Indigent and Indignant Representations Of
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Enclaved knowledge: Indigent and indignant representations of environmental management and development among the Kalasha of Pakistan Peter Parkes University of Kent, Department of Anthropology, United Kingdom 1999 Keywords: environment, cultural anthropology, enclavement, feudalism, development, non-government organisations, natural resources, agriculture, trees, forests, women, human rights, tourism, Islam, Chitral, Kalasha, Pakistan. Introduction: 'No More NGOs!' The main problem that we are facing right now is those actions taken above our heads, without asking the people: for example, when well-wishing foreigners create their own NGOs for the 'protection' of our people and our valleys... These outsiders just involve a few people [in their projects], so the rest of the people stay away. They just say: "There is an NGO at work, so why should we do anything for nothing?" Or when political groups [i.e. factions] are involved in a project, they say: "We don't belong to that party, so why should we do it?" So the unity is gone... in this way, the people stop working together. (Saifullah Jan n.d) Saifullah Jan is an indigenous activist and spokesman for four thousand non- Muslim Kalasha ('Kalash Kafirs') inhabiting three mountain valleys in the Chitral District of northern Pakistan.1 His above cited words opened a polemical speech to regional specialists attending a session on Developmental and Environmental Issues at the Third International Hindu Kush Cultural Conference, held at Chitral in August 1995. After criticizing several projects for needlessly interfering with Kalasha religious culture, Saifullah Jan targeted a range of related 'well-wishing' programmes aimed at local education in the Kalasha language on topical issues of hygiene, local medicine, indigenous tradition, and environmental understanding. His wry rejoinder was again: "We don't need to be told what we already know ourselves! We don't need to be shown pictures of what we can see every day! We need no more NGOs!" The Kalasha have indeed suffered a surfeit of projects and programmes for their cultural protection or economic improvement, which have recently concentrated on issues of local environmental management.2 One of several such organizations, for example, is the Kalash Environmental Protection Society (KEPS), instigated by an energetic British environmentalist and campaigner in collaboration with regional government and development officers.3 Focussing attention on imminent environmental catastrophe, Kalasha are typically represented in the promotional rhetoric of such NGOs as innocent and indeed childlike victims of outside exploiters: First came the roads, then the merchants, the hunters, the woodcutters, the entrepreneurs ...The Kalash, although wily and resilient, were uneducated, innocent of modern ways, and they were easy prey for the unscrupulous. Walnut trees were mortgaged, land was lost to outsiders who wanted to open up the valleys to tourism, and the great cedar forests plundered... The hillsides became vulnerable with the increase in soil erosion, and the fields constantly in danger of being washed away... Aid agencies through ignorance brought in fertilisers and pesticides, endangering the natural organic methods, imposing dangers to the unsophisticated inhabitants. Tour groups proliferated, exploiting their naivety and vulnerability... Afforestation, protection of the environment, better medical facilities, and simple latrines: these are the priorities! (Lines n.d.) Kalasha leaders might endorse such diagnoses of environmental devastation being made on their behalf, albeit scorning some of the prioritised remedies. But they are more strategically preoccupied with prior questions of legal entitlement and the assertion of customary rights to control local resources. Beyond simply decrying a culture of dependency created by ill-conceived interventions, and far from dismissing all development encounters, their underlying preoccupation rather concerns the local organizational implications of such development schemes: their effects on communal 'unity' or 'disunity.' A barely euphemised subtext is that development funding has long been insinuated with Kalasha factional politics, feeding into the competitive political ambitions of local leaders, while undermining their broader campaigns to wrest communal control of environmental resources. Saifullah Jan has himself been engaged in such a long-term struggle to mobilize collective support for Kalasha forest rights. His career therefore offers a privileged personal perspective on a relatively neglected issue of indigenous environmental knowledge: that is, how practical or habitual knowledge may be evoked, translated or variously transformed through adversarial debate into local environmental consciousness, and even further implemented as collective action. I shall therefore concentrate on intentional policies of Kalasha resource management, including its acknowledged failures or apparent mismanagement. Yet I also address broader problems of the intentional mis communication of Kalasha customary knowledge, whose various interpretations by insiders and outsiders are rhetorically deployed by all parties in the legitimation of environmental control. Under situations of 'enclavement' characteristic of small minorities, local resource management necessarily entails a practical political knowledge of outside interested parties (non-indigenous claimants, local government officers, development agents, foreign advocates), as well as of internal dissensions and political opponents within any community. Beyond noting and deploring a common mismatch of indigenous rhetoric and practice (Ellen 1993), we might therefore further examine the actual political speeches and mobilizing practices of representative indigenous leaders - including their failures of persuasion, and their voiced apprehensions of the causes and consequences of such failures - together with the written rhetorical discourses of their developmental assessors (cf. Grillo 1997). 2. Kalasha Enclavement and Development Despite increasing concern with the global-political implications of development intervention (e.g. Ferguson 1990, Escobar 1995), less attention has been paid to its variable micro-political reception as a resource for internal competition within indigenous communities.4 Here 'indigenous knowledge' - or the rhetorical representation of local subsistence practice - also becomes an internally contested resource for political mobilization, especially within minority communities enclaved on the periphery of dominant polities. Some of the recurrent institutional predicaments faced by such communities are vividly conveyed in Mary Douglas's ideal-typical depiction of what she calls an 'enclave culture:' Neither smallness nor intimacy is enough to explain the peculiarities of enclave culture... I ascribe its distinctive culture to its egalitarian organization, which in turn I see as a result of its weakness in holding its membership and resisting the seductions of the larger society... An enclave starts to polarize its world when it has to worry about the defection of its members. The big organizational problem and the distinctive anxiety of the enclave are about defection; yet there can be no show of power, and authority has to be exerted with great care... Equality plus weak leadership make for poor co-ordination... [and] the main disadvantage of the enclave is that it is prone to internal factions...with difficulty in ensuring support for long-term policies. (Douglas 1996: xx- xxii; cf. Douglas 1987: 38-43) Many of these features of enclavement are evident as underlying symptoms of organizational problems alluded to in Kalasha political discourse concerning communal 'unity' and 'disunity' (Saifullah Jan 1996). A chronic preoccupation with defection, for example, is experienced in conversions to Islam, entailing a relentless attrition of local communities, once subject to common ritual and moral rules, which become less enforceable as the majority Muslim population expands (Ahmed 1986). Kalasha leaders can only weakly attempt to stem the tide of such defections: either by relaxing customary sanctions, or else by reinforcing ritual rules of purity and pollution that at least symbolically demarcates their embattled constituencies. In a broader context of outside encroachments, suspicions of treachery are inherent in all personal relations established beyond the community, fuelling mistrust of political leaders mediating with outside authorities. As Douglas indicates, factionalism is thus a corollary of enclavement, where such resentments accumulate in response to any strong assertion of personal authority. For most of this century, Kalasha communities have indeed been driven by periodic factional antagonisms - although one should note that such political animosities are contextually circumscribed and only episodically manifest in everyday life, being offset by alternative institutions of what Douglas terms 'proto-hierarchy.'5 In this essay, I explore the manner in which such political conditions appear to have structured both institutional practices and discourses of environmental management, also examining their effects on the (mis)communication of local environmental knowledge to outsiders. This requires an initial consideration of Kalasha historical experience of enclavement and development over the course of this century. After the legendary conquest of Kalasha kingdoms in southern Chitral around the sixteenth century, conversions to