agarwal- environmentality

8/12/2019 Agarwal- Environmentality

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6

Making Environmental Subjects:

Intimate Government

Honest sober frugal patient under fatigue and privations hospitablegood humored open and usually sincere in their address [Kuroaonis]

are at the same time extremely indolent fickle easily led away by the

counsel of others hasty in pur uing the dictates of passion envious of

each other jealous of strangers capable of equivocation and petty cunning and lastly grossly superstitious.-Raper quoted in Atkinson The

Himalayan Gazelleer

ee an ambulance has come to rescue an old man who is

slowly losing his life. Not many can see that he is already becoming the

backyard tree he has tended for years .-Joy Harjo Transformations Howe Become Ilumans)

Recall Hukam Singh from chapter 1. He started out an environmental

skeptic. But over the period I knew him his concern for the environ

ment grew to a point where he came actively to defend the need for

environmental protection and regulation. He found efforts by the forest

department wanting and saw villagers as the real basis for appropriate

forms of regulation. The shifts in Hukam s beliefs hint at what is per

haps the most important and underexpLored question in relation to

environmental regulation: when and for what reason do socially situ

ated actors come to care for act and think of their actions in relation to

something they define as the environment? Hukam Singh did not care

much about the village forest in 1985 but he was defending the need for

its regulation by 1993. Similarly concern for the environment has not

always existed in Kumaon. It has emerged and grown over time. \Vide

spread involvement in specific regulatory practices is tightly linked tothe emergence of a greater concern for the environment and the cre

ation of environmental subjects. I use the term environmental subjects tonominate those ho thus care about the environment. More precisely

the environment constitutes for them a conceptual category that orga-


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Making Environmental Subject s 165

nizes some of their thinking; it is also a domain in conscious relation towhich they perform some of their actions. The practices and thoughts

of nvironmental subjects, as I define the term , may not always lead toenvironmental conservation. But they are often undertaken in relationto the environment. I draw on evidence related to forests as an exampleof an environmental resource. Further, in considering an actor as anenvironmental subject I do not demand a purist version of the environment: something necessarily separate from and independent ofconcerns about material interests and everyday practices. A desire toprotect commonly owned or managed trees and forests, even with therecognition that such protection could enhance one s material elfinterest , subscribes to environmental subjectivities. In such situations,self-interest comes to be cognized and realized in terms of the environ

ment.If the environmental aspect of environmental subj ects requires some

boundary work, so does the second part of the phrase. It hould beevident that I do not use subjects in opposition to either citizens orobjects One commonsense meaning of subjects would be to ee them asactors or agents. But subjected people are also subordinated. The third

obvious referent of the term is the notion of a theme , or a domain, as inthe environment being the subject of my research (see chapter 7 for adiscussion of Foucauldian meanings of subjection). I use subjects tothink about Kumaon s residents and changes in their ways of lookingat, thinking about , and acting in forested environments in part becauseof the productive ambiguities associated with the term subject Each ofits r f r ~ n t sis an important part of the explorations in t h i ~book.

Given the existence of environmental subjects in Kumaon , a secondquestion can be asked : what distinguishes them from those who still donot care or act in relation to the environment? Of the various residentsof Kotuli, only some have changed their beliefs about the need for

forest protection. Others neither take an interest nor work in relationto protectionist regulations. The), harvest forest products without attending to locally formulated enforcement. The story s more widel),applicable in Kumaon . Thus , to say that Kumaonis have come to careabout their forests and the environment s only to suggest that some ofthem , n increasing numbers over the pa t few decades perhaps, have

come so to care.Answers to questions about who acts and thinks about the environ-


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166 A New Technology

ment as a relevant referential category and when, how, and why one so

acts are the quarry that this chapter seeks to hunt. These answers areimportant for both practical and theoretical reasons. Depending on thedegree to which individuals care about the environment, the ease withwhich they will agree to contribute to environmental protection may begreater and the costs of enforcing new environmental regulations maybe lower. But equally important, and perhaps even more so, is the

theoretical puzz le. \ \That makes certain kinds of subjects, and what isthe best way to understand the relationship betvveen actions an d sub-

jectivities? Against the common presumption that actions follow be-liefs, I suggest , using evidence from Kumaon , that people often firstcome to act in response to what they see as compulsion or in theirshort-term interest and only later develop beliefs that defend shortterm actions on other grounds as well. Against the general tendency to

explain environmental outcomes n terms of static social categoriessuch as caste, gender, and wealth, I highlight the role of practice andregulation . I will show how residents of Kumaon differ in their beliefs

about forest protection, and how these differences are related to theirinvolvement in regulatory practices.

It can be argued that beliefs and thoughts are formulated in responseto experiences and outcomes over many of which consciously formulated strategie by a Single agent have little control. Individuals strate-

gize about the future and attempt to shape the contexts of their interac-tions . There can a lso be little doubt that one can change so me aspec ts of

the world with which one interacts. But equally certainly, the numberand type of forces that affect even one s daily experiences transcendone s own will and design. Much of what one encounters in the world isonly partly a result of planned strategies undertaken in light of one sexisting beliefs and preferences.

The underlying argument is straightforward . At any given moment,people may plan to act in accordance with their existing preferences.But all plans are incomplete and imperfect, and none incorporates the

entire contextual structure n which actions lead to consequences. Forthese and other reasons, actions lead to unanticipated outcomes. Theexperience of these unanticipated outcomes does not always hardenactors in their existing understandings. Some outcomes may show howearlier subject positions were mistaken. In these situations , actors have

an incentive to reconsider existing preferences and subjectivities , in-


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Making Environmental Subjects 167

corporating into their mentalities new propensities to act and thinkabout the world. Even if only a very small proportion of one s dailyexperiences undermine existing understandings, over a relatively shortperiod there may be ample opportunities to arrive at subject positionsquite different from those held earlier.

In any event, persuasive answers about variations between subjectpositions and the making of subjects are likely to hinge on explanationsthat systematically connect policy to perceptions, government to subjectivity, and institutions to identities. Environmental practice, thischapter suggests, is the key link between the regulatory rule that government is ll about and imaginations that characterize particular subjects . n contrast, social identities such as gender and caste play only asmall role in shaping beliefs about what one considers to be appropriate

environmental actions. This is not surprising. After aU the politics of

identity considers significant the external signs of belonging ratherthan the tissue of contingent practices that may cross categorical affiliations. In the subsequent discussion, I hope to sketch the directions inwhich a satisfactory explanation needs to move.

Producing Subjects

The description of my meetings and conversations with Hukam Singh,although it seems to be located quite firmly in an overall argumentabout the emergence of new subjectivities, albeit in relation to thee n ~ o n m e n tresembles Geertz 's idea of a note in a bottle. It comesfrom somewhere else. It is empirical rather than a philo opher s

artificial story , and yet it has only a passing relationship to representativeness (Greenblatt 1999: 14-16). onnecting it to a social groundand other roughly similar stories requires the development of somecrucial terms and the presentation of additional evidence. Two such

terms are im gin tion and resistance

In his seminal account of the origins of nationalism, Anderson fa-

mously suggests that the nation is an imagined community ([1983J1991). In a virtuoso performance , he strings together historical vignettes about the development of nationalism in Russia, England , andJapan in the nineteenth century (83-111) to show how these cases offered models that could successfully be pirated by other states, where


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the ruling classes or leading elements in them felt threatened by t heworld-wide spread of the nationally- imagined community (99) . Themodel that, according to Anderson, comes to triumph is that of officia l

nationalism." e uggests that official nationalisms were:

responses by power groups Iwhich were) threatened with exclusionfrom. or marginalization in, popularly imagined communities Suchofficial nationalisms were conservalive, not to say reactionary, policies . . .Very similar policies were pursued by the same sorts of groups in the vastAsian and African territories subjected in the course of the nineteenth

century . . . land) they were [also) picked up and imitated by indigenousruling groups in those few zone s (among them J3pan and Siam) whichescaped direct ubjection . (110)

It is an interesting and disturbing fact that for Anderson the successfuladoption, superimposition. and spread of offici l nationalism as a substitute for popu lar nationalism lay welJ ,vithin the capacity of rulinggroups to accomplish. despite the imagined nature of nationalism. Anumber of scholars have elaborated on the term imagination, imaginatively, in writing about the nation (e.g. , AppadtJrai 1996: 114 - 15; andChakrabarti 2000a : chapter 6). But in magined Communities itself, thesubsequent analYSis gives relatively short shrift to several aspects of

'( imagination . The successful imposition of an official version of nationalism around the globe, coupled with the imagined quality of national

emergence that is the core of Anderson's intervention, implies that\ pm-ver groups were able to co lonize the very imaginations of the people

over whom they sought to continue their rule. They did so in the face ofexisting popular nationalisms. How they overcame, even for a few decades and certainly only patch ily, the resistance that existing senses of

"imagined belonging" posed to their efforts requires further elaborationthan Anderson provides. The politics at the level of t he subject that islikely involved in the strugg le between official and popular nationalismsneeds additional work if it is to be compelling ly articulated. } Nationalsubjects, to use a shorthand term to refer to the colonization of political

imagination by official nationalizing policies, emerged in his tory. A

history of nationalism therefore needs a politics of the subject.( The question about when , why , and how some subjects rather than

\ others come to have environmental consciousness is preCise ly similarto what Anderson leave out when he considers the nation. Similar


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judgments about the transformation of the consciousness of those whoare less powerful can be found in the work of other scholars. ConsiderBarrrington Moore, who writes: People are evidently inclined to gran tlegitima c ) : to anything that is or seems inevitable no matter how painful it may be. Otherwise the pain might be intolerable (1978: 459). Onemia-ht ask Moore: All eople? f not all, then surely we are forced to~

consider the questions of which ones, when, why, and how? The samemotivation to account for social and political acquiescence impels Gaventa' brilliant study of power and quiescence in Appalachia (198;:).But his analysis of the third face of power can be supplemented by theexamination of mechanisms that would explain when and how it is thatsome people come to accept the intere t of dominant classes as theirown nd others do not .

r n ~ s lo Anderson, for whom the imagination of the less powerfulsubject is unproblematically appropriable by officia l policies, cholars ofresistance have often assumed the opposite. For them, the resi;ting ubje-cl is-able to protect his or her consciousness from the colonizing effectsof elite policies , dominant cultures, and hegemonic ideologies . Thiground truth forms both their starting assumption and their object ofdemonstration . Scott's path-breaking study of peasant re i tance 1985),

his more general reflections on the relationship between domination andresistance (1990), and the work on resistance that emerged as a crossdisciplinary subfield in the wake of his interventions have helped make

familiar the idea that people can resist state policies, elite power , anddominant ideologies. Scott assertively advances the thesis thal the weakwithstand the powerful. perhaps alway , a t least in the realm of ideas andbeliefs. He also suggests that when signs of their autonomous views aboutthe prevailing social order are invisible it is because of material constraintand their fear of reprisal upon discovery, not because they have come

wholeheartedly to acquiesce in their own domination, let alone becausetheir consciousness has been incorporated into a hegemonic ideology .

Scott articu lates this position most fully, perhaps. But a similar understanding of peasants and their interest was also compiicit in theearly efforts of subaltern studies scholars to identify an autonomousconsciousness for the excluded agents of history. 5 onsider, for example, Ranajit Guha's 1982a) seminal statement on the historiography ofcolon ial lndia. This powerful manifesto against elitist history writing,in calling for a more serious consideration of the politics of the people,


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portrays the subaltern as autonomous and subaltern politics as structurally and qualitatively different from elite politics in t} e sense that

vast areas in the life and consciousness of the people were never integrated into [bourgeois] hegemony. 6 Even those who note that the opposition between domination and resistance is too mech3nical to capture how the consciou ness of those subjected to pmve r changes intheir experience of power go on simply to note that w e process is

murky (Comaroff and Comaroff 1989: 269, 290). But for scholars ofresistance and subalternity, the autonomous consciousnesS of peasants,

subalterns , and other marginalized groups endures in the face of dominant elite pressures operating in a spectrum of domains, not just in thedomain of policy. It is reasonable to infer that i for these scholars theweak and the powerless can resist the panoply of instruments availableto dominant groups policy by itself is even less likely to affect the

consciousness of the subject. 7

( It is clear that the works discussed above present h \lO aspects of thepuzzle about the relationship between government and subjectivity.Each of these aspects comprises strong arguments in favor of a particu-

, lar tendency: in one case, the tendency toward the colonization of the

imagination by powerful political beliefs; and in the other the tendencytoward durability of a sovereign consciousness founded 00 the bedrock

of individual or class interest. VVithin themselves , these arguments areat least consistent. Considered jOintly as a potential guide to the relationship between the subject and the sociaJ they lead to conflictingconclusions. It is crucial not to account just for the persistence of acertain conception of interests among a group of people nor just toassume the traightforward transformation of one conception of inter-ests into another but to explore more fully the mechanisms that canaccount for various possible effects on people ' s conceptions of their

interests (Wildavsky 1987,1994).I weave a path through the opposed conclusions of tWO different

streams of scholarship by suggesting that technologies of governmentproduce their effects by generating a politics of the subject that can beunderstood and analyzed better by considering both practice and imagination as critical. The reliance on imagination by some scholars CAp-padurai 1996 ; Chakrabarty 2000a) in thinking about the emergence of

different kinds of subjects is a step n the right directioJ1 . But closerattention to social practices can lead to a species of theorizing that


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Maki ng Environmental Subjects 171

would be more tightly connected to the social ground )vl:lere imagina-tion is always born and , reciprocaUy , which imagination ttlways influ-

e n ~ e s A more c ; l i r ~ c t'examination of th( hetero.geneous rac ices thatpolicy produces , and their relationship with varying social locations,has the potential to lead analysis toward the mechanisms involved inproducing differences in the way subjeci s imagine themselves. 'My in-terest is to highlight how it might be pos ible and why it i necessary topoliticize both community and imagina :ion in the search for a betterway to think about environmental politi( s.

Foucault's insights On the ubject " fOJ m a crucial point of referencebut also a point of departure in consideri 19 the political that is silencedin Anderson's vision, of the imagined .:ommunity. In Discip /ine nd

Punish, Foucault elaborates a particular . model of subject makjng in

which bodies , surfaces , lights" are so arranged as to facilitate the ap-plication of power in the form of a gaze. "He who is ubjectea to a field ofvisibility, and who knows it , he writes , "assume s responsibility for theconstraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself;he inscribes in himself the power relation in \, hich he imultaneouslyplays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection " ([1975]

1979: 202-3). The panopticon, standing for such arrangements of bod -ies, surfaces, antllights, does not just create lines of visibility ; i t can alsobe used as a machi J . ~ snecessaril produces subjects w h ~ ; a k ethem.

II .

selves in ways ~ i r e dby the gaze of power. And , although Foucaultdoes not elaborate ori" the specific mechanisms that are implicated inthe making of subject s (Butler 1997: 2), he recognizes the indetermi-nacy inherent in the n: aking of ubjects ",,,hen he suggests that mecha-

n ~ m sof repression can p r o d u ~ t ~ b . [ a t i o ~a ~ dresistance (J978:115). It Tsthis recognition of contingency that introduces the register of


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the political in the creation of the subject. It is also precisely whatAppadurai has in mind when he suggests that colonial technologies left

an indelible mark on the Indian political consciousness but that there isno easy generalization about how and the extent to which they madeinroads into the practical consciousness of colonial subjects in India.Among the dimensions he mentions as important are gender, distancefrom the colonial gaze, involvement \ ,vith various policies, and distancefrom the bureaucratic apparatus (1996: 134) .

These factors are important, of course. But it is necessary to make adistinction bet\'\ 'een the polilics generated by involvement in differentkinds of practices and the politics that depends on stable interestspresumed to flow from belonging to particular identity categories.Much analysis of social phenomena takes interests as naturally relatedto particular social groupings: ethnic formations, gendered divisions,class-based stratification , caste-categories, and so forth. Imputing in

terests in this fashion to members of a particular group is common tostreams of scholarship that are often seen as belonging to opposedcamps (Bates 1981; Ferguson (1990) 1994)' But doing so is especiallyproblematic when one wants to investigate how people come to holdparticular views of themselves, Categorization of persons on the basisof an externally observable difference underplays how subjects make

themselves and neglects the effects that those persons ' actions mighthave on their senses of themselves, Using social identities as the basisfor analysis may be useful as a first step , a sort of gross attempt to makesense of a bewildering array of beliefs and actions that people alwayshold (e,g. , see the analysi in chapter 5 . But to end the analysis there is

to fail to attend to the many different ways in which people const itute

themselves,Focusing attention on specific social practices relevant to subject

formation along a given dimension or facet of identity creates the Spacefor learning more about how actions are connected to beliefs and subject formation Undoubtedly, practices are always undertaken n thecontext of institutionalized structure of expectations and obligations,asymmetric political relations, and existing views people have of themselves, But to point to the situatedness of practices and beLiefs is not togrant social context a deterministic influence on practice and subjectivity. Rather, it is to ground the relationship among structure practice,and subjectivity on evidence and investigative possibilities,


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Making Environmental ubjects 173

Variations n Environmental Subjectivities in Kumaon

I consider two forms of variations in the nature of enviro nm enta l subjectivity in Kumaon-those that have unfolded over time and those that are

\ geographically distributed across villages. The first et of changes is thepuzzle that began th is book. From being persons who opposed efforts to

protect the forested environment, Kumaonis became persons who undertook the task of protection upon them elve . In tead of protestingthe governmentalization of nature, Kumaonis became active partners init. I describe below the alchemica l shift in interest, beliefs, and actionfor which the move toward the community partially stand. But it i justas important to understand the difference in relation to environmental

practices and beliefs among Kumaonis today and how they affect thecosts of environmental regulation.

My examination of changes over time and ocia l-spatial variation in

how Kumaon's residents see themselves and their forests draws onthree bodies of evidence. The first set of observations is drawn fromarchival materials about Kumaonis' actions in fore ts in the ir t threedecades of the twentieth century and then from a survey of forestcouncil headmen in the early 1990s-sixty years after the Fore t ouncil Rules became the basis for local practices.

The second type of evidence comes from two rounds of interviews Iconducted with thirty-five Kumaon residents in seven village. The fir tround of interviews was conducted in 1989 and the second in 1993 9 Ofthe seven villages, four had formed councils between 1989 and 1993 Inthe interviews, I coUected information on villagers ' social and economic backgrounds , their practices in relation to their fore sts , and theirviews about forests and the environment .

Finally, I use evidence from 244 intervi.ews that I conducted in 1993 inrty-six villages. Of these villages, thirty-eight have forest councils.

The councils have adopted various monitoring and enforcement prac

ti es. [n the remaining eight villages, there are no forest councils, andvillagers' relationship to environmental enforcement is restricted toinfrequent interactions with forest department guards , who are se ldom\1'l.'11 in the forests that these villagers use. Villagers prefer not to see aInrl'st department guard, but even more do they prefer that the guardnot ~ them


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Historical hanges in nvironmental Subjectivities

Hukam Singh 's personal example illustrates what has obviously been amuch larger and more comprehensive process of social environmentalchange in Kumaon. Recall from chapter the recalcitrant acts of rebellion that hill men performed at the beginning of the twentieth century.Unwilling to accede to the demands of the colonial forest department,

often because they were unable to do so, Kumaonis ignored new rulesthat limited their activities in the forests that the state claimed as its

own. They also protested more actively. They grazed their animals, cuttrees , and ob streperously set fire in forests that had been classified asreserved. Forest department officials found it next to impossible to enforce the restrictive rule in the areas they had tried to turn into forests.

Law enforcement was especially difficult because of the unwillingness of villagers to cooperate with government officials. The departmental staff was small, the area it sought to police was vast, and thesupervisory burden was immense. Decrying lopping for fodder and thedifficulty of apprehending those who did it, E C Allen, the deputycommissioner of Garhwal, wrote to the commissioner of Kumaon thatloppings are seldom detected at once and the offenders are still moreseldom caught red-handed, the patrol with his present enormous beat

being probably 10 miles away at the time . . . . It is very difficult to bringan offence, perhap discovered a week or more after its occurrence,home to any particular village much less individual (1904: 9). Demar

cation of the forest boundaries, prevention of fires , and implementation of working plans meant an impossibly large workload for forestdepartment guards and employees even in the absence of villager protests. When the number of protests was high and villagers set firesoften, the normal ta ks of fore ters could become impossible to per

form. One forest department official was told by the deputy commis

sioner of Kumaon that the present intensive management of the forestdepartment cannot continue without importation into Kumaon of regular police (Turner 1924).

After stricter controls were imposed in 1893, the settlement officer,] E Goudge, wrote about how difficult it was to detect offenders ininstances of firing.

[n the vast area of forests under protection by the district authorities thedifficulty of preventing fires and of punishing offenders who wilfully fire


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for grazing is due to the expense of any system of fire protection. ''''hereforests are unprotected by firelines, and there is no special patrol agencyduring the dangerous season , it is next to impossible to find out who theoffenders are and to determine whether the fire is caused by negligence ,accident, or intention The difficulty of making villagers collectivelyresponsible for all fires occurring within their limits in unsurmountable ,because the same belt of forest will touch a large number of villages, andhow could we make them all responsible in any effective manner? (J901:10)

In a similar vein , the forest administration reporl of the United Prov

inces in 1923 described a fu'e in the valley of the Pindar River: During

the year, the inhabitants of the Pindar valley showed theil' apprecialion

of the leniency granted by Government after the 1921 fu e outbreakwhen a number of fire cases \,\, ere dropped, by burning some of the fire

protected areas which had escaped in 1921 These fires are known to

be due to direct incitement by the non-cooperating fraternily (Anony

mous 1924: 266) . The sarcasm is clumsily wielded, but its import isobvious all the same. Villagers could not be trusted because ungraleful

ness was their response to leniency. Other annual reporls of the foresl

department from around this period provide similar claims about the

lack of cooperation from villagers, their irresponsibility, and the in

advisability of any attempt to cooperate with them over proteclioni l

goals. At the same time, some government officials underlined the im

portance of cooperation. Percy Wyndham, asked to assess the impact

of forest settlements, said in 1916 that it must be remembered that n

the tracts administration is largely dependent on the goodwill of thepeople and the personal influence of the officials [on the people]

(quoted in Baumann 1995: 84)Other reports reveal continuing difficulties in apprehending those

who broke government rules . ames of people who set fire could nOl

be identified. Even more unfortunately from the forest department's

point of view, not only the common hill residents but also the heads of

villages were unreliable. Village heads, known as par/hans were paid bythe government and were often expected to carry out the work of

revenue collection. Their defiance , therefore, was even more a cause for

alarm. As early as 1904 , the deputy commissioner of Almora, C A.

Sherring, remarked on the heavy workload the patwaris carried for theforest department and argued for increasing their number substan-


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tially, as the padhans were unreliable. He wrote to the commissioner:It is certain that very little assistance can be expected from the pad

hans , who are in my experience only too often the leaders of the villagein the commission of offences and in the sh ielding of offenders Ifthe control of open civil forest is to be anything more than nominal wereally must have the full complement of patwaris A large forest staffof foresters and guards is also required (1904: 2). H Jackson, the

conservator of forests. concurredi n

a letter to the chief secretary of theUnited Provinces. According to him: The headmen of the villagesdiffer little, if at all. from the rest of the population [There is] noinstance of any influential man giving the information regarding forestoffences committed in the neighboring forest by inhabitants of his ownvillage, while. on the other hand , it frequently happens that offenders

are shielded by l mb rd rs (leaders) at the time of an inquiry (1911:113). The deputy conservator of forests similarly complained tha t villagers refused to reveal the culprit in investigations concerning forestrelated offenses: I t is far too common an occurrence for wholesaledamage to be done by some particular village often nothing approaching the proof required for conviction can be obtained [and]there is too much of this popular form of wanton destruction, thewhole village subsequently combining to screen the offenders (Burke

1911: 44. quoted in Shrivastava 1996: 185)These reports and complaints by colonial officials in Kumaon make

clear the enormous difficulties the forest department faced in realizingits ambition to control villagers' actions on land made into forest. Thecollective action of villagers in se tting fires and lopping trees and theirunwillingness to inform again t members of their fraternity are clearindications of strands of oudarity that connected them in their workagainst the colonial state. With unreliable villagers, limited resources ,and few trained starr members, it is not surprising that the forest de

partment found it hard to rely only on those processes of forest makingthat it had initiated and implemented in other parts ofIndia-processesthat relied mainly on exclusion of people , demarcation of landscapes ,creation of new re trictions , and fines and imprisonment. tO

The response of the state, in the shape of an agreement 'with Kumaonresidents to Cl eate community-managed forests, was the uneasy collab

oration among revenue officials, foresters. and villagers that I traced inchapters 3 through 5. This form of regulatory rule has also gone to-


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BLE 8.

mplaints by Forest council Headmen in Kumaon, 1993 ~ = 324)

mplaints Mentioned by HeadmenNumber of HeadnListing the Compl

nadequate support from forest and revenue department 203 (.63)cials

Limited powers of council officials for environmentalforcement

lnsufficient resources in forests for the needs of village residents

Low income of the council14l .44)130 .40)

61 (.19)

42 (.13)

36 .1I)

31 (.10)

64 .20)

lnadequate demarcation of council-governed forestsLack of respect for the authority of the councilLand encroachment on couDcil managed forestsLack of remuneration for headmenOther (e.g., forest boundaries incorrectly mapped, court cases

ke a long time, residents from other villages break council rules ,0much interference in the day - to-day working of the council,ck of information about forest council rules)

urce Council Headmen survey by author, 1993.t o Figures in parentheses indicate the proportion of headmen menLioning the complaint. Eadman could list up to three complainLs.

gether with shifts in how Kumaon s villagers regard forests, trees, andthe environment . Colonial forest administrators of the 1 9 0 0 wouldhave found many of the present-day Kumaon villagers far more inter

ested n forest protection than their counterparts in the early twentieth

century. Some indication of the extent to which contemporary Ku-maonis have changed in their beliefs, not just their actions, about fore tregulation is evident from the results of a survey of forest councilheadmen I conducted in the early 1990S.

Chapter 1 described the context of that survey. Table 8 summarizesits resu lts. T he council headmen n Kumaon have come to occupy anintermediate place in the regulatory apparatus for the environment. Onth e one hand, they are the instruments of environment-related regulatory authority. On the other, they represent villagers inlerests in the

forests.he aggregate numbers in the survey underscore the inferences in

chapter 1. The greatest proportion of responses from the headmen


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concerns the inadequate enforcement support they get from forest and

revenue department officials. The government of forests at the leve l ofthe community is hampered by the unwillingness or inability of stateofficials to buttress attempts by villagers to prevent rule infractions. Arough calculation shows that nearly two-thirds of the total responses

are directly related to headmen's concerns about the i m p o r t n ~ eanddifficulties of enforcing regulatory rules (rows 1 , 2 , 5 6 7 and part of 9).Admittedly, the council headmen are the persons most likely to beconcerned about forests and the environment among l l the residentsof Kumaon. But the point to note is that even when they were presentedwith an opportunity to freely voice the problems that they face andpotential ways of addressing them, only a very small proportion of the

responses from the headmen , less than 4 percent, are complaints abouttheir low levels of remuneration (row 8). The headmen evidently puttheir own intere ts aside as they tried to grapple with the question ofwhat problems characterized government by communities.

The figures in the table are no more than an abstract, numericalsummation of many specific statements that the survey elicited . The

plethora of these statements calls for a tabular representation. But thesentiments behind the numbers in the table come from actual words. "Ihave tried to give up being the head of our committee so many times.But even those who don't agree with me don ' t want me to leave,"observed one of the headmen. Another said: "I have given years of my

life patrolling the forest. Yes. There were day when my own fields hada ripening crop [and needed a watchman].l am losing my eyesight fromstraining to look in the dark of the jungle . And my knees can no longersupport my steps as I walk in the forest. But I keep going because Iworry that the forest will no longer survive if I retire." One's own life in

exchange for the life of the forest Sukh Mohan's views about the mak

ing and maintaining of his village's forests are centered around hisper onal contribution, but his commitment to forest protection alsomatches objectives that the forest department started pursuing morethan 1 5 0 years ago. Puran Ram gave a reason for his conservationistpractices: We uffered a lot from not having too many trees in OUrforest. Our women didn't have even enough wood to cook. But since we

banned cattle and goats from the forest, it has come back. Now wedon't even have to keep a full-time guard. Villagers are becoming marea\>vare.


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Puran Ram and Hukam Singh both expressed a hope for a connectionbehveen their efforts to conserve the forest and the actions of other

villagers. This common hope th a t I encountered in other conversationsas well is an important indication of the relationship between actions

and beliefs. It signals that n many of the villages a new form of government frames and enacts reasonable guidelines for villager practices inthe expectation that over time practice will lead to new beliefs. Villagers subject to regulations crafted and enacted by the councils will

come to see that stinting is in their own interest. The forest belongs tothe collective defined as the village, and when an individual harve tsresources illegally the action adversely affects all members of the collec

tive. The examples of both Puran Ram and Hukam Singh, as, indeedthose of more than two-thirds of the headmen in my survey, suggest

that the expectation is not just a fantasy.

The differences in the voice and tenor of the archival and morerecent statements I collected offer a basis for making the judgment thatthe practices and views of many of Kumaon s residents about theirforests have changed substantially. These changes occurred after the

passage of the Forest Council Rules in 1931. Partly responsible for thesechanges is the idea that Kumaonis can consider the region foreststheir own once again. But within this shift in ownership by the collective there are many variations in beliefs. These variations in beliefsabout forests and practices related to fore t protection are not system t i ~ e f t e dto the benefits people receive. Benefits from forestsare formally allocated equitably. and this equitable allocation is re

flectedn

the harvests of most villagers. But even \ \ ithin villages there issignificant variation n how villagers see forests and/ or try to protect

them.It may be argued that appropriations by the colonial state in the early

twentieth century drove a wedge between forest s and villager s. Subsequently. the rules that led to community-owned and managed forests

reaffirmed the propriety and legality of villagers possession of them.They recognized that villagers have a stake in what happens to fore tsand expressed some faith in their ability to take rea onable measures

for protection. especially with proper guidance . These institutionalchanges go together with changes in villagers actions and beliefs about

forests. One vi y to explain this change is to suggest that the shift inpolicy and subsequent changes in beliefs and actions are unrelated .


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180 A w Technology

They are sufficiently separated in time that a causal connection canonly tenuously be drawn. This is frankly unsatisfactory. At best, it is a

strategy of denial. It i also incapable of explaining the evidence thatfollows in the next section. A more careful argument would at least

suggest that shifts in villagers' actions and statements in the latter partof the twentieth century are no more than a response to changes in

interests that the new policy naturally generated. The transfer of largeareas of land to villagers in the form of community forests has created

in them a greater concern to protect the fore ts and care for the vegeta

tion the y ontrol.This is an important part of the explanation. t usefully suggests that

the way social groups perceive their interests is significantly dependent

on policy and government instead of being constant and immutable.But it is stiJl inadequate in two ways. It collapses the distinction between the interests of a group as perceived by an observer-analyst, andthe actions and beliefs of members of that group. In this explanation,

interests, actions, and beliefs are of a piece , and any changes in themtake place all at once. Thi assertion of an identity among variousaspects of what makes a subject and the simuiLaneity of change in all ofthe a pects are at best difficult propositions to swallow. The difficultycan in part be illustrated by one s own experience. Vlfe often arrive at anew ense of what is in our interests but continue to hold contradictor}beliefs and act in ways that match more closely the historical sense r

l our interests . Many of the headmen I interviewed in Kumaon, or whowere a part of my survey, tried to enforce rules that they knew were nof[

in the interests of their wn households. Their wives and children e n

often apprehended by the forest guards they had appOinted. Yet t h e

defended their actions in the name of the collective need to proted lforests and expressed the hope that over time villagers ,-vould c o m

around to their view and change their practice . As the next sectiOljmake clear, their hopes were not in vain. Many villagers proved sm.

ceptible to these shifting strategies of government.A second problem with the explanation that headmen care for foreslt

because they have the right to manage them is that it confuses th lprivate interests and actions of the headmen with their public officand interests. The forests that have been transferred to village commwnities are managed by collective bodies of anywhere between 2 to 2C

villagers, ,vho are represented by the forest councils and their e d m ~


18/35


(Agrawal 2 . To attribute a collective interest to these bodies and toexplain what the headmen of these councils say in terms of that intere tis to elide all distinctions between specific, individual actors and the

organizations they lead. A more careful exploration of other actors inKumaon who are involved with the local use and protection of forests is

necessary. Only then can we begin to make sense of the change indi-cated by the survey of headmen summarized in table 8 and the informa-tion provided belo' , about beliefs Kumaonis hold about their fore ted

environment.

Recent hanges in Environmelltal Subjectivities

\\Then I ent to Kumaon and Garhwal in 1989, I traveled there as astudent interested n environmental institution and their effects n

the actions and beliefs of their members. My main interest was to sh wthat environmental institutions-the forest councils-had a significantmediating effect on the condition of forests (Agrawal and Yadama

1997). ot all villages had created locaJ institutions to govern theirforests. Of the t h ~ t nthat I visited, only six had forest councils. Theones that did varied in the means they used t o protect and guard for-ests. Since my interest ' as primarily to understand institutional effectson forests, I focused on gathering archivaJ data from records created

and maintained locally by village councils (Agrawal 1994 .My conversations with village residents were chiefly intended to gain

a sense of their views about forests and the benefits they provide to

residents . I found that villagers who had forest councils were typicallymore interested in protection. They tried to defend their fore t again tharvesting pressures from other residents within the same village butespecially from those who did not live in their village . They al 0 tatedclear justifications of the need to protect forests, even if their effortswere ot aJways successful. In one village near the border between

Almora and ainital districts, a villager used the heavy monsoons tomake the point: Do you see this rain? Do you see the crops in thefields? The rain can destroy the standing crop. But even if the weather, ere good, thieves can destroy the crop if there are no guards. It is thesame with the forest. You plant a shrub, you give it water , you take careof it. But i you don ' t protect it, cattle can eat it. The forest is for us, butwe have to take care of it if we want it to be there for US. ' 2 Another


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20/35


BLE 9vironmental Beliefs of Villagers in Kumaon in 1989 ( = 35)

'sidents of villages

.tt had createdrest counci Is'okhri , Tangnua ,.li Nanauli)J = 2 0'sidents of villagesat did not have arest council)arman, Gogta,Irora) N = 15)

Agreement with theStatement ForestsShould beProtected

1 = low, 5 = high)

235

IIrce: Field work, 1989

Reason to Protectthe Forest

(economic orenvironmental)

Economic = 16

Environmental = 4

Economic = JIEnvironmental = 4

WiUingnes t.Reduce Famil

Con umplion,Forest ProdUCI

(I = low. 5 = hil

1.45

1.7

lIe Respondents were surveyed in the viUages of Pokhri. Tangnua , Toli. l \anauii. DarI

gta. and Sarora .

ers. Exposure to these new institutional constraints, council memb rs

hoped, would lead villagers to adopt more conservationist practi es .

In these four viUages, I had talked with twenty residents in 1989. At

that time, their statements did not suggest that they felt any pres ing

need to conserve the environment. Little distinguished their action

and views from those of the fifteen residents with whom I had talked in

the other three villages Darman , Gogta, and Barora). I had a ked my

thirty-five respondents three questions about their views on the en

vironment. Table 9 reports the responses of villagers to the three que -

tions in summary form.

1 Do you agree with the statement, Forests should be protected.Please indicate the extent of your agreement by using an)' numberbetween 1 and 5 where 1 indicates a low degree of agreement, and 5indicates strong agreement.

II . If forests are to be protected, should they be protected for 1) eco-


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nomic reasons such as their contribution of fodder , firewood, and

green manure, or for 2) other non-economic benefits they provideincluding cleaner air, soil con serv ation , and water retention.

III Do you agree with the statement, To protect forests, my family and Iare willing to reduce our consumption of resources from the localforests. Please indicate the extent of your agreement by using anynum ber between J and 5 where 1 indicates a low degree of agreement,

and 5 indicates strong agreement.

The first question tries to elicit villagers' responses to a very general

statement about forest protection. The second examines the extent towhich villagers see forests as an environmental versus a primarily economic resource. And the third question inquires into the willingness of

villagersto endure

some constraints so asto

meet the objectiveof

forestconservation. The figures in the table indicate that the differences, among the residents of the seven villages are relatively minor. All vil

lagers expressed limited agreement with the idea that forests should beprotected. Their reasons were mainly economic. And they , vere relalively unwilling to place any constraints on the consumption of their

families to ensure forest conservation.Although there is lillie basis for differentiating the responses of both

sets of villagers in 1989 , changes became evident in 1993 when I talkedto the same villagers again. n the case of residents of the four villagesthat had created forest councils, the differences were obvious both in

their actions and in what they said about forests and the environment.Orne had come to participate actively in their new forest councils.

They attended council meetings. A few had limited their use of thevillage forest. Some acted as guards. They even reported on neighbors

who had broken the council's rules. The similarities in their changedbehavior and the changed behavior of forest council headmen brieflydescribed above and also in chapter 1 are quite striking. Those whohad come to have a forest council in their villages, or, perhaps more

accurately, those whose councils had come to have them, had begun toview actions in forests differently.

r Of course, there were others in these four villages whose views hadnot changed so much. Those with whom [ talked were especially likely

to continue to say and do similar things as in 1989 if they had notparticipated in any way in the formation of the forest councils or in the

suite of strategies councils used to try to protect forests. If they had


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BLE 1 0

:anging Beliefs of Kuma on's Villagers about the Environment, J989-93 N 35)

Agreement with the \Villi ngness tStatement "Forest Reason to Protect Reduce FamilShould be the Forest ConsumptionProtected" (economic or Forest Product

(1 low, 5 high) environmental) J low. 5 hi

'sidents of villages 2.35 Economic 16 1.45

:th forest councils Environmental = 41989 (Pokhri,mgnua, Toli , andmauli)

.sidents of Pokhri, 365 Economic 12. 300mgnua. Toli , and Environmental 8Inauli in 1993

sidents of villages 247 Economic 11 1.73thout forest Environmenta l = 4Uncils in 1989

)arman. Gogta,ad Barora)

esidents of 2 2.7 Economic = 12 1.87:arman, Gogta. Environmental = 3

Barora in 1993

l I r c eField research. 1989. 1993te Respondents were surveyed in the villages of Pokhri. Tangnua. Toli. Nanauli. Darm;

ogta. and Barora.

become involved in the efforts to create a council or protect the forest

that came to be managed by the council, they were far more likely to

suggest that the forest requires protection. They were also more likely

to say that they were willing to become personally invested in prot c-

tio n . T h is is certainly not to claim that participation in council ac-

tivities is a mag ic bullet that necessari ly leads to transformation of

subject positions. And yet the testimony of these t\..,enty residents, by

no means a representative sample in a statistical sen e, constitutes a

valuable window on the changing beliefs of those \ ho come to be

involved in practices of environmental regulation ( ee table 10) .

The first two rows of the table make it clear that on the average


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residents in the four villages expressed greater agreement with the idea

of forest protection and a greater willingness to reduce their own consumpt ion of products from local forests than they had in 1989. Of thetwenty individuals , thirteen had participated in monitoring or enforcement of forest council rules in some form , and the shifts n their en-

vironmental beliers turned out to be stronger than those of villagers

who were not involved in any council-initiated actions.The information from interviews in these fom villages is especially

useful compared to the fifteen interviews in the three villages where nocouncils had emerged in the intervening years. In these three villages,

where I also conducted a second round of interviews in 1993, there hadbeen little change in the environment-related practices and views of

local residents. They still regarded, and often rightly so, the presence ofgovernment guards to be a veritable curse. Many of them, usually afterlooking around to make sure no officials \ . ,ere present, roundly abusedthe forest department Indeed, this is a practice that villagers n otherparts of rural India may also find a terrifying pleasure. But even whenmy interviewees agreed that it was necessary to protect forests because

of the many benefits trees provide , they were unwilling to do anythingthemselve to further such a goal. For the most part , their beliefs aboutforests and the environment had also changed little . The last hvo rowS

of table 1 0 suggest that there have been only very minor shifts in villagers perceptions about the need to protect forests and in their willingness to work toward that goal at some cost to themselves.

Varia lions in Environm ent l Subjecliuilies The Plac e of Regulation

The practices and perceptions associated with the emergence of forest

councils in Kumaon contain many variations. The preceding discussioncontain some important clues as to the sources of these variations. Butthe information in tables 9 and 10 is highly aggregated and does nothave sufficient texture to provide much insight into how practices related to environmental regulations affect the way villagers think about

their actions in forests. Further, it is not just the historical dimension ofthe production of different forms of environmental subjects that needs

attention; it is also important to explore the contemporary differencesin the making of environmental subjects.

To examine how and to what extent regulatory practices relate to the


24/35


environmental imaginations of Kumaonis, I report on the responses ofmore than two hundred persons I met and interviewed in 1993. Sincethe number of people I interviewed was much larger in 1993 than in

1989, it is possible to examine how different forms of monitoring andenforcement relate to my respondents beliefs about the environment.Recall from the previous chapter that the forest councils in Kumaon usefive different forms of monitoring and enforcement in their fore ts ( eefigure 7). Two of these fall under the heading of mutual monitoring. Inone, each village resident can monitor all the others and report illegalactions in the forest to the council. In the second, households are as

signed monitoring duties in turn. Under mutual monitoring , there islittle specialization in the task of monitoring and none of the monitorsis paid for the services he performs . Three forms of third party moni-toring exist, and in ll of them a specialized monitor is appointed for

specific durations andis

paid for the work performed. Forms of third-party monitoring are distinguished by the mode of payment to theguard: direct payments by hou eholds in cash or kind , salary paymentsby the council but from funds raised locally, and salary payments from

funds made available through commercial sales of forest products ortransfers received from the state. Table 11 summarizes the re ponses for

different forms of monitoring and shows the extent to which participation in monitoring and enforcement is connected to respondents beliefs about forests and the environment.

Table 11 provides information on the same three questions as didtables 9 and 1 0 , but it probes deeper. Instead of simply reporting theaverage responses of a intervievved individuals , the table presents the

answers of respondents by separating them according to the monitoringregulations adopted by forest councils and their involvement in monitoring practices. Thus , the table relates the participation in particularforms of environmental enforcement to villagers reported beliefs aboutthe environment. To interpret the table , consider row 1. It provides

information on a total of ten respondents, only eight of whom participated in mutual monitoring (all villagers monitor all other villagers).The answers of these respondents to the three questions listed earlier are

arranged according to whether they participated or abstained in mutualmonitoring. Rows 1 5 follow this pattern. The last row is for villages thatdid not have their own council-governed forest , so their residents had no

opportunity to participate in environmental monitoring.


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1 9 A New Technology

sequential relationship between participation in monitoring and the

development of environmental subjectivities. Such an inference wouldonly be possible by interviewing the same respondents before and aftertheir participation in enforcement. The information in table 1 comesclosest to such before and after evidence. The figures in table 11 onlyshow variations in subjectivities across different forms of monitoring

_ and participation in monitoring . It ,:ould be reasonable to suggest that

it is differences in beliefs that prompt my respondents to participate inmonitoring rather than participation that leads them to different beliefs . [t is when we consider together the evidence in tables 1 and 11

that it becomes at all justifiable to suggest that there are variations inthe environmental sensibilities of Kumaon residents that are systemati

cally related to their participation in environmental enforcement andthat these differences stem at least to some extent from such participation. But in any case even table shm-vs important differences in howvillagers in Kumaon think about their forests and their relationshipwith the environment.

The importance of participation in different monitoring mechanisms

becomes evident also in comparison with social identity categoriessuch as gender and caste. Consider the information in table 12 . I t showsthe difference between environment-related beliefs of interviewed vil

lagers by their gender (women versus men , caste (high versus low),and participation in different forms of monitoring. There is scarcely

any difference between men and women or respondents of higher orlower castes. They seem equaUy (un)likely to want to protect forests orreduce their household 's consumption to conserve forests . On theother hand, those who are involved in some form of monitoring andenvironmental enforcement are more likely to agree with the need to

protect forest, to ay that forests need to be protected for environmen-tal rather than economic reasons, and to accept some reduction in theirown use so as to ensure forest protection.

It is reasonable to conclude that when villagers partiCipate in moni-toring and enforcement they come to realize at a personal level the

social costs generated by those who do not adhere to the practices andexpectations that have been collectively chosen. They confront more

directly those who act illegally in the forest and then must decidewhether to ignore such co nfrontations , to choose mOre carefully toenforce h t they had agreed to do collectively, or to join others , ,,'ho


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B L E I 2 .

nder, Caste, and Participation and Their Relationships with

liefs Concerning the Environment, 1993 N = 205)

Monitoring

trategy Used byhe Forest Coun-il, Dimension of

Difference

ENDER

omen (95)

n (uo)

ASTE

igh (106)

\RTICIPATION

es (116)

Agreement withthe Statement

' Forests should beprotected

1 = ow, 5 =high)

344

3.9 2

2.66

urce Field research, 1993.

Reason to ProtectForest b

Economic =69 (73)Environmental =26 (27)Economic =80 (72)Environmental = 0 (28)

Economic = 8 (74)Environmental =28 (26)Economic = 71)Environmental =28 (29)

Economic =70 (60)Environmental =46 (40)Economic = 9 (89)Environmental = I I )

ligures in parentheses indicate number of respondents.

ligures in parentheses indicate percentage of respondents.

Willingness I

Reduce Famionsumption

Forest Produ(

I = ow, 5 =hil

234

244

1.74

are violating socially constructed norms and expectations. Opting forthe first two options is also to opt for what I am nominating an environ-mental subjectivity. Similarly, those who in their actions violate collec-tively generated guidelines to regulate practice can often continue to doso when it is indi\ridually expedient and there is no mechanism toregu late them. But when enforcement is commonplace they are oftenconfronted with the knowledge of their own deviations from what theyhad agreed to do. When their actions are met with direct chalJengesthat they count as appropriately advanced , it becomes far more difficult

to continue to act and believe in a divergent manner. It is in examining


27/35


TABLE 13.Contributions per Household toward Enforcement by Forest Councils, 1993

~ 205)

Number ofForm of Monitoring Respondents

'\- utual monitoring (each household 1 (2 villages)monitors all others).'vlutual monitoring (hou eholds assigned 17 3 villages)monitoring duty in rotation)Third-party monitoring households pay 39 7 villages)

monitors directly)Third-party monitoring salary paid out 98 18 villages)of locally raised funds)Third-party monitoring salary paid out 41 (8 villages)of eXlernaltransfers)

SOllrce Forest council records (data coUected n 1993).

Contributions perHouseholdin rupees)

933

11.44

36.61

16 .22

practices of villagers closely that it becomes possible to trace the links

between politics, institutional rules, and subject formation.

The effects o f more widespread participation are also visible in th eresources that councils are able to mobilize for protecting forests. Con

sider table 13. t presents the per household contributions that forestcouncils are able to use in a year.

The form of monitoring that leads to the highest levels o f contribu

) tiOIlS is one where villagers pay the guard directly. Mutual monitoring

produces the lowest levels of contributions. This should not surprise us

because councils resorting to this form of forest protection have been

unab le to gain the agreement o f lheir members to expend any mone

tary or material resources on monitoring. The contributions men

tioned under option 5 (third-party monitoring, in which the guard ispaid from external funds) are misleading because these are, strictly

speaking, the resources available for monitoring from all sources, not

just the contributions from village households.Clearly, engagement with the regulatory practices o f monitoring and

enforcement is po itively connected both to the existence of environmental orientations among Kumaon's residents and to higher mone-


28/35


tary and material contributions toward enforcement per household .The most important inference for poucy is that certain forms of en

vironmental enforcement are simultaneously associated with higherlevels of involvement by villagers and the generation of environmentalsubjectivities.

Intimate Government

Power had to be able to gain access to the bodies of individuals. to theiracts, attitudes , and modes of everyday behavior But at the same time ,these new techniques of power needed to grapple with the phenomenaof population. in short to undertake the administration, control , and

direction of the accumulation of men.-Michel Foucault , Power Know edg e

A useful metaphor that helps to think about the mechanisms that underpin the production of various forms of subjectivity in Kumaon is

what Latour (1987) has called action at a distance and, following him,

Miller and Rose have termed gove rnment at a distance (1990). Latourshows how intentional causes could operate at a distance to effectparticular kinds of actions in places and by people who are not directlycontrolled. Examining the work of scientists, Callon and Latour (1981)and Latour (1986) describe the affiliations and network that help establish links between calculations at one place and actions in another.The ~ i lel;ment in their r g u m ~ ~ tis the construction of allied

interests through persuasion, intrigue, calculation, or rhetoric (Millerand Rose 1990: 10) . It is not that anyone of the actors involved appealsto existing common interests . Rather , one set of actors, by deploying a '-

combination of resources, convinces another that the goals and prob

lems of the nvo are linked and can be addressed using joint strategies.1

sIn Kumaon, t, \,o crucial types of resources that the forest and revenue 1departments combined and deployed in the 1920S and 1930S were_in- ~

formation and ests. Information about the adverse effects of central.overnment of forests in Kumaon during the second decade of the

nventieth century and about exi ting government of forests by commu

nities in the region prepared the ground for the argument that regulatory control over forests could be decentralized to positive effect. The


29/35


experience of decentralized government of forests in Burma and Madras and the investigation of these experiences firsthand by departmen

tal officials in the 1 9 2 S helped produce the design of the Forest CouncilRules of 1931. The gradual return of the same forested lands that villagers had used until the 1890S (those that the Kumaon forest departmentappropriated benveen 1893 and 1916) provided the material basis

for the idea of a common interest in forest protection between vi llagecommunities in Kumaon and the forest department. Fores t councilsbecame the institutional means of pursuing this common interest over

long geographical distances.In the formulation action at a distance or government at a dis

tance. it s geographical distance that action and government over

come. In an important sense , these formulations are about the uncoupling of geographical from social and political distance that forms ofmodern government accomplish. By clarifying and specifying the relationship between particular practices in forested spaces and the sanc

tions that would follow those particular practices, government encourages new kinds of action among those who are to be governed. Actionat a distance thus overcomes the effects of phYSical separation by creating regulations known to tho e located at a distance. Officials whoover ee the translation of these regulations onto a social ground suc

ceed in their charge because of the presence of a desire among environmental subjects to follow new pathways of practice.

One can well argue that government of the environmentn

Kumaonconformed to this logic of action at a distance in its earlier phasesbefore the institution of community-based government . However, inthi earlier phase the effort to induce a change in the actions of villagersfailed because of the inability of government to constitu te a vision ofjoint interests in forests with which Kumaonis could identify. The for

est councils created the potential for viUagers and state officials to cometogether in a new form of government through which a compellingvision of joint interests could be manufactured. ot all villagers createdforest councils, however, and even in villages where forest councilscame into being not aU were equally successful. n additional development was necessary to make the government at a distance symbolizedby forest councils succeed. Once Kumaon's villagers had crafted highlydisper ed centers of environmental authority for and by themselves,


30/35

Making Envlronmental Subjects 195

processes of government at a distance came to be supplemented simul 1

taneously by what might be called ~ n t i m t egovernment. 6In contrast to government at a distance, which presupposes centers

of calculation, constant surveillance, continuous collection of information, unceasing crunching of numbers, and the imposition of intellectual dominance through experti e (Miller and Rose 1990: 9-10 , intimate government in Kumaon works by dispersing rule and scattering

involvement in government more widely. In consequence, there arenUmerous locations of decision making in each of which there areactors who work in different ways and to dlfferent degrees to protectforests. Homogeneity across these locations is difficult to acco mplishfor a variety of reasons, among them, differences in levels of migration,histories of cooperation, social stratification, occupational distribution,and resource endowments. Monitoring of villagers' actions is patch) }and unpr edictable. Councils collect information, but it is available onlylocally; it is seldom processed and presented in a way that may beuseful for policy-making elsewhere. Practice and SOCiality rather thanexpertise form the basis of intimate government to regulate vil lagers'

actions . The ability of regulation to make itself felt in the realm ofeveryday practice is dependent on channeling existing flows of powerwithin village communities toward new ends related to the environment. The joint production of interests is ba ed on multiple, dailyinteractions within the community. s the community becomes thereferential locus of environmental actions, it also becomes the arena

where intimate government unfolds.Intimate government shapes practice and helps to knit together indi

viduals n villages, their leaders, state officials stationed in rural administrative centers, and politicians interested in classifying existing ecologicalpractices. Intimate government is about the creation and deployment oflinks of influence between a group of decision makers within the vill geand the common villagers , vhose practices these decision makers seek toshape. Institutional changes in the exercise of power are the instrumentsthrough which these links between decision makers and the practices ofVillagers are made real. When successful, they are closely tied to processesof environmental enforcement, as the evidence in this chapter suggests.

Variations in institutional forms of enforcement are connected to theparticipation that villagers are willing to provide and forest council deci-


31/35


sion makers try to elicit. Specialization of enforcement roles and direct

participation in enforcement seem to create the greatest willingness ou

the part of villagers to contribute to environmental enforcement as well asto express an interest in environmental protection, as tables 9 through 12make clear.

But not all forms of institutional enforcement are equally available to

all forest councils, as was discussed in chapter 5 If the number ofhou eholds in a village is small and the households are relatively poor,

the ability of villagers to contribute toward the payment of a salary is

limited. f a village is highly stratified or there are many disagreements

among the villagers, they are also less able to enact sustainable environmental enforcement. These variations in village-level processes influence the extent to which different village communities are able successfully to take advantage of the state s willingness to disperse ruleand decentralize control over forests.

Intimate government is lso about the ways in which villagers themselves try to shape their conduct in forests. Government at a distanceworks in Kumaon only in conjunction with intimate government be

cause villagers get involved in regulatory practices that they see as

important to their own long-term interests. Vith the redefinition ofinterests that exposure to scarcities and regulations makes explicit, acalculation of the costs and benefits of illegal harvests from their ownfore ts versus those from government or other communities forestshas come to pervade the environmental practices of households. In

stead of simply harvesting the fodder, firewood, or the timber they

need from forests near their homes, Kumaon's residents now reckoncarefully before deciding where, how, how much, and when to harvest.The experience of scarcity makes such reckoning unavoidable.

At the same time, it is not simply constraint that new forms ofcommunity-based government embody.l ; If regulations necessitate

careful estimations of availability and scarcity, they also go togetherwith possibilities for other kinds of corrective action against decisionmakers. f villagers do not favor the ,vay their forest is being governed

by their councils, they can attempt to change the regulations adoptedby their council members or even to change the council's membership.Channels that affect what happens in forests allow influence to flow in

multiple directions rather than only one way . And the everyday regulation of what happens in forests is influenced far more directly by vil-


32/35


lagers' links to officials in their forest councils than by their links tostate officials in the forest and revenue departments.

Although intimate government in Kumaon's communities has helped

efforts by the state to govern at a distance, il has done so in ways thatlocal e s i ~ e t sbelieve to be defined locally. Villagers may protect foreslsana control illegal practices of harvesting and extraction. They may alsouse the language of regulation and many of the same idioms of protection that state officials deploy. But they do so in pursuit of goals that they

imagine as their own and in which they often construct state officials asibeff:iCTent unsupportive, or corrupt. This imagined autonomy, stemming from precisely those practices of conservation encouraged by slale

officials, is crucial to the success of decenlralized protection.y focus on how variations in practices of participation relale to

variations in subjectivities tries to move away from ab tract, static cale

gories of social classification based on caste, gender, or location. Themany variations in the nature of regulatory practices within villages,among men and women, and in upper and lower casles render su h

classifications partially useful at best. Terms uch as cultural/orms andsymbolic systems which are central to Paul Willis's penetraling study ofthe reproduction of the difference bet\veen capitalists and workers ,seem equally distant from the process of subject making. Willis is concerned with similar questions about the construction of subjeclivitiesand the confirmation of identity (1981: 173). But it is in the examination of the actual practices of schooling among working class kidrather than in its abstract cultural-Marxist theoretical structure, that

his study finds its most compelling insights.The previous section, in focusing on the aggregate environmental

responses of Kuma on's residents, suggested that using social categories

such as gender and caste to try to under tand subject formation servesonly to obscure the processes through which subjects are made. The ecategories are useful only as proxies, hinting at a small fraction of the

interactions that go into the making of environmental subjects. A shiftaway from categorical relations toward villagers' involvement in prac

tices of social-ecological regulation helps to uncover the frame thatholds the three conceptual units of analysis in this book together: politics, institutions, and subjectivities. '8 The focus on practice hows thatthese seemingly different concepts are linked in the everyday lives of

Kumaon's villagers. It is in the investigation of the texture of social


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198 A ew Technology

practice , simplified analytically by a focus on forms of monitoring andenforcement, that it becomes possible to see mv environmental politics s lived by those who are ubject to it.

Cultivating Environmental Subjects

The argument that there are relationships between government andsubject formation and policy and subjectivity (Foucault 1982: 212) hascome to be well rehear ed n the wake of Foucault s original insights

(Cruikshank 1994 ; Hannah 2000 ; Mitchell 2000; Rose 1999 ; Tully1988). This relationship can be traced by examining technologies of

power that form subjects and encourage them to define themselves in

particular ways and technologies of the self that individuals apply tothemselves n order to transform their own conditions (NUller 1993:xiii-xiv). Both of these technologies are united in the idea of government based on knowledge , and they are visible n the processes thatunfolded in the making of environmental subjects in Kumaon. My discussion of these processes shows that the relationship between government and subject formation s one of mutuality and dependency ratherthan agonism and autonomy.

This chapter has chosen not to engage the friction and heat that

discu ions about Foucault s ethics often generate. Although it is surelyimportant to examine whether his concept of power and the subject

leads to an inability to criticize social phenomena, what s more interesting for my purposes is the extent to which some of Foucault s laterideas about government and its relationship to subject formation canbe investigated on an evidentiary basis n the context of variations inenvironmental subjecthood in Kumaon. 9 Foucault is often accused ofmaking provocative conceptual innovations that cannot be deployed in

relation to evidence generated from a social ground. Similarly, muchpolitical-philosophical debate on subject formation proceeds as if sub

jects emerge and exist independent of historical, political, and socialgrounds. t thus constantly runs the risk of becoming irrelevant toactual processes of subject formation. This chapter has attempted toplace Foucault s ideas about subject formation against a social andpolitical context and to address subject formation concretely rather

than abstractly. Although in the proce s I have sirnpli1ied the concep-


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tual architecture of philosophical discussions about the subject, havedone so with a view to focusing carefully on a dilemma that dividesmuch social-theoretical discu ion about the subject. More concretely,

this chapter has tried to show what differentiates various kinds ofsubjects by viewing practice as the crucial link between power andimagination. It has examined how close attention to practice can per-mit the joint examination of seemingly different, abstract constructs

such as politics, institutions, and subjectivities.In this context, Butler s (1997: 10 caution against using the term

subject interchangeably with person or individu l needs to be taken seriously. Her warning is most u eful for the recognition that the relationsof pO\Ner within which subjects are formed are not necessarily the ones

they enact upon formation. The temporal sequentiality she introducesin the relationship between subjects and power helps underline the fact

that the conditions of origin of a subject need have no more than atenuous impact on that subject s continuing existence and action . 20 InKumaon, the production of environmental subjects in the early twen-

tieth century within the forest department, one might note, led to acascading series of changes in institutional, political, and social do-mains connected to the idea of community. t is in this realm of the

community that new environmental subject have emerged.The making of environmental subjects in Kumaon is thus part of a

broader dynamic that new forms of government have unleashed inKumaon. In tracing the making of environmental subjects, the earliersections in this chapter examined ho\ , variations n subjectivities relate

to participatory practices around different forms of environmentalmonitoring and enforcement. The question of subject formation, implicit in most studies of environmental government, is crucially con-nected to participation and practice. The pract ice of enforcement andregulation in which villagers have come to participate are about a morecareful government of environment and of their m . n actions and

selves .Thus, the emergence of environmental subjects in Kumaon s villages

has been as much a consequence of processes marked by government ata distance as it has been about intimate government. The state s effortsto govern at a distance made available to villagers the possibility offorming forest councils. The recognition of a mutual interest in forest

that was brought into existence by the seeming concessions of the state


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led some village communities to constitute themseLves as creators of

forest councils. Simultaneously , the willingness of the forest councils to

initiate various processes of intim te government in their own commu-nities has affected their uccess in gaining villagers p rticip tion andthe eXlent to which village residents would turn into environmental

subjects.

agarwal- environmentality

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