Indigenous tree tenure in the times of charismatic carnivore conservation: Territoriality and property in the forests of central India

Abstract

In the forested landscapes of central India, elite anxieties around extinction threats to charismatic carnivores has brought about a deeply exclusionary conservationist turn in state territoriality. This article draws a conceptual distinction between territoriality for extraction (TE) and territoriality for conservation (TC) in forested landscapes, since they have different implications for space, nature and society. Through a case study from the Kuno forests of central India, it examines the impact of the shift from TE to TC on indigenous ways of knowing and using the forest. It shows that the Sahariya Adivasi community had evolved a dynamic, site-specific and resilient indigenous system of tree tenure (ITTS) to use and manage the Boswellia serrata (Salai) forest, from which they harvested chir gum for sale. Based on participatory mapping and in-depth interviews, it contends that the ontology of property-as-relations rather than as property-as-possession is more productive for theorizing indigenous use and access of valuable tree species in forest landscapes of the global South. The ITTS is defined in terms of tree tenure, property-as-relations, and indigenous claim-making over resources, and is borne out of people's everyday use, harvest and labour practices around specific plant species. It shows how the ITTS, which withstood more than a century of colonial and postcolonial impulses of TE, is crumbling under the onslaught of a more pernicious form of TC driven by the material and discursive practices associated with cheetah conservation.