Learning from Indigenous People: A Narrative Research on Agricultural Heritage in the Shexian Dryland Terraces, North China
A Chinese saying goes like this: “The methods used may vary, but the principle stays the same” (万变不离其宗). This is also valid for agricultural heritage systems — which are constantly subject to external drivers and changes: In order to become part of local culture and practice, changes to an agricultural system have to integrate into and ‘fit’ the socio-cultural constitution of a society.
What drivers do act upon local agricultural systems, and how do local people react to them? How can we learn about the changes to such a system? My research on these questions led me to the people living and farming in the Shexian Dryland Terrace System of North China. The study might provide a starting point to reflect on how to conserve such outstanding agricultural heritage systems.
An obvious approach to these issues, for sure, is to turn to those who are part of the ‘agricultural heritage system’: Indigenous people, especially farmers, can provide this knowledge. In order to learn about their farming practices and the changes they undergo, we as outsiders need to carefully observe and describe these practices. We therefore decided for an anthropological approach to develop an understanding of key elements of the agricultural system, and of indigenous people’s present interactions with the social-ecological environment — particularly of their adaption strategies.
In such a field research, it may be easy to ask some fixed questions, but difficult to understand and interpret the answers (meaning the perceptions of the interviewees) — and to bridge between local understandings and those of an external audience.
Indigenous farmers as final interpreters
Together with the agricultural heritage research team of China Agricultural University, I started a participatory research in the Shexian Dryland Terrace System in 2015 (more info on the place and system can be found in my last story). Since then, I visited the place regularly and carried out fieldwork there almost every year. In this process, I learned about local people and their lives, and some of them became friends of mine. This close contact is enriching in itself, and of course represents a crucial precondition for our research.
Indigenous people, especially the farmers running the dryland terrace system, are the true subjects of this research: they own the final interpretation, and only they are able to present their local knowledge, as well as their perceptions regarding drivers and changes to their practices.
As a researcher, I prefer to take over the role of a translator to make the inner logics of people’s descriptions understood to outsiders. Through these descriptions, people may be inspired to reflect on how they themselves react to changing conditions in their own surroundings.
Interactions between researchers and interviewees
Our interviewees are of very different age and generations, of different genders and educational status. In this context, does it actually make sense to aim at some general key elements of the system? What can be such a ‘key element’ — is it the same to all our interviewees? In the end, it does not make sense to watch out for an ‘essence’, for ‘pure’ cultural or social constitutions. This is why we decided to approach the subject on the grounds of social-ecological systems thinking.
Most interviewees of course do not regard their everyday routines as something to reflect on: It is the researchers’ task to provide tools that foster such processes of reflection. We focused on farming processes, e.g. on the local farming calendar as one important prompt in our interviews: This tool provides a chance for local people to look back at their farming practices step by step.
Through these research strategies, we were able to gradually learn about the special practices they perform and to transfer them to the outside world. At the same time, the interviews offered farmers a chance to reflect on their own practices.
Key elements and changes on trial
During my most recent visit in summer 2019, we carried out 31 interviews and ran a new round of participatory observation. As a result, we were able to describe 16 key elements of the farming system:
- Donkey or mule, millet, corn, Chinese red pepper, traditional seeds, water cisterns, stone walls and stone houses were classified as key elements inherited from past generations, while…
- …motor vehicles, micro-tillers, herbs cultivation, wheat flour and rice, high-yield seeds, herbicides, mineral fertilizers and brick houses were described as newly adopted.
In addition, we used an induction method to derive the main changes to the system — such as land abandonment, the mechanization of farming tools, and a simplification of the farming calendar — as well as 10 associated drivers from the socioeconomic, technological, natural or cultural realm acting upon the system.
With these findings, I returned to part of our interviewees to test whether they would agree with them. When one of them heard about my interpretations, his reaction was “Yes, yes, yes. That’s it. Better than what I can express. Almost perfect to present the core of our farming (system).” Even when I asked “Do you feel strange or unfamiliar with my description?”, the answer was ‘No’.
Such a reaction is of course strongly encouraging for me in my work. In other cases, however, the picture was not as clear: Sometimes the descriptions of young farmers conflicted with those of the elder generation. In order to find out why, I turned to their life experience and other people’s judgements. One women in her 30s, for example, did not have experience with raising donkeys: Her take on the role of the animal was of course very different from that of an older, experienced farmer, who repeatedly emphasized the importance of donkeys.
Building bridges
In our research paper, we as ‘translators’ tried our best to provide a general understanding of the indigenous knowledge to a wider audience — in order to foster readers’ awareness on the conservation of agricultural heritage–, but to still keep the original features and do justice to local perspectives.
This study, however, presents research outcomes and is not a documentary writing or novel. We as researchers have our strict logical thinking, we gather and process information and try to develop a convincing argument. In order to live up to an inter- and transdisciplinary community, we aimed to make our discussion understandable to people from both practice and academia, e.g. by decreasing the use of academic terms.
A narrative approach is accessible and useful for translating the local to the general. The changes we found in this dryland terraced system provide insights for policy making, e.g. with regards to the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) initiative.
From a social phenomenon to academic analysis, then to recommendations for practical application — that is our way to support indigenous people and to promote the conservation of their agricultural heritage systems.
Last but not the least, we would like to draw your attention to our research paper, which provides further insights into our studies:
Tianyu Guo, María García-Martín & Tobias Plieninger (2021) Recognizing indigenous farming practices for sustainability: a narrative analysis of key elements and drivers in a Chinese dryland terrace system, Ecosystems and People, 17:1, 279–291, DOI: 10.1080/26395916.2021.1930169
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