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C u r r e n t A n t h r o p o l o g y Volume 46, Number 2, April 2005 2005 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2005/4602-0001$10.00

Environmentality

Community, IntimateGovernment, and the Making

of Environmental Subjects in

Kumaon, India1

by Arun Agrawal

This paper examines how and for what reasons rural residentscome to care about the environment. Focusing on Kumaon, In-dia, it explores the deep and durable relationship between gov-ernment and subjectivity and shows how regulatory strategies as-sociated with and resulting from community decision makinghelp transform those who participate in government. Using evi-dence drawn from the archival record and fieldwork conductedover two time periods, it analyzes the extent to which varyinglevels of involvement in institutional regimes of environmentalregulation facilitate new ways of understanding the environment.On the basis of this analysis, it outlines a framework of under-standing that permits the joint consideration of the technologiesof power and self that are responsible for the emergence of newpolitical subjects.

a r u n a g r a w a l is Associate Professor in the School of Natu-ral Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan(Dana Building, 430 E. University, Ann Arbor, MI 48103, U.S.A.[[email protected]]). Born in 1962, he received his M.B.A.from the Indian Institute of Management in 1985 and his M.A.(1988) and Ph.D. (1992) from Duke University. He has taught atthe University of Florida (1993–95), Yale University (1997–2001),and McGill University (2001–02). His research interests lie in thepolitics of development, institutional change, and environmentalconservation. Among his publications are Greener Pastures: Poli-tics, Markets, and Community among a Migrant Pastoral People(Durham: Duke University Press, 1999) and Environmentality:Technologies of Government and Political Subjects (Durham:Duke University Press, in press). The present paper was submit-ted 20 i 04 and accepted 4 viii 04.

1. I am grateful for constructive comments and thoughtful insightsfrom Rebecca Hardin and Donald Moore throughout the writing of

the first draft of this paper. Subsequent versions have benefited fromreadings by John Galaty, James C. Scott, Elinor Ostrom, and othercolleagues at Yale, McGill, and Indiana Universities. Presentationsof early drafts of this paper to interested audiences at these univer-sities, the University of Washington, York University , and the Uni-versity of Michiganlet to incisive questions. Jacqueline Berman, Ash-wini Chhatre, Shubhra Gururani, Tania Li, Victoria Murillo, AmyPoteete, Neera Singh, and Peter Vandergeest read the paper in itsentirety. If some of their suggestions did not find their way into thepublished version, my stubbornness rather than their acuity is to beblamed. Suggestions from four anonymous referees have improvedthe coverage of the relevant literature and the evidence brought tobear on the argument. Finally, the writing of this paper has beensupported by funding from the National Science Foundation (# SBR9905443) and the Ford Foundation (# 950-1160-2).

Down the street an ambulance has come to rescuean old man who is slowly losing his life. Not many can see that he is already becoming the backyardtree he has tended for years.. . .

— j o y h a r j o , How We Become Humans

On my first visit to Kumaon in northern India in 1985,I met a number of leaders of the widely known Chipkomovement, including Sundar Lal Bahuguna and ChandiPrasad Bhatt.2 The meeting that left a longer-lasting im-pression, however, was to occur in a small village, Kotuli,where I spent nearly a week investigating how villagersused their forests. Hukam Singh, a young man with aserious air, told me that it was futile to tryto save forests.Too many villagers cut too many trees. Too many othersdid not care. He himself was no exception. “What doesit matter if all these trees are cut? There is always moreforest.” In fact, he judged that at best only a few villagers

might be interested in what I was calling “the environ-ment.” “Women are the worst. With a small hatchet,they can chop so many branches you will not believe.”He qualified this somewhat: “Not because they want to,but they have to feed animals, get firewood to cook.”

Hukam Singh’s judgment is probably less importantfor what it says about processes of environmental con-servation in Kotuli than for what it reflects of his ownposition. Talking with other people, I realized that thelong periods Hukam Singh spent in the town of Almoraprevented him from appreciating fully the efforts afootto protect trees and forests—the most visible face of theenvironment in Kumaon. He was trying to get a job inthe Almora district court and had stopped farming some

of the family agricultural holdings. The meetings thatthe forest council called almost every other month werenot just a sham. The 85 acres of village forest were moredensely populated with trees and vegetation than severalneighboring forests. Despite the numerous occasionswhen the village guard caught people illegally cuttingtree branches or grazing animals, most villagers did notthink of the forest as a freely available public good thatcould be used at will.

The reasons my conversations with Hukam Singh hada more lasting effect than those with the well-knownChipko leaders were to become apparent during my re-turn visits to Kotuli. I visited again in 1989–90 and inthe summer of 1993. In these intervening years, Hukam

Singh had left Almora, settled in Kotuli, and marriedSailadevi from the nearby village of Gunth. He hadstarted cultivating his plots of irrigated land and boughtseveral cattle. He had also become a member of Kotuli’sforest council. One of his uncles, a member of the coun-cil, had retired, and Hukam Singh had replaced him.More surprising, Hukam Singh had become a convert toenvironmental conservation. Sitting on a woven cot, one

2. For a recent careful study of the Chipko movement, its leader-ship, and its strategies, see Rangan (2000). See Mawdsley (1998) forthoughtful reflection on how Chipko has become an idiom in con-servationist arguments.


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162 F c u r r e n t a n t h r o p o l o g y Volume 46 , Number 2, April 2005

sturdy leg tapping the ground impatiently, he explainedone afternoon, “We protect our forests better than gov-ernment can. We have to. Government employees don’treally have any interest in forests. It is a job for them.For us, it is life.” Feeling that he had not made his pointsufficiently convincingly, he went on. “Just think of allthe things we get from forests—fodder, wood, furniture,food, manure, soil, water, clean air. If we don’t safeguardthe forest, who else will? Some of the people in the vil-lage are ignorant, and so they don’t look after the forest.But sooner or later, they will all realize that this is veryimportant work. It is important even for the country, notjust for our village.”

These different justifications of his personal transfor-mation into someone who cared about protecting treesand situated his actions within a general framework ofconservation are too resonant with prevailing environ-mentalist rhetorics to sound original. But to dismissthem because they are being repeated by many otherswould be to miss completely the enormously interesting,complex, and crucial but understudied relationship be-tween changes in government and related shifts in en-vironmental practices and beliefs.3 It would not be wrongto say that the shift in Hukam’s beliefs hints at what isperhaps the most important and underexplored questionin relation to enviromental regulation. When and forwhat reason do socially situated actors come to careabout, act in relation to, and think about their actionsin terms of something they identify as “the environ-ment”?

My paper attempts to fill this gap. It explores the deepand durable relationship between government and sub-jecthood and shows how regulatory strategies associatedwith and resulting from community decision makinghelp transform those who participate in government. Us-ing evidence drawn from archival records and fieldworkconducted in 1989–90 and 1993, the paper examines theextent to which varying levels of involvement in insti-tutional regimes of environmental regulation lead to newways of understanding the world. In the process it helpsexplain transformations over time and differences at agiven point in time in how people view their relationshipwith the environment.4

Hukam Singh did not care much about the village for-est in 1985 but by 1993 had come to defend the need forits regulation. Similarly, concern for the environment inKumaon has grown over time. Widespread involvement

in specific regulatory practices is tightly linked with the

3. For a distinction between “government” and “governance,” seeRose (1999: chap. 1 ). “Government,” as used in this paper, refersto the different mechanisms used to shape the conduct of specificpersons and groups, including the mechanisms that such personsand groups use on themselves. “Governance” is more directly tiedto the functioning of state apparatuses and refers to the regulatorystrategies deployed formally by states with regard to their citizens(see Rhodes 1996).4. For some important work that begins this kind of analysis, seeAgarwal (1992), Blake (1999), Bryant (2002), Li (2000), Luke (1999),and Sivaramakrishnan (1999). Relatively few political ecologists orecofeminists attend to the issues explored in this paper (see Escobar1999 and Warren 1997).

emergence of greater concern for the environment andthe creation of “environmental subjects”—people whocare about the environment. For these people the envi-ronment is a conceptual category that organizes some oftheir thinking and a domain in conscious relation towhich they perform some of their actions. I draw onevidence related to forests as an example of an environ-mental resource. Further, in considering an actor as anenvironmental subject I do not demand a purist’s versionof the environment as necessarily separate from and in-dependent of concerns about material interests, liveli-hoods, and everyday practices of use and consumption.A desire to protect commonly owned/managed trees andforests, even with the recognition that such protectioncould enhance one’s material self-interest, can be part ofan environmental subjectivity. In such situations, self-interest comes to be cognized and realized in terms ofthe environment.

If the environmental aspect of “environmental sub-jects” requires what Donald Moore (personal commu-nication, 1998) calls “boundary work,” so does the sec-ond part of the phrase. It should be evident that I do notuse “subjects” in opposition either to citizens or to ob-jects. One commonsense meaning of “subjects” wouldbe “actors” or “agents.” But when subjected, people arealso subordinated—a second way of thinking about thesubject. And the third obvious referent of the term is thenotion of a theme or domain, as in the environment’sbeing the subject of my research. I use the idea of subjectsto think about Kumaon’s residents and changes in theirways of looking at, thinking about, and acting in forestedenvironments in part because of the productive ambi-guities associated with it. Each of its referents is impor-tant, but this paper focuses on the continuum betweenthe meanings of subject as agent or subordinate ratherthan the legal-juridical meanings associated with Mam-dani’s (1996) work or the idea of subject that is roughlyequivalent with the notion of a theme.

Given the existence of environmental subjects in Ku-maon, what is it that distinguishes them from those whocontinue not to care about or act in relation to the en-vironment? Of the various residents of Kotuli, only somehave changed their beliefs about the need for forest pro-tection. Some remain unaffected by changing regulations,and others harvest forest products without attending toor caring about locally formulated enforcement. Thus, tosay that Kumaonis have come to care about their forests

and the environment is only to suggest that some ofthem—in increasing numbers over the past few decadesperhaps—have done so.

Answers to questions about who acts and thinks aboutthe environment as a relevant referential category when,how, and why are important for both practical and the-oretical reasons. Depending on the degree to which in-dividuals care about the environment, the ease withwhich they agree to contribute to environmental pro-tection may be greater and the costs of enforcing newenvironmental regulations may be lower. But equally im-portant is the theoretical puzzle: What makes certainkinds of subjects, and what is the best way to understand


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a g r a w a l Environmentality F 163

the relationship between actions and subjectivities?Against the common presumption that actions followbeliefs, this paper will present some evidence that peopleoften first come to act in response to what they may seeas compulsion or as their short-term interest and onlythen develop beliefs that defend short-term-oriented ac-tions on other grounds as well. It will also show thatresidents of Kumaon vary in their beliefs about forestprotection and that these variations are related to theirinvolvement in regulatory practices rather than their so-cial-structural location in terms of caste or gender.

My argument is that beliefs and thoughts are formu-lated in response to experiences and outcomes over manyof which any single agent has little control. There is littledoubt that one can change some aspects of the worldwith which one is in direct interaction, but equally cer-tainly the number and types of forces that affect evenone’s daily experiences transcend one’s own will and de-sign. Much of what one encounters in the world resultsonly partly from strategies reflecting one’s own knowl-edge and preferences. At any given moment, people mayplan to act in accordance with their beliefs. But all plansare incomplete and imperfect, and none incorporate theentire contextual structure in which actions lead to con-sequences. For these and other reasons, actions have un-anticipated outcomes. The experience of these unantic-ipated outcomes does not always confirm actors in theirbeliefs; some of these outcomes may demonstrate thatthose beliefs are inappropriate or that earlier subject po-sitions need revision. In these situations, actors have anincentive to work on their beliefs, preferences, and ac-tions, incorporating into their mentalities new propen-sities to act and think about the world. Even if only avery small proportion of one’s daily experience serves toundermine existing beliefs, over a relatively short period(such as a year or two) there may be ample opportunityto arrive at subject positions that are quite different fromthose held earlier. In this way of thinking about subjectpositions, the durability of subjectivity or the notion ofsubjectivity as the seat of consciousness is what is beingcontested.

In part, I view such opening up and questioning of theidea of durable and sovereign subject positions as a wayto facilitate a conversation among scholars who are oftenconcerned with similar analytical and theoretical ques-tions but use different terms—preferences, identity, sub-jectivity—to signal their common object of concern.

Thus, despite the major theoretical differences amongeconomists, sociologists and anthropologists, and post-structuralists, they often refer to similar empirical phe-nomena when, for example, they assert that “preferencesemerge from interactions between individuals and theirenvironment” (Druckman and Lupia 2000:1), speak ofthe role of anthropologists in the “construction of Chu-mash identity and tradition” (Haley and Wilcoxon 1997:761), or suggest that “human subjectivity is socially elab-orated” (Cronick 2002:534). By pointing to thesepotentially fruitful areas of overlap I do not intend todeny the real differences among those who use particularterms to signal their specific theoretical allegiances.

Rather, my aim is to indicate common concerns acrossdisciplinary divisions, show how different terms are de-ployed in different disciplines to refer to common con-cerns about the making of subjects, and foreground someskepticism about the possibility of access to a deep sub-jectivity. An ethnographer’s observations, conversations,interviews, and surveys are ways of opening a windowand throwing light on how people think, act, imagine,or believe at any given moment and how their ways ofdoing and being change over time. Investigators—indeed,even close friends and family members—can deduce in-ternal states of mind only from external evidence. Thereis no direct access to inner thoughts or subject positions.5

In any event, persuasive answers about variations be-tween subject positions and the making of subjects arelikely to hinge on explanations that systematically con-nect policy with perceptions, government with subjec-tivity, institutions with identities. Environmental prac-tice, this paper suggests, is the key link between theregulatory rule that government is all about and imag-inations that characterize particular subjects. In contrast,social identities such as gender and caste may play onlya small role in shaping beliefs about what one considersto be appropriate environmental actions. This should notbe surprising. Although the politics and analytics of iden-tity consider significant the external signs of belonging,it is the tissue of contingent practices spanning categor-ical affiliations that is really at stake in influencing in-terests and outcomes. In the subsequent discussion, Ihope to sketch the direction in which analysis needs tomove.

Producing SubjectsThe description of my meetings and conversations withHukam Singh, although it seems to be located quitefirmly in an argument about the emergence of new sub-jectivities in relation to the environment, resemblesGeertz’s idea of “a note in a bottle.” It comes from“somewhere else,” is empirical rather than a philoso-pher’s “thought experiment,” and yet has only a passingrelationship to representativeness (Greenblatt 1999:14–16). Making it connect better with a social groundand with other roughly similar stories requires the de-velopment of some crucial terms and the presentationof additional evidence. Two such terms are “imagina-

tion” and “resistance.”In his seminal account of nationalism’s origins, An-derson famously suggests that the nation is an imaginedcommunity (1991 [1983]). In a virtuoso performance, hestrings together historical vignettes about the develop-ment of nationalisms in Russia, England, and Japan inthe nineteenth century (pp. 83–111) to show how thesecases offered models that could successfully be piratedby other states where “the ruling classes or leading el-

5. In this regard, see also Sen’s (1973) brilliant demonstration ofthe fatal tensions in operationalizing the preference-revelationmechanisms so beloved of behavioral economists.


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ements in them felt threatened by the world-wide spreadof the nationally-imagined community” (p. 99). Themodel that according to Anderson comes to triumph isthat of “official nationalism.”6 He suggests (p. 110) thatofficial nationalisms were

responses by power groups . . . [who were] threat-ened with exclusion from, or marginalization in,popularly imagined communities. . . . Such officialnationalisms were conservative, not to say reaction-ary, policies. . . . very similar policies were pursuedby the same sorts of groups in the vast Asian andAfrican territories subjected in the course of thenineteenth century. . . . they were [also] picked upand imitated by indigenous ruling groups in thosefew zones (among them Japan and Siam) which es-caped direct subjection.

It is interesting, even disturbing, that for Anderson thesuccessful adoption, superimposition, and spread of of-

ficial nationalisms as a substitute for popular national-isms lay well within the capacities of ruling groups toaccomplish, despite the imagined nature of nationalism.A number of scholars have imaginatively elaborated onthe term “imagination” in talking about the nation (Ap-padurai 1996:114–15; Chakrabarty 2000a:chap. 6), but inImagined Communities itself the subsequent analysisgives it relatively short shrift. The successful impositionof an official version of nationalism around the globe,coupled with the imagined quality of national emergencethat is the core of Anderson’s intervention, implies thatpower groups were able to colonize the very imaginationof the masses over whom they sought to continue torule. How they overcame, even for a few decades and

certainly only patchily, the resistance that existingsenses of “imagined belonging” posed to their efforts re-quires further elaboration than Anderson provides. Thepolitics at the level of the subject that is likely involvedin the struggle between official and popular nationalismsremains to be compellingly articulated.7 National sub-jects (to use shorthand to refer to the colonization ofpolitical imagination by official nationalizing policies)emerged in history. A history of nationalism thereforerequires a politics of the subject.8

The question when, why, and how some subjectsrather than others come to have an environmental con-

6. Anderson borrows the term from Seton-Watson but gives it a

bite all his own (p. 86)7. It is precisely to this politics that Chakrabarty (2000a), indebtedno doubt in important ways to Chatterjee (1986, 1993), draws at-tention whenhe seeks to “make visible the heterogeneous practicesof seeing” that often go under the name of imagination. Chakra-barty examines the differences among the many ways of imaginingthe nation by talking about peasants and a literate middle class.8. The inattention to this politics in Anderson’s accountis signaled,of course, at the very beginning of his cultural analysis of nation-alism. After defining the nation as “an imagined political com-munity—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign”(1991[1983]:6–7), he closely examines every term in the definitionexcept “political.” It is not only Anderson’s history of nationalismthat can be enriched by attending to the politics of subjecthood butalso his view of culture more generally.

sciousness is precisely what Anderson leaves out in con-sidering the nation. Analogous judgments about thetransformation of the consciousness of those who areless powerful can also be found in the work of otherscholars. According to Barrington Moore, “People are ev-idently inclined to grant legitimacy to anything that isor seems inevitable no matter how painful it may be.Otherwise the pain might be intolerable” (1978:459).One might ask, “All people?” If not all, then surely weare forced to ask which ones, when, why, and how. Thesame motivation to account for social and political ac-quiescence impels Gaventa’s (1982) brilliant study ofpower and quiescence in Appalachia, but his analysis ofthe third face of power can be supplemented by the ex-amination of mechanisms that would explain when andhow it is that some people come to accept the interestsof dominant classes as their own and others do not.

In contrast to Anderson, for whom the imagination ofthe less powerful subject is smoothly appropriable by of-ficial policies, scholars of resistance have often assumedthe opposite. For them, resisting subjects are able to pro-tect their consciousness from the colonizing effects ofelite policies, dominant cultures, and hegemonic ideolo-gies. This ground truth forms both their starting assump-tion and their object of demonstration. Scott’s path-break-ing study of peasant resistance (1985), his more generalreflections on the relationship between domination andresistance (1989), and the work on resistance that emergedas a cross-disciplinary subfield in the wake of his inter-ventions have helped make familiar the idea that peoplecan resist state policies, elite power, and dominant ide-ologies. Scott assertively advances the thesis that theweak probably always withstand the powerful, at least inthe realm of ideas and beliefs. He also suggests that whentheir autonomous views about the prevailing social orderare invisible it is because of material constraints and fearof reprisals upon discovery, not because they have comewholeheartedly to acquiesce in their own domination, letalone because their consciousness has been incorporatedinto a hegemonic ideology.

Scott articulates this position most fully, but a similarunderstanding of peasants and their interests was alsopart of early efforts of subaltern-studies scholars to iden-tify an autonomous consciousness for the excludedagents of history.9 Ranajit Guha’s (1982a) seminal state-ment on the historiography of colonial India, for exam-ple, in calling for a more serious consideration of the

“politics of the people,” portrays the subaltern as “au-tonomous” and subaltern politics as structurally andqualitatively different from elite politics in that “vastareas in the life and consciousness of the people werenever integrated into [bourgeois] hegemony” (pp. 4–6;seealso Guha 1997). Even those who note that the opposi-tion between domination and resistance is too mechan-

9. The essays in Guha and Spivak (1988) are among the best intro-ductory texts about subaltern studies. See Guha (1982b, 1997), andChatterjee and Jeganathan (2000) for a sense of the different mo-ments in the life of a collective. Ludden’s (2001) collectionof papersconstitutes a fine example of some of the more careful criticalengagements with the work of subaltern-studies writers.


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ical to capture how the consciousness of those subjectto power changes with their experience of power go onto note that the process is “murky” (Comaroff and Com-aroff 1989:269, 290). But for scholars of resistance andsubalternity, the autonomous consciousness of peasants,the subaltern, and other marginalized groups endures inthe face of dominant elite pressures operating in a spec-trum of domains, not just in the domain of policy.10

It is clear that the works discussed above constitutetwo facets of the puzzle of the relationship between gov-ernment and subjectivity. Each facet is a strong argumentin favor of a particular tendency: in the one case, thetendency toward the colonization of the imagination bypowerful political agents and in the other the tendencytoward durability of a sovereign consciousness foundedupon the bedrock of individual or class interest. Withinthemselves, these arguments are at least consistent, butconsidered jointly as a potential guide to the relationshipbetween the subject and the social they lead to conflict-ing conclusions. It is crucial not just to account for thepersistence of a certain conception of interests within agroup of people or to assume the straightforward trans-formation of one conception of interests into another butto explore more fully the mechanisms that can accountfor both (and other) possible effects on people’s concep-tions of their interests.

I weave a path through the opposed conclusions ofthese two different streams of scholarship by suggestingthat technologies of government produce their effects bygenerating a politics of the subject that can be betterunderstood and analyzed by considering both practiceand imagination as critical.11 The reliance on imagina-tion by some scholars (Appadurai 1996, Chakrabarty2000a) in thinking about the emergence of differentkinds of subjects is a step in the right direction.But closerattention to social practices can lead to a species of the-orizing more closely connected to the social ground inwhich imagination is always born and, reciprocally, thatit often influences. A direct examination of the hetero-geneous practices that policy produces and their rela-tionship with varying social locations has the potentialto lead analysis toward the mechanisms involved in pro-ducing differences in the way subjects imagine them-selves. My interest is to highlight how it might be pos-sible and why it is necessary to politicize bothcommunity and imagination in the search for a betterway to think about environmental politics.

Foucault’s insights on the “subject” form a crucialpoint of reference but also a point of departure in con-sidering the political that is silenced in Anderson’s visionof the imagined community. In Discipline and Punish,

10. At the same time, it is fair to observe that more recent schol-arship in a subalternist mode has begun to use more seriously Fou-cault’s ideas about power and subject formation and to examinehow different kinds of subjects come into being both under colo-nialism and in modernity (Arnold 1993, Chakrabarty 2000b, Prak-ash 2000).11. For an attractive recent account of environmentalist history,forces of modernization, and changing imaginaries, see Gold andGujar (2002).

Foucault elaborates a particular model of subject mak-ing—the panopticon—which facilitates the applicationof power in the form of a gaze. “He who is subjected toa field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes respon-sibility for the constraints of power; he makes them playspontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself thepower relation in which he simultaneously plays bothroles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection”(1979 [1975]:202–3). Here then is a mechanism—thegaze—that acts as a sorting device. Those subject to thegaze become subject to power, examples of the effects itcan produce. Those who escape the gaze also, presum-ably, escape the effects of power.

Although this example introduces political practiceinto the process by which subjects make themselves, itobviously will not do. By itself, the model needs morework for any number of reasons, among them its absenceeven in total institutions and the infeasibility of applyingits principles outside such institutions.12 Nor is it thecase that visibility in asymmetric political relationshipsnecessarily produces subjects who make themselves inways desired by the gaze of power. Foucault does notelaborate on the specific mechanisms implicated in themaking of subjects (Butler 1997:2). He does, however,refer to the indeterminacy that is inherent in the processbecause modern forms of power and mechanisms of re-pression do not yield predictable outcomes (1978a:115).

Thus, he argues in Discipline and Punish that “itwould be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or anideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a re-ality, it is produced permanently around, on, within thebody by the functioning of a power that is exercised onthose punished—and, in a more general way, on thoseone supervises, trains and corrects . . . ” (1979 [1975]:27). But his studies (1978b, 1980) of Pierre Riviere andHercule Barbin are about how these persons mobilizedcounterdiscourses against dominant scientific accountsof their transgressions and crimes. He makes the pointclearly in his discussion of different technologies thatshape humans. There are “technologies of power, whichdetermine the conduct of individuals and submit themto certain ends or domination, [leading to] an objectiv-izing of the subject; and technologies of the self, whichpermit individuals to effect . . . a certain number of op-erations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, con-duct, and ways of being, so as to transform themselves. . .”( 1988:18). In his own attempts to trace how subjects

make themselves, Foucault is especially attentive to thepractices related to ethical norms in late antiquity, theconfessional, and the pastorate; however, the specific in-stitutional and political arrangements that shape prac-tice and subjectivity vary both over time and in space.Foucault explicitly recognizes the many different waysin which subjects come into being (2000 [1979], 2000[1982]). Much of the vast secondary literature on neo-liberal governmentality, in contrast, defers a consider-

12. By “total institutions” I mean what Foucault (1979 [1975]:263)calls “complete and austere institutions”; prisons, concentrationcamps, and insane asylums are prime examples.


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ation of how subjects make themselves, focusing pri-marily on technologies of power aimed at objectifyingindivi-duals.13

The same observation applies to many of those whoextend Foucault’s ideas about governmentality to the co-lonial and postcolonial contexts, remaining preoccupiedmostly with the coercive aspects of state, institutional,and social power (Ferguson 1994 [1990], Gupta 1998,Scott 1995, Pels 1997; cf. Bryant 2002). Even in worksthat focus on the conscious reshaping of the self by theuse of technologies of the self, however, there is rela-tively little attention to variations in self formation andaccounting for such variations in terms of social prac-tice—the main focus of the ensuing discussion. In par-ticular, writings in the field of development and envi-ronmental conservation, even when influenced byFoucault and Bourdieu, have been relatively inattentiveto the variable ways in which self formation takes placeand how it may be shaped by involvement in differentforms of practice (cf. Blake 1999).

I use the term “environmentality” here to denote aframework of understanding in which technologies ofself and power are involved in the creation of new sub-jects concerned about the environment. There is alwaysa gap between efforts by subjects to fashion themselvesanew and the technologies of power that institutionaldesigns seek to consolidate. The realization of particularenvironmental subjectivities that takes place within thisgap is as contingent as it is political. Indeed, it is therecognition of contingency that makes it possible to in-troduce the register of the political in thinking about thecreation of the subject. It is also precisely what Appa-durai (1996:134) has in mind when he suggests that co-lonial technologies left an indelible mark on Indian po-litical consciousness but that there is no easy gen-eralization about how and to what extent they “madeinroads into the practical consciousness of colonial sub-jects in India.” Among the dimensions he mentions asimportant are gender, distance from the colonial gaze,involvement with various policies, and distance from thebureaucratic apparatus.14

These factors are of course important. Nonetheless, itis necessary to distinguish between the politics gener-ated by involvement in different kinds of practices andthe politics that depends on stable interests presumed toflow from belonging to particular identity categories

(Lave et al. 1992, Willis 1981). Much analysis of socialphenomena takes interests as naturally given by partic-ular social groupings: ethnic formations, gendered divi-sions, class-based stratification, caste categories, and so

13. See, for example, Luke (1999), most of the essays in Barry, Os-borne, and Rose (1996), and the vast majority of the essays on gov-ernmentality-related papers in the journal Economy and Society.Among the exceptions are Dean (1994, 1995) and Rimke (2000). Seealso Rose’s extensive work on psychology (1989, 1998).14. See also Dean (1999), Hacking (1986), andthe essays inBurchell,Gordon, and Miller (1991). Poovey (1995) provides a closely arguedaccount of the relationship among policy, institutions, changes inpractices, and the formation of class and culture.

forth. Imputing interests in this fashion to members ofa particular group is common to streams of scholarshipthat are often seen as belonging to opposed camps (Bates1981, Ferguson 1994 [1990]). But doing so is highly prob-lematic when one wants to investigate how people cometo hold particular views about themselves and how theirconceptions of their interests change.

Categorization of persons on the basis of an externallyobservable difference plays down the way subjects makethemselves and overlooks the effects that subjects’ ac-tions have on their senses of themselves. Using socialidentities as the basis for analysis may be useful as a firststep, a sort of gross attempt to make sense of the be-wildering array of beliefs that people hold and the actionsthey undertake. To end analysis there, however, is to failto attend to the many different ways in which peopleconstitute themselves, arrive at new conceptions of whatis in their interest, and do so differently over time.15

To say that people’s interests change so as to take intoaccount environmental protection is not to suggest thatconflicting desires for personal gain, defined potentiallyin as many ways as there are subjects, no longer exist orthat interests do not matter. Instead, it is to insist onthe mutability of conceptions of interests and subjects’practices.16 To use an imperfect analogy, it is to think ofsubjectivity as a palimpsest on which involvement ininstitutionalized practices inscribes new and sometimesconflicting understandings of what is in one’s interestover and over again. Social and environmental practiceas it emerges under differing institutional and politicalcircumstances is, therefore, a critical mediating conceptin my account of the connections between context andsubjectivity.17 Under changing social conditions and in-stitutions, identity categories as guides to a person’s in-terests make sense only to the extent that they prevent,facilitate, or compel practice.

Focusing attention on specific social practices relevantto subject formation along a given dimension or facet ofidentity creates the opportunity for learning more abouthow actions affect ways of thinking about the world andproduce new subjects.18 Undoubtedly, practices are al-

15. For insightful studies that illustrate the difficulty of readinginterests from identity categories, see Carney (1993) and Schroeder(1999). Robbins (2000) shows how the intersection of caste andgender influences environmental management.16. As Bourdieu says, “the concept of interest as I construe it hasnothing in common with the naturalistic, trans-historical, and uni-versal interest of utilitarian theory. . . . Interest is a historical ar-

bitrary, a historical construction that can be known only throughhistorical analysis, ex post, through empirical observation and notdeduced a priori” (Wacquant 1989:41–42).17. Some useful introductions to the large literature on practiceand identity canbe found in Mouffe (1995), PerryandMaurer(2003),and Quashie (2004). The insights of the Birmingham School areespecially relevant here. For a useful review and introduction seeLave et al. (1992).18. My thinking on this subject has been significantly influencedby feminist work on the materiality of the body, in which the bodyis understood “as neither a biological nor a sociological category,but rather the point of overlap between the physical, the symbolic,and the material social conditions” (Braidotti 2003:44). See alsoButler (1993) for a provocative discussion of the materiality of thebody.


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ways undertaken in the context of institutionalizedstructures of expectations and obligations, asymmetricpolitical relations, and the views that people have ofthemselves. But to point to the situatedness of practicesand beliefs is not to grant social context an unambiguousinfluence on practice or practice a similar control oversubjectivity. Rather, it is to ground the relationship be-tween context, practice, and subjectivity in evidence andinvestigative possibilities. It is simultaneously to refuseto accept the common social-scientific practice of usingidentity categories or a combination of such categoriesto infer people’s interests.

Variations in Environmental Subjectivities inKumaon

This paper considers two forms of variations in environ-mental subjectivities in Kumaon—those that have un-

folded over time and those that are geographically dis-tributed. The first set of changes is that by whichKumaonis, formerly persons who opposed efforts to pro-tect the forested environment, became persons who un-dertook the task of protection themselves. Instead of pro-testing the governmentalization of nature, Kumaonisbecame active partners in that governmentalization(Agrawal 2001, Sarin 2002). I describe below the alchem-ical shift in interest, beliefs, and actions for which themove toward community partially stands. Equally im-portant to understand, however, are the contemporarydifferences in environmental practices and beliefs amongKumaonis and their effect on the costs of environmentalregulation.

My examination of changes over time and contem-porary social-spatial variations in the way Kumaon’s res-idents see themselves and their forests draws on threebodies of evidence. The first comes from archival ma-terials about Kumaonis’ actions in forests in the firstthree decades of the twentieth century and a survey offorest council headmen in the early 1990s, 60 years afterforest council regulations became the basis for local for-est-related practices. The second body of evidence comesfrom two rounds of interviews I conducted with 35 Ku-maon residents in seven villages, the first in 1989 andthe second in 1993.19 Of the seven villages, four hadformed councils in the years between 1989 and 1993.Both in 1989 and 1993, I asked my respondents approx-

imately 40 structured and unstructured questions abouttheir socioeconomic status, modes of participation in theuse and government of forests, views about forests, andrelationships with other villagers and Forest and Reve-nue Department officials. The responses to some of thequestions can be presented quantitatively. In the dis-cussion below, I report the quantitative information intabular form and offer extended extracts from my in-

19. During my first visit, I had talked with a total of 43 villagers.I could not meet and talk with 8 on them in 1993 for a variety ofreasons; several had moved out of the village, several could not belocated, and 1 had died.

formants’ responses to provide texture to the inferencesthat .the evidence in the tables facilitates. The third bodyof evidence comes from 244 surveys I carried out in 1993in 46 villages. These villages included those I had visitedin 1989, and 38 of them had forest councils. In the re-maining 8 villages, villagers’ relationship to environmen-tal enforcement was restricted to infrequent interactionswith Forest Department guards, seen only irregularly inthe forests that villagers used. (Villagers prefer not to seeForest Department guards, but they prefer even morethat the guards not see them!)

I use different sources of evidence in part of necessity.What I wish to understand and explain is how the subjectpositions of Kumaonis about their forests have changed,and since it is impossible to go back in time to gain directtestimony from them, the archival record is a useful sub-stitute. Statements by colonial officials about the actionsof Kumaon’s villagers serve as the basis for inferencesabout what might have motivated these actions. Theyneed some interpretive care, since both Revenue and For-est Department officials likely wrote so as to portraytheir departments in the most favorable light possible.Finally, since the archival record provides informationabout both ordinary villagers and their leaders, I usedfieldwork to gain information from both these types ofresidents in contemporary Kumaon.

A second reason to use different sources in combina-tion—quantitative data and detailed verbal responses—is to triangulate across my findings from these differentsources. Quantitative data provide information on howthe understandings of a large number of my respondentshave changed in the aggregate. It is therefore extremelyuseful to indicate changes in a summary fashion and totake into account even those respondents whose answersdo not match my expected findings. But quantitative in-formation is less reliable as an index to the mental stateof specific individuals. It may be true that even whenactions and words of individuals are observed at lengthand over a long time period they cannot reveal the“truth” about subject positions, but more detailed ob-servations can facilitate a more reliable sense or at leastmore reasonable inferences about individual subjectivi-ties. Reliance on a combination of sources allows me tomake general inferences about transformations in sub-jectivities over long periods of time, make more specificarguments about such changes over short periods, and,finally, construct preliminary arguments about the re-

lationship between subjectivities and institutionalizedpractices versus identity categories.

historical changes in environmentalsubjectivities

Hukam Singh’s personal example illustrates what hasobviously been a much larger and more comprehensiveprocess of social environmental change in Kumaon. Anumber of studies have outlined the acts of rebellion ofKumaon’s hill people at the beginning of the twentiethcentury in response to the British colonial state’s effortsto constrain and close access to forests (Sarin 2002, Shri-


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vastava 1996). Between 1904 and 1917 more than 3,000square miles of forest were transferred to the ImperialForest Department in greater Kumaon (KFGC 1921), ofwhich nearly 1,000 square miles were located in theNainital, Almora, and Pithoragarh Districts.20 Even ear-lier, the colonial state had made inroads into the area offorests under the control of local communities, but theselatest incursions raised the special ire of the villagers.Their grievances were particularly acute because of newrules that specified strict restrictions on lopping andgrazing rights, restricted the use of nontimber forestproducts, prohibited the extension of cultivation, in-creased the amount of labor extracted from the villagers,and augmented the number of forest guards. The lastraised the level of friction between forest guards and thevillage women who harvested products from the forest.

Unwilling, often because they were unable, to accedeto the demands made by the colonial Forest Department,Kumaonis ignored the new rules that limited their ac-tivities in forests that the state claimed as its own. Theyalso protested more actively, often simply by continuingto do what they had done before the passage of new reg-ulations. They grazed their animals, cut trees, and setfires in forests that had been classified as reserved. ForestDepartment officials found it next to impossible to en-force the restrictive rules in the areas they had tried toturn officially into forests.

Law enforcement was especially difficult because ofthe unwillingness of villagers to cooperate with ForestDepartment officials. The department staff was small,the area it sought to police was immense, and the su-pervisory burden was onerous. Decrying the lopping forfodder by villagers and the difficulty of apprehendingthose who cut fodder, E. C. Allen, the deputy commis-sioner of Garhwal, wrote to the commissioner of Ku-maon, “Such loppings are seldom detected at once andthe offenders are still more seldom caught red-handed,the patrol with his present enormous beat being probably10 miles away at the time . . . . It is very difficult tobring an offence, perhaps discovered a week or more afterits occurrence, home to any particular village much lessindividual” (1904:9). Demarcation of the forest bound-aries, prevention of fires, and implementation of workingplans meant an impossibly heavy workload for ForestDepartment guards and employees even in the absenceof villager protests. When the number of protests washigh and villagers set fires often, the normal tasks of

foresters could become impossible to perform. One For-est Department official was told by the deputy commis-sioner of Kumaon that “the present intensive manage-ment of the forest department cannot continue withoutimportation into Kumaon of regular police” (Turner1924).

After the stricter controls of 1893, the settlement of-ficer, J. E. Goudge (1901:10), wrote about how difficultit was to detect offenders in instances of firing:

20. Since I completed my fieldwork, the districts of Almora andPithoragarh have had two new districts carved out of them: Ba-geshwar and Champawat.

In the vast area of forests under protection by thedistrict authorities the difficulty of preventing firesand of punishing offenders who wilfully fire for graz-ing is due to the expense of any system of fire pro-tection. Where forests are unprotected by firelines,and there is no special patrol agency during the dan-gerous season, it is next to impossible to find outwho the offenders are and to determine whether thefire is caused by negligence, accident, or intention.

In a similar vein, the Forest Administration Report ofthe United Provinces in 1923 said about a fire in thevalley of the Pindar River (Review 1924:266): “Duringthe year, the inhabitants of the Pindar valley showedtheir appreciation of the leniency granted by Govern-ment after the 1921 fire outbreak, when a number of firecases were dropped, by burning some of the fire protectedareas which had escaped in 1921. . . . These fires areknown to be due to direct incitement by the non-coop-erating fraternity.” The sarcasm is clumsily wielded, but

its import is obvious: villagers could not be trusted be-cause ungratefulness was their response to leniency.Other annual reports of the Forest Department fromaround this period provide similar claims about the lackof cooperation from villagers, the irresponsibility of vil-lagers, and the inadvisability of any attempt to cooperatewith them to achieve protectionist goals. At the sametime, some state officials underlined the importance ofcooperation from villagers. Percy Wyndham, asked to as-sess the impact of forest settlements, said in 1916, “Itmust be remembered that in the tracts administrationis largely dependent on the goodwill of the people andthe personal influence of the officials [on the people]”(quoted in Baumann 1995:84).

Other reports reveal continuing difficulties in appre-hending those who broke rules to shape forest use andmanagement. Names of people who set fires could notbe obtained. Even more unfortunate from the Forest De-partment’s point of view, it was not only the ordinarypeople but also the heads of villages, padhans, who wereunreliable. Many village heads were paid by the colonialstate and were often expected to carry out the work ofrevenue collection. Their defiance, therefore, was evenmore a cause for alarm. As early as 1904 the deputy com-missioner of Almora, C. A. Sherring, remarked on theheavy work that patwaris performed for the Forest De-partment and argued in favor of increasing their numbersubstantially because the padhans were unreliable (1904:

2):21

It is certain that very little assistance can be ex-pected from the padhans, who are in my experienceonly too often the leaders of the village in the com-

21. Patwaris constituted the lowest rung of the revenue adminis-tration hierarchy in colonial Kumaon and typically oversaw landrevenue collection for anywhere up to 30 villages, depending onthe size of the village and the distances involved. They continueto be critical to revenue administration and play an important rolein the collection of statistics, calling village households to accountfor minor infractions of official rules, whether related to agricultureor to forestry.


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mission of offences and in the shielding of offenders.. . . If the control of open civil forest is to be any-thing more than nominal we really must have thefull complement of patwaris. . . . A large forest staffof foresters and guards is also required.

The deputy conservator of forests similarly complainedthat villagers refused to reveal the culprit in investigationsconcerning forest-related offences: “It is far too commonan occurrence for wholesale damage to be done by someparticular village. . . . Often nothing approaching the proofrequired for conviction can be obtained. . . . There is toomuch of this popular form of wanton destruction, thewhole village subsequently combining to screen the of-fenders” (Burke 1911:44, quoted in Shrivastava 1996:185).These reports and complaints by colonial officials in Ku-maon make clear the enormous difficulties the Forest De-partment faced in realizing its ambition to control villag-ers’ actions on land made into forest. The collectiveactions of villagers in setting fires and lopping trees and

their unwillingness to become informants against their“fraternity” indicate the strands of solidarity that con-nected them in their work against the colonial state. Withunreliable villagers, limited resources, and few trainedstaff, it is not surprising that the Forest Department foundit hard to rely only on those processes of forest makingthat it had initiated and implemented in other parts ofIndia—processes that relied mainly on exclusion of peo-ple, demarcation of landscapes, creation of new restric-tions, and fines and imprisonment.22

The response of the state, in the shape of an agreementwith Kumaon residents to create community-managedforests, was an uneasy collaboration among the RevenueDepartment, foresters, and villagers (Shrivastava 1996,

Agrawal 2001). It appointed the Kumaon Forest Griev-ances Committee to look into complaints by Kumaonisagainst the Forest Department and on the basis of thecommittee’s recommendations passed new rules to fa-cilitate the formal creation of village-based forest coun-cils that could govern local forests. Over the next 60years more than 3,000 new councils came into being inKumaon. The Revenue Department has created new of-ficials who supervise the functioning of these councils.Annual reports detail the progress in creation of councils,their income from sales of timber and resin, and theextent to which this form of government has found ac-ceptance in Kumaon’s villages.

The birth of a new form of regulatory rule has been

accompanied by shifts in how Kumaon’s villagers todayregard forests, trees, and the environment. Some indi-cation of the extent to which contemporary Kumaonishave changed in their beliefs, not just their actions, about

22. The inability of the state to protect property in the face ofconcerted resistance is of course not a feature of peasant collectiveaction in Kumaon alone. The threat to established relations of useand livelihood that the new regulations posed is similar to thethreat that new technologies and new institutions have posed inother regions. For example, the invention of mechanized imple-ments has often sparked such responses from peasants and agrarianlabor and found some success precisely because of the inability ofthe state machinery to detect rule violations (Adas 1981).

forest regulation is evident from the results of a surveyof forest council headmen I conducted in 1993. The coun-cil headmen in Kumaon have come to occupy an inter-mediate place in the regulatory apparatus for the envi-ronment. On the one hand, they are the instruments ofenvironment-related regulatory authority. On the other,they represent villagers’ interests in forests. The greatestproportion of responses concerns the inadequate enforce-ment support they get from Forest and Revenue De-partment officials. The government of forests at the levelof the community is hampered by the unwillingness orinability of state officials to buttress attempts by villag-ers to prevent rule infractions. A rough calculationshows that nearly two-thirds of the responses are directlyrelated to headmen’s concerns about the importance ofand difficulties in enforcing regulatory rule. Admittedly,the council headmen are the persons most likely to beconcerned about forests and the environment among allthe residents of Kumaon. But the point to note is thateven when presented with an opportunity to voice theproblems that they face and potential ways of addressingthem, only a very small proportion of the responses fromthe headmen are complaints about the lack of remuner-ation (row 8). The headmen evidently put their own ma-terial interests aside as they tried to grapple with thequestion of the problems that characterize governmentby communities.

The figures in the table are no more than an abstract,numerical summation of many specific statements thatthe survey also elicited. The common themes in thesestatements call for a tabular representation, but the sen-timents behind the numbers come from actual words. “Ihave tried to give up being the head of our committeeso many times. But even those who don’t agree with medon’t want me to leave,” observed one of the headmen.Another said, “I have given years of my life to patrollingthe forest. Yes. There were days when my own fields hada ripening crop [and needed a watchman]. I am losingmy eyesight from straining to look in the dark of thejungle. And my knees can no longer support my steps asI walk in the forest. But I keep going because I worrythat the forest will no longer survive if I retire.” SukhMohan’s views about the making and maintenance ofhis village’s forests focus on his personal contribution.One might even discount some of what he and the otherheadmen say as hyperbole—rhetoric inflating the con-tribution they actually make. But what is more inter-

esting is that this rhetoric in favor of forest protectionmatches objectives that the Forest Department beganpursuing nearly 150 years ago. Puran Ram gave a reasonfor his conservationist practice: “We suffered a lot fromnot having too many trees in our forest. Our womendidn’t have even enough wood to cook. But after webanned cattle and goats from the forest,it has come back.Now we don’t even have to keep a full-time guard. Vil-lagers are becoming more aware.” Many other forestcouncil headmen concurred. Some of the more strikingstatements included “If we want to get sweet fruit, wefirst have to plant trees” and “The side of the mountainis held together by the roots of the trees we plant and


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grow. Without the forest, the whole village would slideinto the mouth of the river.”23

Puran Ram and Hukam Singh both thus expressed ahope for a connection between their efforts to conservethe forest and the actions of other villagers. This com-mon hope, which I encountered in other conversationsas well, is an important indication of the relationshipbetween actions and subject positions. It signals that inmany of the villages a new form of government framesand enacts reasonable guidelines for villagers’ practicesin the expectation that over time practice will lead tonew subjectivities, new ways to regard the forest. Vil-lagers may be forced to follow council regulations in theshort run, but over time they will come to see that stint-ing is in their own interest. The forest belongs to thecollective defined as the village, and when an individualharvests resources illegally the action adversely affectsall members of the collective. The examples of bothPuran Ram and Hukam Singh, as indeed those of more

than two-thirds of the headmen in my survey, suggestthat the expectation is not just a fantasy.The differences in the voice and tenor of archival and

more recent statements I collected offer a basis for thejudgment that the practices and views of many of Ku-maon’s residents about their forests have changed sub-stantially. Some of these changes reflect a greater interestin careful use of forest products, a greater willingness toabide by regulations, and a stronger desire to call uponstate officials to help protect trees in comparison withthe past. These changes in subjectivities have occurredsince the passage of the Forest Council Rules in 1931.Partly responsible for these changes is the idea that Ku-maonis can consider the region’s forests their own once

again. I do not report statements and actions of the sameindividual persons who lived in the early 1900s, but asystematic change seems to have occurred in the forest-related practices and beliefs of individuals belonging tothe same social class and status over the time period inquestion.24 Within the shift in ownership by the collec-tive, there are of course many variations. Not allvillagershave come to see Kumaon’s forests as their own. Vari-ations in their beliefs about forests and in their practicesaround regulation of forest protection are not, however,directly connected to the benefits they receive from for-ests. Benefits from forests are formally equitably allo-cated, and this equitable allocation is reflected in theactual harvests by most villagers (Agrawal 2001, Shri-

vastava 1996). But even within villages there is signifi-cant variation in how villagers see forests and protectthem.

23. For a quantitative analysis of the data from the survey, seeAgrawal and Yadama (1997).24. I have reported statements and actions by various persons asbeing representative of the groups to which they belong, a commonstrategy for scholars belonging to fields as different in their as-sumptions as cultural anthropologists and rational-choice politicalscientists. See Bates (1981) and Bates, Figueredo, and Weingast(1998) as rational-choice exemplars of this strategy and Ferguson(1994 [1990]) and Gupta (1998) as counterpart examples from cul-tural anthropology.

It may be argued that appropriations by the colonialstate in the early twentieth century drove a wedge be-tween forests and villagers. Subsequently, the rules thatled to community-owned and community-managed for-ests reaffirmed the propriety and legality of villagers’ pos-session of forests. They recognized that villagers have astake in what happens to forests and expressed somefaith in their ability, especially with guidance, to takereasonable measures for their protection. These insti-tutional changes go together with changes in villagers’actions and beliefs about forests. One way to explain thischange in villagers’ actions and beliefs is to suggest thatthe observed shift in policy and the subsequent changesin beliefs and actions are unrelated—that they are suf-ficiently separated in time that a causal connection canonly tenuously be drawn. This is frankly unsatisfactory.At best it is a strategy of denial. A more careful argumentwould at least suggest that shifts in villagers’ actions andstatements in the later part of the twentieth century areno more than a response to the changes in ownershipthat the new policy produced. The transfer of large areasof land to villagers in the form of community forests hascreated in them a greater concern to protect the forestsand care for vegetation that they control.

This is an important part of the explanation. It usefullysuggests that the way social groups perceive their inter-ests is significantly dependent on policy and regulationinstead of being constant and immutable. But it is stillinadequate in two ways. It collapses the distinction be-tween the interests of a group as perceived by an ob-server-analyst and the actions and beliefs of members ofthat group. In this explanation, interests, actions, andbeliefs of all group members are of a piece, and anychanges in them take place all at once. This assertion ofan identity among various aspects of what makes a sub-ject and the simultaneity of change in all of these aspectsis at best a difficult proposition to swallow. We oftenarrive at a new sense of what is in our interest but con-tinue to hold contradictory beliefs and act in ways thatbetter match the historical sense of our interests. Manyof the headmen whom I interviewed in Kumaon or whobecame part of my survey were trying to enforce rulesthat they knew were not in the interests of their ownhouseholds. Their wives and children were often appre-hended by the forest guards they appointed. Yet, theydefended their actions in the name of the collective needto protect forests and expressed the hope that over time

villagers would come around to their view and changetheir practices in forests. As the next section makesclear, their hopes were not in vain. Many villagers provedsusceptible to these shifting strategies of government.

A second problem with the explanation that headmencare for forests because they have the right to managethem is that it confuses the private interests and actionsof the headmen with their public office and interests.The forests that have been transferred to village com-munities are managed by collective bodies of anywherebetween 20 and 200 village households represented bythe forest councils and their headmen (Sarin 2002). Toattribute a collective interest to these bodies and explain


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table 1Complaints by Forest Council Headmen ( n p 324 ) inKumaon, 1993

Complaints Mentioned by Headmen(in Order of Frequency)

Number of HeadmenListing the Complaint

1. Inadequate support from Forestand Revenue Department officials

203 (.63)

2. Limited powers of council offi-cials for environmentalenforcement

185 (.57)

3. Insufficient resources in forestsfor the needs of village residents

141 (.44)

4. Low income of the council 130 (.40)5. Inadequate demarcation of coun-

cil-governed forests61 (.19)

6. Lack of respect for the authorityof the council among villagers

42 (.13)

7. Land encroachment on council-managed forests

36 (.11)

8. Lack of remuneration for

headmen

31 (.10)

9. Other (e.g., incorrect mapping offorest boundaries, length of courtcases, violation of rules by resi-dents of other villages, too muchinterference in the day-to-dayworking of the council, lack ofinformation about forest councilrules)

64 (.20)

not e : Figures in parentheses indicate the proportion of head-men mentioning that complaint. Each headman could list up tothree complaints.

what the headmen of these councils say in terms of thatinterest is to elide all distinctions between specific in-dividual actors and the organizations they lead. A moreintimate and careful exploration of other actors in Ku-maon who are involved in the local use and protectionof forests is necessary. Only then can we begin to makesense of the changes indicated by the survey of headmensummarized in table 1 and the information below aboutthe beliefs of Kumaonis about their forested environ-ments.

recent changes in environmentalsubjectivities

When I went to Kumaon and Garhwal in 1989, I traveledthere as a student interested in environmental institu-tions and their effects on the actions and beliefs of theirmembers. My main interest was to show that environ-mental institutions—the forest councils—had a signifi-

cant mediating impact on the condition of forests. Notall villages had created local institutions to govern theirforests. Of the 13 that I visited, only 6 had forest councils.The ones that did differed in the means they used toprotect and guard forests. Since my interest was pri-marily to understand institutional effects on forests, Ifocused on gathering archival data from records createdand maintained locally by village councils. My conver-sations with village residents were aimed chiefly at gain-ing a sense of their views about forests and the benefitsthey provided. I found that villagers who had forest coun-cils were typically more interested in forest protection.They tried to defend their forests against harvesting pres-sures from other residents within the same village but

especially from those who did not live in their village.They also stated clear justifications of the need to protectforests, even if their efforts were not always successful.In one village near the border between Almora and Nai-nital Districts, a villager used the heavy monsoons tomake the point:25

Do you see this rain? Do you see the crops in thefields? The rain can destroy the standing crop. Buteven if the weather was good, thieves can destroythe crop if there are no guards. It is the same withthe forest. You plant a shrub, you give it water, youtake care of it. But if you don’t protect it, cattle caneat it. The forest is for us, but we have to take careof it, if we want it to be there for us.

Another villager in a council meeting I attended pointedto the difficulties of enforcement:26

Until we get maps, legal recognition, and markedboundaries [of the local forest], council cannot workproperly. People from Dhar [a neighboring village]tell us that the forest is theirs. We cannot enter it.So we can guard part of the forest, and we don’tknow which part [to guard]. Since 1984 when the

25. Interview #2 with Shankar Ram, translated by Kiran Asher.26. Interview #13 with Bachi Singh, translated by Kiran Asher.

panchayat was formed, we have been requesting the

papers that show the proper limits so we can man-age properly, protect our forest. But what can one doif the government does not even provide us the nec-essary papers?

A second villager in the same meeting added, “Mister,this is Kaljug.27 No one listens to authority. So we mustget support from the forest officers and revenue officersto make sure that no one just chops down whatever hewants.”

Residents of the seven villages that did not have forestcouncils scarcely attempted any environmental regula-tion—no doubt in significant part because the forestsaround their village were owned and managed by eitherthe Forest Department or the Revenue Department. Vil-

lagers perceived regulation as the responsibility of thestate and as a constraint on their actions in the forest—gathering firewood, grazing animals, harvesting trees andnontimber forest produce, and collecting fodder. Therewere therefore clear differences between the actions andstatements of villagers who had created forest councilsand brought local forests under their control and those

27. In Indian mythology, Kaljug is the fourth and the final era beforetime resumes again to process through the same sequence of eras:Satjug, Treta, Dwapar, and then Kaljug. It is the time whendharma—action according to norms—gives way to adharma—ac-tion in violation of norms—and established authority fails.


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table 2Changing Beliefs of Villagers about the Environment, 1989–93

Presence/Absence of ForestCouncil in 1993 andYear of Interview

Number ofRespondents

Degree ofAgreement

on ForestProtectiona

Number GivingEconomic versus

Other Reasons for

Forest Protection

Degree ofWillingnessto Reduce

Consumptionof ForestProductsEconomic Other

Present1989 20 2.35 16 4 1.451993 20 3.65 12 8 3.00

Absent1989 15 2.47 11 4 1.731993 15 2.27 12 3 1.87

not e : Changes in degree of agreement on forest protection and degree of willingness to reduce consumption of forest productsin the villages that had forest councils in 1993 are statistically significant: for forest protection, x2 p 14.03, d.f. p 4, p ! .005; forreduction of consumption, x2 p 15.05. d.f p 4, p ! .005.aResponses scored on a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high).

of villagers who relied on state-controlled forests to sat-isfy their requirements for fodder and firewood.

During my return visit in 1993 I realized that four ofthe seven villages (Pokhri, Tangnua, Toli, and Nanauli)that had lacked forest councils in 1989 had formed theirown councils in the intervening years. They had draftedconstitutions modeled on others in the region and usedthe provisions of the Forest Council Rules to bring undertheir control the local forests that had earlier been man-aged by the Revenue Department. A series of resolutionsby the new councils prescribed how (and how often) tohold meetings, when to elect new officials, the basis for

allocating fodder and grazing benefits, the levels of pay-ments by villagers in exchange for the right to use forests,monitoring practices in relation to the forests’ conditionand use, and ways to sanction rule breakers. Exposureto these new institutional constraints, council membershoped, would lead villagers to more conservationistprac-tices in the forest. Many households in fact had begunsending members to council meetings. In two of the vil-lages, households regularly participated in patrolling theforest. In three of them they were restricting the amountof fodder and firewood that was harvested, the numberof animals that were grazed, and the incidence of illegalentry into the forest by outsiders. In one village the coun-cil had stopped a long-standing case of encroachment onthe government land that had become communityforest.

In the four villages with new forest councils, I hadtalked with 20 residents in 1989. At that time their state-ments had not suggested that they felt any pressing needfor conserving the environment. Little had distinguishedtheir actions and views from those of the 15 residentswith whom I had talked in the other three villages (Dar-man, Gogta, and Barora). The three questions for whichtheir responses can be summarized are as follows:

1. Do you agree with the statement “Forests shouldbe protected”? Please indicate the extent of your agree-ment by using any number between 1 and 5, where 1

indicates a low degree of agreement and 5 indicatesstrong agreement.

2. If forests are to be protected, should they be pro-tected for economic reasons or for other noneconomicbenefits they provide, including cleaner air, soil conser-vation, and water retention?

3. Do you agree with the statement “To protect forests,my family and I are willing to reduce our consumptionof resources from the local forests”? Please indicate theextent of your agreement by using any number between1 and 5, where 1 indicates a low degree of agreement and5 indicates strong agreement.28

The figures in table 2 indicate that the differencesamong the residents of the seven villages in 1989 wererelatively minor. All villagers expressed limited agree-ment with the idea that forests should be protected; theirreasons were mainly economic, and they were relativelyunwilling to place any constraints on the consumptionof their families to ensure forest conservation. Althoughthere was little basis for differentiating among the re-sponses of the two sets of villagers in 1989, changes be-came evident in 1993 when I talked again with the samevillagers. In the case of the four villages that had createdforest councils, the differences were obvious both in theiractions and in what they said about forests and the en-vironment. Some of them had come to participate ac-

tively in their new forest councils, and a few had limitedtheir use of the village forest. Some acted as guards, andsome even reported on neighbors who had broken the

28. The form in which I posed these three questions may haveincreased the likelihood of responses indicating the desireto protectforests. My interest, however, is less in presenting a representativepicture of the extent of environmental awareness in Kumaon thanin showing how the desire to protect forests changes over time andhow it is related to practice versus identity categories such as casteand gender. I have not identified any reasons that there would bea bias in favor of overreporting of environmental awareness thatwould be systematically related to thepassage of time or to differentidentity categories.


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council’s rules. The similarities in their changed behav-ior and the changed behavior of the forest council head-men that I briefly described above are quite striking.Those who had come to have forest councils in theirvillages or, perhaps more accurate, those whose councilshad come to have them, had begun to view their andothers’ actions in forests in a way that valorized protec-tion of trees and economy in the use of forest products.

Of course, there were others in these four villages whohad not changed much. Those with whom I talked wereespecially likely to continue to say and do the same thingsas in 1989 if they had not participated in any way in theformation of the forest councils or in the suite of strategiesused by forest councils to try to protect forests. If theyhad become involved in the efforts to create a council orprotect the forest that came to be managed by the council,they were far more likely to suggest that the forest re-quired protection. They were also more likely to say thatthey were willing to be personally invested in protection.This is certainly not to claim that participation in councilactivities is a magic bullet that necessarily leads to trans-formation of subject positions. And yet, the testimony ofthese 20 residents, by no means a representative samplein a statistical sense, constitutes a valuable window onhow beliefs change for those who come to be involved inpractices of environmental regulation (see table 2).

Residents in the four villages with forest councils ex-pressed greater agreement with the idea of forest protec-tion and greater willingness to reduce their own con-sumption of forest products from local forests in 1993than in 1989. They explained that reducing consumptionof firewood and fodder from council-managed forests typ-ically meant the exercise of even greater care in use, thesubstitution of agricultural waste for fodder, using pres-sure cookers or improved stoves, and in some instancesshifting harvesting activities to government-owned for-est. Of the 20 individuals, 13 had participated in moni-toring or enforcement of forest council rules in someform, and the shifts in their environmental beliefs turnedout to be stronger than for those who had not becomeinvolved in any forest-council-initiated action.

The example of Nanauli is useful for elaborating onsome of the points that table 2 summarily conveys. Alower-caste woman (Sukhi Devi), a lower-caste man (Ra-mji), and two upper-caste men (Hari Singh and GovindJoshi) were my four respondents in Nanauli. In 1989 theywere only mildly in agreement with the idea of protect-

ing forests; they equated such protection with limits ontheir family’s welfare and capitulation to the demandsof the Forest Department. Sukhi Devi said that she wasnot sure her actions would have any effect. Ramji refusedeven to accept that the condition of the village forestwas the responsibility of villagers. Hari Singh, prefacinghis comments with a curse against external meddling invillage affairs (a sentiment from which I was unsure thatI was excluded), began counting on his fingers the reasonsnot to do anything about the forest: “Fires in the forestare natural. If the forest is closed to grazing, what willvillage animals eat? Even if villagers in Nanauli stopcutting trees, those living in other villages will not stop.

The near-vertical slopes in many parts of the forest meanthat it is naturally protected. The Forest Departmentalready has a guard in place. Villagers do not have timeto waste.” He would have gone on but for the interrup-tion from Govind Joshi: “Leave it alone, Hari. Agrawaljigets the idea.”29

When I returned in 1993, I encountered quite a differ-ent situation. The newly formed forest council for Na-nauli had been talking to villagers about the importanceof looking to the future, and villagers had started payinga small amount to the council for the grass and firewoodthey extracted from the forest. The council had ap-pointed a full-time guard who was paid out of villagers’contributions. The council was holding 10–15 meetingsa year, mostly clustered together during the monsoonmonths. And Ramji, who had served a six-month stintas the forest guard, seemed deeply committed to the for-est council and its goals. When I reminded him of myprevious visit and conversation, he overcame his earlier

reluctance to dismiss Hari Singh’s opinions of four yearsago. “You know, some people watch and others do. Whenthere was talk of making a council, I was one of the firstto realize how much it would benefit our village. Harijihas much education, a lot of land, many trees on thatland. He does not need the council forest. No wonder hedoesn’t see any reason to help with the forest.” AlthoughHari Singh was not involved in any direct monitoring orenforcement activities, he was one of the seven councilmembers and was making his contributions toward thesalary of the village guard on time. When I asked whetherhe was willing to reduce his use of forest products toprotect trees, he almost snapped at me, “Am I not alreadypaying for the guard, and [thereby] reducing my family’s

income? Do you want to skin me alive to save thetrees?”30 His shortness could easily have been the resultof a struggle he was likely waging within himself—onthe one hand helping guard the forest and on other won-dering if it was necessary. Of the four persons with whomI had talked in 1989, Sukhi Devi was the least orientedtoward forest protection. She was poor and had fallenbehind on the contribution each village household wasmaking toward guard salaries. For her, the council withits talk of forest protection was yet another impositionamong the many that made her life difficult. As I satwith her and one of my research assistants in front ofher leaky thatched hut, she slowly said, “I have grownold, seen many changes. I don’t know if we need all these

meetings and guards and fines. We were doing fine. Allthis new talk of saving trees makes my head spin.”31

These different responses contain important cluesabout the relationship between social-environmentalpractices, redefinition of a subject’s interests, and for-mation of new subjectivities. As individuals undertakenew actions, often as a result of resolutions adopted by

29. Interviews #17, 18, 19, and 20 with Ramji, Govind Joshi, HariSingh, and Sukhi Devi, translated by Ranjit Singh.30. Interviews #17a and 19a with Ramji and Hari Singh, translatedby Ranjit Singh.31. Interview #20a with Sukhi Devi, translated by Ranjit Singh.


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Fig. 1. Types of monitoring mechanisms in Kumaon forest councils.

their village’s forest council, they have to define theirown position in relation to these resolutions and thechanges in practices that they necessitate. Their effortsto come to a new understanding of what constitutes theirbest interest in the context of new institutional arrange-ments and new knowledge about the limits of availableresources must entail significant internal struggles. IfRamji spends months trying to apprehend rule violators,walking around the forest, being held accountable forunauthorized grazing and felling, and being paid for hisefforts, it is understandable that he has begun thinkingof his interests and subjectivity in relation to these prac-tices rather than in terms of his caste or gender. Simi-larly, if Govind Joshi and Hari Singh are contributingtoward protection, they have to move some mental fur-niture around to accommodate actions involving themin forest protection. If Sukhi Devi does not engage inactivities that orient her to think about what she doesin the forest except to view it as a source of materialbenefits, it is not surprising that her gender or caste doesnot make her a defender of the forest. Socially definedidentity categories are a poor predictor of interests pre-cisely because they objectify and homogenize their mem-

bers, ignoring the very real lives that people live in theshadow of their social identities. Imputing a commonset of interests to all those who belong to a particularidentity category is only a convenient analytical tool.More complex theorizing in this vein—relating caste andgender or caste, gender, and class to interests, for ex-ample—is subject to the same critique.

The information from interviews in these four villagesis especially useful in comparison with the 15 interviewsin the three villages where no councils had emerged inthe intervening years. In these villages, where I also con-ducted a second round of interviews in 1993, there hadbeen little change in the environment-related practices

of local residents. They still regarded the idea of pro-tecting local forests as a waste of time and the presenceof Forest Department guards as a veritable curse. Manyof them, usually after looking around to make sure noofficials were present, roundly abused the Forest De-partment. Indeed, this is a practice that villagers in otherparts of rural India may also find a terrifying pleasure.But even when my interviewees agreed that it was nec-essary to protect tree because of their benefits, they wereunwilling to do anything themselves toward such a goal.For the most part, their positions regarding forests andthe environment had changed little.

variations in environmental subjectivities:the place of regulation

The environmental practices and perceptions associatedwith the emergence of forest councils in Kumaon con-tain many variations. The preceding discussion, despiteits important clues to sources of variation, is based onhighly aggregated information. To examine how and towhat extent regulatory practices, in contrast to struc-tural-categorical signs of belonging such as caste and gen-

der, relate to the environmental imaginations of Ku-maonis, I report on the responses of more than 200persons I met and interviewed in 1993. The larger num-ber of people makes it possible to examine how differentforms of monitoring and enforcement relate to respon-dents’ beliefs about the environment.

The forest councils in Kumaon depend for enforce-ment on monitoring by residents themselves or by thirdparties (fig. 1). Under one form of mutual monitoring,any villager can monitor any of the others and reportillegal actions in the forest to the council. Under theother, households are assigned monitoring duties in turn.There is little specialization in the task of monitoring


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table 3Participation and Belief among Villagers, 1993

Monitoring Strategy andParticipation

Number ofRespondents

Degree ofAgreementon Forest

Protectiona

Number GivingEconomic versus

Other Reasons forForest Protection

Degree ofWillingnessto Reduce

Consumptionof ForestProductsaEconomic Other

MutualAll (random)

Participant 8 3.25 4 4 2.63Nonparticipant 2 3.00 2 0 2.00

RotationParticipant 12 4.25 4 8 3.42Nonparticipant 5 2.80 4 1 2.40

Third-partyPaid by household

Participant 32 4.00 20 12 3.06Nonparticipant 7 2.86 6 1 2.29

Paid with local fundsParticipant 55 3.98 36 19 2.80Nonparticipant 43 2.81 38 5 1.72

Pa

agrawal - environmentality

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