‘When orange becomes sweeter’: understanding climate variability, situated knowledge and development in an Eastern Himalayan region of India

Abstract

In contemporary times, climate variability has spurred interdisciplinary efforts to gauge the impacts of climate change. Drawing from field-based research in Arunachal Pradesh, India, this paper explores what constitutes ‘climate knowledge’ when bio-physical environmental changes are perceived differently among community members. To associate bio-physical realities with socio-cultural knowledge and practice, it is necessary to shift the frame of reference. This enables an interdisciplinary study of climate change that is more productive for both natural sciences and interpretative social sciences. We also discuss the hybrid nature of climate’s ontological and material relations emerging from colonialism, capitalism, and development, which further shape the relationship between community and environment. Finally, the article discusses the loss of Indigenous communities’ cosmological world-making practices in the context of weakening traditional livelihood practices and social cohesion. The paper suggests that climate change needs to be considered not only as a loss of biodiversity but also as a loss of culture when it comes to interpreting the environment.

Keywords:

• Climate change
• interdisciplinary approach
• Indigenous communities
• development
• climate variation
• situated knowledge

Acknowledgements

The authors are extremely grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their profound and constructive engagement with the earlier drafts of this paper. Their insightful and rigorous comments have encouraged us to push our boundaries and rethink our conceptual and methodological frameworks. We are thankful to Dr Subhadeepta Ray for his nuanced feedback which further strengthened the paper. We are obliged to the people of Zinga and Meonsa villages of Ziro Valley for allowing us to be a part of their everyday lives and giving us space for meaningful conversations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Throughout this article, local knowledge refers to the situated knowledge in response to one’s practical engagement with the environment. For details see Yeh (2016), Nightingale.

2 As defined by climate science, ‘Anthropocene’ refers to a geological epoch where humans take centre stage in altering climate and ecosystems. The scholarship within interpretative social sciences uses the term Anthropocene in its original conception to scrutinise and illuminate how this term underlies issues of power, culture and divisions of time and space across societies. Our usage of this term follows similar meaning.

3 Xaxa (1999) views Indigenous people as a social group who have encountered invasion and colonisation from outside of their territorial area or country. Indigenous people live their lives more in accordance with their own social, economic and cultural institutions than with the rules that apply to the rest of society. He also notes that terms like Adivasi, tribe, Aborigines and Autochthonous are commonly used to refer to Indigenous people in the context of India. The phrase ‘Indigenous people’ appears to be debatable in the context of India because Dalits and other marginalised groups also assert their claim to being Indigenous. While tribal scholars and activists are pushing to protect these communities’ rights, autonomy and ability to make decisions, the Indian state has been opposing this terminology as it might go against the idea of nation building and harm the larger agenda of developmentalism. For more detailed discussion please refer to Xaxa (1999), Roy Burman (2009) and Gergan and Smith (2022).

4 Indigenously developed practice of farming where paddy and fish are reared together. This ensures employability of the indigenous farmers year round.

5 To understand contemporary state-making process in Northeast India, it is pertinent to know that during colonial times this region not only acted as a periphery but was also created as margin to the newly independent nation states in South and Southeast Asia. During the colonial period, this place acted as a buffer zone to foreign expropriation vis-à-vis China and Burma to mainland India. In recent times, the policy of the Government of India to turn the Northeast region, especially Arunachal Pradesh, into ‘India’s Future Powerhouse’ as a development initiative have sparked massive protests in the region. For details, see Sharma (2018).

6 Pseudonyms have been used to protect the identity of research participants. In addition, the names of the villages where the study has been conducted have been changed to pseudonyms.

7 For details see Chakraborty et al. (2021).

8 During fieldwork, it was observed that people experimented with new varieties of crops not grown indigenously in their homesteads as an alternative to traditional farming by communal labour, which was declining. At times, if the produce is good, attempts were made by the farmers to sell it in the market. However, as they opined, the scale of production in a homestead is not equivalent to the sustainability guaranteed by paddy cultivation year round.

9 Our usage and understanding of cosmological world-making is derived from Rosalyn Bold’s conception of cosmoscapes. It refers to Indigenous practices of actors where the landscape is seen as an aggregate of ancestral beings guiding humans with destiny points. For more details, see Bold (2020).

10 For details see De la Cadena (2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mridusmita Dutta

Mridusmita Dutta is a doctoral scholar in the Department of Sociology, Tezpur University. Her doctoral project examines the politics of knowledge production in disaster governance at political, environmental and material intersections with the annual occurrence of floods in the floodplains of the Brahmaputra. Her research interests include knowledge production regarding climate change, politics of disaster adaptation, disaster and infrastructure.

Amiya Kumar Das

Amiya Kumar Das, Associate Professor, teaches sociology at Tezpur University. He is also the Coordinator of the Centre for Public Policy and Governance at Tezpur University, Assam. His research interests include governance and development, sociology of health and illness, and traditional ecological knowledge. His recent publications include Investigating Developmentalism: Notions of Development in the Social Sphere (co-edited, 2019) and Indigeneity, Citizenship and the State: Perspectives from India’s Northeast (co-edited, 2021). He is also interested in sustainable farming and is a collaborator in the Feeding City Lab project at the University of Toronto.