Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Based on long-term ethnographic research in China’s Hani Rice Terraces, this paper examines why Indigenous farmers continue to cultivate under heritage governance and tourism development, showing how everyday farming sustains food sovereignty through negotiated, future-oriented practices.

Paper long abstract

Recognised as a UNESCO Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System, the Hani Rice Terraces are commonly governed through state-led frameworks of food security and heritage conservation that prioritise landscape maintenance while often neglecting the everyday conditions required for sustained cultivation. Yet the continuity of this living agricultural system ultimately depends on farmers’ own decisions to keep farming. Under conditions shaped by smallholder marginalisation, heritage governance, and tourism development, why do people still choose to cultivate? Based on long-term ethnographic research in the core communities of the Hani Rice Terraces in southwest China, this paper draws on participant observation, in-depth interviews, and comparative analysis across generations and livelihood strategies. It shows that cultivation has shifted from a taken-for-granted collective obligation to a selective and negotiated practice, shaped by generational change, labour scarcity, and the uneven redistribution of heritage- and tourism-derived value. The paper conceptualises everyday farming as a generative practice of Indigenous food sovereignty, enacted through pragmatic negotiations among economic calculation, ethical responsibility, social recognition, and attachments to land. The findings suggest that governance interventions focused on technical landscape repair often undermine farmers’ agency and accelerate disengagement. By contrast, institutional mechanisms that redistribute the terraces’ multiple values—food, landscape, and heritage—to active cultivators can reactivate farming as a dignified and sustainable livelihood choice. The paper shows that Indigenous food systems persist less through overt political mobilisation than through everyday, future-oriented practices that work within, and sometimes beyond, state-led frameworks, thereby transcending polarising binaries of state/community, tradition/modernity, and resistance/compliance.