Monoscapes - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 38

Philippines, isolated and alien peoples of Indonesia, aboriginal tribes of
Taiwan, natives of Borneo, and aborigines of Peninsular Malaysia. As
Nancy Lee Peluso indicates: 'the terms are politicized by their application to particular
users rather than uses'. 24
Many of these people, nomads, pastoralists, slash-and-burn hill tribes,
hunter-gatherers, gypsies, and itinerants, have been a thorn in the sides
of states. 25 States have tried to settle them, or have moved settled peoples
into their regions, such as the massive forced ' transmigrasi ' of Javanese rice
families to the outer regions of Indonesia during the 1980s. Excluded
from their own rice cultures and landscapes, the Javanese were resettled
to new areas that were inappropriate for rice cultivation, and which were
already full of local people. Conflicts were inevitable, and neither
dispossessed group benefited. These changes echo the experience of
transportees who were excluded from Britain during the 18th and 19th
centuries, many for minor misdemeanours after the loss of their lands
during the enclosure. These transportees were relocated to Australia, where
they took over land from Aboriginal tribes.
This forced resettlement is deeply damaging to people. Kaichela
Dipera, a Mukalahari from Botswana, says of the Bushmen of the Kalahari
Game Reserve:
The experience of moving away is so painful when you think of it because they are
moving from a place where they have been living for a long time. They know what
the plants are for; they know the source of water and food. When people are moved
to a new place they are cut off entirely from their culture and are moved to a place
where they must start a new culture. 26
In truth, such disconnections are more than painful. They take away
people's sense of the meaning of life, and the memories of dispossession
can last for generations.
The savannahs of East Africa are world renowned for their wildlife.
Yet, they have emerged as a result of a long process of co-evolution
between pastoralists, their cattle, and local wildlife. Without one, the
others suffer. When the Maasai were expelled from their lands in Kenya,
the newly created parks were colonized by regenerating scrub and wood-
land, leaving less grazing for antelopes. 27 Even greater harm is caused by
agricultural development. One of the most notorious cases comes from
Tanzania, where wheat farms were imposed on the dry Basotu Plains from
the late 1960s to the early 1990s. These plains are the homeland of more
than 30,000 Barabaig pastoralists, whose culture is based upon the
keeping of livestock and common use of forage, water and salt resources
scattered throughout their territory. A complex grazing rotation system