[permaculture] Permaculture Review of _The Art of Not Being Governed_

narthex dreams narthexdreams at yahoo.com
Sat Nov 6 06:15:40 EDT 2010


Please read my blog post reviewing (from a permaculture angle) the book The Art of Not Being Governed, an Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. My thoughts on Permaculture's relationship to social systems and alternative society.

http://fireflower.wordpress.com/2010/07/10/the-art-of-not-being-governed/

The Art of Not Being Governed
			By Eric

			
				

“Of course, the overall resistance of swiddening to state 
appropriation lies both in its hilly location and dispersal and in the 
very botanical diversity it represents. It is not uncommon for shifting 
cultivators to plant, tend, and encourage as many as sixty or more 
cultivars. Imagine the bewildering task facing even the most energetic 
tax collector attempting to catalogue, let alone assess and collect 
taxes, in such a setting. It is for this reason that J.G. Scott noted 
that hill peoples were ‘of no account whatever in the state’ and that 
‘it would be a sheer waste of energy in the eyes of an official to 
attempt to number the houses or even the villages of these people.’ Add 
to this the fact that nearly all swidden cultivators also hunt, fish, 
and forage in nearby forests. By pursuing such a broad portfolio of 
subsistence strategies they spread their risks, they ensure themselves a
 diverse and nutritious diet, and they present a nearly intractable 
hieroglyphic to any state that might want to corral them.”

“After a demographic collapse following a famine, epidemic, or war — 
if one were lucky enough to have survived — swiddening might become the 
norm, right there on the padi plain. State resistant space was therefore
 not a place on the map but a position vis-a-vis power; it could be 
created by successful acts of defiance, by shifts in farming 
techniques, or by unanticipated acts of god.” (emphasis mine).

I’ve been reading The Art of Not Being Governed, An Anarchist 
History of Upland Southeast Asia by James C. Scott. It is full of 
fascinating food for thought. One of the most interesting topics it 
raises is the relationship between socio-political forms and 
agricultural strategies of certain peoples.


Scott makes the point that in Southeast Asia — and fairly generally 
worldwide — the food system that has historically been part and parcel 
of the state and state-making is sedentary agriculture, usually of a 
grain monocrop. This allows for legible, taxable, storable food 
surpluses and requires a dense peasant population close to the state 
core, which feeds the state’s need for manpower. It is the foundation 
for standing militaries, large building projects, vast solidified 
hierarchies, dense populations, etc.

The food-system strategies used by non-state, often egalitarian 
peoples are foraging, hunting and gathering, nomadic pastoralism, and 
shifting agriculture (a.k.a swidden).

Scott really starts to get somewhere interesting with his discussion 
of “escape agriculture” and “escape crops.”

The traits of escape crops being:

– crops that cannot be stored long post-harvest without spoiling

– crops that have low value per unit weight and volume

– root crops: easy to conceal and storable in-ground.

– crops that grow on marginal land

– crops that require less care

– diversity of crops: provide more health & nutrition and mature 
unevenly.

Escape agriculture usually provides a higher return per unit labor — 
it is consummately “lazy gardening,” and the reason so many marginal 
groups have been seen as lazy by state-makers.

By being the opposite of sedentary grain monoculture produced by 
peasant cultivators, escape agriculture becomes “a form of wealth 
inaccessible to the state” (and one might widen that inaccessibility to 
encompass capital as well. The “appropriation-resistance” of this form 
of agriculture often also means resistance to commodification. )

I have been pondering the question of what food system, then, would 
be part and parcel of a social form that was both egalitarian & 
state-resistant and sedentary. Not because mobility is undesirable, but 
because it is probably not possible for all of us to practice mobile 
agriculture considering the present world population and the degraded 
state of our ecosystems.

It would be good to know more about non-state societies that were 
sedentary, or at least not primarily mobile — it was suggested to me 
that Native Americans in the Northeast (pre-Columbus), and Hawaiians 
(“pre-warlord take-over-and-enslavement-of-the-peaceful first 
inhabitants”) may have fit this bill.

In this sense the “permanence” referred to in the word Permaculture 
has to signify permanence of place, in addition to sustainability or 
permanence over time. One of permaculture’s original definitions was “a 
perennial agriculture for sustainable human settlement.”  
Indeed, Bill Mollison, the co-founder of the permaculture concept, 
sources its genesis for him in the anger over the ecological devastation
 that made a mobile, dream-like life now impossible. (“As a child I 
lived in sort of a dream, and I didn’t really awaken until I was about 
28 years old, I spent most of my early life working in the bush or the 
sea, and it wasn’t until the 1950s that I noticed that large parts of 
the system were disappearing. First fish stocks became extinct. Then I 
noticed the seaweed around the shorelines had gone. Large patches of 
forest began to die. I hadn’t realized until those things had gone that 
I’d become very fond of them…Fury is what drives me; not love of people,
 not love of the earth.”)

The escape agriculture described by Scott is mobile, indeed must be 
mobile to escape the state’s grasp. But for most of us, there is nowhere
 left to run. If we are to live in an egalitarian, free social form the 
whole world must be turned upside down. Out of this we must design a 
kind of permanent escape agriculture that incorporates state- and 
capital- prevention into its core strategies. Permaculture could, and I 
think, should, be seen as this set of strategies.

Permaculture is frustrating precisely because it does does not jive 
with the routines and patterns of capitalism. Organic farmers attempting
 to make a living by growing food for the market are rightly annoyed 
with its prescriptions which mostly do not fit the geometry of commodity
 food production. It is a food system more appropriately aligned 
explicitly with a social form that is yet to be created. In its ideal 
form it shares many traits with the “escape agriculture” outlined by 
Scott: extreme crop diversity; patterning that is illegible to 
state/capital; appropriation-resistant, non-commodifiable crops; crops 
that require less care, that have a high productivity per unit labor. It
 starts to resemble permanent foraging within an artificial, recombinant
 ecology.

We should start thinking and talking more about what it means to have
 a system of cultivation that is state-resistant, commodity-resistant, 
that is suited for free and egalitarian social relations — because one 
thing I have learned from Scott’s book is that the one is inextricably 
tied up with the other.

Peasants of the world, self-abolish!



      


More information about the permaculture mailing list