The Nature of Shifting Cultivation: Stories of Harmony, Degradation, and Redemption

Shifting cultivation is identified as a major cause of tropical deforestation. Sources that recount such impacts routinely employ an Eden-lost narrative structure that represents shifting cultivators as having their relatively harmonious human-environment relationships disrupted by various forces. While such disruptions lead to land degradation, official development institutions via research into alternatives to such agriculture offer redemption, or the return to relative ecological harmony. This Edenic narrative vehicle allows shifting cultivators to be represented as “primitives” in need of modernization, yet it also more commonly allows a sympathetic representation as holders of valuable, albeit threatened, indigenous knowledge that can be applied to the development of solutions. However, embedded within both hostile and sympathetic accounts from both scientific and policy sources are cultural images that persist as a legacy of colonialist assumptions of social evolution and cultural hierarchy.