Juno Negi

This project examines farmland abandonment in Pauri Garhwal, Uttarakhand, India as a socio-ecological and cultural process rather than a mere cessation of cultivation. Positioned at the intersection of anthropology and cultural-landscape studies, the project explores how people-land relationships transform when traditional farmlands are abandoned. Using liminality (Turner 1967; van Gennep 1960) as a central analytical lens, it conceptualises abandoned farmlands as transitional terrains—neither fully cultivated nor entirely rewilded—where ecological succession, memories, and governance converge. Ethnographic fieldwork, combined with ecological surveys, vegetation sampling, and camera-trapping, will trace how human meanings and non-human agencies co-constitute these landscapes. The project also investigates how state visions of “barren land” and “forest land” intersect with local moral geographies and claims of belonging. By integrating interpretive anthropology with mixed-methods ecological observation, this research advances an anthropology of landscape transitions, highlighting how ecological, cultural, and political processes intertwine amid rural outmigration and environmental change in the Western Himalaya.