Landscape plasticity and its erasure

Abstract

For centuries, people who call themselves Akha had formed village landscapes of rotating shifting cultivation fields amid regenerating trees together with enduring wooded sites, all under the purview of their ancestors. In Mengsong, an Akha settlement on the ridge separating China and Burma, farmers had managed complex, biodiverse and flexible landscapes for 250 years. In 1996–1997, my extended research there identified cultivation patterns that I called landscape plasticity, referring to farming practices that were highly mutable over space and time, often transgressing state-allocated property lines and the international border with Burma. From 1997 to 2011, a combination of exclusionary state forest policies, the racialization of upland minorities, and a state poverty alleviation project brought landscape plasticity and the ancestors to an end. Using concepts from sentient landscapes, resource access, environmentalism, racialization, and capitalist markets, this paper seeks to explain how landscape plasticity and the ancestors were erased. At the same time, I explore the puzzle of why Akha farmers saw these contingent outcomes as positive