FOREWORD

K. SIVARAMAKRISHNAN

IN this study, so relevant to the times, Tomas Cole offers an examination of how Indigenous people participate in building peace and sovereignty amid political violence, forest conservation initiatives, and the relentless intrusion of the forces of capitalism in contested landscapes. He does this work in the highlands of southeast Myanmar, an area rich in forests and their lore. This is a region known by long-term residents as an embattled home where strife is seared into their memory. Repossessing the land is, Cole shows, about making peace with ancestors and spirits. It also requires the Indigenous residents, working with Karen activists, to find ways to refashion and create programs of nature conservation, all while negotiating national integration and maintaining a measure of political autonomy in Myanmar.

This is research that is particularly resonant with other work in many parts of the world where Indigenous people struggle to secure lands rights and recognition of their homelands. There is now a considerable literature on this topic in the Americas, Canada, Australia, and, to some extent, Africa. Such inquiries in Asia are fast emerging as a key topic for political and environmental anthropology. Cole takes an approach that is both well suited to the history of such movements and struggles in Myanmar (and more generally for highlands of mainland Southeast Asia) and can offer some new directions to scholars interested in these questions elsewhere. He does so by examining the multiple valences of possession in and of the land where human corporeal rights and more-than-human spiritual or spectral dwelling meet in the forests.

Forests have long been considered places of wonder and dread, holding treasures and threats, across cultures. In the history of Western civilization, this has been well discussed in the writings of Robert Harrison.¹ Much of the mystery, generating both attraction and trepidation, of forests extended to forest people. Across Asia the conquest of forest peoples and the control of forests often became part of a civilizing process undertaken by regional agrarian polities and, later, colonial empires. Studies of colonial efforts to command and exploit forests in Asia detail some of these developments.² But this large-scale history often conceals the continuing inhabitation of forests by people, spirits, and powers that locally remain salient to the reproduction of social relations, patterns of forest use, and conflicts over forest management.

Through skillful and patient ethnography, Cole turns to these obscured histories and cultural politics. As in the case of research that is questioning the erasure of Native American ideas and values, as well as rights and claims, in the development of protected areas in North America, Cole wishes to uncover how externally initiated conservation might meet and even be modified by Indigenous ideas, political assertion, and conservation projects.³ He carries out this work by considering local Indigenous ideas of forest inhabitation by the spirits of ancestors and how they come to inform forest conservation initiatives in the Salween Peace Park. In this way, Cole offers a whole new perspective on what has been discussed as community-based conservation. He does so by focusing on the meanings and practices emergent from within the community rather than the efforts to decentralize or delegate externally designed conservation projects to local entities either organic (village authority) or synthetic (forest committees and self-help groups).

Cole is also offering a novel history of peace parks. In the past, critical studies of peace parks and advocacy for them as desirable conservation initiatives have often emphasized their crucial role in promoting both environmental values and peacebuilding in conflict-ravaged areas. These have often been contentious international border zones.⁴ For some scholars, peace parks are a borderland manifestation of placing conservation at the service of promoting the political hegemony of regional states. Across Asia researchers have drawn attention to such processes in China, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Pakistan. But for others, especially conservation scientists, peace parks hold a unique possibility that can promote peacebuilding in borderlands, which are often rife with conflict. To such idealistic visions peace parks might be the way to mitigate and even avert the deadly conflicts that may become more severe in times of climate change.⁵

The Salween Peace Park is formed in a borderland in Myanmar but in the context of the animosities and warfare between the Myanmar state and ethnic minorities. A region redolent with the history of colonial forestry (mostly for teak) is now contested terrain where conservation is a vehicle for state intrusion and the assertion of local claims on the forest and enactment of self-government. As Cole notes, the sharply undulating terrain of the highlands in southeast Myanmar is fragmented by many ridges and valleys. Each fold in this wrinkled topography becomes an ecologically and socially distinct site for the larger peace and conservation initiatives to play out in terms of specific local mobilizations.

What Cole does well here is to build a careful examination of the different ways in which forests are inhabited and possessed by Indigenous people and their ancestors while recounting the ways in which these forms of dwelling were altered and reasserted in response to forces of dispossession driven by government consolidation and international resource mining efforts. Throughout the book, Cole dwells in the struggles for sovereignty that implicate people and the spirits of their ancestral dead, as well as the way the pragmatic approaches to forest management embedded in and emergent from these struggles are elevated from local immediacy to more durable regional outcomes in the Salween Peace Park.

This project was born concurrently with the hopeful democratization that began in Myanmar fifteen years ago. In the last few years Myanmar has fallen into more difficult times. However, the politics of sovereignty and Indigenous efforts to shape conservation in keeping with their beliefs will remain vital to the future of Myanmar and the prospects for various Indigenous people in the region. In a time when Indigenous efforts to reimagine how humans might live in the world are gaining attention across continents, this study offered by Tomas Cole is a timely contribution to the wider conversation.