Prices and Politics in Andean Water Reforms

Water rights are best understood as politically contested and culturally embedded relationships among different social actors. In the Andean region, existing rights of irrigators’ collectives often embody historical struggles over resources, rules, authorities and identities. This article argues, first, that the neo‐liberal language that is increasingly used in water policies is ill‐suited for recognizing and dealing with these social, cultural and political dimensions of water distribution. Local water rules and rights, their dynamics, and the way they are linked to power relations, local identities and contextualized constructions of legitimacy, remain invisible in neo‐liberal policy discourse. Second, this same discourse actively destroys these local rights systems and presents itself as the only viable cure to the problems it generates. The ways in which local irrigators’ collectives attempt to protect their water security raise questions about the fundaments and effects of neo‐liberal water reforms, but these questions are neglected or poorly understood. This article proposes a more situated, layered and contextualized approach to Andean water questions, not just to improve representational accuracy but also to increase political visibility and legitimacy of peasant and indigenous water claims. What is needed is not just a new ‘typology’ or ‘taxonomy’ of water rights, but an alternative ‘water rights ontology’ that understands locally existing norms and water control practices, and the power relations that inform and surround them, as deeply constitutive of water rights.     

Conditional Belonging: Farm Workers and the Cultural Politics of Recognition in Zimbabwe

This article examines Zimbabwean land politics and the study of rural interventions, including agrarian reform, more broadly, using the analytical framework of territorialized ‘modes of belonging’ and their ‘cultural politics of recognition’. Modes of belonging are the routinized discourses, social practices and institutional arrangements through which people make claims for resources and rights, the ways through which they become ‘incorporated’ in particular places. In these spatialized forms of power and authority, particular cultural politics of recognition operate; these are the cultural styles of interaction that become privileged as proper forms of decorum and morality informing dependencies and interdependencies. The author traces a hegemonic mode of belonging identified as ‘domestic government’, put in place on European farms in Zimbabwe's colonial period, and shows how it was shaped by particular political and economic conjunctures in the first twenty years of Independence after 1980. Domestic government provided a conditional belonging for farm workers in terms of claims to limited resources on commercial farms while positioning them in a way that made them marginal citizens in the nation at large. This is the context for the behaviour of land‐giving authorities which have actively discriminated against farm workers during the politicized and violent land redistribution processes that began in 2000. Most former farm workers are now seeking other forms of dependencies, typically more precarious and generating fewer resources and services than they had accessed on commercial farms, with their own particular cultural politics of recognition, often tied to demonstrating support to the ruling political party.     

Ruling by Record: The Meaning of Rights,Rules and Registration in an Andean Comunidad

This contribution looks at land property relations in a peasant community in the central highlands of Peru. Rather than using a rights‐based approach, the authors propose a ‘practice force field approach’ for their analysis of property relations under communal land tenure regimes. Their study combines qualitative ethnographic case studies with quantitative analysis of data on land distribution. In contrast to rights‐based approaches, this perspective understands the legal discourses that people draw upon to explain property relations as ‘justifying rule talk’ rather than the reflection of a system of property rights. It is shown how property relations are shaped in mediated interactive processes, where official rules, moral principles, shared histories and strategic games come together. The authors use this practice force field approach to study Usibamba, an Andean community that has developed a true disciplinary regime of communal governance based on control over land. The role of ‘rule talk’ and the function of elaborate local systems of land registration are examined in the context of the annual reallocation of communal land. Particular attention is paid to the performance of the president of the comunidad during this delicate process and his reflections on the course of events.     

The Colonial Roots of Forest Extraction: Rosewood Exploitation in Southern Belize

In 2013 there was a spike in the illegal export of rosewood, a highly‐valued tropical hardwood, from Belize. Hewn by Maya workers at night, logs were sold to Chinese buyers. Although protected by international conservation agreements, container‐loads of rosewood were exported unprocessed, unmarked and untaxed. This article examines the rosewood exports, providing a critical analysis that seeks its underlying causes and lessons for development. Drawing on extensive archival research, interviews with multiple actors, and data on China's rosewood imports, the authors show that the exports reflect a long‐standing pattern: the extraction and export of unprocessed primary commodities from Belize's forests. However, contemporary patterns are not simply repeating colonial history. On the demand side, the recent rosewood boom was triggered by a rapid rise in demand from urban, middle‐class consumers in China, stimulating a new commodity chain. On the supply side, the ‘rosewood crisis’ was facilitated by a peculiar legal‐political conjuncture: it occurred during a period after the Maya communities had won legal rights to their forests through the courts, but before the state had recognized those rights. Thus the incomplete recognition of indigenous land rights collided with long‐standing patterns of forest extractivism and explosive demand in China.     

The Symbolic Making of a Common Property Resource: History,Ecology and Locality in a Tank-irrigated Landscape in South India

Today there is a pervasive policy consensus in favour of ‘community management’ approaches to common property resources such as forests and water. This is endorsed and legitimized by theories of collective action which, this article argues, produce distinctively ahistorical and apolitical constructions of ‘locality’, and impose a narrow definition of resources and economic interest. Through an historical and ethnographic exploration of indigenous tank irrigation systems in Tamil Nadu, the article challenges the economic-institutional modelling of common property systems in terms of sets of rules and co-operative equilibrium outcomes internally sustained by a structure of incentives. The article argues for a more historically and politically grounded understanding of resources, rights and entitlements and, using Bourdieu's notion of ‘symbolic capital’, argues for a reconception of common property which recognizes symbolic as well as material interests and resources. Tamil tank systems are viewed not only as sources of irrigation water, but as forming part of a village ‘public domain’ through which social relations are articulated, reproduced and challenged. But the symbolic ‘production of locality’ to which water systems contribute is also shaped by local ecology. The paper examines the historical and cultural production of two distinctive ‘cultural ecologies’. This serves to illustrate the fusion of ecology and social identity, place and person, in local conceptions, and to challenge a currently influential thesis on the ecological-economic determinants of collective action. In short, development discourse and local actors are seen to have very different methods and purposes in the ‘production of locality’. Finally, the article points to some practical implications of this for strategies of ‘local institutional development’ in irrigation.     

A zone of exception: gendered violences of family ‘Happiness’ in Vietnam

This article examines the ways in which women’s ‘family happiness’ in Vietnam paradoxically, and alarmingly, is rendered compatible with the endurance of what is diminished as ‘minor’ partner violence. Thus focusing on the gendering of ‘happiness’ and the discrepancies between ideals and practices, the article unfolds how intersections between a number of ‘power-geometries’ including violence preventive legislation, an official family discourse, and the patrilineally organized family facilitate the conditions that allow for male-to-female violence in the domestic sphere. The article highlights how Intimate Partner Violence transmutes the ‘happy family’ into a ‘zone of exception’ wherein which the laws prohibiting violence are suspended, the juridico-political status and rights of a woman blurred, and a state of chronic precariousness and crisis generated. Such tendencies are fortified by the ambiguous strategies of the Women’s Union. In maneuvering between violence preventive legislation and family ideals, the Union is criticizing patriarchal family hierarchies while also encouraging women to nurture family happiness by complying with an abusive partner.     

Enrolling the Private Sector in Community Development: Magic Bullet or Sleight of Hand?

The role of the private sector in international development is growing, supported by new and evolving official programmes, financing, partnerships and narratives. This article examines the place of the private sector in ‘community development’ in the global South. It situates corporate community development (CCD) conceptually in long‐standing debates within critical development studies to consider the distinct roles that corporations are playing and how they are responding to the challenges and contradictions entailed within ‘community development’. Drawing on field‐based research across three different contexts and sectors for CCD in Fiji, Papua New Guinea and South Africa, the article suggests that caution is required in assuming that corporations can succeed where governments, non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) and international development organizations have so often met with complex challenges and intractable difficulties. We argue that four specific problems confront CCD: (a) the problematic ways in which ‘communities’ are defined, delineated and constructed; (b) the disconnected nature of many CCD initiatives, and lack of alignment and integration with local and national development planning policies and processes; (c) top‐down governance, and the absence or erosion of participatory processes and empowerment objectives; (d) the tendency towards highly conservative development visions.     

Mixed Outcomes: The Impact of Regional Autonomy and Decentralization on Indigenous Ethnic Minorities in Indonesia

This article examines how indigenous ethnic minorities in Indonesia are being affected by the implementation of decentralization and regional autonomy policies. New legislation transferred responsibility and authority over various issues, including resource extraction and local governance, from the central government to regional authorities at the district level. Members of the growing indigenous rights movement hoped that this decentralization process would allow ethnic minority communities to retain or regain control over natural resources through local‐level politics. Furthermore, some ethnic minorities saw the implementation of decentralization as an opportunity to return to local forms of land tenure and resource management that had been disparaged by the national government for most of the twentieth century. However, these new laws also encourage district level governments to generate income through natural resource exploitation, as they will receive a certain percentage of these revenues. Minority communities could be adversely affected as local governments disregard their land rights in efforts to raise income to cover their new expenses, essentially continuing the practices of previous governments. This article examines the new opportunities, as well as the new threats, posed by decentralization to ethnic minorities throughout Indonesia.     

Tourists,sailors and labourers: A survey of early labour recruiting in Southern Melanesia

Abstract

This essay explores missionary allegations about slave‐dealing in Fiji, and their acceptance by British officials, as cultural responses to sexual relationships between indigenous women and white men. It also examines the imperial implications of ‘the culture of anti‐slavery’, whereby rhetoric about the enslavement of non‐European women became a rationale for attempted legal intervention in the mixed‐race community of Levuka. Finally, it considers how humanitarian rep resentations were contested, then appropriated, by one of the objects of their disapproval: a ‘lawless’ white man from Levuka. William Nimmo's response to the anti‐slavery proclamation gives us valuable information about Levuka's growing self‐definition as a community, and its attempts to control behaviour within its ranks. Using the ‘Christianisation and civilisation’ argument as successfully as the missionaries had, Nimmo and his friends sought recognition and respect from British authorities who seemed biased toward the missionary point of view, while making their own bid for official support in Fiji.     

Unsettled Rights: Afro-descendant recognition and ex-situ titling in Colombia

Ethnic recognition and collective titling have since the second half of the 20th century been promoted as ways of compensating for historical injustices and countering the destructive effects of capitalist development. While holding promise of autonomy, territorial rights, and resource control, they have also been seen as political technologies governing, spatially tying identities to place, and incorporating new areas into capital market relations. This paper draws on and contributes to these debates by exploring how the Colombian legislation for Afro-descendants ethnic recognition and collective titling is understood, employed and ‘reworked’ from below as well as from above. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and document analysis, the paper follows the case of an Afro-descendant sand-extracting community in the Cauca Valley Region, Colombia. Threatened by a competing mining claim, the villagers seek to gain ethnic recognition among other things to secure rights and control mining resources. In the process, the villagers are offered a land plot away from where they live and work to title as their collective territory; a mechanism that I term ‘ex-situ titling’. As the villagers have no prior relation to the land, nor intend to resettle there, I argue that the ex-situ land titling only serves as a procedural step in the process of ethnic recognition, which, nevertheless, contributes to the uncertainty and incertitude around the villagers' ethnic rights and resource control.     

(Re)asserting Indigenous Rights and Jurisdictions within a Politics of Place: Transformative Nature of Native Title Negotiations in South Australia

Australia's dominant politics of place has largely failed to give meaningful recognition to Indigenous peoples. The Native Title Act 1993 required governments, industry and others to (re)consider the basis and extent of their authority, unsettling the non‐Indigenous systems’ assumed dominance. While Indigenous hopes about Native title have diminished as a result of subsequent judicial, legislative and administrative responses, Native title negotiations have been pivotal in redefining politics of place and Indigenous–settler relationships in Australia at several scales. Focusing on South Australia's Statewide Indigenous Land Use Agreement Negotiation Strategy, this paper considers such a redefinition. The paper identifies four strategies as critical to success in transformative spatial politics: getting process right; recognising and supporting Indigenous jurisdictions; engaging and transforming non‐Indigenous scales; and shifting Native title process away from legalities, towards people and relationships. Since 1999, these strategies have transformed the politics of place and built more equitable inter‐cultural relationships and networks based on mutual recognition and respect between Indigenous and non‐Indigenous rights and interests in land and waters.     

Witchcraft,Social Cohesion and Participation in a South African Village

The past thirty years have seen development agencies, non‐governmental organizations and their funders embrace ‘participatory’ development strategies. These strategies require the poor to take part in decision‐making about, and the implementation of, development projects and programmes. Underlying enthusiasm for participation is the recognition that centralized, top‐down systems and methods have not delivered development, and the assumption that the poor are eager and able to ‘participate’. Using ethnographic research on witch beliefs and their impact on social relations in a South African village, this article argues that such assumptions are not always justified. It shows that witch beliefs and related conflicts have long‐term negative consequences for intra‐community relations and examines what this implies for development policy and practice.     

Land and Sea Tenure at Erub,Torres Strait: Property,Sovereignty and the Adjudication of Cultural Continuity

Approaching property as social practice, and native title as a confluence of indigenous, ethnographic, and legal discourses, we address two themes: firstly, the ethnocentrism of the state's division of ‘property’ from ‘jurisdiction,’; applied to deny indigenous societies' practice of the latter; and secondly, the contradictions inherent in judicial evaluation of continuity and discontinuity in indigenous law and custom. We explore the relationship of ‘home place’ to tenure at Erub, where island, reef and ocean comprise a cultural and experiential continuum. Rights across a full spectrum of material/symbolic resources involve a dynamic tension between principles of exclusion and incorporative reciprocity. The issue of how to balance more particular against more collective rights is at play with each nesting of more local into more inclusive socio-territorial identities: from households and lineages, through island communities, sub-regional island groups, and Torres Strait regionally, to the encapsulating state and evolving international orders. At Erub, an island community long regarded as a vanguard of creolization for Torres Strait, newcomers have by-and-large been assimilated to indigenous systems of land- and sea-holding and authority. The connection between people and territory is a complex practice of social identities and interests responding to political opportunity, according to cultural forms that manifest substantial and traceable continuities to indigenous arrangements, as innovation has proceeded. The continuities appear sufficient to satisfy criteria for native title recognition as articulated in the Mabo decision, but the criteria themselves are too narrowly based to accommodate the processual dynamics of evolving culture and tradition. A reordering of territorial jurisdiction, predicated on the principle of Islander consent to development activities in their homelands/seas, would provide more authentic conditions for cultural autonomy.     

‘Time of Troubles’: Arnold J. Toynbee's twentieth century

Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975) has long been neglected or discounted by scholars of international relations and historians of international thought. Yet his contributions to International Affairs, as well as his Surveys of international affairs and his A study of history demonstrate both his capacity for acute interpretation of contemporary events and the depth of his learning about past international societies. This article examines his analysis of mid‐twentieth century international relations, that ‘Time of Troubles’ which he believed would only be escaped through a recovery of ‘creativity’ and profound change in the ways in which world politics were practised. It explores the foundations of his approach to the field, demonstrated both in his Surveys of international affairs and his twelve volume magnum opus, A study of history, as well as his essays in journals. It analyses his diagnosis of the causes of our contemporary ‘Time of Troubles’, in the light of past episodes in world history Toynbee thought analogous to that present condition of international relations. And it traces his retreat from political solutions to the challenges faced in the twentieth century and his movement towards religious responses as a putative alternative. It concludes by arguing that Toynbee deserves recognition, not simply as a pioneering world historian or a controversial interpreter of the politics of the Middle East, but as an acute commentator on the international relations of a troubled age.     

On expectations in the aftermath of the ‘refugee crisis’: Ethnographic prospects from a post‐industrial German city

At the height of the ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe, right‐wing critics challenged refugees’ rights to asylum. One of the ways they did this was by predicting chaotic, doom‐laden futures. In reality, nobody – neither the communities hosting the refugees, nor the refugees themselves – knew what the post‐crisis future would bring. Anthropologists are in a position to consider that future ethnographically. This article discusses the emerging future expectations of one Afghan family in the German post‐industrial city of Bremerhaven. It attends to the local production of representations of the future during the aftermath of the crisis. The author uses this material to literally look ahead with ethnography and to thereby intervene in the broader context of the politics of expectations. He argues that the earlier we anthropologists can provide detailed accounts of how the future is starting to take shape in our fieldsites, the more efficiently we can stop further fearmongering and the deprivation of human rights. These ‘ethnographic prospects’ may allow us to ask different questions and offer different imaginations of the future.     

Official Statistics and the Contemporary Politics of Indigeneity

Critical scholarship on colonisation tells us that official statistics have reflected the perspectives of the colonisers. However, the colonised, in asserting ‘Indigenous rights,’ have begun to use official statistics to advocate policies that will relieve the continuing structural injustice that is colonisation's legacy. This paper examines Aboriginal and Maori intellectuals' efforts to quantify, using official statistics, the ‘unfinished business’ of settler colonial liberalism. Examining Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioners' annual Reports, the paper argues that their quantitative comparisons of Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations highlighted the contested implications of ‘equality.’ Turning to New Zealand, the paper reviews two issues: the appropriate boundary of the ‘Māori population,’ and whether it is possible to measure Māori well-being according to Māori norms. The paper draws on the work of Andrew Sharp to make sense of the difficulties and opportunities that face Indigenous intellectuals in Australia and New Zealand when they operationalise ‘social justice’ in the terms of a comparative statistical archive. The paper argues that there are now two distinct idioms in which to represent the collective Indigenous presence within settler colonial nation-state—one signified by the concept ‘population,’ the other by the concept ‘people.’ The tensions between ‘population’ and ‘people,’ resonating with undecided issues about the claims of Indigenous citizenship upon a liberal policy, are a feature of contemporary Indigenous political discourse.     

(RE)MAPPING INDIGENOUS ‘RACE’/PLACE IN POSTCOLONIAL PENINSULAR MALAYSIA1

ABSTRACT. This paper focuses on how indigeneity has been constructed, deployed and ruptured in postcolonial Malay(si)a. Prior to the independence of Malaya in 1957, British colonial administrators designated certain groups of inhabitants as being ‘indigenous’ to the land through European imaginings of ‘race’. The majority, politically dominant Malays were deemed the definitive peoples of this geographical territory, and the terrain was naturalized as ‘the Malay Peninsula’. Under the postcolonial government, British conceptions of the peninsula were retained; the Malays were given political power and recognition of their ‘special (indigenous) position’ in ways that Orang Asli minorities—also considered indigenous ‐ were not. This uneven recognition is evident in current postcolonial political, economic, administrative and legal arrangements for Malays and Orang Asli. In recent years, Orang Asli advocates have been articulating their struggles over land rights by drawing upon transnational discourses concerning indigenous peoples. Recent judicial decisions concerning native title for the Orang Asli potentially disrupt ethno‐nationalist assertions of the peninsula as belonging to the ‘native’ Malays. These contemporary contests in postcolonial identity formations unsettle hegemonic geopolitical ‘race’/place narratives of Peninsular Malaysia.     

Political Structure and the Limits of Recognition and Representation in Ghana

Recent studies of democratization in sub‐Saharan Africa often focus on government recognition granted to traditional authorities. This article examines northern Ghana, where chiefs of a minority group are denied formal recognition but pressure state officials to recognize their status as land custodians. This leads to contests and debates between state officials, chiefs and communities over whether the customary institutions have in fact been recognized for what they claim to be. The article uses episodes of contention to nuance conceptualizations of recognition as a specific relationship between actors and institutions, and as a question of government policy or choice. Recognition and non‐recognition are contested in a grey zone of social constructions. Non‐recognition persists as a continuation of colonial policy, state law path trajectory, and state officials’ endeavours to stay out of ‘traditional’ affairs. However, customary rights to land are validated by the new local government institution, and chiefs use newfound positions to expand their jurisdictions. Stakeholders affirm unequal social categories underpinning different understandings of recognition. The article examines contentions that hinge on interpretations of who is recognizing and not recognizing whom, and actors’ efforts to reshape and reproduce political structures.     

Cities of Extremes

Modern cities have always been the locus of both inequality and opportunity. However, neoliberal policies pursued since the 1980s have intensified urban disparities. Cities are increasingly shaped more by the logic of the market than the needs of their inhabitants. This article, which introduces a collection of papers on the topic, examines the implications of the neoliberal turn for the ‘right to the city’ as the fundamental tenet of urban citizenship. While evidence suggests a formidable challenge from market forces to the ‘right to the city’, the authors argue that the neoliberal city remains a highly contested urbanity in which poor inhabitants continue to struggle for citizenship in highly diverse ways. The challenge for scholarship is to discover and document those intricate modes of claim‐making.