Cultivating Resistance: Ethnoecology, Anticolonialism, and Indigenous Territoriality in Twentieth-Century Southeast Asia

Over the course of the twentieth century, highland Southeast Asian indigenous societies grappled with the incursions of diverse Western imperial interests and, later, with the more imminent colonization endeavours of newly independent, development-oriened nation states. Disparaging ethnographic assessments of indigenous agriculture and subsistence practices frequently served as justifications for these undertakings. As the century wore on, Western anthropologists adopted more appreciative views of indigenous agrarian lifeways - a shift usually explained as a result of anthropology’s gradual movement away from tiered classificatory approaches toward a Boasian emphasis on the functional sophistication of indigenous cultures in relation to their environments and histories. Focusing principally on the work of Harley Harris Bartlett (1886-1960), a University of Michigan botanist, plant ecologist and ethnographer who analyzed indigenous ethnoecology in interwar Sumatra, and Harold Conklin (1926-2016), a Yale-based ethnobotanist and ethnoecologist of the post-World War II Philippines, this paper instead explores the role played by Batak, Hanunóo and Ifugao strategic priorities in helping to revise this anthropological perspective. I also examine how Conklin’s self-consciously anticolonial stance on Philippine indigenous swidden and terrace agriculture was shaped by Native American-led activism. In addition to situating Southeast Asian indigenous territorial colonization at the temporal juncture of imperial and national projects of dispossession, then, this paper also analyzes American ethnoscientific reassessments as the partial cumulation of indigenous anticolonial efforts that were trans-Pacific in their reach and influence.