The Social-Spatial Organization of Forest-Lands and the Subjective Classification of its Lands in a Shifting Cultivation Village

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to clarify the subjective classification of lands in a shifting cultivation village, relating to the social framework of forest-land ownership and the spatial formation of forest-land use. For this purpose, the author attempted to describe the villager's knowledge of the forest-lands in a mountain village.The author chose a mountain village, Onaru in Omogo-mura, Ehime Prefecture, as a case study. Onaru is a remote village in the Shikoku Mountains, and the settlement is located on slopes at about 850m above the sea.In Onaru, equal ownership of forest-lands by the villagers gradually collapsed after about 1900. There then arose a difference in the scale of holdings of forest-lands, and the lands owned by each of the villagers became scattered. Most of the forest-lands were privately owned, covered by lots for shifting cultivation and fallow. However, the outer zone of the territory in Onaru was common land and covered by natural forests. The villagers engaged in shifting cultivation on their own or rented fields, before the rapid depopulation in the 1960's. They rotated crops of corn, wheat, potatoes and so on, for staple foods, and mitsumata (materials for paper), for selling.In order to elucidate the villagers' recognition of their lands, the author examined their knowledge of the lands, showing 117 Koaza (small place names) of Onaru. Koaza were written in the land register book made in the 1880's, and there were many suffixes signifying landforms and plants. The results can be summarized as follows:It was found that the villagers classify their lands based on conditions such as slope, altitude, sunshine, wind and soil. For example, they distinguished between hiura (slope in the sun) and kageyama (slope out of the sun), ma-tsuchi (soil adapted to mitsumata) and onji-tsuchi (soil adapted to potatoes).The knowledge held by each villager was not only rich, but also homogeneous. The reason for this can be thought of as follows: Knowledge was important for both landowners and tenant farmers to select land for cultivation. In addition, it can be indicated that swidden lands were widely scattered in the territory of Onaru, and the villagers jointly burned the thickets to shift each others' location.The subjectfve classification of lands in Onaru was based on the villagers' indigenous knowledge. It was obtained through the management of shifting cultivation, which used forest-lands adapted to the local environment.