Representing Natural Resource Development in Asia:

"Modern" Versus "Postmodern" Scholarly Authority

  Privileged Ecotypes in Southeast Asia: Ecological Models, Authority, and Bias in Environmental Representation

Michael R Dove


  "We're Tired of Trees."
  (Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari 1987:15)


  I. Introduction
The thesis of this paper is that subjective views of the environment, just like
subjective views of ethnicity, gender, or class, are part of the discourse of
oppression--perhaps one of the last of its parts to be viewed critically.  I will
illlustrate this thesis by looking at one particular aspect of the environment that is not
"seen for the forest," Southeast Asia's fire-climax grasslands.  I will suggest that: (1)
prevailing views of these grasslands have been heavily influenced by political
agendas, (2) these politicized views have been supported by significant elements of
modern scientific belief, (3) a critique of this belief has been carried out (albeit with
little impact), but not by (avowed) post-modernists.

II. How Grasslands Are Conceived

1. Ethnographic "Readings" of Grassland

Southeast Asian ethnographers, beginning in the nineteenth century, and then with
some frequency as of the middle of this century, pioneered readings of grasslands as
a sign of human impact on the natural environment.  The more astute ethnographic
observers properly saw grasslands as evidence of not intermittent but more or less
continuous human perturbation of the landscape (Conklin 1959:61; Clarke 1966;
Dove 1981,1986a,1986b; Sherman 1980), stemming from a relatively high intensity
of land-use, associated with a relatiely high level of resource-need.  Insofar as the
presence of grassland indirectly reflects this higher intensity of resource-use, it was
seen as a sort of "window" on human economic history.  The more-easily observable
landscape level changes associated with grassland succession were seen as indirect
evidence of less-easily observable changes in human society (e.g., Robbins 1963).






  Representing Natural Resource Development in Asia:
  "Modern" Versus "Postmodern" Scholarly Authority       12

  The insights that grasslands offer into human history were based on the evidence of
change in the grasslands themselves, evidence that challenged the view of the
environment as being "beyond" history, a view that has prevailed with little criticism
until recently.1  Braudel (1980:3) writes of his third type of history, the langue
duree:

  [It ] is an inquiry into a history that is almost changeless, the history of man in
relation to his surroundings.  It is a history which unfolds slowly and is slow
to alter, often repeating itself and working itself out in cycles which are
endlessly renewed. . . .[It] exists almost out of time and tells the story of
man's contact with the inanimate.  

  Ethnographic studies of Southeast Asian grasslands directly challenged this traditional
view of the environment.  The conception of grassland from these studies, as
something that exists only by virtue of continuing and carefully managed human
intervention in natural processes of succession, directly contradicts Braudel's image
of human "contact with the inanimate".  My own studies of the Banjarese grasslands
of Southeast Kalimantan (e.g.) show that they have not existed "time out of memory",
but instead are the product of relatively recent social, technological, and
environmental developments: they are, in short, a product of history.

2. Community vs. State "Readings" of Grassland

The indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia also "read" grasslands, although not for the
same things as ethnographers.  Thus, the Banjarese of South Kalimantan see Imperata
grassland as a sign of good and thus arable soils (Dove 1981:191).  Specifically, they
see the growth of tall stands of Imperata, as opposed to growth of short, ground-
hugging, "prostrate" grasses2, as a sign that--in their system of grassland cultivation
by hoe and plough--the fallow period has been sufficiently long and the land is ready
for tilling again.

Interestingly, the tenurial significance of grasslands varies according to the land-use
system.  Within systems of swidden cultivation, succession to grassland often signifies
a lapsing of forest rights.  Within systems of grassland cultivation, in contrast, the
working of grassland creates tenurial rights, which persist so long as some sign of
cultivation persists, lapsing only when this disappears.  In the case of the Banjarese
that I studied, grassland cultivation causes the arable cover of Imperata to succeed to
a non-arable cover of prostrate grasses.  So long as these latter grasses remain on the

1  Cronon (1983:164) writes of the tendency to see the premodern environment, in particular, as natural and static.

2  Suryanata (1985:54) identifies several of these prostrate grasses as Paspalum conjugatum, Axonopus compressus,
and Cynodon dactylon.  Prostrate grasses (also called the "creeping growth habit") replace erect grasses as an
adaptive response under both heavy cultivation and heavy grazing.






  Privileged Ecotypes in Southeast Asia:
  Ecological Models, Authority, and Bias  in Environmental Representation                            M R. Dove        13

  land, the title of the previous cultivator is recognized; but when these grasses begin to
succeed back to Imperata--which usually takes place in three years--this title must be
renewed by another round of cultivation, or else it lapses.

The ways that grasslands are read, the "messages" that are taken from them, varies
greatly between local communities and entities of the state.  For example, regarding
the lapse of tenure just discussed, whereas Imperata may signify to the local
communities the cessation of a particular management regime, it does not signify the
absence of management--which is perhaps the major distinction between folk and
state perceptions of grassland.  That is, the existence of grasslands is normally
intended (at some level) by the local community (cf. Keen 1978:213; Seavoy
1975:49); it is not an accidental or unavoidable ecological development.  Rather, it is
a recogized, anticipated, and desired part of the local "built landscape."  In contrast,
state views of Imperata and other grasslands tend to assume that they are accidents,
that they are unintended deviations from the built landscape that they intend.

Anthropogenic grasslands are "vernacular landscapes", as opposed to the "official
landscape" that the state would generally like to see there in its place.3  My studies in
Kalimantan (Dove 1981,1986a,1986b), for example, show that the state "reads" the
grassland as threatening (through erosion and fire) and unproductive (indigenous
economic uses are not acknowledged).  For many official observers, indeed,
grasslands like these are the quintessential landscape resource "other"-- not a resource
but the absence of a resource.4  However, state views of localized grassland
landscapes are often in fact state critiques of the local community;5 and state efforts
to "rehabilitate" grasslands often amount to efforts to restructure economic or
political relations with the local community.6  This dimension of the mystification of
grassland ecology has been overlooked by even astute observers.  Referring to the
1870 colonial land law in Indonesia, which classified all so-called "wasteland"--
including grasslands -- as inalienable state property, Sherman (1980:126) writes that
"This and other laws, such as the 1879 law against burning of grassland, fail[ed] to



3  As Jackson (1984:148) writes (cited in Williams 1995), "A landscape, like a language, is the field of perpetual conflict and
compromise between what is established by authority and what the vernacular insists upon preferring."

4  A number of ethnographic studies have recognized this official "otherness" and thereby helped contribute to the burgeoning
field of study on the contested interpretation and construction of landscapes (e.g., Harvey 1990; Williams 1995).

5  As Raymond Williams says, in an oft-quoted passage, arguments about nature are often really about culture:
The idea of nature contains an extraordinary amount of human history. . . . What is often being argued, it seems to me, in
the idea of nature is the idea of man; and this not only generally, or in ultimate ways, but the idea of man in society, indeed
the ideas of kinds of societies. (Raymond Williams 1980:67,70-71).

6  Cf. Harvey (1990:425): "A revolution in temporal and spatial relations often entails, therefore, not only the destruction of
ways of life and social practices built around preceding time-space systems, but the `creative destruction' of a wide range of
physical assets embedded in the landscape."






  Representing Natural Resource Development in Asia:
  "Modern" Versus "Postmodern" Scholarly Authority       14

  alert Geertz (in his classic 1963 study of "agricultural involution" on Java) to the
possibility of built-in political bias in the reports of Imperata's perniciousness."

The fact that perceptions of grasslands vary according to the perspective and agenda
of the observer is fundamental to the practical ecology of grasslands.   It is a decisive
factor in the repeated failure of government efforts at grassland "reclamation".  Yet
it is still resolutely left out of even the most insightful contemporary analyses of
grassland development (see Vandenbeldt's [1993] volume on Imperata in Southeast
Asia as an example).  The fact that observers systematically disagree about grasslands
is regarded as an obstacle on the path to tackling the "problem" of grasslands,
whereas it should be regarded as the central problematic itself.7

III. Why Grasslands Are Conceived That Way

A generation of research before and another following World War II was devoted to
active interventions designed to replace grasslands with something more productive
and more desirable (e.g., a plantation or permanent agricultural fields).8 The more
astute of the participants in such efforts now recognize that grassland "reclamation" is
economically unfeasible (Vandenbeldt 1993:5)9, but the perception that they need to
be reclaimed persists.  Why is this?

1. Development Context

Scholars of grasslands have pointed out that the complex, composite system of
perennial crops, food crops, and forage grasses that contemporary academic
"experts" have proposed for "abandoned" Imperata lands is often already  being
practiced there on an indigenous basis (Sherman 1980:143).  If the end-state that the
development experts are pursuing is already attained--and the case of Sumatra's
grasslands is not atypical--then what is the purpose of the development process?  
What are the implications of portraying skilled, indigenous resource managers --
which accurately characterizes the Batak inhabitants of these grasslands--as needy
victims, as people confronted with resource degradation--e.g., the grasslands--that
they supposedly cannot cope with?  What are the implications of asking, "How can we
[benevolent external intervenors] `help' get rid of the grasslands?"  The answer is that


7  As Thompson, Warburton, and Hatley (1986) say about disagreement over the status of the Himalayan environment, the
actual state of the environment may be less important than the fact that the local, national, and international actors involved
all hold--and act upon--different perceptions of this state.

8  These efforts were characterized by an emphasis on technological innovations with little or no consideration for economic
(or social) costs (cf. Whyte 1962:8).

9  Thus, the emphasis has shifted from trying to completely reforest grasslands to trying instead to accelerate natural
afforestation (e.g., Drilling 1989).






  Privileged Ecotypes in Southeast Asia:
  Ecological Models, Authority, and Bias  in Environmental Representation                            M R. Dove        15

  the official construction of a situation as one in which help is needed typically
empowers the potential helper and dis-empowers the potential helpee (Dove 1993;
Edelman 1974).  It is vitally important for any agency involved in development to be
able to publicly portray a potential development subject as needy of the resources that
agency has to offer.  It is vitally important for any such agency, in short, to create a
sort of conceptual welcoming niche for itself (cf. Ferguson 1990).  Thus, Leach and
Fairhead (1994) show how a process of forest incursion into grassland zones in
Guinea is mis-represented as a process of grassland incursion into forest zones, in
order to construct the picture of "environmental crisis" needed to obtain donor
funding.  In my study of the Banjarese (Dove 1981), I show that whereas the
government sees the Imperata grasslands as a problem, the Banjarese see them as an
important solution (to many of life's problems); and whereas the imperative in
government planning is how to eliminate (to get rid of) the grasslands, the imperative
in the peasant system of grassland management is how to maintain (to keep) them.

This emphasis on self-privileging in representations of grasslands has important
implications for how failures in efforts to "rehabilitate" these grasslands should be
interpreted.  The development community commonly blames development failures on
recalcitrant development subjects, sometimes on poor implementation, and
occasionally on poor policy.  But even the explanation that hits closest to home, poor
policy, is naive, because it treats this and other factors as isolated phenomena as
opposed to phenomena that are deeply "embedded" in wider social and historical
processes.10  Analyses based on these false assumptions result in an inability to
correct, and thus a tendency to perpetuate, development failures.  As Esteva
(1987:136) writes:

  For years, the literature arrived at the analytical conclusion that a missing
factor or tool, or the perverse, corrupt, or inefficient use of something, could
explain the damage done by development to people and their environments.  
These `analyses' have come to a dead end.  They move in a vicious circle, like
a dog chasing its tail.

  Since these false assumptions are themselves socially determined this raises the
question, To what extent are "unintended" development failures in fact "intended" (in

10  Cf. Hecht and Cockburn (1989:193):
The forces propelling this destruction are not irrational.  Explanations that focus on the supposed ignorance of the actors or
on short-sighted planning miss the reality: there was money to be made; survival to be sustained in clearing forest.  These
have been processes with a logic and trajectory deeply embedded in the region's political and economic history.

In a related vein, see Ascher's (1993:11) critique of analyses that dwell on "corruption":
To view this [cooperation between timber concessionaires and president's family] all as "merely" collusion and corruption
would, however, be a serious mistake. . . . The tragedy of the corruption and collusion, from the perspective of the health of
the policy-making process, is that they are seen by so many as the only relevant factors, and distract attention from the other
issues.






  Representing Natural Resource Development in Asia:
  "Modern" Versus "Postmodern" Scholarly Authority       16


  some structural sense)?  There is an important body of literature now on how
institutions bring about the very outcomes that they are designed to oppose (e.g.,
Foucault 1977; Willis 1981).  This raises the question whether the contested grassland
landscapes that dominate much of upland Southeast Asia are in fact what the wider
society is supposed to achieve.11

2. Scientific Context

Science is implicated in the attainment of the ecological landscapes that we actually
get, as opposed to the ones for which we are purportedly striving.  To see how, we
may start by
looking at information flows.  The lack of information is an important part of the
social construction of the reality of upland Southeast Asia;12 it is an important
element in the kinds of development policies that are formulated for and implemented
there.13  There is powerful institutional support for uncertainty, which must be seen
in this context as more than a sociological epiphenomenon.   Thompson, Warburton,
and Hatley (1986:23) write:

  Uncertainty, we begin to realise, is not just the absence of certainty but,
rather, a positive thing in its own right--something that can be socially
generated and socially imposed in order to protect the legitimacy of
established institutions and to prevent that legitimacy from being eroded by a
creeping tide of certainty.

  11  Ascher (1993:15) asks this same questions regarding forests, as follows: "What are the institutional interests of the
Forestry Ministry?  If this question can be answered, we may understand--and suggest ways to counteract--the seemingly
paradoxical behavior of a forestry agency that has been aiding in the liquidation of the forests."

12  What Hecht and Cockburn (1989:1) write regarding the Amazon applies world-wide:
The mystery that is part of the Amazon's allure is not merely a function of the region's immensity and of the infinitude of
species it contains.  It is also the consequence of centuries of censorship, of embargoes placed on knowledge and travel in the
region by the Spanish and Portuguese crowns, of the polite silences of the religious orders during the Amazon's colonial
history.

13  For example, in a recent analysis Ascher (1993) argues that a "rent transfer" strategy is responsible for the rapid
degradation of Indonesia's tropical forests, and that the persistence of this strategy is dependent upon "embarrassment
minimization".  Ascher (1993:17) writes:
  The rent transfer strategy is both a potential embarrassment and the object of concerted opposition (especially from
international donors).  Therefore, the Forestry Ministry and other agencies have an incentive to suppress, restrict, or simply
neglect to gather relevant information.


  Ascher (1993:18) writes, "The restriction on information goes further than the simple failure to gather or publicize data: it
has posed a severe limitation on scientific research and economic assessment.  There are strong disincentives for the Forestry
Ministry and other agencies that could fund research projects to do so, as long as the findings are likely to be embarrassing or
to arouse conflict."  The product of these disincentives is reflected in Gillis' (1987:71; cited in Ascher 1993:18n) comment,
that "The quality of technical information on African and most Latin American tropical forests is superior to that available
for the dense Dipterocarp forests of Indonesian Kalimantan, where most harvesting takes place."






  Privileged Ecotypes in Southeast Asia:
  Ecological Models, Authority, and Bias  in Environmental Representation                            M R. Dove        17



  (Active management of information is a minor sub-set of a wider structure in which
information is generated without conscious prejudice but with prejudice
nonetheless.14)

The need for uncertainty mitigates against research on sensitive topics like grassland;
andt when research is done, it mitigates against research that is properly focused and
properly conducted.  Thus, those aspects of grassland ecology that are central to the
"myths" about tropical grasslands are rarely studied empirically; and even when they
are, misunderstanding persists--evn in the work of the most astute scholars of tropical
ecology.  Thus, Sherman (1980:118,128-130) has pointed out repeated inconsistencies
in the analysis of grassland ecology in the classic work on tropical soils and shifting
cultivation by Nye and Greenland (1960) and in Sanchez's (1976) text on tropical
soils.  There also are examples of misunderstanding from the social sciences: in a
painstaking review of the literature, Sherman finds faults with practically all of the
pioneering studies of society and tropical environment by social scientists, including
those by Pelzer (1945), Geertz (1963), Hanks (1972), and Leach (1954).  Based on
textual analyses of what these scholars wrote themselves, Sherman demonstrates that
they utilized out-dated concepts of grassland ecology that were not supported by their
own data.15

Lack of information cannot be blamed for the lack of understanding of Southeast
Asian systems of grassland ecology and management.  Sherman's (1980) textual
critiques show in case after case that scholars had in hand the information that they
needed to properly interpret the grasslands, but they suppressed or otherwise misused



14  As Leach and Fairhead (1994:84,86) state, in their previously-cited analysis of how grassland-forest succession is
officially reinterpreted as forest-grassland succession:
Information about the nature of environmental change is constituted and maintained within the exercise of political and
institutional power.

Nor is it the case that particular people or institutions are pursuing conscious and direct personal interests in using
information for political or economic ends; rather, all are subject to and are the vehicles of the same conjuncture of
intellectual, institutional and economic structures . . . .

This "conjuncture" of structures results in an inverse association between the incidence or abundance of the research, on the
one hand, and on the other hand the political sensitivity of the research.

15  In some cases Sherman is able to identify what appears to be selective use of these data: thus, Sherman (1980:134-5)
notes that Leach's (1954) initial published recognition that the Kachin preferred grassland fields to forest fields is omitted
from subsequent publications (cf. Nugent 1982:523).  As Sherman points out, in his most famous work on the Kachin
Leach (1954) transforms this difference in land cover preference into a question of differences in ecological zones.  Sherman
(1980:139-140) argues that the erroneous interpretation of grassland ecology in these past accounts throws into question
larger picture that these works presented on society and environment in Southeast Asia.






  Representing Natural Resource Development in Asia:
  "Modern" Versus "Postmodern" Scholarly Authority       18

  it.16  Accurate interpretations of grassland ecology also existed in the literature but,
again, were either ignored or misused.17  Harley H. Bartlett (University of Michigan
botanist) published in 1956-61 a 1,657 page bibliography, summarizing the literature
to that date on "Fire in Relation to Primitive Agriculture and Grazing in the
Tropics", much of which dealt with Southeast Asia's fire-climax grasslands.  Both he
(Bartlett 1956) and Conklin (1959) also published separate, concise, and explicit
corrections to the prevailing myths about grassland ecology.  And there have been a
series of insightful studies in the years since, including--by way of example only
within a sizeable universe--those of Sajise (1972) in the Philippines, and Soewardi et
al. (1974) and Suryanata and McIntosh (1980) in Indonesia.  The fact that such
studies existed but had little or no impact on beliefs about grassland ecology is
sociologically meaningful.  As Holling, Taylor and Thompson (1991:21) write about
mistakes: "Surprises - the mistakes we go on and on making - are profound truths,
even though (indeed, precisely because) they cannot tell us what is true."

Douglas (1986:70,71,74) illustrates how scientific thinking is constrained by scientific
institutions in an intriguing essay that looks at the curious phenomenon of scientific
"forgetfulness".  Her analysis is based on the work of the sociologist Merton
(1957,1961,1963), who found that scientific "discoverers" routinely deny the
existence of the prior discoveries that contributed to their work.  As a result, the
same scientific question may remain "in a static condition, as though it were
permanently condemned to repetition without extension" (Merton cited in Douglas
1986:74).  Merton's thesis suggests that the fact that understandings of grassland
ecology are periodically obtained, and published, but ignored,18 is not an "accident",
but that it is integral to the science of development--and to the institutions that
sponsor as well as carry out this science.19


16  In some cases, the myth and the reality are simply reported together, with little if any apparent sense of cognitive
dissonance.  For example, the characterization by researchers of Imperata lands in the Cagayan Valley in the Philippines as
"idle grasslands" (Maus and Schieferli 1989) is repeated by later researchers in the same project, even though the latter's
research concerns the gathering of Imperata for the market, for thatch, as an important--and in some cases the most
important-- source of income for the inhabitants of the region (Yanes and Zeehers 1992).  The later researchers add the prefix
"so-called" to the label "idle grasslands" and also the caveat that "these areas are still suitable for agricultural and other
purposes", but they still do not directly contest--much less problematize the basis for--the validity of the evaluation "idle
lands."

17  Sherman (1980) presents a dramatic example of this: the Batak system of grassland agriculture he described in 1980, in
contravention of the literature and expert opinion, had already been described by the Dutchman Junghuhn in a published
account (1847) over one century earlier, with little apparent effect.

18  Thus, Gerlach (1938) published one-half century ago an accurate account of the same system of Banjarese grassland
agriculture described in Dove (1981), but with little perceived impact.

19  Douglas (1986:76) writes, "Note that Merton has made a back-door approach to the problem.  He is not asking `How do
people think about the constraints the social order imposes on their thoughts?'  He asks `How are they prevented from
thinking?  What are the impossible thoughts?'"






  Privileged Ecotypes in Southeast Asia:
  Ecological Models, Authority, and Bias  in Environmental Representation                            M R. Dove        19


  In one of the best-known analyses of why some findings are accepted in science and
some are not, namely Kuhn's (1962) thesis of paradigm change, he tells us that
because of differences in world view and conceptual language, evidence gathered and
interpreted within other paradigms is simply ignored.  Kuhn's analysis of the
operation of these paradigmatic "blinders" in science may help to explain the fact that
most of the work that is done on grasslands--at least the work that is policy-related--
is characterized by a studied avoidance of empirical investigation.20

This ignoring/avoidance is not neutral in its consequences: it privileges non-local
science, policy, and resource-use regimes.  My study of the grasslands in
Southeastern Kalimantan shows how prevailing beliefs about fire-climax grasslands
supported government plans for hydro-electric development and tree plantations, at
the same time as they undermined local use of grasslands for rice cultivation, pasture,
thatch, and hunting.  The government resource regimes were supported, and the local
ones undermined, primarily through simple denial of the latter's existence.  This
denial has critical implications for analyses of the success and failure of development,
in particular the apportionment of blame.  According to the prevailing paradigm,
local resistance to government development plans was based not on a conflict of
interest between two groups (viz., central government and local communities) with
naturally divergent agendas, but on a developmental conflict between rational central
planning (with supposedly equal benefits for central planners and local villagers) and
local resistance due to misunderstanding and traditional values (etc.).

IV. What These Conceptions of Grassland Mean

These misconceived views of Southeast Asia's grasslands are not ad hoc mistakes,
they are tied into a much wider "modern" scientific paradigm, which has been
subjected to an
intensifying critique over the past quarter-century.  This critique sheds additional
light on our understanding of the way grasslands have been misunderstood.

1. Explanation of the Environment

The modern view of the environment was (and is) characterized by a "unifying logic"
that "marginalized heterogeneity, spontaneity, and difference" (Zimmerman


20  As Sherman in his study (1980:126n39) notes with regard to the myth of barren grassland soils, "It should come as no
surprise that in all the time it was assumed that forest-covered soil regenerated its former fertility while grassland caused
erosion and leaching, no tests were done on the possibility of increased fertility levels under grassland conditions."   What
Leach [1954:22] said of swidden agriculture four decades ago could still be said to hold true for grassland: "It has been the
subject of much learned abuse but not much careful observation."   Cf. Ascher's (1993:2) comment that, "The
incompleteness of official statistics allows the Forestry Ministry to claim, without fear of definitive contradiction, that
commercial logging direct accounts for only ten per cent of Indonesia's deforestation."






  Representing Natural Resource Development in Asia:
  "Modern" Versus "Postmodern" Scholarly Authority       20

  1994:103).21  It has been challenged by a revisionist (viz., late-modern) view in
which nature has no direction, no progression, only change (Zimmerman 1994:102).  
This shift in views has temporal, spatial, and conceptual dimensions.

Thus, a former emphasis on stability and homeostasis has become an emphasis on
instability and chaos.  The former emphasis was reflected in the study of, search for,
and valorization of so-called "climax" ecological communities (epitomized by
"primeval tropical rainforest").  The new emphasis is reflected, in contrast, in
interest in ecological "perturbation".  Most ecologists now believe that perturbations
like fire, flood and storm--and perhaps even some human impacts--play an integral
and necessary role in the functioning of ecosystems.  The spatial dimension of the
modern/late-modern shift is reflected in essentialist views of the environment and in
the current anti-essentialist critique (cf. Vayda 1990).  Categories of vegetation or
examples of ecotypes that were formerly regarded as "real", fixed, and meaningful--
like "forest versus grassland"--are now problematized.22  The essentialist view of the
environment was associated in the social as well as natural sciences with a broader
valorization of the "untouched other" (terra incognita, the virgin forest or the
uncontacted tribe) that is now discredited.  The modern view of the environment
dichotomized nature and culture, such that if culture is present, then nature is not (or
at least not wholly).23  (One of the problems with this dichotomization of nature and
culture is that it abstracts people from their physical environment (Williams 1980:75)





21  This view continues to manifest itself in such things as the currently popular concept of "sustainability", which
emphasizes a dubious notion of balance and continuity as opposed to imbalance and historical change.

22  As some of the pioneering research is summarized by Worster (1990:8): the forest (e.g.) is just "an erratic, shifting
mosaic of trees and other plants."

  23  This romantic vision of nature is well-expressed in Thoreau's (1856, vol.8:221) lament that the human impact on New England
left him only a "partial poem" of nature to read:
  I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and
then, to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out
many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places. I should not like to think that some demigod
had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars.  I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth.


Cronon (1983:chapter 1) has criticized this idealized "complete poem" of nature as a fiction based on a problematic
dichotomy.  Cronon (1991:8) himself provides an excellent example, and critique, of one such dichotomy and abstraction in
his study of the development of the Chicago metropolis:


Why did it make sense, in trying to understand rural nature, to draw a boundary between it and the urban world next door?  
The more I pondered that question, the more I began to doubt the 'naturalness' of the wall that seemed to stand so solidly
between the country I thought I loved and the city I thought I hated.  If that wall was more than a habit of thought than a fact
of nature, then decrying the 'unnaturalness' of city life in a place like Chicago was merely one more way of doing what my
own environmental ethic told me to oppose: isolating human life from the ecosystems that sustain it.






  Privileged Ecotypes in Southeast Asia:
  Ecological Models, Authority, and Bias  in Environmental Representation                            M R. Dove        21

  and thereby provides the conceptual "distancing" necessary for the idea of human
"intervention in nature."24)

2. Explanations of Grassland

The differences between modern and late-modern views of the environment have
important implications for the perception of grasslands.  Grasslands are seen as
something that is unmanaged in the modern view but managed in the late-modern
view (the former sees them as an unintentional outcome of environmental relations,
whereas the latter sees them as an intentional outcome).  In an important corollary to
this, in the modern view, grasslands need outside intervention (e.g., to be managed
and made productive); whereas in the late-modern view, they do not.  The modern
justification for intervention comes from a model of the landscape on which
boundaries have been erected in such a way as to differentially allocate blame and
responsibility, and ownership and authority (cf. Cronon 1991:8,184-185).  The late-
modern model of the landscape, in contrast, tears down these boundaries, as it
considers this differential allocating of responsibility and authority to be specious and
self-privileging (viz., on the part of the model-makers).  There also is an important
rhetorical dimension here: whereas the modern view acknowledges only differences
in "understanding" of the common landscape, the late-modern view portrays conflicts
over grasslands (e.g.) as (contested) differences between an official landscape and a
"vernacular" landscape (Jackson 1984:148).

A key distinction between modern and late-modern views of grasslands is their
imputed stability versus instability, which has important development implications:
those who see grasslands as stable classify them as a developmental "dead-end": in
contrast, those who see the grasslands as instable believe that they often represent a
stage in the transition to intensive agriculture (Dove 1986a, 1986b; Sherman 1980).  
According to modern science's view of grasslands, the events leading to and from
grassland successions are  linear and predictable: over-use or abuse of resources lead
in, and massive external technological inputs (can perhaps) lead out.  In contrast, the
late-modern view of grassland development is multi-linear (if not quite
"indeterminate"): grassland succession can be precipitated by a number of different
social and ecological factors (Conklin 1959), operating singly or collectively, and
with or without human intention.  Similarly, grassland development can be
terminated by a number of different factors, ranging from more intensive land-use
(from intensive agriculture and grazing [Conklin 1959:61-62; Gibson 1983; Singh et
al. 1985:49; Wharton 1968) or less intensive land-use (leading to natural
afforestation).


24  Criticism of the nature-culture dichotomy, and of the environmental "management" that is produced by this distantiation,
has been called the "central intuition" of the "deep ecology" movement (Warwick Fox (1984:196), cited in Zimmerman
1993:199).






  Representing Natural Resource Development in Asia:
  "Modern" Versus "Postmodern" Scholarly Authority       22


  There is an implicit difference here with regard to directionality: whereas both
modern and late-modern views recognize that forest can become grassland and
grassland can become forest, the former is characterized as a somehow much easier
and therefore more threatening shift, whereas the latter is characterized as much
more difficult and thus challenging.  Vandenbeldt's (1993:3) description typifies the
modern view: "Imperata cylindrica grasslands are a fire-climax vegetation type
derived from [emphasis added] cleared forest lands."  It would be equally
ecologically valid, yet it is unheard-of, to describe such grasslands as "a fire-climax
vegetation type terminating in closed forest."  The emphasis on the forest->grassland
direction of change, to the exclusion of the grassland->forest direction, misrepresents
the nature of the processes involved and problematizes the human role in them.

3. Explanations of Studies of Grassland
A final distinction between modern and late-modern views of grasslands pertains to
the conventions of research and the question whether they help to reveal or to
obscure grassland dynamics.  According to the modern view, science is the "culture
of no culture" (Traweek 1988:162; cited in Franklin 1995:177) but according to the
late-modern view, science does have cultural conventions, and the conventions by
which a given problem is studied can become part of the problem itself.  One of the
most obvious places these conventions manifest themselves is in the questions that are
asked (or not asked).  For example, I suggest that questions that are persistently
raised in development circles, such as "How can we reclaim the grasslands of
Southeast Asia?", must be rejected (not answered) because of the political assumptions
contained in them (e.g., about why the grasslands need to be reclaimed, what
"reclamation" means, who will control it, and who will benefit from it).25

V. Summary And Conclusions
I have several points to make by way of summary and conclusion.  First, this analysis
of views of grassland shows how easily "contingency" in the environment can be read
subjectively.  Whereas the presence of grasslands was commonly interpreted (under
the "modern" scientific paradigm) as a "lesson" about what could happen (by
implication, if sufficient care is not taken) to non-grassland land covers, the reverse
(and ecologically equally likely shift) was rare: that is, it was rare for observers to
interpret forest as a lesson about what could happen to grasslands (a much-debated
exception involves the great mid-west prairie that used to cover the very ground we
stand on today).  Indeed, far from problematizing the grassland-nongrassland shift,
modern observers tended to deny this possibility.

25  Similarly, Haraway (1992:311) points out that environmental questions such as, "Who speaks for the jaguar?" implicitly
raise questions about presumptive authority that are far more important to answer than the manifest question, which she
would in fact reject.   As Zimmerman (1994:366) says of Harding's point: Supposedly acting in the role of a disinterested
party, but in fact projecting his own fond dreams onto the jaguar and acting as a ventriloquist, the spokesman seeks to
protect the animal from those who are threatening it, that is, the people who are closest to it in the forest.






  Privileged Ecotypes in Southeast Asia:
  Ecological Models, Authority, and Bias  in Environmental Representation                            M R. Dove        23


  Second, whereas I have argued that there is a problem with the way political agendas
are bound up in state interpretations of grasslands, the solution is not to further
divorce conceptions of society from conceptions of the environment.  Rather, the
solution lies in recognizing that the two are inextricably bound together--whether we
want them to be or not--and making this binding as explicit as possible.  (This is the
essential point of  "radical  ecology": that ontological divisions between society and
environment are invalid and the true source of most environmental havoc.)

Third, this critique of conceptions of grassland illustrates how wide the scope of
discourses of oppression can be--tied as they are in this case to fundamental precepts
of modern, western science.  This is a reminder of how difficult it is to be truly
critical.  As Escobar (1984:390) among others has pointed out, the challenge for
counter-discourses is to avoid operating "within the same discursive space, and within
the same field of power, of the dominant strategy."

A fourth and related point is that the late-modern revision of thinking about
ecological perturbation and vegetative succession has not noticably affected state
policies toward anthropogenic grasslands in Southeast Asia.  Following Escobar, we
may ask if this means that science occupies the same discursive space as oppressive
state development regardless of what it says?

Fifth, and finally, the post-modern critique helps us to understand the work that
scientists have done over the past two decades or so to tear down and replace the
modern scientific view of the environment, because that work was itself a post-
modern project.  That is, while self-avowed post-modernists have been talking about
post-modernity, avowedly (in most cases) non-postmodern scientists have been doing
it.  This seems to be worth thinking about.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My studies of anthropogenic grasslands in Indonesia were mostly carried out during
the years 1979-1985 while I was based in Java and making periodic field trips to
Kalimantan, with support from the Rockefeller and Ford foundations and the East-
West Center and with sponsorship from Gadjah Mada University.  A recent series of
field trips to Kalimantan, beginning in 1992, have been supported by the Ford
Foundation, the United Nations Development Programme, and the John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation with sponsorship from BAPPENAS and
Padjadjaran University.  The author is grateful to Vivian Gutierrez and John Cusick
for assistance with library research.  An earlier version of this paper was presented
in the panel on "Representing Natural Resource Development in Asia: 'Modern'
Versus 'Post-modern' Scholarly Authority," at the Annual Meeting of the Association
of Asian Studies, Chicago, 12-16 March.  The author alone is responsible for the
analysis presented here.






  Representing Natural Resource Development in Asia:
  "Modern" Versus "Postmodern" Scholarly Authority       24

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