A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Australian National University.....ABSTRACT: "Although shifting cultivation has long been condemned as a wasteful land use practice, research has failed to identify alternative models suitable to the conditions under which shifting cultivators work. The failure of outside interventions suggests that attention should be directed to cases where, faced with land shortages, shifting cultivators have successfully developed their own innovations for intensified cultivation. This dissertation explores a striking exception to the general collapse of shifting cultivation systems in the Asia-Pacific region, in Nagaland, a remote corner of N.E. India where, for centuries, Naga farmers have managed a local alder tree (Alnus nepalensis) in their swidden fields. The study focuses on Khonoma, a long- established Angami Naga village in Kohima District with a reputation for particularly intensive use of alder in its dryland cultivation. A nearby Angami village, Tsiesema, does not practice alder management. It was thus adopted as a secondary research site that provided a benchmark of swiddening in the absence of alder, and through comparisons between the two study villages, allowed the study to better gauge the costs and benefits associated with alder management. The study explores the cultural ecology of Khonoma, with special emphasis on the role of alder in its swidden fields. It carefully documents how alder is being managed, examines the evidence for what benefits it provides, and seeks to reconstruct the historical reasons underlying alder?s magnified importance in Khonoma. It shows alder to be a pioneer tree that thrives in the study area, and how through centuries of trial and error, Khonoma has become extraordinarily skillful in managing it as an improved fallow species. By accelerating fallow functions, alder has allowed Khonoma to dramatically intensify its cultivation without slipping into the downward spiral of degradation typically seen when swidden systems are pushed beyond their ecological resilience. The thesis demonstrates how interwoven history, culture, the environment, the landscape and livelihood strategies are in Khonoma, and how they led to it managing alder more intensively than neighboring societies. The Khonoma experience provides a compelling example of farmers using a multipurpose tree as a ?bridge” that allowed them to effortlessly make the transition from shifting to permanent cultivation. This was achieved through small, incremental changes to their existing cultivation practices - an approach vastly more acceptable to farmers than the completely new technologies that projects often attempt to parachute into swidden communities.".....At 191MB the original document (follow the link to the Digital Himalaya site) may be too large for everyone to access. OBL has therefore split the document into Text and Gallery and reduced these sections using Finereader OCR and Adobe Acrobat tools. Since the full document is more than 1600 pages, this process may have produced errors. The original 191MB file should therefore be taken as authoritative.