land so often ignored, that a comparison of actual returns to labor under different regimes of rice cultivation is rare. The exceptions are illuminating, as in Christiansen (1986:21–24), which compares systems of cultivation alongside the amount of labor needed to produce one ton of rice: Swidden agriculture: 500–1,000 hours Permanent rainfed or flooded agriculture: 1,000–1,333 hours Permanent gravity irrigation: 1,600 hours 24. Leach 1954; Kirsch 1973; Friedman 1975. 25. Swidden cultivation can serve as the basis for statelike sociopolitical formations (Dumond 1961:301–16) and has even been promoted by modern states as an instrument of rule. Shepherd and Palmer (2015) examine how, in East Timor early in the twentieth century, a destructive form of swidden cultivation of grains arose as “a centralizing, inward-looking, and state-compliant agent of subordination—less at the margins of state power and right in the grip of it.” 26. Moertono 1981:79–80, 85; Houben 1994:337. Even today in Java’s densely settled lowlands, an evil person may still be called—with no possibility of literal accuracy— wong alasan, “forest dweller.” 27. As Rambo (1980:86) has written, a society that does not live in or understand the forest can exploit it in one of three ways: first, it can utilize forest-dwelling groups as intermediaries; second, it can become a forest-dwelling group itself; and third, it can convert the forest to an environment more suited to exploitation by a nonforest people. This last alternative was the primary one adopted by Java’s historic states. 28. Pigeaud 1960–1963, 4:300. 29. Ibid., 4:455.

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30. Horne 1974:45–46. 31. The symbolic power of the forest in Javanese culture is marked in the practice of leaving a single tree standing in the village to represent the forest that once stood there (Carpenter 1987). Giambelli (1999:502) says that something similar is still practiced in Bali today: “It should be noted that in Nusa Penida not all the trees covering the area to be cleared are, in fact, cut. The rule is that at least one tree, generally the largest one close to the boundary of the clearing, must be left standing, as that is the place where the zvong gamang, memedi or other forest spirits formerly inhabiting the whole of the area will now reside.” 32. Geertz 1960:24. 33. Headley 1979:49–58. 34. Ibid.:55–57. This threatening vision of the return of the forest is not without basis. Houben (1994:337–38) notes that during the time of the Java War early in the nineteenth century, agricultural lands around Yogyakarta and Surakarta were abandoned and quickly reverted to forest. Ladurie (1974) has shown that cycles of deforestation and afforestation were an integral part of the ebb and flow of civilization over the longue durée in western Europe. 35. See Geertz’s (1980:77–82) point regarding irrigation in precolonial Bali, that similar political-ecological structures repeat at different scales, from the micro to the macro levels. 36. In other parts of the Indo-Malay region, the upland-lowland dichotomy is characterized as one between hulu and hilir, or upstream and downstream (Kathirithamby-Wells 1995). Airriess (2003:91) characterizes this as follows in the historic Malay world: “The hilir or downstream environment where the centre of political power is located, was associated with the istana, authority, court etiquette, élite culture and formal religious tradition. The hulu or upstream environment is conceived as being occupied by a subsistence agrarian village culture characterized by informal and animisticfolk customary rules guiding human relationships.” See also S. Singh (2012) on the analogous muang-pa dialectic in contemporary Laos. 37. An analogous model obtains in contemporary China. Called the “Yangtze River model,” it labels the upper reaches of the river as having “Traces of Primitive Society,” the central reaches as “Agricultural Society,” and the lower reaches as “Industrial Society/Emerging Knowledge Society” (Barabantseva 2009). 38. In Sumatra, where riverine geomorphology was more determining than in Java, Kathirithamby-Wells (1995:27) writes of the mandala kingdom: “Its optimal size, consistent with political viability was . . . synonymous with the riverine exchange system.” See also the discussion in my chapter 3 of Geertz’s (1980:21) analysis of the northsouth, mountain-plain axes of the historic Balinese kingdoms. 39. The unity of the opposites of upland and lowland, forest and civilization was reflected in the traditional practice of keeping at the lowland courts iconic representatives of the distant forests, including not only wild beasts but representatives of the autochthonous forest peoples, the Kalang, Gajah Mati, and Pinggir (Campbell 1915 1:8–9; Seltman 1987; Wieringa 1998; Lombard 1990; Tirtokoesoemo n.d.). See also Bayly (1993:7) on the tradition in the subcontinent of rulers associating with forest

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peoples, for access to their “domain of magic, hunting, asceticism and the arts of tracking and spying on animals and man.” 40. The analogous case in Bali involves ritual integration of volcano and lowlands but focuses less on the management of volcanic hazard—although that is not absent— but rather management of water (Lansing 1991). 41. Kohn 2013:164, 165. 42. Ibid.:165, 178. 43. Schrieke 1957:76–77. This simile regarding the king and the tiger is also found in the speech by Ayam Wuruk, emperor of Majapahit, in the Na¯gara-Keˇrta¯gama, canto 89, stanza 2 (Pigeaud 1960–1963, 3:105). See also the reference in my chapter 6 to this passage from the Rgveda: “He [Agni, the god of fire] eats the woods as a King eats the rich” (Griffith 1973:44). 44. Moertono 1981:22n16. Moertono draws this version of the king and tiger simile from the Serat Rama (Jasadipura 1919:43). 45. Schrieke 1957:76; Pigeaud 1960–1963, 4:305. In chapter 6, Gold (2013:179) cites contemporary villagers in Rajasthan as saying that the forest disappears when the king disappears. 46. Boomgaard 2001:161–66. 47. See the study by Shepherd and Palmer (2015) of the promotion of grain cultivation—including both rice and maize—by the colonial Portuguese authorities in East Timor early in the twentieth century. 48. The prejudice against nongrain staples like sago is regionwide, as attested to by Koonlin’s (1983:138, 139) work in Malaysia, where he characterizes the government stance toward sago as one of “neglect” and “disregard.” 49. Janowski (1988:20) argues that the development of the most recent, most intensive form of wet-rice field (baa) can only be explained in terms of prestige. 50. The commitment to rice in Java in the nineteenth century is reflected in this observation by Crawfurd (1820:346): “Such is the paramount importance and value of the rice culture, that all lands bear a value in reference to their capacity of producing this grain. This is the constant test applied to them.” The corollary to the valorization of high-labor grain production is the demonization of low-labor systems of production, even by otherwise astute observers such as Alfred Russel Wallace (2000:292, 363, 404), a near-contemporary of Crawfurd. 51. Dove 2011. 52. Ras 1968:626. Ras goes on to describe the majority of Nagara’s population as “artisans,” meaning smiths, gunsmiths, carpenters, and boatbuilders—not farmers. 53. See Frazer’s (1900, 1:182–83) citation of a colonial-era account from the Mandeling of northern Sumatra: “When he wishes to clear a piece of forest-land for cultivation it is necessary that he should come to a satisfactory understanding with the woodland spirits who live there, before he lays low their leafy dwellings. For this purpose he goes to the middle of the plot of ground, stoops down, and pretends to pick up a letter. Then unfolding a bit of paper he reads aloud an imaginary letter from the Dutch Government, in which he is strictly enjoined to set about clearing the land without delay.” In this manner, the Mandeling attempt to reconfigure this local activity at a higher hierarchical level, one where the responsibility falls on others.

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54. An analogous example of insight and resistance involves the ratu adil, “just king,” who comes down from the mountain forests to save corrupt lowland society (P. Carey 1981; Kartodirdjo 1984). The ratu adil occupies a place in society that is similar to that of shamans and traders in some respects. Outside society, usually thought of as someone who fled society, the ratu adil looks across multiple hierarchical levels and gains insight—and ultimately power—thereby. 55. See Kathirithamby-Wells 1995:39–40. 56. Kolff 1953. 57. Geertz 1963:91, 75, 79–80. 58. Pelzer 1957:155; Geertz 1963:106–11. 59. Kohn 2013:165. 60. Ibid.:164, 165. 61. Dove 2011. 62. See Sherman 1980:126. 63. Because of the polder tradition, “The Dutch officials appreciated a cultivation method that was intensive, demanded hard work, completely modified the landscape, and gave high yields per hectare”—thus the irrigated rice field (Colombijn 1998:60). 64. Geertz 1963:12–37.

Chapter 6. Historic Parting of the Wild from the Civilized in Pakistan 1. Another example of this is Ludden’s (1996:61) description of the evolution over time of the Tamil term kadu: “Over the millennia separating classical and modern times, kadu moved from the exterior [meaning ‘burning ground’] into the periphery [‘untamed forest’], and then into the centre of Tamil agrarian life [‘dry farmland’].” 2. King 2017; Peluso and Vandergeest 2011:275; Beliso-De Jesús 2019. 3. H. Raffles 2004:235, 235. 4. Urdu-English Dictionary 1977:265. 5. Monier-Williams 1899:417. 6. Harrison (1992:x) claims that the history of the meaning of “forests” in the Western world is replete with similar paradoxes. He writes, “If forests appear in our religions as places of profanity, they also appear as sacred. If they have typically been considered places of lawlessness, they have also provided havens for those who took up the cause of justice and fought the law’s corruption. If they evoke associations of danger and abandon in our minds, they also evoke scenes of enchantment. In other words, in the religions, mythologies, and literatures of the West, the forest appears as a place where the logic of distinction goes astray. Or where our subjective categories are confounded. Or where perceptions become promiscuous with one another, disclosing latent dimensions of time and consciousness.” 7. Zimmermann 1987:vii, ix. 8. Monier-Williams 1899:152. 9. Zimmermann 1987:39, 18, 39, 4–7, 48. The positive connotations of jangala, and its association with kingly rule, is perhaps reflected in the way that the cognate term janggala traveled with Indic culture to the East Indies and became the name for a ninth

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century Hindu Javanese kingdom, which in all Javan court chronicles precedes Pajajaran and Majapahit (T. Raffles 2010:64, 80–82). By the fourteenth century, Janggala had diminished to a state subject to Majapahit, whose ruler took from it virgins, “whoever is beautiful,” and “serving men” (Pigeaud 1960–1963, 3:20, canto 17, stanza 2.4, and 3:24, canto 18, stanza 5.3). 10. Wright (2010) regards the depiction in the Vedic texts of Aryans invading western India and driving out the barbarians as partly mythological. 11. Zimmermann 1987:44. 12. Ibid.:59. See also Schaller (1967:149): “The species [blackbuck, Antilope cervicapra] once roamed in huge herds throughout the open woodlands and cultivated tracts of India, making it one of the most conspicuous and most hunted members of the country’s fauna.” 13. Zimmermann 1987:61. 14. Analogous to the indexical role of the antelope in the Aryan jangala was the role of the American buffalo in the Native Americans’ Great Plains. 15. Schaller 1967:7; see also Allchin 1963:170–71. 16. Zimmermann 1987:18. 17. See Champion, Seth, and Khattak (1965:38, 40) on the role of grazing and fire in creating contemporary preclimaxes in the subcontinent. 18. Laris et al. 2015. 19. Tyler 1986:47. 20. Griffith 1973:44, 639. 21. See also Banerjee 1980:39; Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) 1986:156. Zimmermann (1987:44) also mentions Imperata cyclindrica as an important savanna component, which is both palatable to livestock and well suited to a fire environment. 22. Griffith 1973:45, 541. His conjecture (ibid. 45n) that this verse reflects concern to keep fire away from pasture shows how little comprehension there has been of the ecological underpinnings of Vedic beliefs. 23. Griffith 1973:639. Fire and water are the two natural forces in the subcontinent that suppress mature vegetative successions and stimulate depauperate ones with higher nutritive value to livestock. Annual floodwaters in the alluvial plains suppress mature vegetation and, when they recede, permit the growth of immature vegetation in its place. The fact that this same end is attained on dryland through the use of fire may explain the coupling of fire and flood in such suggestive verses in the Rgveda as: “Kin as a brother [Agni] to his sister floods” (Ibid.:44). 24. Ibid.:44, 639. The simile of “shaving” the earth’s vegetation with Agni’s fire is illuminated by the ritual practice throughout South Asia and Southeast Asia, in both historic and contemporary times, of shaving babies’ heads to stimulate the growth of a more luxuriant crop of hair (I am indebted to Carol Carpenter [1987] for this observation). Contemporary farmers on Merapi volcano in Central Java draw an explicit analogy between human hair and earthly grass: “Farmers regard wild grass as the hair of the earth (wulu bumi), which means that the grass always grows like human hair even though cut frequently” (Hudayana 1996:104).

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25. Zimmermann 1987:37–38, 44. 26. Gilmartin 2015. 27. See jangal in Punjabi: “A Forest, a wood, a jungle, a desert, a forest land, any uncultivated ground” (B. Singh 1983:478). 28. Gold and Gujar 2002: 242, 244. 29. This historical shift in meaning from fallow land (within the agricultural system) to wild land (outside it) is noted in Hobson-Jobson’s entry for “jungle” (Yule and Burnell 1903:470): “The native word means in strictness only waste, uncultivated ground; then such ground covered with shrubs, trees or long grass; and thence again the Anglo-Indian application is to forest, or other wild growth, rather than to the fact that it is not cultivated.” 30. Jungli kikar, “wild kikar,” which most often refers to Prosopis juliflora now growing wild throughout the arid plains of Pakistan, was initially introduced by the forest service. Thus, the meaning of jungli or jangli has more to do with the opposition of nature and culture than with the opposition of wildness and domesticity. 31. See Osterhoudt (2010) on sense versus sensibility in Malagasy agriculture versus forestry. 32. Kipling’s insights have of late partly rescued him from the disregard to which he was long condemned for his colonial-era views, as reflected in his treatment at the hands of Edward Said (1993) and Salman Rushdie (1991:80): the latter concludes an essay on Kipling by saying, “There will always be plenty in Kipling that I find difficult to forgive; but there is also enough truth in these stories to make them impossible to ignore.” 33. Kipling 1961:207, 212. 34. See Misra 1980:147. 35. The ability of the forest to return after being cleared has been documented by historians like Ladurie (1974:4), who tracks successive advances and retreats of forest in western Europe over a millennium—which he calls “the immense respiration of a social structure”—in response to the impact of warfare and epidemics on the human population (see also Bechmann 1990:292–93). This “respiration” has entered the popular imagination as the “moving” forest, as is evident in this famous scene in which Macbeth seeks prophecies from the witches, act 4, scene 1 (Shakespeare 1856): “Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be until / Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill / Shall come against him.” This prophecy relieves MacBeth because it seems so unlikely: “That will never be / Who can impress the forest, bid the tree / Unfix his earth-bound root?” And indeed, Birnam Wood never comes to Dunsinane Hill, only Macbeth’s enemies camouflaged with branches from it, which thus fulfills the prophecy in a sense. But the prophecy would be not only unlikely but witless without the popular belief that forests do sometimes move—as any farmer who leaves his or her lands fallow for too long can attest. This popular belief may be what Tolkien (1954–1956) drew on when he wrote of moving trees and forests in The Lord of the Rings. 36. Zimmermann 1987:39. 37. Ibid.:59. 38. Wharton (2008) similarly suggested that the spread of wild cattle through the subcontinent in historic times followed the opening of the forest by swidden cultivators.

notes to pages 142 – 151

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39. Sivaramakrishnan (1997) demonstrates how colonial British policy systematically separated forestry from agriculture, which may have contributed to the historic separation of the wild from the civilized. 40. Cronon 1996:84–85, 69. 41. Descola 2013:51, 63. 42. Zimmermann 1987:vii, 202, 203, 198, 98. 43. Ibid.:103–11; see also B. Smith 1991:521. 44. Gold and Gujar (2002:208) report an analogous metaphor: the last king of Sawar in Rajasthan would deter his subjects from degrading the forest by conflating it with his own body, saying, “If you cut the smallest branch of a tree it is as if you were cutting my finger.” The putative linkage is also suggested by the simultaneous ending of the kingship and the forests: as one villager tells Gold (2013:179), “Just as the ra¯ja¯maha¯ra¯ja¯ are now finished, the jungle too, is finished.”

Chapter 7. Ritual, Myth, and the Rise of “Greedy Rice” 1. Brockway 1979; Schiebinger and Swan 2007; Baber 2016. 2. Osterhoudt 2010, 2016; Nazarea 2005; Minnis 2014. 3. Kohn 2013:37, 37–38. 4. Barrau 1965b:288, 282. 5. Condominas 1986:44; D. Harris 1977:215; Spencer 1966. 6. See the analysis by Coursey and Coursey (1971:478) of the “New Yam festivals” of West Africa, and their claim that the proscription on iron tools during these festivals points to a pre–Iron Age origin for yam agriculture. 7. Dove 1985b:161. 8. Similarly, the Semai of the Malay Peninsula insist that they have “always” cultivated the new world crops maize and cassava (Dentan 1971:140). 9. Nor does taro have any importance among the Kantu’ as a source of liquor, although neighboring groups use it for this purpose. 10. Stahl 1989:181. An exception is the delicacy mpin, which is made by threshing, winnowing, soaking, husking, and then winnowing again—but not cooking—the new and tender kernels of the not-quite-ripened glutinous rice crop. 11. In Southeast Asia, bamboo containers historically filled part of the niche subsequently occupied by metal cooking containers (ibid.:183); but observation of the use of bamboo among contemporary Dayak cultivators—and also Penan hunter-gatherers— suggests that it is more suited for the cooking of meat and fish than tubers. 12. There is also a possible symbolic association between the charcoal-eating memory and the basic fact of subsistence in a swidden society: swidden farmers eat crops that are grown on—thus, that “eat”—the burnt forest in which they make their swiddens. 13. Yen 1975:162; Stahl 1989:185. 14. N.C. Scott 1956:94; Richards 1981:167–68. 15. Richards 1981:268. The posited association between graves and root-crop mounds is supported by the contemporary Iban proscription against allowing any green

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leaves to fall into a human grave before it is covered. The interment of herbaceous matter represents propagation by vegetative means; but according to the posited association between tuber mound and human grave, the corpse takes the role of this herbaceous matter—a metaphoric relationship that is confused by the accidental interment of actual herbaceous matter. Possibly related to these beliefs is the historic Polynesian practice of burying fallen enemy warriors in taro fields (Kirch 1994:277–78). 16. On Java a retort to this disparagement is tua-tua keladi, semakin tua semakin menjadi, “old taro, the older it gets, the better it gets” (Kedaulatan Rakyat 1984). 17. R. Barton (1946:5) argues that the greater uncertainty in rice cultivation in the Philippines, compared with sweet potato cultivation, explains why ritual focuses on the former. 18. Rice production compares poorly to other sorts of vegetative production as well. For example, Strickland (1986:131) claims that sago production in Borneo is twoto-four times as energy efficient as rice cultivation. 19. Regarding the ruthlessness of grain versus root crops, Descola (2013:28) observes that “The cultivation of cuttings differs from that of cereals in that each plant requires personal attention and is therefore invested with a manifest individuality.” Within cereal cultivation, a similar distinction is made between reaping panicle-bypanicle with a finger knife, as was traditional in Borneo and throughout Southeast Asia (Dove 1980), versus harvesting en masse with a sickle or scythe—which even in Europe became the symbol for death, the “grim reaper.” 20. Cultural recognition of the human cost of rice agriculture is in keeping with Coursey’s (1978:139–40) thesis that the Neolithic revolution in which grain crops were domesticated was experienced as a traumatic break with the past. 21. D. Harris 1972:188, 1973:403. 22. Sauer (1952:89), writing about the nutrient demands of early cultivation, cites the biblical story of Isaac the cultivator and Esau the hunter. This story repeats the essential structure of the myth of Pulang Gana, in that it is Esau’s failed search for game that leads to his acquiring grain from Isaac. 23. Rutter 1929; Harrisson 1964; H. Barton 2012; Ormeling 1957; Terra 1958; Spencer 1966. Exploitation of wild sago greatly predates any crop cultivation: there is evidence in Niah Cave in what is today Sarawak, East Malaysia, of sago exploitation ca. 40,000 b.p. (H. Barton 2012; Barton and Paz 2007). 24. See Burkill 1951; Barrau 1965a; Harlan 1992:207. 25. Wolff 1994; see also Osmond 1998:127. 26. Barker, Hunt, and Carlos 2011:70; Barker et al. 2017:57. 27. The curse was in retaliation for killing one of the Pleiades. The disappearance from view of one of the Pleiades, in a possible supernova toward the end of the second millennium b.c.e., is suggested in mythology all over the world. 28. See Visser (1989:35) on the Toraja: “According to informants, millet and rice were planted together in the beginning of the twentieth century, and even today, one can occasionally see such mixed planting.” 29. Schneider (1995:22) reports finding Job’s tears planted along the boundaries of most rice swiddens in Southwest Sumatra. Barrau (1965b:292n2) reported the cultivation of Job’s tears in New Guinea as food, a source of ash-salt, and ornament.

notes to pages 155 – 157

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30. See Arora 1977:362–64; Sather 1977:167n13; Watt 1889–1896, 2:495. 31. The hunter-gatherer Semai of the Malay Peninsula, who cultivate and use Job’s tears today only for ornamental purposes, formerly used it in their thunder squall ritual and remember it from before that as the ancestor of their crops (Dentan 1991:426). 32. Condominas 1972:50; Dentan 1991:426. 33. The fact that Job’s tears, millet, and rice all prefer the same type of planting environment (Spencer 1966:35) may exacerbate this perceived tension among them; although Cramb (1985:40) reports a variant belief among some Iban that the archaic grains do not threaten but protect the rice. 34. Less common are beliefs regarding conflict between rice and tubers. Ochse (1980:56) reports a traditional Javanese belief that planting tubers and rice together in the same field will cause root rot in the rice. 35. Descola (2013:10) sees this as the application of human principles of social relations to nonhumans: “The use of social categories to define relations of proximity, symbiosis, or competition between natural species is particularly interesting here in that it largely extends to include the plant kingdom. Thus, big trees maintain a hostile relationship: they provoke one another in fratricidal duels to see which will be the first to give way. Hostile relations likewise prevail between bitter manioc and sweet manioc, with the former seeking to contaminate the latter with its toxicity. Palm trees, on the other hand, maintain more pacific relations of an avuncular or cousinhood type, depending on the degree of resemblance between the species.” Recent research suggests that plants not only compete with one another but also share, trade, and exchange (Klein, Siegwolf, and Körner 2016). 36. M. Hall 2011:7–8. 37. Elsewhere in the archipelago, maize cultivation is sufficiently ancient to have become ritualized. Verheijen (1984:20) writes of Flores, “We may assume that maize was already common in Manggarai in the first half of the 17th century, because in Rumphius’ time it was known everywhere in the archipelago. Forty years ago, however, nobody in Manggarai was conscious of its introduction. Maize together with rice figured in the myths of origin as locally created in far-off days. It also had its own place in agricultural rites.” 38. Skeat and Blagden 1960, 1:11, 341, 343. 39. Blust 1984:232; Wolff 1994:514–17. García-Granero et al. (2016) suggest that foxtail millet was domesticated in northern China in the eighth millennium b.p. 40. Monier-Williams 1899:847; Zoetmulder 1982:733, 734. 41. Mahdi 1994:438. 42. See the analysis by Balée and Moore (1994) of historical change in plant names among the Tupí Guaraní of the Amazon, and what this tells us about their history of plant domestication. 43. Condominas 1972:53; Dentan 1968:47. 44. Burkill 1966, 1:638–39; Hutterer 1988:69; Condominas 1972:50; Dentan 1991:426–27. Hutterer (1983:182n8) suggests that uncultivated Job’s tears can be a “volunteer” in swidden fields. 45. Condominas 1972:50.

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46. Arora 1977:365; Burkill 1966, 1:629–30; Condominas 1972:48. 47. Condominas 1972:48, 54. 48. Richards 1981:159, 191, 194; Sutlive and Sutlive 1994:117, 136, 137. See also Fox (1991:250, 254–55) on the way that maize in eastern Indonesia was initially named a type of sorghum, another archaic grain. 49. In Java and the Javanese language, the non-rice cultigens are called pâlâwidji, which in earlier times was also used to refer to the “albinos and freaks” included in courtly processions on ceremonial days (Horne 1974:421; Tirtokoesoemo n.d.:viii). Thus, the non-rices are a metaphor for imperfection, and rice is a metaphor for perfection. 50. Dove 1983a. 51. Henley 2004:127; M. Smith 2006:489. 52. See Davidson’s (2016) analysis of cultural recognition and valorization of the hard work of rice growing in West Africa. 53. Freedman 2008; Dove 2011. 54. Plant contests are a common idiom: for example, the early-twentieth-century confrontation between swidden rice production and rubber tapping in Borneo was expressed among the Dayak of Borneo in a dream in which the rubber trees “eat” the spirit of the rice (Dove 2011). 55. Coursey is not correct in this claim: onions, radishes, turnips, etc. are all vegetatively propagated roots that are either native to, or of great antiquity in, western Europe. 56. Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000:112. 57. More recently Talhelm et al. (2014) have argued that in China there is an association between rice cultivation and social interdependence, on the one hand, and on the other hand wheat cultivation and social independence, which reverses the role of wheat in the earlier debate over potatoes in Europe. 58. See also Ries (2009) on the material importance and symbolic marginality of the potato in post-Soviet Russia. 59. Coursey 1978:136, 138, 134. 60. Khoury et al. 2014. 61. Many scholars have embraced the rhizomatic model: Kohn (2013:140) writes, “I believe that a relational model, with the rhizome rather than the tree as its core image, better conveys the sense that so-called indigenous people have of themselves and of their place in the world.” 62. E.g., Velásquez-Runk 2009; Kirksey 2012. 63. Ferguson 1990. 64. J. Scott 1998. 65. Besky and Padwe 2016. 66. Kohn 2013:24.

Chapter 8. Weedy Signs of Intent and Error 1. See also Gan, Tsing, and Sullivan 2018. 2. Porteus 2002; Deakin 2007.

notes to pages 167 – 177

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3. See Pietsch (2012) on the dominance of treelike diagrams in the study of the evolutionary relationships over the past half millennium. 4. Rojas-Briales 2015. 5. Baxter 1995:6. 6. McWilliam 2000. 7. Echols and Shadily 1992:468. 8. See Wegner (2017) for a detailed exegesis of the semantic domain of “weed” in Queensland, Australia. 9. Dove 1985b:161, 167. 10. Conklin 1954; Berlin, Breedlove, and Raven 1974. 11. Tsing 1999; Lowe 2006; Mukharji 2014. 12. Pigeaud 1960–1963, 4:160. 13. Whitmore 1975:206. 14. Bartlett 1955–1961, 1:72, 251–52, 415. 15. Work in swiddens is also onerous but it yields relatively high returns to labor; it is the lower returns to labor in more intensive permanent-field systems of agriculture, like that of the transmigrants, that elicit the takut kerja, “afraid of the work,” comment. 16. E.g., McWilliam 2000:459. See also the study of fire in savanna environments in Sumba and Flores by Russell-Smith et al. (2007), focusing on the breakdown in “structured” burning regimes due to local and national politics. 17. Jayne 1910. 18. D. Hall 1981. 19. Marsden 1966:406. 20. Bartlett 1956:701; Bartlett 1955–1961, 2:191–92. 21. The Gouverenements Besluit, “Government Decree,” of 1890 created reserves above four thousand feet in Central/Eastern Java, and five thousand feet in Western Java, where all tree felling was prohibited (Boomgaard 1988; see also Smiet 1990). 22. See Bartlett’s (1955–1961, 2:721) description of an identical system of grass cutting on the adjacent volcano, Mount Merbabu. 23. A subsequent eruption in 2010 triggered another shift in the village economy, with a substantial amount of the labor in livestock husbandry being reallocated to mining of sand for use in both domestic and international construction. 24. Park managers in the Ujung Kulon nature reserve in southeastern Java found that they had to cut back invading ligneous and herbaceous growth every four months in order to preserve pure stands of Imperata as browse for wild cattle, Bos sondaicus (Setyodiwiryo 1959:43). 25. Horses were largely owned by, and were thus a marker of, the aristocracy in historic Java. 26. Pigeaud 1960–1963, 4:455–57. 27. Bartlett 1955–1961, 1:424. 28. Pigeaud 1960–1963, 4:456. 29. Hadiwidjojo 1956. See also S. Gupta’s (1971:60) account from the subcontinent: when Buddha was born, his mother deposited him in a clump of Munja ghas

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(Imperata), as a result of which the plant became sacred and was used to make the sacred thread of the Brahmanas. 30. Carpenter 1987. 31. Hadiwidjojo 1956:6. 32. See T. Raffles’s (2010, 1:330) report from the early nineteenth century on the use of Imperata among the Tenggerese—a remnantal Hindu population in East Java— to bless a mother and her firstborn child; see also Rifai and Widjaja (1979) on the prominence of Imperata in Hindu ritual in contemporary Bali. 33. Kedaulatan Rakyat 1985. Woodward (2011:245) reports that the Yogyakarta sultan traditionally kept deer, for hunting, at the village of Krapyak, located some seven kilometers to the south of the kraton, “palace.” 34. Setyodiwiryo 1959. 35. The villagers on Merapi say that during the time of the wali sanga, the legendary nine apostles who introduced Islam to Java, a deer was killed and its gajih, “fat,” was buried in the forest; and from the buried fat emerged the first laron, “termites” (family Termitidae). These termites nest in open ground, especially that covered by Imperata, on Merapi’s slopes (Dammerman 1929:26). The termites cultivate a symbiotic fungus, which looks like the roots of Imperata. Thus it appears as if the termites are farming Imperata, and indeed the villagers believe that this was the origin of the first Imperata plants (Dammerman 1929:25, 26; L. Kalshoven 1981:78). 36. Villagers often employ delayed triggers in burning the grasslands: a common one involves tying a packet of matches to a burning cigarette, placing it in the grasslands, and then hastening away. This allows the burner to be far away from the grassland by the time it actually catches fire and, if the site is later inspected by forestry officers, it suggests that the fire was not intentional but was due simply to the carelessness of a village smoker. 37. Soewardi and Sastradipradja 1980:165. 38. The regional economic crisis in the late 1990s triggered a surge in the market prices of livestock products, however, which made it worth the villagers’ while to start growing some improved grasses. 39. If the Imperata is not sprayed or overgrazed or overtilled, however, it can prevail against these prostrate weeds, which is cited by transmigrants as one of its advantages (Suryanata 1985:53–54). 40. Many observers have reported successful tilling of Imperata grasslands by hoe or plough (Ormeling 1957; Clarke 1966; Sherman 1980). 41. Holm et al. 1977:64, 69. Some natives believed that the colonial Europeans valued Imperata for cattle fodder: at the end of the nineteenth century in North Borneo, the native term for Imperata was rumput Blanda, “European grass,” in the belief that Europeans had introduced it to feed their cattle (Roth 1980, 1:405). 42. Burkill 1966:992; Meulen 1982. 43. McWilliam 2000; see also J. Gupta 1949. 44. Holm et al. 1977:214. 45. Eussen and Wirjahardja 1973:15. 46. See also Nakamura and Nemoto 1993.

notes to pages 182 – 189

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47. See Holm et al. 1977:64; Sherman 1980:132; and Suryanata 1985:54. 48. See Potter 1996; Dove and Kammen 2015. 49. See Beek and Banga (1992:71) on an analogous spatial pattern among the Dogon of Mali in West Africa: “The farther into the bush, the less work will be needed to change the life of the bush into a living for men.” 50. See Boserup 1965. 51. Chromolaena has been called “Japan grass” in parts of the People’s Republic of China in the belief, similar to that of the Banjarese, that it was introduced by the Japanese during World War II (Pei Sheng-ji, personal communication). In northeast Cambodia Chromolaena is called “airplane weed” in the belief that it was dropped by American bombers during the Vietnam War (Padwe 2020). 52. Baxter 1995:7. 53. Jong Boers 1995. 54. Holm et al. 1977:214; Baxter 1995:8; Odeyemi, Afolami, and Adigun 2013:80. Whereas farmers on Sumbawa value Chromolaena for its ability to compete with Imperata, McWilliam (2000:458–59) cites a group on the island of Timor who—like the villagers on Merapi volcano and the transmigrants in South Sumatra—value Imperata and do not appreciate Chromolaena’s ability to shade it out. 55. Hubert de Foresta makes a similar argument for Africa: the mid-twentiethcentury spread of Chromolaena through Africa can be tracked by its being named after successive leaders who came to power in the 1960s and 1970s (cited in Baxter 1995:7). 56. Chromolaena appeared two decades earlier in the Indonesian island of Flores, at the time of independence, and so was named appropriately. As Verheijen (1984:5–7) writes, of Eupatorium cannabinum and Chromolaena odorata, respectively, “The sudden appearance of these plants, one high in the mountains and the other in lower regions, precisely in the eventful time of national reconstruction after Indonesia’s fight for freedom, is well reflected in most of their names.” These included: merdeka, “freedom”; sinsus, “census,” after the first national census in 1953; oka-dé, or OKD for Organisasi Kemaman Desa, a citizen guard formed in 1958–1959; Ganéfo, for Games of New Emerging Forces held by the Third World Bloc in Indonesia in 1963; and even rokét, “rocket,” referring to the contrails of jets, which first began to be seen in the skies over the region at about this time. 57. There are exceptions to this official antipathy toward Chromolaena: McWilliam (2000:462) reports that in Timor, the local government stance toward Chromolaena “ranges from ambivalence to a positive acceptance or endorsement of the expansion of the weed,” especially in the Forest Department. 58. D. Hall 1981. 59. There were exceptions to this rule: the historic maritime trade in pepper, for example, greatly affected the land-use practices of the pepper kingdoms of Jambi and Palembang in the interior of Sumatra (Andaya 1993). 60. The colonial Dutch regime and local Bimanese Sultanate had some impact on land use in Sumbawa, but it was locally limited, especially in the desolate peninsula where Tambora volcano sits. 61. Boserup 1965.

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62. Baxter (1995:7) cites Hubert de Foresta’s review of the global scientific literature on Chromolaena: “between 1972 and 1990, 146 articles were devoted to chemical agents used to defeat the shrub.” 63. Li 2007b.

Epilogue 1. Lévi-Strauss 1983:329, 330. Sometimes the shoe was on the other foot: when the Norse settlers of Greenland first encountered the native Inuit, they noted that the “skraelings” did not bleed when wounded (McGovern 2014:139). 2. Viveiros de Castro 1998:475, 476. 3. Ramos 2012:486, 487, 489. 4. Uexküll 2010:191, 158, 190. 5. See also Willerslev 2007; P. Kalshoven 2015. 6. Taussig 1993:122–23, 42–43. 7. See Kohn 2013:24: “The Runa are both of and alienated from the spirit world, and survival requires cultivating ways to allow something of one’s future self—living tenuously in the spirit realm of the forest masters—to look back on and call out to that more mundane part of oneself that might then hopefully respond.” 8. Willerslev 2004:629. 9. See also Sperber 1975. 10. Ingold 2010:514.

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Credits

Earlier analyses of some of the material in this volume were published by Michael R. Dove in the following places: 1985. “The agroecological mythology of the Javanese, and the political-economy of Indonesia.” Indonesia 39:1–36. 1986. “The practical reason of weeds in Indonesia: Peasant vs. state views of Imperata and Chromolaena.” Human Ecology 14 (2): 163–90. 1992. “Foresters’ beliefs about farmers: A priority for social science research in social forestry.” Agroforestry Systems 17:13–41. 1992. “The dialectical history of ‘jungle’ in Pakistan: An examination of the relationship between nature and culture.” Journal of Anthropological Research 48 (3): 231–53. 1993. “Uncertainty, humility and adaptation to the tropical forest: The agricultural augury of the Kantu’.” Ethnology 32 (2): 145–67. 1996. “Process versus product in Kantu’ augury: A traditional knowledge system’s solution to the problem of knowing.” In Redefining Nature: Ecology, Culture, Domestication, edited by R. F. Ellen and K. Fukui, 557–96. Oxford: Berg Publishers. 1999. “The agronomy of memory and the memory of agronomy: Ritual conservation of archaic cultigens in contemporary farming systems.” In Ethnoecology: Situated Knowledge/Located Lives, edited by V. Nazarea, 45–70. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. 2004. “Anthropogenic grasslands in Southeast Asia: Sociology of knowledge and implications for agroforestry.” Agroforestry Systems 61:423–35. 2005. “Knowledge and power in Pakistani forestry: The politics of everyday knowledge.” In Political Ecology Across Spaces, Scales, and Social Groups, edited by Susan Paulson and Lisa Gezon, 217–38. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

280

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2008. “Perception of volcanic eruption as agent of change on Merapi volcano, Central Java.” Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research 172:329–37. 2010. “The panoptic gaze in a non-Western setting: Self-surveillance on Merapi volcano, Central Java.” Religion 40:121–27. 2019. “Plants, politics, and the imagination over the past 500 years in the IndoMalay region.” Current Anthropology 60 (S20): S309–20.

Index

abduction, logical, 16–17. See also Bateson; Peirce; syllogism “absent Orient,” 76 Adas, Michael, 82, 90, 115 Adigun, Joseph A., 181 Afolami, Steve O., 181 African Americans, 21–22 Agamben, Giorgio, 6–7, 22, 85 agency: human, 114–15, 140–41, 190–92, 194; of plants, 14, 129–30, 155, 160 Agni (Javanese deity of fire), 118, 135–36 agriculture: agrarian history, 29–30; agricultural intensification, 113–19, 174, 186–87; agro-cultural politics, 119–25; farming-forestry interface, 99; intercropping, 126–27; permanent-field agriculture, 67, 111, 113, 117–18, 175, 184, 187–88, 223n23, 233n15; mythology, 151–52; separation from forestry, 229n39. See also cultigens; irrigation; rice; swidden agriculture Agung volcano (Bali), 83 Airriess, C. A., 224n36 Al-Biruni, The Exhaustive Treatise on Shadows, 105 Albuquerque, Don Alfonso de, 174 Alekseyev, Anatoly, 43 alterity, 38–39 Amazonian societies, 11, 18–20, 24–25, 30, 42–43, 119–21, 127, 132, 211n12, 231n42 Amungkurat (Mataram king), 82 Anderson, Benedict R. O’G., 114, 217n20

animals: “animal turn,” xii, 2, 11–13; “becoming the animal,” 23; husbandry, 175–76; mockery of, proscriptions against, 17, 47–48; rights of, 11; studies of, 34–38; suffering in, 9–11 animism, 18–19 Anishinaabe (Native American people), 169 antelope, 144–45; Indian (Antilope cervicapra), 135, 141–42, 144–45, 197, 227nn12 and 14 anthropogenic disturbance, and grassland formation, 172 anthropology: ecological, 35; and Enlightenment project, 5 anupa (wet forest), 29, 131, 134; jangala/anupa dichotomy, 134, 139–41, 194–95 Apache (Native American people), 22 Appadurai, Arjun, 133, 144, 165 archaeological evidence, 29, 55, 88, 149, 153–54 Ardrey, Robert, 35 Aristotle, 6, 14 Arya people, 134–37, 141–44, 194–95, 197, 227n10 Ārya¯varta, 134 Atjeh (N Sumatra), 106–7 augury, 38; birds and, 26–27, 50–72; environmental variables and, 60–65; household as unit of, 57–59, 215n25; interpretation in, 57–59, 62–65, 203–5; and subsistence risk, 65–70. See also birds; divination; kempang tree; omens

282

index

Avicenna, 104 Ayurveda, 104, 134 Babad Tanah Jawi, 81–82, 118 babul (Acadia nilotica), 101, 221n33 Bali, 4, 75, 80, 83, 154, 175, 223n15, 224nn31 and 35, 225n40, 234n32 Bananas (Musa spp.), 149, 153 banded kingfisher (memuas; Lacedo melanops), 44, 51 Banjarese people, 124–25, 170, 188–89 banyan (Ficus bengalensis), 99 “barbering” metaphor, 136, 176–77, 227n24 Barker, Graeme, 124, 153 barking deer (kijang; Cervulus muntjac), 44 Barrau, Jacques, 148 Barrie, J. M., Peter Pan, 219n8 Barton, Huw, 153–54, 158–59 Barton, R., 230n17 Basso, Keith, 22, 47 Bateson, Gregory, ix–x, 3–5, 131, 164, 192, 199, 201, 208n15, 209n52; on play, 47, 213n38; and syllogism in grass, 16–17, 192; on watching his cat, 8–9 bats, 12 Batumarta (transmigration site; S Sumatra), 179–81 Baudrillard, Jean, 208n23 Baxter, Joan, 168, 185–86, 189, 236n62 bears, 210n69 Beas (river), 134 beaver, 10 bebali’ (transformation), 44–48 bees, 10 begela’ (offering ceremony), 67 Behrend, Timothy, 74, 80 Bellwood, Peter, 154 Benjamin, Walter, 23–24, 73–74, 105, 108, 196 Bentham, Jeremy, 10–11, 77–79, 85–86 Bermuda grass (Cynodon dactylon), 136 Bessire, Lucas, 19–20 Bimanese people (Sumbawa), 170, 184–85, 188–89 Bima Sultanate (Sumbawa), 184, 235n60 bioindicators, 53–54 biopolitics, 160, 210n66 Bird-David, Nurit, 15 birds, 54–55, 214n1; augury with, 26–27, 50–72; calls of, 51, 62, 214n6; mutualistic relationships, between people and birds, 54; omen birds, 44, 51–52, 57–58, 64–65, 197, 203–5, 214n3. See also augury; banded kingfisher; crested jay; Diard’s trogon;

divination; maroon woodpecker; owl; rufous piculet; scarlet-rumped trogon; tailor bird; white-faced eagle; whiterumped shama black pepper (Piper nigrum) cultivation, 37; trade, 125–26, 235n59 Bloch, Maurice, 25–26 block planting, of exotic tree species, 98, 220n21 Boeke, Julius H., 126 Bogoras, Waldemar, 95 Bond, David, 19–20 Bontoc peoples (Philippines), 150 Boomgaard, Peter, 156, 160–61 Boraston, J. MacLair, 215n16 Borges, Jorge Luis, fictional taxonomy of, 35–36, 144 Borneo, 26, 36–38; agricultural history, 148–54, 230n19, 234n41; and bird augury, 50–72; and human-animal relations, xi, 1–2, 17, 32–51, 212n18; and rice cultivation, 123, 154, 158, 230n18; and rubber, 127, 232n54. See also Kalimantan Boserup, Ester, 114 botanical gardens, colonial, 146 bread, European valorization of, 162 Browning, Robert, Paracelsus, 93 Bruinessen, M. van, 217n19 Buddha, 233n29 buffalo, water, 121–22 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc de, 7 Bui Nasi (Kantu’ “evil rice spirit”), 151–52 Bulmer, Ralph, 54 Burkill, I. H., 36, 136 Burnell, A. C., 87 burning, agricultural, 135–36, 172, 177–78, 184, 187, 227n23, 234n36 Cambodia (Kampuchea), 95, 235n51 Carlos, Jane, 153 Carneiro da Cunha, Manuela, 119–20 Cartesian divide, 13, 19, 143–44; machine analogy, 9. See also Descartes Casati, Roberto, 94–95, 101, 106, 220n25 cassava (Manihot esculenta), 149–50; cassava pigs, 42 cat, domestic, 7–9 center and periphery, in mandala concept, 74–76, 92 Central Bureau of Statistics (Indonesia), 123 Chalmers, David J., 201 chameleon, spiny-backed (kuai; Agamidae), 44

index charcoal, as mythical food, 150–51, 229n12 chemical fertilizers, use of, 221n32 Chenab (river), 134 chickens, as sacrificial animals, 212nn20–21 children: Javanese transmigrant, 180; special relationship with shadows, 95, 219n8 chili pepper (Capsicum spp.), 102 China, 57, 125, 217n8, 231n39, 232n57, 235n51; and divination, 55, 216n44; Yangtze River model, 224n37 Chinese, ethnic, in Borneo, 66 Christie, Anthony, 118–19 Christie, Jan W., 117, 119 Chromolaena odorata, 30, 166–70, 181–90, 235nn51, 54, and 57 Chukchee people (Siberia), 95 civilized/uncivilized dichotomy, 28, 113, 138–40, 146, 195 classification, folk and scientific taxonomies, 169–70 Clements, Frederic, 167 climax vegetation, 167 Cohn, Bernard S., 77 Collins, Derek, 216n33 Colombijn, Freek, 129 colonialism, 77, 86–87, 125–29, 174–75, 188; colonial records, and crop politics, 160–64. See also Dutch colonial rule Comaroff, Jean, 166 Comaroff, L., 166 Condominas, Georges, 150, 156 Conklin, Harold C., 63–64, 148 consciousness: human, x, 3, 6, 201, 208n14; mind, distinguished from, 3; nonhuman, 11–12; self-comprehension, 208n15; self-knowledge, 6–7; self/other dichotomy, 195–98; self-surveillance, 77 conservation policy, 167 “constitutive absence,” 147 contingency, 27, 50–72, 157–60, 164, 194, 216nn45–46 cooking technologies, 150–51, 229n11 cosmology, Javanese, 79–85, 118–19. See also macrocosm; mandala; microcosm Coursey, D. G., 158, 161–63, 230n20 Crawfurd, John, 116, 124, 128–29, 225n50 crested jay (bejampong; Platylophus galericulatus), 44, 51 Cronon, William, 29, 142 crops: export, 69, 126, 129, 174; impact of shade on, 102–3; politics of, Dayaks and, 160–64. See also cultigens cross-cultural study, 5

283

cultigens: archaic, 146–49; archaic grains, 154–57, 231n33; colonial study of, 160–64. See also cassava; grains; maize; oil palm; pajale; pepper; potato; rice; rubber; sago; sugar cane; sweet potato; taro; tobacco; tubers; wheat cultuurstelsel (cultivation system), colonial Dutch, 126–27 “curious twist” (Bateson), ix–xi, 3–4 Dalits (India), 96 Darnton, Robert, 35 Darwin, Charles, 9–10 Day, Tony, 76, 84, 88 Dayak peoples (Borneo), 2, 26–27, 32–49, 50–72, 89–91, 148–50, 160, 163–65, 169, 195–99, 211n12, 212n20, 215n28, 229n11, 232n54. See also Iban; Kantu’ Deacon, Terrence, 147 death: shade associated with, 93–94; grave symbolism, 151, 229n15 deception, shade/shadow and, 106 deer, 177–78, 234nn33 and 35; barking, 44; mouse, 45, 48; menjangan/rusa (Cervus timorensis), 177–78; sambar (Cervus unicolor), 41, 213n30 Deleuze, Gilles, 32, 163, 167 Deli (N Sumatra), 174 Demetz, Peter, 105, 108 Denham, Tim, 153 Derrida, Jacques, 7–8, 10–11, 21 Descartes, René, 9. See also Cartesian divide Descola, Philippe, 2, 5, 18, 43, 95, 143, 160, 197, 207n3, 211n12, 213n31, 230n19, 231n35 development discourse, colonial and postcolonial, 112–13 Diard’s trogon (papau; Harpactes diardii), 44, 51 Dirks, Nicholas B., 77 disease etiology, 39 distancing, 23–24, 145, 194, 198–99, 209n58. See also perspectivism divination, 38, 54–55, 62–64, 216nn40 and 44; bird augury, 26–27, 50–72; and precarity, 65–70. See also augury; birds; contingency; hieromancy; lottery; omens; poison oracle; scapulimancy Dogon people, 235n49 domestic-wild dichotomy, 138–40, 146; undomesticated space, jangal as, 138–40 doubling, mimetic, 196–97 Douglas, Mary, 168

284

index

Du Bois, W. E. B., 21–22, 210n72 Durga (Hindu deity), 118 Durkheim, Emile, 25 Dutch colonial rule, 125–29, 161, 225n53, 235n60; dual economy thesis, 126–29 Dutton, Michael, 76 dyadic relations, and geography of rule, 80 eclipses, solar, 93, 218n39 Ecuador, 13, 20, 48, 52, 120, 147, 211n3 Edwards, Penny, 95 elephant, Asian, 97 Ellen, Roy F., 14 emergent complexity, 4–5 Enlightenment, the, 5, 9, 24–25, 209n34 Enright, Kelly, 132 equilibrium, ecological, 4 ethnobotany, 14 ethnocentricity, 193 ethnoprimatology, 23 ethnozoology, 14, 54 ethology, 34–35 Europe, swidden agriculture in, 112–13 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 15, 35, 54–55 fallowing, agricultural, 30, 67, 111–12, 127, 163, 174–75, 182–89, 228nn29 and 35 fauna-flora bias, 13–14 Fausto, Carlos, 42–43 Feld, Steven, 54 Ferguson, James, 93 field houses, Banjarese, 183 fire: sacrificial, 135–36; used in deer hunt, 178. See also burning Firth, Raymond, xi, 13–14 Flad, R. K., 216n44 flies, 20 flooding, 60–65, 227n23 Flores, 235n56 Foley, Kathy, 119 food sovereignty, 123 forest, 99, 113–19, 124, 132, 163, 167, 223n27, 224n31, 226n6, 228n35; clearing/opening of, 57, 117–18; farming-forestry interface, 99; flight to, 115, 124, 184; “forest representatives,” 224n39; forest/village divide, 136–37; “respiration” between forest and open land, 228n35; separation from agriculture, 229n39; return of, 140–42, 179, 181, 224n34. See also trees Foresta, Hubert de, 185, 235n55, 236n62 Forest Department (Java), 179 Forth, Gregory, 54, 62

Foster, Charles, 23, 200 Foucault, Michel, 5–6, 36, 55, 76–77, 86, 89, 160 Fox, James J., 148 foxtail millet (Setaria italica), 29, 36, 39, 66, 147, 149, 154–57, 231n33 Freeman, J. Derek, 56, 59–60, 65 Freud, Sigmund, 93 Galen, 104 gaze, of nonhuman other, 38–39; return gaze, 197 Geertz, Clifford, 35, 54, 80, 111, 117–18, 126 Gell, Alfred, 215n16 Gembong, 82, 84 Ghosh, Kaushik, 76 Giambelli, R. A., 224n31 Gillison, Gillian, 4 Gimi people (New Guinea), 211n82 global vision, 18, 54, 198 Gluck, Carol, 93 glutinous rice, 39, 155–56, 229n10 Gold, Ann Grodzins, 138, 215n29, 220n18, 229n44 Goldhizer, Ignaz, 106 Golkar Party (Golongan Karya, “Business Party”), 186–87 Gomes, Edwin H., 66, 215nn24 and 32 governmentality, non-Western, 76 grains: archaic, 154–57, 231n33; boiled, 150; cultivation, transition from archaic grains to rice, 154–57; valorization of, 164; tuber-to-grain transition, 149–54. See also bread; foxtail millet; Job’s tears; maize; rice gra¯ma-aranya (village-forest) divide, 136–37, 140 grass: cutting, 176–77; human affinity for, 167–68; grasslands, 172, 176–77, 182. See also Bermuda grass, Imperata cylindrica; Napier grass; Saccharum spontaneum; savanna Graves, William M., 88–89 graveyards, trees, 99 Greenland, 236n1 Griffin, Donald R., 23 Guattari, Félix, 32, 163, 167 Gujar, Bhoju Ram, 138, 220n18, 229n44 Hall, Billy, 11 Hall, Matthew, 14 Hamengkubuwono X (Yogyakarta sultan), 78 Handel, George Frideric, 93–94 Hanunóo people (Philippines), 63–64

index Haraway, Donna J., 8, 11 Harris, Marvin, 35 Harrison, Robert, 93, 167, 226n6 Harrisson, Tom, 51, 55, 62, 214n1 Haudricourt, A. G., 163 Hayden, Brian, 158–60 hazard, environmental, 90 Heine-Geldern, Robert, 74 Helliwell, Christine, 158 Helmreich, Stefan, 8, 160 Henley, David, 161 hierarchical movement, 120–22 hieromancy (liver divination), 41, 207n4, 212n18 Hikajat Pòtjoet Moehamat, 107, 221n42 Hippocrates, 104 hobo camps, as “jungle,” 131–32 Holbraad, Martin, xii, 22, 55 Homer, 22, 32, 53, 215n16 homo sacer, 85. See also Agamben Homo sapiens, use of term, 6 Hornborg, Alf, 25 horses, 177–78, 233n25 Hose, Charles, 66–67 Houben, Vincent J. H., 224n34 household, as augural unit, 57–59, 215n25 Howell, Signe, 12 humans: human-animal relations, fakery in, 200; human-animal studies, 34–36; human-animal transformation, 32–34, 45; humans and pigs, 32–49, 196, 197; mutualistic relationships, between people and birds, 54 Hunt, Chris, 153 hunting, 15, 23–24, 42, 49, 117, 120, 135, 177–78, 200, 216n40, 234n33; hunter in pig village tale (Borneo), x, 1, 32–34, 194, 198, 207n3; hunter-hunted relations, 15, 23–24, 31, 40, 48–49, 211n12; and sacrifice, 40, 43–44; spirits and, x–xi, 26, 33, 39, 43–44, 50–51, 95, 211n12, 212nn14 and 18; and tuber-to-grain transition, 152–53 Hutterer, Karl L., 118 Iban people (Borneo), 56, 151, 154–55, 157, 215n25, 231n33 Ifugao people (Philippines), 159 illness, 39. See also shamans Imperata cylindrica, 30, 166–83, 185, 187–90, 196, 227n21, 233nn24 and 29, 234nn32, 35, 39, and 41, 235n54 Indian antelope (Antilope cervicapra), 135, 141–42, 144–45, 197, 227nn12 and 14 Indian jujube (Zizyphus mauritania), 101–2 Indian olive (Olea ferruginea), 100–101, 221n33

285

Indus River valley, 134 industrial logging, 37 Ingold, Tim, 3, 12, 15, 18, 34, 163, 198, 200–201 insects, 209n37 International League of Animal Rights, 11 Inuit people, 236n1 irrigation, state-controlled (Bali), 223n15; irrigated agriculture, 4, 28, 50, 80, 102–4, 113–15, 223n23. See also sawah Isaac and Esau, biblical story of, 230n22 Islamicization, 42, 81, 91, 169, 217n19, 234n35. See also Muslims Ives, Sarah, 14, 169, 210n66 Jambi (Sumatra), 235n59 jangal, 29, 133, 138–40; undomesticated space, 138–40; jungli kikar (wild kikar), 228n30; jungli log (wild people), 139. See also jungle jangala, 29, 131, 133–42, 226n9; jangala/ anupa dichotomy, 134, 139–41, 194–95. See also savanna Janggala kingdom (Java), 227n9 Janowski, Monica, 123 Japanese, 170, 174, 180, 184, 188, 191, 235n51 Java, xi, 28–29, 36, 41, 50, 110–30, 154, 156–57, 171, 174–75, 177–78, 211n2, 217n19, 218n39, 225n50, 232n49, 233nn21, 24, and 25; Java War, 224n34 Javanese people, 28, 79, 81–83, 89–90, 122, 177, 180, 188; concept of power, 114–15; farmers, 127, 170, 172, 175–77 Jeffreys, Elaine, 77 Jensen, Erik, 55 Jhelum (river), 134 Job’s tears (Coix lacryma-jobi), 29, 36, 39, 66, 147, 149, 154–57, 230n29, 231nn31 and 33 Jones, Samantha E., 153 Jung, Carl, 93 jungle, 131–33. See also jangal kadu (Tamil term for land), 226n1 Kafka, Franz, 22–23 Kalimantan, 129, 174, 188; Southeast, 124–25; South, 62, 170, 181–82; West, 26, 36–38, 62, 149, 169. See also Borneo Kaluli people (New Guinea), 54, 212n14 Kant, Immanuel, 5, 9, 24–25 Kantu’ people (Borneo), 26, 30–49, 50–72, 146–49, 158–59, 169, 212n21, 229n9; harvest ritual, 155–56; and sacrifice, 212nn18–19, 21, and 24, 213nn30 and 35; and taro cultivation, 149–54, 229n9

286

index

Kaplan, Martha, 86–88 Kartodirdjo, Sartono, 82 Kathirithamby-Wells, J., 224n38 Kayan people (Borneo), 62 Kedu (Central Java), 177 Keeler, Ward, 82–83, 108–9, 218n39 Keesing, Roger, 3–4 Kelabit people (Borneo), 123 kempang tree (Artocarpus elasticus), augury, 62–64 Kershaw, Eva Marie and Roger, 17, 34, 42, 56, 215n23 Kerto Dimejo (Javanese volcanic spirit), 81 Khan, Abdul Hamid, 100 Kimberling, Brian, 53–54 Kinarejo (Javanese village), 83 King, Victor T., 56 Kipling, Rudyard, 140–41, 228n32 Kirch, Patrick V., 222n4, 223n16 Kirksey, S. Eben, 8 Knight, Chris, 199–200 Kockelman, Paul, 19–20 Kohn, Eduardo, 14, 48, 147, 165, 196, 236n7; and hierarchical relations, 52, 113, 119–21, 124–25; and mimetic relations, 24, 198–99; and post-human studies, 2–3, 13, 20–21, 25 Krapyak village (Java), 234n33 Krech, Shepard, 54 Kyaddondo, David, 55 labor, agricultural, 111–13, 115–16, 127, 138, 151–52, 179, 182–83, 185, 189, 215n30, 222n4, 223n23, 225n50, 233nn15 and 23 Lacan, Jacques, 10 Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roi, 224n34, 228n35 land, appropriation of, 189; management by local people versus government, 189 Lansing, J. Stephen, 4, 75–76, 223n15 lapik benih (place of the seed rice), 146–47, 164–65 Laws of Manu, 134–35, 220n13 Lawu, Mount (Java), 79 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 30, 32, 35, 193–94, 207n2, 211n8 Lewis, J. D., 199–200 Lewis-Jones, Kay E., 13 Li, Tania M., 76 liminality, 192 Linnaeus, Carl, 6–7, 113, 171; Linnaean system of classification, 170 lion, 97, 209n35 litter, leaf/flower, 100–101, 185, 221n33 livestock: fodder for, 136, 175–76, 179–80;

grazing, 135, 172–73, 175. See also Imperata cylindrica; pastoralism longhouse (Borneo), 45–46, 61, 69, 212n24, 213n30, 215nn25 and 30, 216n36 Lopes de Sequeira, Diogo, 174 Lorenz, Konrad, 34–35 lottery principle, 71–72 macrocosm, 74, 84, 92, 218n29. See also mandala Madhya Pradesh (India), 141–42 Mahdi, Waruno, 154, 157 maize (Zea mays), 149, 156–57, 175, 231n37 Majapahit (Javanese kingdom), 75 Malacca, 174 Malamoud, Charles, 136–37 Malay Peninsula, 36, 229n8, 231n31 Malay people, 66 Malaysia, 54, 56, 225n48 mandala, 27, 73, 82; harmony, 74, 82; homology, 74; mandala kingdoms, 27, 73–77, 89–91, 119, 224n38. See also microcosm; macrocosm; mimesis; sacred ring communities Mandeling people (Sumatra), 225n53 manure, use of, 175–77 Marco Polo, 173 maroon woodpecker (kutok; Blythipicus rubiginosus), 44, 51 Marx, Karl, 10 Mataram (Javanese kingdom), 75, 81–82 Mbabad (to clear), 118 McDougall, William, 66–67 McKittrick, Katherine, 208n14 McWilliam, Andrew, 169, 186, 189, 235n54 Mendonsa, Eugene L., 55 Merapi volcano (Java), 27, 77–79, 119, 122, 175–79, 196–97, 227n24, 234n35 Meratus Mountains (S Kalimantan), 124 mesquite (Prosopis juliflora), 101, 220n27, 228n30 metamorphosis, x, 22–23. See also transformation, human-animal metaphor, 15–17, 72, 200, 232n49; antelope, 144–45; “barbering,” 136, 176–77, 227n24; forest as, 229n44; generational, 151–52; weeds as, 191–92. See also buffalo; tigers Metcalf, Peter, 56 microcosm, 74, 84, 92, 218n29 mimesis, x–xi, 23–24, 27–31, 44, 48, 72, 79, 92, 195–96, 199; differentiation in, 92; in Javanese cosmology, 81–83, 89–91; and mandala concept, 74–75; mimetic displays,

index

287

45–47; mimetic faculty, 195–97; theater as, 108–9. See also mimicry; mirrors; Taussig mimicry, 21, 23, 105, 211n80. See also scarecrows mirrors and mirroring, 8, 22–23, 79, 81, 88–90, 177, 196, 199, 222n48; reciprocal, 48–49 misidentification, risk of, 38 Misra, R., 135 Mnong Gar (Cambodia), 150 Moertono, Soemarsaid, 75, 115 Montaigne, Michel de, 12, 53, 209n34 Moore, O., 216n40 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 10 Morris, Desmond, 35 mountains, as place of insight, 89 mouse deer (pelandok; Tragulus spp.), 45 Mukharji, Projit Bihari, 170 multi-species ethnography, xii, 2, 8, 11, 13–14, 23. See also ontological turn; post-human turn mushrooms, 14 Muslims, 33, 66, 82, 221n40; and pork taboo, 33–34; saints, 79, 81, 217n19. See also Islamicization

Ogden, Laura A., 11, 169 oil palm (Elaeis guineensis), 38, 70 old age: “old tuber, old taro,” 151–52; “old taro, the older it gets, the better it gets,” 230n16 omens: animals, 38, 44–48, 214n2; birds, 44, 51–52, 57–58, 64–65, 197, 203–5, 214n3; coercive nature of, 59–60; rainbow, 45–46, 213n34; stem omen (pun burong), 57, 64; tarsier, 44. See also banded kingfisher; crested jay; Diard’s trogon; maroon woodpecker; owl; rufous piculet; scarletrumped trogon; tailor bird; white-faced eagle; white-rumped shama Onesicritus, on shade and stature, 94, 219n4 Ong, Aihwa, 76 Onghokam, 115 “ontological turn,” xii, 2, 13, 19, 198, 211n82; and perspectivism, 19–20. See also multi-species ethnography; post-human turn “other,” 109, 130, 193–94 outlaws, 117, 139 Ovid, 22, 32 owl, 51, 213n33

Nabhan, Gary P., 14 Nadasdy, Paul, 15 Na¯gara-Kerta¯gama, 75, 117, 225n43 Nagel, Thomas, 12 Najmuddin al-Kubra, 217n19 napier grass (Pennisetum purpureum), 179 nature/culture divide, 140, 142–45; isomorphism, of, 119–22 neem tree (Azadirachta indica), 102, 221n29 Neolithic, 143, 230n20 New Guinea, 211n82, 215n16, 230nn25 and 29. See also Papua New Guinea ngali tanah ritual (“digging the earth”), 215n25 Niah Cave (Sarawak, E Malaysia), 230n23 Niinemets, Ülo, 92–93 nonhumanist thinking, x Norris, Margot, 23 north-south axis, and geography of rule, 80–81 Nuer people (Sudan), 15

padi belabok (“stealth rice”), 169 padi taun (annual grains), 155–56 PAJALE (padi, jagung, and kedelai [rice, maize, and soybeans]), 123 Pakistan, x–xi, 27–29, 92–109, 131–45, 228n30; farmers, 98–99, 220nn18, 19, and 21, 221n32; Punjab and North-West Frontier Province, 92, 96–97, 133–34 Pakistan Forest Institute, Peshawar, 98 Pakistan Forest Service, 98–99, 105–6, 138, 220n19 Palembang (Sumatra), 235n59 Palmer, L., 223n25 panopticism, 85–89; panopticon, 27, 77–79, 85–89 Papua New Guinea, 4, 54, 212n14 Park, Karen E., 51, 54 pastoralism, 135, 138 Patek people (Malaysia), 54 peccary, Tayassu pecari (white-lipped peccary), 42–43 Pedersen, Morten, xii, 22 Peek, Philip M., 55 peepal (Ficus religiosa), 102 pegela’ (offering made to spirits), 155–56 Peirce, Charles S., 16, 52 Pelzer, Karl J., 148, 150–51

O’Connor, Richard A., 110–11, 117, 122–23, 129, 158 Odeyemi, Ishola S., 181 Ogan people (Sumatra), 170, 172–75, 179–81, 188

288

index

Peña Conquista, Toño, 34 Peña Ismare, Chindio, 34 Penan people (Borneo), 49, 66–67 pepper (Piper nigrum), trade in, 125–26, 235n59 Persian lilac (Melia azedarach), 100, 221n33; bitter shade of, xi, 102 perspective: double, 48–49; linear, 209n58; reversal of, 199–200 perspectivism, x, xii, 18–22, 25, 27, 30–32, 34, 38, 48–49, 89–90, 92, 145, 194, 210n60; reverse perspective, 20–22 pest outbreaks, as environmental variable, 60–65 Phillipps, Quenten, 51 Piaget, Jean, 95 Pidir (Sumatra), 174 Pigeaud, Theodore G. Th., 90–91 pigs, x, 1, 26, 31–49; cassava, 42; domestic, 39, 41–43, 212nn20 and 24; feral (wild, bearded; Sus barbatus), 41–43, 49, 212n19; hunter in pig village tale, x, 1, 32–34, 194, 198, 207n3; pork, consumption of, 33–34; as sacrificial animal, 39, 43, 212nn20 and 24; werepig, 211n2 pig-tailed macaque (Macaca nemestrina), 49 plants: communication, 14; competition and conflict, 155, 181, 230n19, 231nn33 and 35, 232n54; historicity, 170; histories, 146–49, 170, 184, 186–92; introduction/origin, 149, 154, 161–62, 184, 231n37; mobility, 169; names, 148–49, 157, 169, 171, 190, 235n56; pioneer plants, 181; “plant turn,” 13–14, 129, 209n43; succession, 30, 110–11, 136, 140–41, 153, 160, 167, 174–75, 181–84, 190, 227n23; plant’s eye view of the world, 209n43 —origin stories, of plant arrivals, 150, 168–70, 184, 186–87, 229n6, 231n37, 234n35, 235n51; Chromolaena, 184, 186–90; Imperata, 173–75, 179–80, 187–91 Plato, 14, 108; parable of the cave, 27, 94, 106 play, and ritual, 47–48. See also theater Pliny the Elder, 94 poison oracle (Zande), 70–71 poison tree (pohon upas; Antiaris toxicaria), 87–88, 96 Pollan, Michael, 162, 209n43 Polynesia, 13–14, 222n4, 223n16, 230n15 population concentration, in Java, 113–19 pork, consumption of, 33–34 post-human turn, x, 2–3, 9, 11–12, 193–94. See also multi-species ethnography; ontological turn

potato (Solanum tuberosum), 162 power, Javanese concept of, 114–15 precarity, and omen-taking, 65–70 proto-Austronesian (PAN), 153, 157, 171 Proust, Marcel, 210n72 Prum, Richard, 20 Pulang Gana (Dayak deity), 44, 150, 152–53, 230n22 Punan people (Borneo), 66–67 Puri, Rajindra K., 49 Pushto proverb, 100, 105 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 54 Raffles, Hugh, 132 Raffles, Thomas S., 157, 219n41 rainbow, as ill omen, 45–46, 213n34 rainfall, as environmental variable, 60–65 Rajasthan (India), 138, 215n29, 220nn18 and 27, 225n45, 229n44 Ramayana, 170 Rambo, A. Terry, 223n27 Ramos, Alcida Rita, 20, 193–94 Raphals, Lisa, 55 Rappaport, Roy A., 4, 35 Rappoport, Dana, 152 ratu adil (“just king”), 89, 226n54 Ravi (river), 134 reindeer, 43 Reo, Nicholas J., 166, 169 Rgveda, 136, 225n43 rhinoceros, 97 rhizome, model of, 163, 167, 232n61. See also tubers Riam Kanan valley (S Kalimantan), 181–84 rice: “addiction,” 124, 164–65; glutinous, 39, 155–56, 229n10; as metaphor for perfection, 232n49; and spice trade, 160; stem rice (padi pun), 146; surplus, 111–12, 215n30; transition from archaic grains to rice, 154–57; varieties of, 149 —cultivation of, 4, 27–30, 36, 50, 80, 158, 184, 223n23, 225n50, 230nn18 and 20, 232n57; and augury, 65–70; “escape” from, 124; monocropping of, 158; origins of, 150–60; and state development, 114–17, 119–25, 164; valorization of, 113, 164; wet-rice cultivation, 110–11, 113–19, 158, 194 Richards, Anthony, 55 Ries, Nancy, 162 ritual: actors, participants as, 45–47; and agricultural history, 4, 146–49; curing, 39; errors in, 40; as escape from rice, 164–65;

index harvest, 155–56; and play, 47–48; use of archaic grains in, 154–57; use of Imperata in, 177–78. See also pegela’; sacrifice; shamans; temusi’; theater —ritual proscriptions: allowing green leaves to fall into human grave, 229n15; archaic grains, 155; burning, 184; mockery of animals, 17, 47–48; traditional land-use practices, 186; tree felling, 220n22; use of iron tools, 229n6; work on day an omen is received, 56 Robson, Stuart, 80 Rochberg, Francesca, 55 Rofel, Lisa, 76 roofbouw (“robber agriculture”), 129 Rouffaer, G. P., 115 rubber (Hevea brasiliensis), 36, 69, 120, 127–29, 149; economy, 24, 127; production, 36, 69–70, 120, 127–29, 174 Rudge, Alice, 54 rufous piculet (ketupung; Sasia abnormis), 44, 51, 203–5 ruler, likened to forest, 229n44 Rumphius, Georg Eberhard, 36, 96 Runa people (Ecuador), 20–21, 24, 48, 52, 211n3, 236n7 Rushdie, Salman, 228n32 Saccharum spontaneum, 181 “sacred ring communities,” 90–91 sacrifice, 39–40, 135–36, 212nn16 and 20, 213n30; and hunt, 40, 43–44; Kantu’ and, 212nn18–19, 21, and 24, 213nn30 and 35; sacrificial offerings, 39, 43, 212nn20, 21, and 24, 213nn31 and 35; sharing, of sacrificial meat, 213n30; substitution, in, 212n24, 213nn31 and 35. See also pegela’; ritual sago, 225n48, 230n18; wild, 230n23 Said, Edward, 228n32 Sandin, Benedict, 55, 154 Sather, Clifford, 55, 155 Sauer, C. O., 230n22 savanna, 167, 196–97, 227n21; ecological instability of, 134–37; on Mount Tambora, 184–85. See also jangala sawah (pond fields), 110–13 scapulimancy, 216nn40 and 44 scarecrows, 20–21, 24 scarlet-rumped trogon (beragai; Harpactes duvauceli), 44, 51 Schaller, George B., 142 Schneider, Jürg, 156

289

Schrieke, Bertram J. O., 115 Schrödinger, Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander, 7, 208n20 SEAMEO BIOTROP, 168 Séh Jumadil Kubra (spirit-saint), 79, 81, 217n19 Semai people (Malaysia), 157, 229n8, 231n31 semiosis, 13, 194 semiotics, 52, 55, 147 Serat Rama, 225n44 Setten van der Meer, N. C. van, 114 sexual delicts, and sacrifice, 212n24 shade and shadow, xi–xii, 27–28, 93–96, 199, 219n8; characteristics of tree shade, 99–102, 220n26; Pakistani folk beliefs, 96–109, 221n31; relation of shade/shadow to object, 92, 94–95, 105–9, 196; visuality of, 106 “The Shadow” (radio program), 222n49 Shakespeare, William: Hamlet, 53; Macbeth, 228n35 shamans, 39, 52, 124–25, 226n54 Shepherd, C., 223n25 Sheridan, Michael, 129 Siberia, 43–44, 199, 211n12 Siegel, James, 106–7 Sigley, Gary, 77 signs, 52, 107, 194 Singalang Burong (Dayak deity), 44, 66 siris (Albizia lebbek), 101 sissoo (Dalbergia sissoo), 101 Sivaramakishnan, K., 229n39 slippage, 24, 31; between object and shadow, 108–9; between sign and thing, 196–97 Smart, Alan, xii Smith, Monica, 164 South America, 11, 19, 32, 34, 127, 213n29 South Asia, 27, 96, 131, 142, 227n24 Southeast Asia, 17, 32–33, 36, 73, 76, 82, 89, 96, 110–12, 117, 129–30, 147–48, 152–55, 157–60, 171, 184, 207n4, 212n20, 227n24, 229n11, 230n19 Spencer, Joseph E., 148 spice trade, 125–26, 174 spider, 10, 20 spirits: inside Merapi volcano, 79, 81–83, 89, 90, 119, 177, 217n19; summoning, to sacrifice, 39–40 state development, and rice cultivation, 113–19, 122–25 state surveillance, 27, 54, 77, 83–89 Stevens, Wallace, 19 Stewart, John L., 100

290

index

Stoddard, Mary, 20 Stone, Peter, 71–72 subjectivity: human, 5–6, 12; nonhuman, 12, 33 subsistence risk, augury and, 65–70 sugarcane, varieties of, 149 Suharto’s “New Order,” 37, 50, 76, 83, 188 Sumatra, 41, 173–75, 188, 191, 224n38, 235n59; North, 106, 127, 174, 225n53; South, 172–75, 179–80, 182, 235n54; Southwest, 156, 230n29 Sumbawa, 170, 184–88, 218n41, 235n60 Surakarta, 224n34 Sutlej (river), 134 Swancutt, Katherine, 55 sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas), 149–50 swidden agriculture, 28, 50, 111–19, 164, 194, 223n25; and augury, 56–60, 65–70; and environmental variables, 60–65; felling (nebang), 67, 204; and flight to forest, 115–16; and Imperata, 172, 174–75, 182–84; in North America, 112–13; and rubber, 127–29; site selection, 57; slashing (nebas), 67; stem swidden (umai pun), 57, 146–47, 164; swamp swidden (umai paiya’), 67–69, 149; wet-rice dichotomy, 110–13, 116–17, 131, 222n3 syllogism, 16–17, 192 symbiopolitics, 160 tailor-bird (beriyak; Orthotomus spp.), 214n3 tamarisk (Tamarix aphylla), 101 Tambiah, Stanley J., 73–74, 79–80, 90; galactic polity, 73 Tambora volcano (Sumbawa), 184–87, 218n41 Tanita, Kimiko, 11 Tanizaki, Jun’ichiro¯, 95 taro (Colocasia esculenta), 66, 149–54, 229n9 tarsier, western (ingkat; Cephalopachus bancanus), 44 Taussig, Michael, 24, 38, 46, 195–97 Tedlock, Barbara, 55 temusi’ ritual, 45–48, 67, 196; as metamiscommunication, 47 Tenggerese people (Java), 234n32 termites, 234n35 thatching, 173, 188 theater, 108–9, 201, 222n46; in ritual, 40, 45–48 Theophrastus, 14 Thwaites, Thomas, 23 tick, 12 tiger, 32, 211n1; and forest, 121; and water buffalo, 121–22 Tikul Batu (Kantu’ longhouse), 69

Timor, 186, 235nn54 and 57; East, 223n25, 225n47 Tinbergen, Niko, 35 tobacco cultivation, Dutch system of, 127, 174 Tolkien, J. R. R., 228n35 Toraja people (Sulawesi), 230n28 transmigration, 37, 179–81 Treadwell, Timothy, 210n77 trees: felling, 67, 204, 220n22, 233n21; impact on crops, 221n33; planting and cultivation, 98–99, 104; pruning of, 100, 104–5, 221n38; in shrines, 99; roots, impact of, 103–4; shade (sayah), 96–105, 220n26, 221n42; single, representing former forest, 224n31; temperature under, 101–2; Western fixation on, versus rhizome, 163, 167. See also forest; mesquite; peepal; Persian lilac; siris; sissoo; tamarisk; white mulberry Truett, Joe C., 167 Tsing, Anna L., 93, 111, 123–24, 166, 191 tubers, 175; in European tradition, 161–63; and protein deficiencies of, 153; roasted, 150; transition to grain, prehistoric, 149–54 Turgo (Javanese hamlet), 85, 175–76 Uexküll, Jakob von, 12, 23, 25, 95, 195 umwelt (environment) of organisms, 12, 25 Unani Tibb, 104 Universal Declaration of Animal Rights (1989), 11 upframing, 120–22 upland-lowland dichotomy, 224n36 Valladares, Fernando, 92–93 Van Keuren, Scott, 88–89 Vasco da Gama, 173–74, 188 Vedic literature, 141–45, 227nn10 and 22 Velásquez Runk, Julie, 34 Verheijen, Jilis A. J., 231n37, 235n56 Vietnam War, 235n51 village/nonvillage dichotomy, 136–40 Visser, Leontine E., 230n28 Vitebsky, Piers, 43 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 18–19, 34, 38, 48, 193–94, 197 volcanos, 77–80; eruptions, 81–82, 176, 184, 197, 218nn33 and 41, 233n23; monitoring, 83–85. See also Lawu; Merapi; Tambora von Frisch, Karl, 35 Vulcanology Service, Indonesian, 83–85, 122 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 36, 161, 225n50 Wallace, Anthony F. C., 110

index “wasteland,” as classification, 189 water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes), 168 weeds, 30, 166–70, 179; as metaphor, 191–92. See also Chromolaena; Imperata Wengker, Prince (Majapahit court, Java), 113 Werbner, Richard, 55 werepig (babi ngepet), 211n2 werewolf, 22 Wharton, Charles H., 228n38 wheat cultivation, 232n57 white-faced eagle (Brahminy kite; lang burak mwa), 214n3 white mulberry tree (Morus alba), 101 white-rumped shama (nenak; Copsychus malabaricus), 44, 51 Whyte, Michael, 55 Whyte, Susan Reynolds, 55 wild cattle (Bos sondaicus), 228n38, 233n24 wild-domestic dichotomy, 138–40, 146 “wilderness,” 142–43 Wilf, Eitan, 70–71, 216n45 Willerslev, Rane, 21, 43, 48–49, 199

291

Wittfogel, Karl, 114 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 31, 201, 209n35, 219n54 Wohlleben, Peter, 14 Wolff, John U., 171 wong alasan (forest dweller), 223n25 Woodward, M., 234n33 World Resources Institute (WRI), 167 World War II, 170, 181, 184, 235n51 Wounaan people (Panama), 34 Wyndham, Felice S., 51, 54 Wynter, Sylvia, 208n14 Yahya, Farouk, 55 Yogyakarta Sultanate (Java), 27, 73–91, 122, 177, 224n34, 234n33; geography of rule, 79–85; palace (kraton), 74, 78–79, 89–90, 177, 218n24 Yukaghir people (Siberia), 48–49 Yule, Henry, 87 Zimmermann, Francis, 133–37, 140–44, 227n21