usage that is so “solid” that it can be sold between villagers. The regional body in charge of land management, the Garo Hills District Council, officially supports the continuation of communal land ownership. But contrary to official policy, many officers involved with agriculture in the region are convinced that a change from swidden agriculture to permanent crops is part of an inevitable, and in a way desirable, modernization of agriculture, which necessarily includes the “individualization” of the landholdings that accompany it. Permanent crops are generally considered more profitable, and the resulting cash income is believed to allow families to accumulate surplus more easily than from the subsistence crops that are central to swidden agriculture. However, the price of some of these cash crops, such as areca nuts, has declined for many years in a row. And the prices of cash crops do not necessarily keep pace with inflation, which reveals some of the vulnerabilities of market-oriented agricultural production.
Transforming swiddens into orchards also only makes sense to families who can mobilize the labor to maintain them. Even though areca and cashew trees are relatively low maintenance, people do need to keep them free from weeds and creepers in order for them to thrive. Young saplings, such as those of areca nut trees, also need to be protected from wild and domestic animals, and demand fencing. Since people need to stay close to their orchards, this limits them in maintaining their swiddens, because of the distances between them. Consequently, once orchards gain importance, people end up living dispersed across the land that belongs to their village, abandoning the village nuclei that until recently were considered characteristic of the Garo. This lends further support to the common idea that traditional Garo culture is closely tied to swidden cultivation, and the former loses meaning once the latter ceases to be practiced.
One major consequence of the increasing importance of permanent cultivation is that it “fixes” the access that families have to land. The more families depend on orchards to which they maintain a permanent claim, the less they depend on the village head and the families who are close to him, to obtain access to land. This means that villagers become less dependent on one another, in an economic sense, than they previously were. The communal resource management, which is so much at the center of popular imaginations of indigenous people’s connectedness to nature, is increasingly challenged.
Christianity and the Pacification of the Environment
As previously mentioned, according to Garo community religion, the village head not only positions himself as an experienced leader, but also facilitates and hosts some of the most important ceremonial interactions with the deities. Remarkably, it is in villages where most of the land has become permanently cultivated that the majority of people have converted to Christianity. This implies the abandonment of most, if not all, of the earlier religious responsibilities of the village head. Most people are aware of the close link between swidden agriculture and the community religion, and in the cases where swidden agriculture has declined, the practicing of community religion has followed, and vice versa. In addition to ascribing the ownership of the land and the crops it yields to the deities, these celebrations epitomize people’s mutual dependencies. In order to make and cultivate swidden, people need to cooperate, and thus overcome any conflicts of interest that they may face.
The conversion to Christianity in the Garo Hills has not so much meant an “erasing” of the traditional cosmology, but rather the imposition of Christian religious tenets onto the existing pantheon (de Maaker 2013b). Christianity projects an omnipotent God, who thus encapsulates the deities and other entities identified within the community religion. The Christian clergy have subsequently emerged, with regards to agriculture, as the negotiators to the divine. People who have become Christians no longer take part in the collective celebrations that are so central to the community religion. The seasonal Christian celebrations that have replaced them no longer emphasize relationships between families, the way those linked to the community religion do, and do not underscore the position of the village head as a senior kinsman to the entire village.
The “privatization” of land use, in combination with the conversion to Christianity, also reduces the mutual dependence between villagers. Previously, economic success would translate into prestige, under a broad array of socioreligious mechanisms. In the course of that translation process, much of the wealth (e.g., animals for meat, and heirlooms or valuables) that people collected would be redistributed in potlatch-like feasting. The conversion to Christianity sharply reduced the need for this redistributive feasting, thereby placing those who are Christians in a better position to accumulate wealth. Nowadays, such wealth typically takes the form of a brick house, or consumer goods such as furniture, a television, a bicycle, or a motorbike—which in turn imbue social status. The weakening of the earlier redistributive mechanisms makes way for an increase in income disparities among villagers. Owning houses and consumer goods is an increasingly important “modern” ideal, in which villagers identify with an “outside” world, in line with their incorporation into global Christianity.
The abandoning of swidden cultivation, combined with the conversion to Christianity, also changes the ways in which people interact with the environment. Since Christianization in a way “numbs” the entities who, according to the community religion, are present in the land, it changes the way in which people perceive the nature amidst which they live. This gradually creates room for a less complicated exploitation of the land, as well as for more objectified notions of nature as “beautiful” and “sound” in its own right. With the predatory entities being granted less of a presence, people are free to use, exploit, and control their environment, without facing the threat of (supernatural) retaliation. Likewise, that same nature can serve as décor for the aspirations of ethno-nationalist groups, who consider themselves the ultimate owners of nature vis-à-vis non-Garo outsiders, against whom they agitate.
Conclusion: Ownership, Access, and Belonging
In this chapter, I have explored Garo perceptions of land and nature, and how these are changing over time. I have shown how these perceptions are inspired by religious ideas, and rooted in agricultural practices. I started out by showing that the “sacrality” of land for indigenous people provides a powerful argument against its alienation by capitalist forces. In the struggle for land fought by the Dongria Khond, it seems likely that this argument proved convincing, and helped them to win the case against the Vedanta mining company. Ethnic activists who campaign for the creation of a Garo homeland, such as the Garo student unions, appeal to a similar sentiment when they call for the defense of Garo soil against outsiders. However, referring to this special relationship in the Garo case seems to neglect the fact that, at least traditionally, Garo did not primarily consider nature as beneficial. According to Garo practitioners of the community religion, the land in which they live is inhabited by primordial entities with whom they need to negotiate its occupation. This negotiation, which involves acknowledgment of the deities as well as extensive sacrifices, creates a privileged relationship, which in turn produces the exclusion of outsiders.
The conversion of many Garo to Christianity has implied gaining control of, if not the numbing of, the deities of the community religion by Christian divinity. People therefore no longer need to justify and negotiate their usage of the land with its primordial owners. Even in the cases where people have not converted to Christianity, and continue to practice the community religion, the growing Christian presence has resulted in a gradual decline of their fear of the primordial entities. Consequently, these conversions have facilitated more “possessive” and permanent forms of cultivation, for example the creation of orchards. Religious conversions have also weakened the position of the village head, since it has taken away some of the responsibilities of his office. Instead, the authority of the village head has come to depend largely on legal entities created by the Indian state. This shift in terms of legality has contributed significantly to the emergence of conditions that have rendered privatization viable over collective ownership.
In the Garo Hills, indigenous claims tend to be formulated by urban Christian activists, who themselves have little or no involvement with agriculture,
