Swiddening in the 21st Century
Harvesting rice with some of Southeast Asia's last shifting cultivators - A lavishly illustrated guide --- [Estimated reading time: 30 min.]
Despite my prolific use of dashes, fancy words and occasionally clumsy phrasing, please rest assured that all essays on this blog were entirely composed by human hand, heart & mind, and are thus guaranteed free of any useless AI slop. No LLMs were used in any step of its creation, and no part of it was altered by generative AI in any way, shape or form. I’m an outspoken critic of the overhyped algorithms erroneously known as “artificial ‘intelligence’” and a staunch advocate for natural intelligence, so I would rather drown myself than ask a bot for advice. If you don’t believe me, go read my pre-ChatGPT-release essays. It saddens me deeply that technological progress has arrived at the point where this issue even needs clarification, but apparently that’s the world we live in now. Best of luck to us.
Few people alive today can comprehend the profundity of the connection between a traditional, land-based people and the ecosystem which they inhabit, including all the plants and animals who feed them – even though it used to be the norm for all people, in all cultures, for ninety-nine percent of our species’ existence. In our modern age it has become so rare that I know only very few people personally who retain this deep interrelation to both the land and the food that nourishes them. One of them is my wife Karn.
For as long as she can remember, her family made seasonal offerings to the guardian spirit of the rice field, and the rice plant herself. The last household in the village to harvest by hand, her family enlists the help of relatives and friends for the rice harvest, instead of the giant, gas-guzzling machine employed by everyone else. Stubbornly, her mother refused to even discuss the possibility of perhaps using the subdistrict’s combine harvester, as helping hands are more and more difficult to find each year. Everyone knows that it’s better to harvest the rice by hand, both for the land and for the quality of the resulting rice.
Despite only sporadically using artificial fertilizer – they still keep a few cows, so manure is abundant – yields are substantial. As a result, her family’s rice is of such exceptional quality that the owner of the local rice mill always buys their rice directly, for his own family to eat. The grains are fragrant, large, fully mature, and free of dust – the most beautiful and delicious rice in the whole area.
Nonetheless, last year a compromise had to be made, at least in some of the fields. Willing workers were hard to find and those that were available demanded higher wages than before. With fanatic determination the system is tightening its grip, creaking and groaning and running hot, and the convulsions are felt even in the remotest backcountry.
Earlier that year, due to the sustained labor shortage, her parents had broadcasted the seed rice instead of transplanting seedlings, a method that requires considerably less effort and time, but yields lower harvests due to strong competition from weeds. In some parts the grass density was so high that harvesting by hand would have taken a lot of time for little returns, so, with a heavy heart, the machine’s operator was called.
Slowly, just as the Machine Age nears its peak, the long era of the manual rice harvest is coming to an end in her village.
Despite all our efforts at diversification, rice is still our main staple food for the better part of the year. Not because the other crops are less promising or productive, though, but mainly because of – damn you! – convenience. We can get rice pretty much for free (Karn travels home to help with the annual harvest) and if you have buckets full of rice in your house it is just the easiest choice. Tubers have to be dug up first, then washed, peeled and chopped. Arto nuts require the processing of the fruit first, and consequently have to be peeled. And green bananas, while certainly delicious enough, exude an annoyingly sticky sap that temporarily ruins hands and pots.
Rice just has to be washed and boiled.
Should rice harvests start to seriously diminish (and thus prices to soar), I’m fairly confident that (in theory, at least) we wouldn’t starve. Each year we continue to increase the abundance and density of all the alternative staple crops integrated into our ecology.
But for now, it’s mostly rice that keeps us going.
As we embarked on our own journey to become subsistence farmers, growing a forest-like agro-ecosystem – a “Food Jungle” – we soon realized that rice will play an extremely limited role in our diets, at least if we’re serious about complete self-sufficiency and reliance on only our own small piece of land.
The method we are developing here is informed and inspired by permacultural and indigenous techniques of plant cultivation, wildtending and forest gardening, and ideologically underpinned by the primitivist critique of grain agriculture and civilization.1
As “practicing primitivists,” we are well aware of the inherent dangers of grain monocultures for society, and how a storable surplus easily leads to widespread and persistent dominance hierarchies, patriarchy, slavery, warfare and a whole panoply of concomitant horrors. But Karn was not ready to renounce her beloved rice plant, and was thus relieved to learn that there are plenty of (historically semi-nomadic) cultures that manage to both grow rice and to resist state power and maintain an egalitarian social structure.
Over the years, we have started to realize that rice indeed does have a place among our future staple crops, it just shouldn’t take the central role if we a) want to avoid hypothetical future appropriation of staple crops by parasitic entities (like the state, or a local fiefdom), and b) want to create resilient local food systems adapted to an increasingly erratic climate.
The more we read and heard about various historical shifting cultivators all over Southeast Asia, the more fascinated we were by the ingenuity of their versatile approach to food cultivation – a compromise between foraging/wildtending and fixed-field, monocrop agri-culture.
We read about the Meratus Dayak and the Kantu’ of Kalimantan, Indonesia, who were still full-time swiddeners when the respective ethnographies about them were written. Karn found a twenty-year-old, passionately detailed ethnography about the Pakagaway in Thai that details their practices and beliefs over three volumes.
I wrote an essay series defending indigenous horticultural techniques against outdated and inaccurate critiques, and Karn published an article with IMN (Indigenous Media Network), a local, indigenous-led press outlet, praising the virtues of their lifestyle.
Whereas swiddens were more diverse the longer one looks back in time,2 even the remaining non-state hill cultures on the margins of civilization have increasingly focused their planting efforts on rice over the last few centuries. Rice now constitutes the singular staple food of choice for virtually everyone in the entire region.
But how are things these days? Is it still possible to do shifting cultivation in the modern world, and, if yes, how does it differ from the historical practice? Does it move closer to “conventional” rice farming?
It was time to find out for ourselves.
Towards the end of last year, Karn finally fulfilled herself a wish she had held for a long time: to go visit some of the remaining few rotational farmers in Northern Thailand, and assist them with the various tasks that make up their seasonal routines. The most attractive (and most romantic) of those annual tasks is undoubtedly the harvest.
The time of the harvest is one of relentless, strenuous work, long days and aching backs, but also one of homecoming, family, communal feasting, abundance, thanksgiving, and celebrating another successful year – and Life itself.
After a good bit of online research, she found two communities3 that appeared to be good candidates. Thankfully, the new generation of hill dwellers is digitally proficient enough to advertise their lifestyle and local products on social media (without which you practically don’t exist in Southeast Asia), despite only having very patchy cellphone reception on their land.
Both are Karen (in Thai: กะเหรี่ยง; “Ga-riang”) communities, Pakagayaw4 to be specific – one of several subgroups – one remote and still very traditional, the other successfully navigating the immense challenge of trying to find their place alongside modern Thai society. Both villages still hold communal land rights, meaning their land can’t be parceled up and sold, and each steward hundreds of hectares of partially forested land.
They have permission to practice rotational farming by the relevant government authorities, but still feel that the rules are staked against them. Instead of the traditional ten-year fallow period, the law5 forces them to settle for six-year periods instead – meaning less mature forest cover at the time of slashing, less biomass, and hence less natural fertilizer in the form of ashes.
After having successfully forced them to settle down just a few decades ago, the government would now like them to properly “contribute to the Economy” – aka. grow cash crops like corn for “the Market,” become dependent on consumer items and conveniences, and stop being troublemakers. Ruling elites are keen to claim their ancestral lands as Nature Reserves, to look “green” on the international stage and “achieve climate goals” – but (because modern conservationist dogma allows for no merging of “the natural” and “the human realm”) therefore the ethnic communities living there would have to be expelled first.
Only a little over a decade ago, Forest Rangers employed by the Royal Forest Department forcibly evicted a Karen community from what’s currently considered Kaeng Krachan National Park and burned their dwellings, alleging that they had encroached on “protected areas.” Residents claim that they have called the contested area their home for generations.
We had eagerly followed the struggle online, but Karn felt strongly that she could only gain a better understanding of the perpetual conflict between state power and some of the last free, self-governing people of our region if she spoke to those on the (figurative) frontlines.
At the same time, she would gain valuable insights into the details of the traditional subsistence mode, the ecological knowledge and the folk wisdom of a people who haven’t given up yet.
Both communities agreed to host her for a week, but seemed a bit confused by the unusual request. (She was later told that she was the first guest who actually helped with their work, was seriously interested in the details of practices used in shifting cultivation, and asked empathetic questions about their spiritual beliefs, from a shared understanding of the world and our place in it.)6
Karn had never before traveled to the North of the country, so she was visibly excited as the day of her departure neared. After a few more preparations were made, she boarded the bus and the adventure began.
With a slightly heavy heart I had to stay behind, tending the garden, feeding the chickens and rabbits, and watering vegetable beds. But as a tall, pale foreigner who speaks fluent Thai, I am well aware that my presence might have tainted the experience in various ways.
First stop: Baan Mae Por Kee (บ้านแม่ปอคี)
After a long and arduous journey, each consecutive vehicle smaller than the one before, Karn arrived in Baan Mae Por Kee, close to the Myanmar border, in Tak province. She traveled the last few kilometers up a winding dirt road on the back of an old motorcycle, through a patchwork of forests and fields, until the village came into view. With only a little over two hundred residents, the community is large enough to be almost entirely self-sufficient, but small enough to retain strong cohesion and maintain intimate familiarity.
Karn was invited to stay with an old couple and their high-school-aged daughter in the spacious house they had built themselves and maintained over decades. It can get really cold up in the mountains, so all dwellings are closed on all sides (and hence rather dark inside). Tired from the long journey, she soon retired to her makeshift quarter to regain her strength for the next day.
Early in the morning, a communal work party consisting of members of all households left the village for the daily harvest. The swidden harvested that day was a thirty-minute walk away, a pleasant warm-up exercise to dispel the cold.
What immediately strikes the eye is how much forest there is in between the swiddens. There are many large stands of old-growth, designated areas of protected forest, that serve as central nodes of biodiversity from which the forest can radiate outwards again. They are used frequently by the villagers to forage for a staggering variety of wild foods and various materials, as well as for hunting. Those patches, which include watershed- and cemetery forests, are prohibited from being cleared for farming. In between, there are current fields and past swiddens in various stages of regeneration: towering wildflower meadows, scrublands, thickets, and secondary forest. Together, they create a hyperdiverse landscape of edges, with higher levels of biodiversity and carbon sequestration than unbroken climax rainforest.
Some patches of mature forest have an especially high spiritual significance: whenever a child is born the umbilical cord is placed in a bamboo container and tied to a tree, forging a spiritual connection between the newborn baby and its spirit tree that will last a (human) lifetime – and beyond. Any harm to the tree would be akin to hurting its human companion, and the cultural impact of this simple custom is considerable. From early childhood on, kids are taught that they share a bond with another very different, but nonetheless living, breathing being that they can always seek out, pray to and confide in. The resulting reciprocal relationship forms their baseline perception of plants as fellow creatures, not merely inert stands of resources, and lays the foundation for a life lived in service of the land and all its myriad inhabitants.
Once the group arrived at the swidden they went to work immediately, forming a long row of people slowly moving along the contour line of the hill.
The land is quite steep in places, yet soil erosion is negligible: the underground root system is still intact until long after the burn, and since soil disturbance during planting is minimal, the soil surface remains largely unbroken. Even on slopes that we would leave alone for fear of catastrophic erosion, crops are planted without any detrimental effects to soil integrity.
As soon as the rain arrives after the burn, both cultivated plants and wild pioneers start sprouting. Rice plants form dense mats of roots, and together with the young plant community establishing itself, the soil is soon protected from erosion, both from above (vegetation cover) and below (root network).
The earth is very dark and of excellent texture, full of carbon and life. We can only dream of soil like this – not even in our vegetable beds have we been able to accumulate a similar substrate. Apart from the ashes of the burn, no artificial (or natural) fertilizer is used for the entire growing season. Traditional methods of shifting cultivation practiced by indigenous peoples throughout the tropics have created anthropogenic “dark soils,” the most famous of which is the Amazonian terra preta de índio.
The practice of swiddening has, over the millennia, created cultures that know their land so intimately that they immediately recognize subliminal changes in the soil composition, and what that means for potential crop productivity. This method of plant cultivation is extremely flexible, and allows for minute crop adjustments to changing conditions in the field. It is not the humans who declare which plant shall grow where – the land gives clues, the people read them and comply.
At lunchtime, everyone gathered in the field hut next to the swidden and assessed all the vegetables and herbs collected while harvesting – in no time, several dishes were prepared from scratch.
Sometimes people add bush meat from traps in and around the swidden, sometimes they bring chicken or pork from the village. A large variety of greens (both wild and cultivated) are eaten raw, and leafy vegetables are folded and used to pick up rice, which is then dunked in chili paste or soups. It is customary to eat with your hands, although spoons are used as well.
After lunch people rest for a little while, and soon return to work. As is common for shifting cultivators throughout Southeast Asia, nobody announces the beginning and end of breaks, but it is custom that the swidden’s owners take the lead.
Everyone knows what to do, without the need for explicit coordination other than arranging the harvest dates for each swidden (a rough schedule is set during informal community meetings in the evening). Tasks are fluent: if, say, people notice that space on the drying racks runs out, they might help building a few more racks before continuing with the harvest.
In the afternoon, once the section in question is harvested, people return to the village, bringing home baskets full of fresh produce they gathered in the fields and forests.
Some swiddens are further away from the village, at times considerably so. Paths are maintained collectively, whenever the necessity arises. If there is a branch hanging in the way, it is swiftly cut with a bushknife by whoever encounters it.
A second swidden contained areas with a high density of herbs, tubers, minor crops like sesame, plants used as dye for clothing, and flowers that are specifically planted for their ritual use and/or insect-repellent function (either by deterring pests or attracting those that feed on them).
The work proceeds at leisurely pace, and creates an atmosphere that closer resembles a Sunday afternoon stroll than agrarian drudgery. There is no hurry, because if you work with this many people every task is finished in no time. People are constantly chatting, joking and laughing, creating a contagious atmosphere of communal joy that makes one forget any physical burden.
Some trees are left standing in the slashing phase, and their burned remains are used as trellis to grow various climbing vegetables, or as a source of firewood. Sometimes the plants’ vines escape and are cut back during weeding, because they can take over a considerable area and smother the rice plants. Luckily, the young shoots of many curcubits and legumes are edible as well, so little is wasted.
Already a few weeks after the initial slashing, the first tree stumps start sprouting back. Since much of their root system was unaffected by the fire they regenerate vigorously, and soon form the canopy of the secondary forest that might become a swidden again in a few years’ time. Those that grow fast enough to overshadow young rice plants are cut back during the weeding phase, and those with edible young foliage are intentionally trimmed to provide a steady harvest of leafy greens to be eaten with meals.
Sowing a swidden requires a lot of vegetable seed, but since land is not the limiting factor, entire patches of vegetables are set aside for seed-saving. Often, the initial rice seed mix contains some vegetable seeds as well (as well as various herbs and flowers), although many vegetables are sowed independently, either before, during or after the rice has been planted. There might be areas in which the rice doesn’t sprout as densely, so the area is filled in with other useful plants afterwards.
When the only measure is yield per unit of land, paddy (wet) rice cultivation is the most productive way to plant rice. Rotational farming might be less work overall, but it requires more land – which is not too tragic because hill cultures inhabit marginal lands not suited for wet rice cultivation anyway. But since shifting cultivators are well aware of the high productivity of wet rice cultivation, they make use of the technique wherever the landscape allows it.7 Here, the nearby river’s water is used to irrigate a few paddies, creating a truly picturesque scene:
Back in the village, the day is far from over: animals need to be looked after, chores are waiting, and dinner has to be prepared. Only once it gets dark do people retreat to their dwellings and the community slowly quiets down.
No two houses are the same, and each is constructed with the help of the entire community, according to the wishes and needs of the respective residents.
Villages are still largely self-sufficient, although many compromises have been made. Most houses use modern roofing materials and have (at least some) electricity, and there is even a family that owns a car. In their free time people pursue various handicrafts, fashion and maintain tools and structures, and process various materials, all the while socializing. Very few tasks are done solitary.
Everything even remotely useful is utilized, and what breaks is repaired, recycled or composted – nothing goes to waste. While the “circular economy” is still little more than an abstract concept for overdeveloped countries, traditional societies have never abandoned this paradigm.
And at night, instead of watching TV, people rest, visit neighbors, chat idly, or do light tasks such as the processing of cotton and its gradual conversion into cloth.
Producing their own clothes is an important aspect of all hill cultures, and no effort is spared to create the intricate colorful patterns that form a central part of the identity of different culture groups.
On the last day of the week it rained, so the harvest was postponed for the time being, and people rested or attended to various other household-related tasks. Karn had the opportunity to spend the morning in the small village school, where children of various ages learn the basic school subjects and engage in various activities, such as sports or playing traditional instruments. All of the teachers are young adults from the village, eminently inspiring people who received a formal (higher) education but decided to return to serve their community instead of pursuing material goals elsewhere.
Karn’s visit was a memorable event for the entire community, and people were genuinely curious as to why an “outsider” would actually want to learn their ways. Usually, visitors believe it’s both inevitable and desirable that the Pakagayaw are included into proper Thai society eventually, as the superiority of consumer-capitalism is entirely unquestioned in mainstream Thai culture. Often guests bring cheap industrial junk food and sugary treats for the children – instead, Karn brought dried seafood (a specialty from our province) and exotic seeds (from our garden), and in fruit season we sent them several large boxes of mangosteen as a thank you.
Second stop: Baan Hin Laad Nai (บ้านห้วยหินลาดใน)
Baan Huay Hin Laad Nai is a small village nestled into the hillsides of the Golden Triangle province Chiang Rai. It has been featured in numerous documentaries and magazines, and is thus relatively well-known: an exemplary ethnic community with many ties and connections to activists, scholars and experts in many different fields who are interested in preserving the various aspects of their way of life. They regularly partner with students doing conservation or agroecology research on their land, host tourist groups,8 and have a broad palette of products for sale.
By the time Karn arrived most swiddens had already been harvested, but the work was far from over – now the rice needed to be threshed and carried back to the village. The rice stalks had dried well in the sun, and now needed to be bundled and carried to designated collection points for threshing.
During threshing, the rice bundles are jammed between two sticks that are connected with a short piece of rope, and then forcefully bashed onto the ground to loosen the grain. It’s a fun enough task, but although it might look easy, it is quite exhausting – the muscle groups utilized are rarely used in everyday life – and, accordingly, people switch frequently.
Men and women do all swidden tasks together in mixed work groups, although there are slight variations along gender lines with specific tasks. When clearing a swidden, for instance, men cut larger trees and women cut branches; during the burn, men lay and direct fires and women create firebreaks and sweep together unburned vegetation into piles. But during the harvest, everyone, no matter what age or gender, is engaged in all tasks.
Red cockscomb (Celosia argentea), one of the main plants used to distract potentially predatory insects (away from the crops), is abundant in all swiddens. Planted at least in part for its sheer beauty, the flowers are also frequently used in rituals and ceremonies, as offerings, and as a cultural symbol for swiddening.
The time of the rice harvest is also their main vegetable season, when the greatest variety is harvested for consumption and seedkeeping. The change from wet to dry weather induces fruiting in most cultivated varieties, and the abundance this creates is enviable.
In Hin Laad Nai fewer vegetables were planted directly into the swidden than at Mae Por Kee – instead they had large, continuously cultivated vegetable gardens closer to the village. Every single garden or farm we know of would pale in comparison to the enormous variety of useful plants growing side by side in the deep, black soil.
Karn learned that Pun Pun Organic Farm, a famous distributor of free vegetable seed samples to budding gardeners, got their original set of heirloom seeds from Hin Laad Nai.
Rotational farming is an unfathomably complex, multi-faceted and inherently dynamic system that has been perfected over millennia. Unknowingly adhering to the permaculturalist adage that “the problem is the solution,” predation by rodents, birds and some insects is reduced by simply turning them into food.
During the daily commute, detours are made regularly to check traps, gather forest products, harvest cultivars from previous fields, and to scout potential sites for next season’s swiddens. Suitable locations are remembered, discussed, marked, and, in a few months time, slashed & burned.
There is no shortage of things to do in the forest, and the Pakagayaw spend a lot of their time there. Unlike contemporary agricultural societies’ rather strict distinction between domesticated and wild landscapes, for shifting cultivators those lines are blurred in what more closely resembles the system formalized as the “five zone” in permacultural teachings – just infinitely more sophisticated.
The honey of four different bee species is collected regularly, and after the visit of a Japanese beekeeping expert a few years ago, honey production has intensified even more. Simple temporary hives are made from wood, bamboo or clay. Some hives are only harvested after four years, to be used for medicinal purposes.
The forest provides an abundance of highly cherished seasonal delicacies, such as spiders, mushrooms and insects. Over a dozen species of insect larvae alone are collected from the wild. Everyone who wants to eat a certain specialty is free to go and forage for it whenever they want. Needless to say, having to pay for food is a relatively foreign concept to the Pakagayaw.
Hin Laad Nai is much more “developed” than Mae Por Kee, and much better connected to the outside world; both TVs and cars are already common. Regardless, they’ve successfully managed the tightrope act of preserving their traditions and beliefs while integrating themselves into modern society to the exact extent they deem appropriate.
Still, some older people expressed concern over the lure of the city for younger people, and it will require a constant conscious effort by all generations to keep the community thriving.
Baan Hin Laad Nai has a lot of other fascinating side projects – the vegetable gardens, a large tea plantation/agroforestry system, several fruit forests, workshops on basket-weaving, herbalism, and producing clothes – whose complete exploration would have necessitated a much longer stay, but by the end of the week Karn felt she got a decent overview of their main activities.
The general atmosphere in both communities was magical, the bounty of Nature breathtaking, and the people living there knowingly appreciate the beauty of their home. Just being surrounded by the lush landscape raises ones spirits. In the words of Jordan Lovinger (who writes Years of Gap), “we are biologically programmed to enjoy being a thing that experiences life,” and nowhere does this come more naturally than in the hills, far away from the bustle of the cities and the roar of the highways.
The last swiddening Pakagayaw communities are proud of their culture and their traditional subsistence mode, and would never think of trading it for fixed-field corn farming, as many of their neighbors have done. Nonetheless, it has become harder to continue.
As I explained in the introduction, the government dislikes it. Self-sufficiency is bad for the economy, and any viable alternative to wage slavery and consumerism is a dangerous threat to the system.
But young Pakagayaw have discovered a potential remedy: they are building small bungalows and homestays around their villages to accommodate potential tourists. In addition to their ever-growing assortment of local products (honey, clothing, tea, coffee, baskets, organic produce, etc.), their contribution to the nation’s prestige and GDP will increasingly take the form of cultural and ecological tourism – which, paradoxically, the government itself encourages. Since it is currently fashionable for countries to show off their alleged “cultural diversity” on the global stage, the Thai state finds itself in a double bind: eliminate all remaining cultural differences for the sake of increased control, ease of governance and exploiting the last few marginal economic potentials, or parade the “hill tribes” around in front of international audiences for “soft power” and props.
Karn would have liked to learn more about their internal social and political organization as well (for instance how they view money and counter its destructive effects on community cohesion), but most people seemed reluctant to discuss such topics in any detail with a stranger they’d just met. Ethnic communities in Thailand are, understandably, wary of outside agitators and government spies up to the present day.9 Continuously deceived and betrayed by outsiders, centuries of averse experiences with various iterations of pompous kingdoms and nation states have made them careful, leery, and protective.
And yet, one evening, an older man from Hin Laad Nai – himself a seasoned activist and community organizer – finally agreed to talk to Karn. The conversation that followed was easily the most “radical” (i.e. rational) opinion she’d ever heard from anyone in the entire country.
As a collectivist culture, all Thais agree that the government should (ideally!) be a sort of benefactor, and it is its duty to assist and help its citizens. But having found themselves on the receiving end of relentless coercion, oppression and exploitation, the various hill cultures know better. They remember the true face of the state, its function as insatiable mythical “evil giant,”10 and find themselves locked in a perpetual David-versus-Goliath struggle between independence and subservience that is far from over.
This is, historically speaking at least, a far more accurate picture than the statist propaganda taught in schools. Around the world, states incorporated, subjugated and eradicated all formerly free peoples, who (more often than not) evaded and/or actively resisted such efforts. In the face of total technological domination, however, open resistance has become a quasi-death sentence, so for the moment a more careful and considerate approach is necessary.
One can only hope that the Thai state will soon find itself busied by more pressing concerns of self-preservation in the face of economic and societal collapse, thus taking pressure off the few remaining people resisting total state control. Only then can the Pakagayaw hope to return to their historical norm: being proud and fiercely independent non-state people.
After two eventful weeks, Karn finally returned home to me, exhausted but glowing with excitement, bringing along a digital treasure trove of photographs, short videos, and audio recordings of conversations with village elders, each with so much love for detail that I couldn’t have possibly asked for any more myself – definitely more than enough to make my old armchair ethnologist’s heart sing. For each of my follow-up questions she had an elaborate answer, since she’d already asked them the same thing.
Frustratingly, ethnographic literature rarely goes into details regarding the actual practice of plant cultivation, but Karn’s visit answered many questions we had harbored for a long time, and we gained plenty of inspiration and motivation from her experiences.
For several evenings we combed through her archive, discussed her adventure, and mused about what it might mean for our future.
Meanwhile, the majority of social interactions I had had in the past two weeks were thinly veiled attempts at convincing me to cut all those “worthless jungle trees” in our garden and plant more commercial durian, so we can finally afford a pickup truck like everyone else. Perhaps people thought that I was more susceptible to persuasion, now that the boss was not around. Very few people here understand exactly what we do, let alone why we do it – the Pakagayaw villagers, on the other hand, had listened with great interest to what Karn told them about our way of “farming” and the underlying philosophy.
I was even tempted to muse if it wouldn’t be better for us to start anew once more, embedded in a place where the people listen to Nature and understand her language. But, considering what we’ve invested in our current piece of land, this idea seems too risky and difficult.
Of course, we can’t just move in with them, and it is impossible for us to become Karen people,11 but, we ultimately concluded, we can very well use some of their wisdom, knowledge and experience in what we do here.
One of the more obvious things we’ve come to realize is that, so far, we’ve feared – and thus underutilized – fire as a horticultural technique far too much. Just like all primitive technologies, it can convey immense benefits to those who know how to wield it wisely. Henceforth, we will carefully experiment a bit more with fire farming, and small initial trials were promising.12
Additionally, Karn has since put her mind to finding someone willing to plant rice here in our community, although chances are slim. Durian is – superficially at least13 – more attractive from an economic perspective (as well as a status symbol), and for well over two decades nobody has planted rice in our district.
But, to our great surprise, a long-time friend from the village has recently expressed interest to start a trial14 on some semi-fallow land he doesn’t have the time to cultivate.
It is astonishing that, in a country developing (quite literally) at breakneck speed, there are still people living (almost) completely off the land, while conventional farming has made everyone else ever more dependent on the global industrial & economic behemoth. In this “advanced” society, those growing food have turned into debt slaves, machine operators and pesticide alchemists, and city people have to pay for every single thing, starting with the absolute essentials: food and water to fresh air.15
No, the world’s remaining traditional rotational farmers have far preceded and will outlive the insanity and hubris that’s currently considered “the norm,” and their continued defiance flies in the face of the dominant culture’s fundamental justifications for its existence. We don’t need jobs, money or material wealth to live happy and fulfilled lives. We don’t need to destroy Nature and deplete our environment to survive. We don’t need convenience, luxury or excessive levels of comfort. We don’t need machines to do our work (let alone our thinking) for us. And we don’t need a formal education to be competent, knowledgeable and wise.
Despite the dominant culture’s desperate attempts to portray itself as invincible, the façade slowly starts crumbling. Now, if something were to happen to modern society (gosh, what could it be?), the various hill cultures of Southeast Asia would fare rather well – to them, the collapse of techno-industrial civilization will merely be a slight inconvenience, which they would have little problem adapting to and recovering from. And even when an increasingly erratic climate complicates rice cultivation, they have the best preconditions to adapt their subsistence mode accordingly.
Most importantly, they still have an intact, fully functioning community, with a strong shared identity and a cohesion that is almost entirely unheard of in overdeveloped countries.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a healthy, diverse and abundant environment creates healthy, happy and content people, and those people form healthy, stable and resilient communities.
In conclusion, what impressed both Karn and me the most was the extent of self-sufficiency and the immense amount of extremely detailed ecological knowledge held by all Pakagayaw. We can only dream of knowing the plants and animals around us as well as they do, of being able to predict the weather and the seasons by observing subtle environmental clues (such as the movement of certain insects, or the height of wild figs on their fruiting trunks). And we can only hope to one day be part of a community half as strong and wise as theirs.
Moreover, she noticed many similarities to her own ethnic group, the Isan people (themselves a longstanding victim of the oppression, exploitation and forced cultural “Thaification” efforts by the Siamese/Thai government over the past century), and their struggle. There are even certain beliefs and rituals that are strikingly similar to those she has known since childhood, perhaps drawing on a common pre-Buddhist background.
This realization entails strategic advice: to break the spell of the dominant culture, to expose its lies and mock its arrogance, it helps to revive pride in the myriad land-based cultural identities that were paved over in the name of cultural uniformity and national identity. For as long as I know her, Karn has insisted that she is Isan, not Thai (and so is the food she makes!). This reminds us that the few cultures whose names now designate entire countries were once just one group among many others – and usually the most haughty, ruthless, brutal and authoritarian ones.
But true strength lies in diversity.
And soon enough, after a few days of well-deserved rest, her mother called, inquiring as to whether she’s already free to assist with the annual rice harvest back home. So, once again, she shouldered her backpack and kissed me goodbye, off to honor her role in the reciprocal relationship of mutual dependence between cultivator and crop, cutting stalk after stalk heavy with golden grain, and thus securing a common future, for both the rice and us.
This year she will carry with her countless stories and anecdotes, cherished memories that will continue to guide us, and remind us what we need to hear most in these challenging times:
Alternatives exist. It is still possible.
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As laid out in great detail by James C. Scott in his 2017 book ‘Against the Grain - A Deep History of the Earliest States.’
Before the state assumed near-total control over their respective “sovereign territory,” so-called “escape crops” (James C. Scott, 2009) were of greater importance to evade taxes, raids, control & influence by the state. Tropical shifting cultivation – “fire farming” – was very different before metal tools became common. Previously, felling with stone axes required more effort, so swiddens were smaller and more trees were left standing, especially taller ones. Rice thrives best in wide, open areas, which were less abundant in the resulting clearing. The partly burned swidden still provides perfect habitat for various root crops, however, who don’t mind a bit of shade (like cassava or taro). Some of them (like various yams, Dioscorea spp.) grow vines that can make use of the remaining stands of trees, which are now – due to the heat of the fire – free of competing climbers and have less dense foliage.
Three, actually, but regrettably she didn’t have enough time to visit the third one.
I use the simplified romanization of the phonetic Thai interpretation of their name, a more precise spelling would be Pgaz K’Nyau. It translates as “the people.”
In Thailand there is legislation (which certainly makes sense in most other cases) that automatically turns fallow farmland with lower or no title deeds into state-owned “protected areas” after a few years.
In terms of ideology, spirituality, and general worldview, we both have much more in common with traditional, land-based cultures than we do with our fellow villagers.
The Kantu in Kalimantan, Indonesia, have traditionally planted wet rice in their “swampland swiddens,” located in the flood zone of the rivers and streams traversing their lands. Suitable areas were severely limited in scope, but highly productive when compared with dryland swiddens.
During Karn’s stay, a group of permaculturalists from India visited them to exchange knowledge and seeds – they generously shared some of their vegetable seed with her as well.
Only a decade ago, a well-known indigenous activist was abducted, tortured and brutally murdered by park officials. Until today, none of the perpetrators have been convicted of murder, despite conclusive evidence.
In stories and myths, the state is often portrayed as a mystical figure, a giant (ยักษ์; “yák”), similar to Fredy Perlman’s concept of Civilization as “Leviathan.” The mythical giant is viewed as benevolent by central Thai culture, but is perceived as threatening and dangerous by the hill cultures on the fringes.
The only way to become part of their community is through intermarriage.
I will elaborate on those experiments in an upcoming Rewilding Update: “Playing with Fire” (coming next year).
If measured only by price per kilo; about 100 Baht for durian, and between 10 and 15 Baht for (unhusked) rice. Upfront costs are much higher for Durian, and the overall labor intensity of durian plantations is also considerably higher. Both provide a single annual harvest whose earnings have to be enough for the household’s entire year’s worth of expenses.
More on that in the next Rewilding Update: “Widening the Circle” – coming soon!
Yes, those who can afford it pay for clean air: indoor air purifier sales surge each year during the annual smoke season, when industry, air- and road traffic, forest clearing and crop residue burning makes the air in much of Southeast Asia literally hazardous to breathe. During rainy season each rain shower clears particulate pollution out of the sky, but in dry season smog accumulates. Despite still being blamed as a main culprit, the burning of swiddens makes up a negligible percentage of the annual smoke load.
What an absolute treat to read as the year winds down. Hope you both get a chance to do more trips like this in the future. You live in a remarkable part of the world.
What a beautiful, reverential homage. I was captivated. Thank you for sharing, David!