LOSING  PLACE  IN  THE  CORN  MOUNTAINS:   FOREST  CONSERVATION,  IN  SITU  DISPLACEMENT  &  AGRARIAN   TRANSFORMATION  IN  UPLAND  NORTHERN  THAILAND     Daniel  B.  Ahlquist,  Ph.D.   Cornell  University  2015     In the uplands of far northern Thailand, the landscape and the lives of those who live there are changing in tandem. On a landscape once characterized by an ever-shifting patchwork of forests, swidden fields and fallows, a stark duality now prevails. Virtually unbroken monocultures of hybrid maize blanket the hillsides in all directions, stopping only at the very edge of forests now protected by the laws and muscle of the Thai conservation state. In this dissertation, I draw on extensive participant observation and multi-sited ethnography centered on two Akha villages in Chiang Rai Province to excavate the processes and relationships behind the emergence of this bifurcated landscape, and to explore the ways in which upland land use practices, livelihoods and communities shape, and are shaped by, this changing landscape. I argue that the agrarian transformation underway in the uplands of northern Thailand today is both an outcome and a constituent element of an ongoing process of in situ displacement that is reconfiguring the relationship between farmers and the soil. It is a process with roots in the state's forest conservation project, which disabled the villages' rotational swidden systems and undermined local mechanisms for maintaining soil health. And it is a process that compels farmers to knowingly participate in an agricultural system that is literally   iii   and figuratively eroding the soil, as a sustaining foundation, from under their feet as inequalities widen in their communities and insecurity accumulates in their lives. This particular form of displacement tends to be overlooked by displacement scholars and policy makers because it manifests slowly over time, in banal but important ways that are difficult to see or connect to the disruptions informing them (Feldman & Geisler, 2012). Through multi-sited ethnographic methods and farmer-centered participant observation, and through an explicit focus on process and experience, this research seeks to address this important blind spot in the conservation, agrarian change, and displacement literatures.       iv