Presentation short abstract

This paper draws from research conducted with forest-dwelling communities in two conservation areas in India, exploring the relationship between dispossession and various forms of labour, including the hidden labour that communities perform for the state in order to maintain conservation spaces.

Presentation long abstract

Political ecology has long been interested in the relationship between enclosure, conservation and labour. Building on these literatures, this paper offers new insight into questions of labour, resistance and dispossession. Drawing from research conducted with Van Gujjars and Soligas – two forest dwelling communities who live in and around Protected Areas in India – I show that dispossession is contested through various forms of resistance and articulations of care. Tracing historical control of territories and communities by the state from colonial times to the present, I show that communities have consistently been marginalized and ‘managed’, either as useful sources of kooli, or daily wage labour, or as lawless, criminal and outsiders in the landscape. Today, decades into establishing conservation areas, the state no longer views forest-dwelling people as useful labour, and local sources of employment are few and far between. However, despite their perceived negligibility in the landscape, communities articulate their belonging through both explicit and implicit assertions of hidden labour that they perform in their everyday lives. Bringing the two sites and communities’ experiences into conversation with each other through a relational comparison framework, I show the convergences between community assertions that without them, the work of the forest department would not be possible. Invoking both historical relations of care for the forest, and the everyday ways in which the forest department is dependent on community presence, I show that hidden labour is simultaneously an assertion of legitimacy in the landscape, and a challenge to fortress conservation models.