Paper short abstract:

The paper studies everyday practices of forest conservation in upland central India. Through ties of patronage and protection with indigenous villagers, state actors are involved in a long-term exercise of remaking land and community that has contributed to identity formation among upland residents.

Paper long abstract:

The critical scholarship on conservation bureaucracies and their relations with forest communities has focused on the asymmetries of power and the material and symbolic struggles over knowledge, resources and conservation. However, state officials exercise a governmental rationality in forests that goes beyond the objective of ‘translating conservation policies into action’. Taking the case of forest villages and their adivasi (indigenous) residents in upland central India, I argue that the forest bureaucracy has been involved in a long-term exercise of remaking land and community that is at odds with its stated objectives of conservation and (participatory) forest management.

The work of subordinate forest officials includes protecting and harvesting valuable teak timber, regulating tenure and villagers’ access to forest land and ‘government through community’ (Rose, 2004; Li, 2007). In the process, they forge ties of exploitation, patronage and protection with village forest protection committees, "hill farmers" and landless "encroachers" on forest land. This paper, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Madhya Pradesh, India, focuses on such informal and everyday practices of conservation and their implications for subject formation among adivasi residents of forest villages. In conversation with anthropological scholarship on the postcolonial and developmental state, I aim to theorise (and position) the state in political forests beyond the long-held binaries of exclusion and participation, injustice and rights, and conservation and development.