For generations, upland swidden farmers in what is now northern Thailand cultivated the mountain slopes with an eye toward maintaining a balance between soil health and human needs. Today, however, the shifting mosaic... [ view full abstract ]
For generations, upland swidden farmers in what is now northern Thailand cultivated the mountain slopes with an eye toward maintaining a balance between soil health and human needs. Today, however, the shifting mosaic landscape of swidden cultivation has given way to monocultures of maize and other cash crops that stretch to the edge of forests now guarded by the Thai conservation state. Within this context, a paradox has come to characterize upland agriculture: many upland farmers now find themselves knowingly engaging in land use practices that they see as undermining the viability of the soil on which their livelihoods depend.
Drawing on extensive ethnographic observation in two upland communities, we contend that this paradoxical behavior cannot be understood in isolation from state policies – including forest enclosures, village sedentarization, and deeper market integration, among others – that have fundamentally reconfigured the relationship between upland farmers and the soil. We argue that these policies triggered and continue to reinforce a dramatic agrarian transformation and an underlying, ongoing process of in situ displacement in upland communities. Whereas ex situ displacement entails the forced or coerced removal of people from place, the in situ displacement of uplanders quite literally entails the erosion of place, as a sustaining foundation, from under their feet, and imposes on those affected a “significant loss of rights, status, or security without [physical] dislocation” (Geisler, 2003: 71).
Within the displacement literature, the static framing of displacement as physical eviction treats place as little more than a passive context in which local people reside, use resources, and carry out their livelihoods. Furthermore, it treats displacement as a discrete event, rather than as an affective and ongoing process. In doing so, it forecloses important possibilities for understanding the very real ways in which those displaced in situ experience diminishing (re)productive capacity and accumulating insecurity in slow, sometimes invisible, often banal, but nonetheless meaningful ways (see: Feldman et al., 2011; Feldman & Geisler, 2012). In this paper, we foreground the changing relationship between upland farmers and the soil in order to (re)animate place as a dynamic socio-ecological and moral terrain in which upland communities forge both meaning and livelihoods through norms and practices that shape, and are shaped by, the physical environment. By doing so, we seek to shed light on the ways in which the changing political-ecological terrain of upland agriculture renders farmers insecure by constraining their land use possibilities.
