Care through cultivation: Indigenous Swidden agriculture as forest care

Abstract This paper argues that the agricultural practices of Bunong swidden cultivators in northeastern Cambodia constitute relational care for forests that is fundamentally misunderstood, misrecognized, and marginalized by dominant state policies, conservation, and development paradigms. Bringing together care theory, long‐term ethnographic research, and foundational swidden scholarship, the paper reconceptualizes forest care through Indigenous ontologies and relationality, conceptualizing current conservation as a regime of anonymous care and Bunong swidden cultivation as relational care. It shows how the romanticization of the Bunong as ‘Caretakers of the Forest’ selectively celebrates the protection of spirit forests and collection of resources while obscuring swidden—rotational cultivation in forest clearings. It argues that ‘taking care’ among Indigenous communities practicing swidden agriculture is inseparable from cultivation, so that felling trees and cultivating land become practical, relational, and ethical engagements with land, spirits and ancestors, rather than the antithesis of care. Building on Lisa Stevenson's distinction between anonymous and relational care, the paper develops a relational care perspective that explains why swidden is frequently misrecognized and invisibilized by external actors who reduce care to statistical forest cover. It also demonstrates empirically that, despite rapid socio‐environmental change and legal restrictions, rice and swidden cultivation remain central to Bunong identity, livelihoods and more‐than‐human relations across generations. The paper concludes that swidden cultivation is not a conservation problem but a conservation practice in its own right, and argues that conservation and land‐use policies should recognize Bunong swidden as situated, more‐than‐human care, redesigning legal and management frameworks to support Indigenous territorial control and land‐sharing forest–agriculture mosaics. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.