Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects

Abstract

"In the first quarter of the twentieth century, massive forest fires raged throughout Kumaon in the western Indian Himalaya. Only some of these fires were the usual summer fires. Between 1911 and 1916, the colonial state had reclassified nearly 80 percent of Kumaon's forests into reserves. Villagers found that they had limited or no rights left in the reserves. In response they set fires in the newly classified reserves in a vivid spectacle of challenge to new forms of government over nature. Official reports and surviving accounts of villagers' actions suggest that many fires were deliberate protests against state interventions."