is typically culturally ‘institutionalized’ and
‘embedded’ in a variety of persons, offices, ritu-
als and customary practices, the unanswered
questions are: why has this knowledge been so
difficult to legitimate, under what circumstances
can such knowledge/practice be institutionalized
without cooption or subversion, and how might it
be systematized in some way?
The community, and the cultural community
in particular, looms large in the discussion of
development alternatives: communities that
resist or stand at the edge of the hegemonic
system, or communities defined by their pur-
ported autonomy or form of knowledge and prac-
tice, or communities defined increasingly by
political articulations and identifications that are
at odds with the developmental nation (see
Corbridge and Harriss, 2000). But the com-
munity turns out to be – along with its lexical
affines, namely tradition, custom and indigeneity –
a keyword whose meaning is not easy to divine
(Clarke, 2000). The community is important
because it is typically seen as: a locus of knowl-
edge; a site of regulationand management; a
source of identityand a repository of ‘tradition’;
the embodiment of various institutions(say pro-
perty rights) which necessarily turn on questions
of representation, power, authority, governance
and accountability; an object of state control; and
a theater of resistanceand struggle (of social
movement, and potentially of alternative visions
of development). It contains, in other words, dif-
ferent sorts of imaginaries. It is often invoked as
a unity, as an undifferentiated entity with intrin-
sic powers, which speaks with a single voice to
the state, to transnational NGOs or the World
Court. Communities, of course, are nothing of
the sort (Zerner, 2000).
One of the problems is that the community
expresses quite different sorts of social relations
and forms: from a nomadic band to a sedentary
village to a confederation of Indians to a trans-
national virtual network (‘netwar’ as the Rand
Corporation dubs it). It is usually assumed to be
the natural embodiment of ‘the local’ – configu-
rations of households, lineages, longhouses –
which has some territorial control over resources
which are historically and culturally constructed
in distinctively local ways. A community, then,
typically involves a territorialization of history
(‘this is our land and resources which can be
traced in relation to these founding events’) and
a naturalized history (‘history becomes the
history of my people and not of our relations to
others’). Communities fabricate, and refabricate
through their unique histories, the claims which
they take to be naturally and self-evidently
their own. This is why communities have to beunderstood in terms of hegemonies: not everyone
participates or benefits equally in the construc-
tion and reproduction of communities, or from
the claims made in the name of community inter-
est. And this is exactly what is at stake in the
current work on indigenous peoples and other
movements such as the infamous tree-hugging or
Chipko movement in north India (Rangan, 2000;
Sinha et al., 1997) or the Ogoni movement in
Nigeria (Watts, 2000).
Far from the mythic community of tree-
hugging, unified, undifferentiated women articu-
lating alternative subaltern knowledges for an
alternative development – forest protection and
conservation by women in defense of customary
rights against timber extraction – we have three
or four Chipkos each standing in quite different
relationship to development, modernity, alterity,
the state and local management. It was a move-
ment with a long history of market involvement,
of links to other political organizing in Garawhal,
and with aspirations for regional autonomy.
Watts (2000) shows how Saro-Wiwa created a
particular Ogoni identity against the Shell oil
company and the Nigerian state to create a strik-
ingly modernist movement for whom a goal was
more fruits of modernity, not fewer. Tsing (1999)
and others (see Zerner, 2000) have shown how
indigenous green development movements may
create customary knowledges and practice as the
currency with which development monies may
be parlayed. Tradition or custom hardly captures
what is at stake in the definition of the community
or indigenous alternatives.
There are a number of implications that stem
from an examination of the role of community
and indigeneity in development alternatives.
First, and most obviously, the forms of com-
munity regulations and access to resources are
invariably wrapped up with questions of identity
(Watts, 2000). Second, these forms of identity
(articulated in the name of custom and tradition)
are not stable (their histories are often quite shal-
low), and may be put to use (they are interpreted
and contested) by particular constituencies with
particular interests. Third, images of the com-
munity, whether articulated locally or nationally,
can be put into service as a way of talking about,
debating and contesting various alternatives to
development or indeed for development. Fourth,
to the extent that communities can be understood
as differing fields of power – communities are
internally differentiated in complex political,
social and economic ways – then to that same
extent we need to be sensitive to the internal
political forms of resource use or conservation
(there may be three or four different Chipkos
or Ogoni movements within this purportedly446 BEYOND THE WEST3029-ch23.qxd 03-10-02 4:55 PM Page 446