Presentation short abstract

This paper examines the porous boundary between “political” and “lived” forests in Jharkhand. Ethnography in Dumka and West Singhbhum shows how contested boundaries, shifting claims, and negotiations with the state transform forests into property, managed landscapes, and rigid territorial zones.

Presentation long abstract

Scholarship has often distinguished between “political forests” and “lived forests” (Peluso and Vandergeest, 2020) in framing forests as both discursive and ecological spaces. This paper unsettles that separation by examining their porosity through historically-informed ethnographic research in Dumka and West Singhbhum in Jharkhand, India. Colonial interventions and subsequent zoning produced contested forest boundaries, with legal categories frequently diverging from their enforceability on the ground - an outcome shaped by everyday negotiations among forest-dependent communities, interests of the timber markets, and the operation of the many state(s). These processes have in turn reshaped the materiality of the forests itself, reinforcing and constraining subsequent processes.

Contemporary claims under the Forest Rights Act (FRA) must be read within this trajectory. While significant, following Li (2011), we argue that claims-making under the FRA generates new forms of exclusive rights, derived partly from bureaucratic languages and governmental logics — even as they contest exclusions embedded in conservation regimes. This marks a shift from earlier, flexible and overlapping forms of access grounded in kinship, customary authority, and social relations; to increasingly rigid definitions of land as private property and forests as resources.

These processes culminate in the consolidation of forests as property, as managed landscapes, and as territorially demarcated zones, rather than interdependent ecosystems, with irreversible impacts on the material ‘nature’ of forests (Tsing, 2019). The paper thus links political and lived forests within the FRA discourse, by tracing contested regimes of regulation, force, market, and legitimation that operate therein, continuously reshaping both, discursively and materially.