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The History And Development Of De-Swiddening Among The Ersu In Sichuan, China, Edwin A. Schmitt

HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies

The process of coercing or forcing farmers to transition from shifting agriculture to more sedentary agricultural practices, a process I refer to as “de-swiddening”, has been well documented for many decades. Most often this process takes place in the political context of a state’s attempt to make an agricultural system more “legible”, as Scott (1998) has aptly described it. In a more recent context, de-swiddening has actually been taken under the banner of environmental protection. In both instances, institutional bodies which design de-swiddening policies rarely consider its unintended consequences. In China, to prevent erosion in upland regions of the country, …