Internal and external discourse of communality, tradition and environment: Minority claims on forest in the northern hills of Thailand

ABSTRACTED FROM THE INTRODUCTION: This paper addresses the question of land rights and forest conservation for those on the periphery, i.e. the minority hill-dwelling population, specifically, the Karen. Over the past century, the hill-dwelling Karen in Thailand have transformed their subsistence agriculture from that based primarily on swidden cultivation in secondary forests on the lower hill slopes towards wet-rice cultivation in irrigated paddy fields. In either case, the Karen are in a no-win situation. Swidden agriculture in forested land (i.e., state land) can be condemned as an illegal practice, while their paddy fields are diminished in size. In this paper, then, I address the two-fold nature of the problem of hill forest and land for the Karen. First, I discuss land and forest use in the community, and the internally oriented discourse of communality. The Karen maintain a discourse of communality even as land rights within the community are becoming diversified and stratified. Second, I examine how the Karen resist government projects and claim their rights to livelihood based on forest land against the background of rising nationwide concern over environmental issues. The strategies for survival adopted by a minority ethnic group in a modern nation-state meet various external forces, some of which challenge, repress, and delimit these strategies while other adopt them for their own purposes or for a state common goal they share with the Karen. To begin, in the following section, I outline land and forest policies in Thailand as a background against which various discourses on the hill tribes in relation to forest have arisen.

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