D
olly Kikon’s book, Living with Oil and Coal, is brilliant. I read the book as a scholar allied to Indigenous struggles against carbon colonialism in the mountains of the Canadian North Pacific Coast. Despite sharing certain basic elements, with prominent mountain peaks and British-descendent legal regimes, it is obviously a very different place than the borderlands of Assam and Nagaland that are the focus of Living with Oil and Coal. Nevertheless, Kikon’s book spoke powerfully to me. Particularly provocative is her thinking around the intersections of overlapping sovereignty projects, hydrocarbon extraction regimes, the politics of love and desire, and the gendered impacts of development. Kikon’s scholarship powerfully speaks through the particular context of Northeast Indian and is deserving of attention by scholars across a wide spectrum of interests, from state theory to resource geographies, from feminist geopolitics to studies of tribal and Indigenous peoples.
The first thing that struck me about Kikon’s book was how powerfully her in-depth ethnography, focused on the foothill borderlands between the valley state of Assam and the mountain state of Nagaland, disrupts the stability of hill/valley distinctions. This presents a particularly important injunction against the Manichean binaries that James C. Scott (2009) has been advancing in his anarchist theorization of the highlands of Southeast Asia. Scott writes at a grandiose scale, providing an account of the roughly 100 million people that occupy the 2.5 million km2 mountainous area across parts of seven Asian countries that area he calls Zomia. He argues that Zomia, at the periphery of the nation-states that surround and encompass it, is best understood in terms its residents’ strategic escape from states, in effect living in the hills to preserve their ungovernability.
While Kikon gently stages her intervention, suggesting that the Scott’s dyadic conception of hill and valley do not hold in the foothills in which she works, the challenge that she presents to hill/valley dichotomies is at once deep and broad. On the one hand, through her close ethnographic study, Kikon showcases the need for nuance and care in our research. Against the hubris of overarching categorical arguments, Kikon highlights the value of carefully attenuated claims based on a depth of emplaced understanding. On the other hand, her study of the foothills also presents a broader challenge to Scott’s dualistic frames. Attending to the liminality of the foothills undoes imagined divisions between hill and valley, as Kikon demonstrates the entanglement of both hill and valley peoples with multiple state projects. She documents how the foothills are interpenetrated by the sovereignty and state-making projects of myriad actors and entities, including those from the hills themselves. Simply put, Kikon shows how theorizing through the liminal spaces of borderlands provides a lens to critically engage and interpret competing sovereignty projects and their overlaps.
Reading Living with Oil and Coal, I was consistently impressed with Kikon’s sophisticated approach to borderlands studies and how her work could inform broader scholarship on frontiers and borders. Thinking through the borderlands, of course, has been a major concern of North American scholars since the turn of the nineteenth century, when Frederick Jackson Turner (1921) first boldly proclaimed the role of closing the frontier in US nation-building. Of course, critical scholars have shown that: borderlands were spaces of Indigenous agency as they negotiated between competing powers and created hybrid political formations (White, 1991); frontiers regularly enrolled Indigenous peoples into regimes of tremendous violence with devastating consequences for their communities (Blackhawk, 2008); borderlands are inscribed not only across space but also the gendered bodies that exist within those spaces (Anzaldúa, 1987); and frontiers are not historically closed but continue to be actively contested spaces (Limerick, 1987). Kikon’s book represents the very best of the tradition of borderland and frontier theorizing. She demonstrates the importance of the borderlands between Assam and Nagaland to various, competing state projects, from economic development to military control to cultural nationalism. She shows how this creates spaces for local tribal agency, but also results in brutal forms of violence that continue to be enacted on local people.
Her book is a tremendous addition to thinking around processes of the state. Paying attention to different state projects—including Assam economic programs, Indian military designs, and Naga aspirations for cultural self-determination—Kikon shows the borderlands as a space in which multiple relationships between the sovereign and the subject are continually being articulated and reformed. These state projects crucially rely upon enrolling non-state actors, such as tribal associations, village councils, insurgents, traders, and landowners, and lapse in the absence of these connections. Perhaps the most provocative aspect of Kikon’s book is thinking through these political connections in terms of love. Here she carefully traces how local residents articulated political relationships in terms of the language of morom, a broad term for love and affection that encompasses aspects of patronage, adoration, lust, attachment, care, and compassion. Kikon highlights how intimately political understandings of territory and violence mapped onto women’s bodies in connection to discourses or morom. But she demonstrates the importance of the language of love and its absence to locals’ descriptions of their relationship to the state. For locals, the lack of state affection was often evident in infrastructural abandonment, materially visible in the conditions of village roads.
Another particularly poignant aspect of Kikon’s analysis was her attention to the ways in which economic relationships were culturally embedded. While tribal and Indigenous peoples are often portrayed as connected to the land in ways that are antithetical to extractivism, Kikon demonstrates how tribal customs in various ways are wed to extractive relations. This is evident in the ways that Naga communities in the foothills leverage their tribal autonomy over community lands and natural resources to legitimize coal mining operations through customary law. In this regime of customary coal extraction, tribal identity is not opposed to resource exploitation but a key way in which local peoples culturally modify fossil capitalism to secure their participation within it. Similarly, Kikon demonstrates how transactions in the haats, local markets distinctive to the foothills in which Naga residents engage in exchanges with Assam traders, are part of a culturally embedded economy. Despite asymmetric power relations, in which Assam traders dominate economic transactions, haat exchanges continue to operate in accordance with local storied landscapes, cultural taboos, transgressions, and partnerships.
As a book on resource politics, Kikon’s careful attention to gender relations addresses a major gap in the literature. She notes the hyper-masculine militarism of coal extraction, as well as the ways that the cultural politics of conflicts over resource extraction breed notions of ethnic purity that are inscribed upon the bodies of women and used to control them. These are dynamics that are often forgotten in critical scholarship on fossil capitalism, which tends to focus on negotiations in the public sphere and neglects their domestic effects. Kikon’s intervention here is again vital, calling upon scholars to attend to the ways in which resource politics circulate through gendered economies of ethnic identity, circumscribing women’s autonomy and reinscribing patriarchal relations.
Paying attention to the politics of desire, Kikon also highlights the extent to which speculation about and aspirations for different futures informed coal and oil politics. Describing the role of carbon fantasies, Kikon highlights the importance of imagined coal and oil futurities to forging extractive alliances. Landowners, politicians, and insurgents shared aspirations to participate in oil extractive futures, which were dominated by the centralized state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) and its expanding infrastructural network. Simultaneously, local actors looked to sustain and expand existing localized regimes of coal mining in the villages. However, as Kikon demonstrates, despite dreams of a prosperous future, the political reality of the foothills continued to be defined by the militarization of the region and its attendant economies of violence.
The final section of Kikon’s book delves deeper into the political subjectivities produced through carbon extractive regimes within a militarized space. Here counterinsurgency operations and oil exploration coupled, interpellating ideal citizen-subjects, the bhal manu or good person. Technical discourses of oil exploration regularly erase the broader social dynamics of the region, including the quotidian effects of militarization. As installing new regimes of oil extraction requires a zone free of conflict, militarized processes of profiling ideal carbon citizens are normalized. The consequences for local residents deemed potentially insurgent and thus against the national project of economic development, as Kikon describes in gruesome detail, are horrific. The deeply troubling image of torture of the anti-national subject haunted me after reading the book.
As Living with Oil and Coal leaves the reader with a sense of the embodied effect of militarized extractive regimes too often forgotten in political economic critiques, I would not ask the book to do any more than it already accomplishes. It is crucial reading for many of those who write about resource conflicts but pay little regard to how extractive geographies are felt on the ground. However, with this knowledge in hand, future research on the foothills can further expand thinking about the different materialities of extractivism.
Thinking about the materialities of carbon extraction in the borderlands of Assam and Nagaland, I am curious about the ways that regional coal and oil operations fit within broader political economies, but also how these operations were materially implanted within the region. Regarding the political economy of coal and oil, how does foothills extractivism fit within larger commodity flows and their associated strategies of accumulation? Who profits and how are these profits extracted? Living with Oil and Coal clearly demonstrates the important role of land ownership in securing resource rents for locals. But what are the labor relations involved in coal and oil production, and how do these relate to the differences between customary coal extraction and the centralized, state-owned operations of ONGC? How do the ethnic politics, bonds of kinship and tribal identity, and nationalism that Kikon discusses inflect these labor relations?
Similarly, how do different economic actors manage the financial risks associated with conflict in the region? Conversely, what materialities are necessary to actualize the movement of carbon resources? Kikon effectively describes how coal is mobilized through local networks. However, the particular infrastructures and technologies, as well as actors from scientists and engineers to financiers and police, involved in materializing oil extraction could be further documented. Kikon introduced readers to the role of geologists in rendering oil extraction technical and effacing broader social and political concerns. Future research could further expand analysis of the types of material relationships that are made possible by the scientists and engineers in the oil and gas industry, and the extractive infrastructures they design.
Another major question flowing from this book is that of climate politics. Climate change is already evident in the increased presence of major storm events and fires. What are the climate futurities that are implicated in coal and oil extractivism in Northeast India? How do local politics connect to the global climate crisis? And, conversely, how do broader questions of climate adaptation or perhaps more optimistically green transitions double back in local negotiations between competing state projects? Can there be a transition from a state of abandonment to more socially and ecologically sustainable forms of state love? Or more succinctly, what is the meaning of state love in the Anthropocene?
References
Anzaldúa, Gloria E. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books.
Blackhawk, Ned. 2008. Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West. Harvard University Press.
Limerick, Patricia. 1987. Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of The American West. WW Norton.
Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Yale University Press.
Turner, Frederick Jackson. 1921. The Frontier in American History. Henry Holt and Company.
White, Richard. 1991. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge University Press.
Tyler McCreary is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Florida State University.
