swidden

I was editing a book, and I saw a word I didn’t recognize: swidden.

MS Word recognized it. It had no red underline. 

I looked it up. It turns out to be a word for a field that has been cleared for agricultural production by cutting the existing natural vegetation, letting it dry in place, and burning it in place. 

As I looked at it, I saw a word that presents as having a long English pedigree – a word like midden, which we hardly use anymore (unless we are archaeologists or zoologists) but that has been in the language for most of a millennium, or like hidden, which is still seen often. Somehow this old word swidden was peeking up from the ashes of underbrush, and being used as if it had always been common.

As it turns out, sometimes you just need to let a word rest for a while – a few centuries, in this case – and though its usefulness had been depleted, it now has fertile ground again. Here is what Wiktionary revealed to me: a quote from Guido Sprenger’s “Out of the Ashes: Swidden Cultivation in Highland Laos,” in Anthropology Today 22, no. 4 (August 2006), page 9:

It’s not that Karl Gustav Izikowitz (1903–1985) invented swidden. When the Swedish anthropologist did fieldwork in northern Laos, he focused mainly on economic issues. In his view, the Rmeet . . . had a particularly ancient type of agriculture, characterized by the burning of a plot in the forest each year and allowing fallow periods of 10–15 years for the soil to recover. After his return to Sweden in 1938, Izikowitz recalled a similar technique practised in his home country, called svedja, meaning ‘to burn a field’ (as verb) or ‘burnt field’ (as noun). With the help of Professor Eilert Ekwall, he located an old dialectal word in English for it: swidden.

This swidden is from Middle English swithen (‘burn, scorch, singe’), from Old Norse svíða (‘singe, burn’). So it means, basically, ‘burning’. The key to this form of agriculture is that land that may not have enough nutrients in it to support the crops can have the nutrients added from the ashes of the burnt vegetation. To make a swidden, you don’t simply cut one day, burn the next, and plant the day after; you cut, let it all sit during the rainy season and then dry out in the dry season, then burn it, and the next wet season the field is ready and fertile. 

You can use such a field for a few years, but then you have to let it lie fallow for several years while it regrows the wild vegetation. This means that swidden farming uses a lot of land over time, and is not suitable for cash crops or for any area with too dense a population. But it’s quite sustainable for certain kinds of subsistence farming populations; the land is allowed to regenerate, after all. And since it is used for subsistence farming rather than cash crops, it typically involves a diversity of crops rather than a monoculture.

Why dig up an old word? Well, it comes with a certain feeling of antiquity and staying power, but it also comes without some of the associations and implications other terms might have. There is, in fact, a common term for the kind of agriculture that uses swiddens: slash and burn. Tell me how that sounds to you.

We know what slash and burn is, don’t we? Here’s Wiktionary’s definition: “Rough, coarse and lacking finesse, performed with little skill.” Slash is a violent, bloody, uncontrolled word; burn has more negative than positive tone. If someone says “slash-and-burn agriculture,” you probably think of it as merely destructive and unsustainable, callous, bad for the environment. Slash one day, burn the next. Grab what you can and to hell with the world.

Which, if done in a massive and short-sighted way, slash and burn can be. But it doesn’t have to be bad. And it can be difficult to have a clear-sighted discussion of a subject when the name used is overgrown with negative associations. You could invent a new word, yes, although new words tend to be formed from existing ones anyway, and if they aren’t then they’re rootless and may not survive. But you could also put in the sweat equity to uncover a hidden but suitable old word, like swidden, and perhaps it may be fertile, at least for a few seasons.