Adaptive self-organization in swidden agriculture

More than forty years ago, Michael Dove (1983) traced persistent myths about swidden agriculture to a "political economy of ignorance." A polarization of "good" and "bad" perceptions of swidden was sustained, he argued, because it served the interests of the powerful, and it remains entrenched today even as theory, methods, and data have improved markedly. This essay argues that a second, epistemological problem may contribute to the persistence of these myths: the dominant epistemological approaches to swidden research talk past one another. First, drawing on Barker and Fraser's (2023) concept of the "unraveled rope," I examine the argument structure of three swidden case studies spanning distinct disciplines and opposing normative poles. In each, the empirical work is sound, but argument defects exist: the conclusion misrelates the evidence to undefended value premises, overstating what the data can support about whether swidden is good or bad for the forest. Second, I conduct a targeted review of the swidden scholarship that shows how this polarization may reflect a deeper disjuncture between top-down and bottom-up research traditions, neither of which fully explains how small-scale societies shape large-scale forests. Third, I propose adaptive self-organization as an integrative framework connecting community-level decisions to emergent, landscape-scale dynamics. Synthesizing two decades of my own research, I show how adaptive self-organization connects farmers' local decisions to the landscape-scale forest patterns. In doing so, the essay reframes swidden as an adaptive self-organizing coupled human-nature system and offers an epistemological counterpart to the political economy of ignorance Dove diagnosed a generation ago.