Gendered frontiers of land control: indigenous territory,women and contests over land in Ecuador

Agricultural and rural land has become the site of considerable policy, governmental and scholarly concern worldwide because of violence and dispossession, food insecurity and contests over private property regimes. Such issues are highly gendered in territories with majorities of indigenous populations where overlapping legal regimes (statutory, multicultural, customary) and histories of dispossession have created complex spatialities and access patterns. States' formalization of indigenous rights, neoliberal restructuring and land appropriation are the backdrop to Ecuadorian women's struggles to access, retain and pass on land. Despite a burgeoning literature on Latin American indigenous territories, women are often invisible. Using collaborative research among two indigenous nationalities, the article analyses the political–economic, legal and de facto regimes shaping women's claims to land and indigenous territory. Focusing on Kichwa women in the rural Andes and Tsáchila women in a tropical export-oriented agricultural frontier area, the article examines the criteria and exclusionary practices that operate at multiple scales to shape women's (in)security in tenure. Women's struggles over claims to land and territory are also discussed. The article argues that Latin America's fraught land politics requires a gendered account of indigenous land–territoriality to unpack the cultural bias of western feminist accounts of multiculturalism and to document the racialized gender bias across socio-institutional relations.     

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.     

Preservation between empire,nation and nationalisms: the problem of history and heritage in India

This article looks at the problematic questions of heritage and history in a postcolonial nation‐state such as India. It looks at the colonial past of the preservation of historical buildings and relates this to the postcolonial history of the use of heritage and history for both nation‐building and also to assert the claims and counterclaims of postcolonial identity politics. The article shows how the state and its bureaucracy historically acquired the right to be the custodian of culture, history and heritage, and it also argues that the state nevertheless was and remains circumscribed by subnational and communitarian claims to heritage and the past.     

Aquatic Identities,Fluid Economies: Water Affinities and Authenticating Narratives of Belonging in East Timorese Myth and Ritual

ABSTRACT Customary land tenure claims provide a useful analogy for customary access and usage rights to critical water resources. In an increasingly water‐constrained future, such rights are at risk of political and economic contestation and local communities may find themselves abruptly divested of critical water resources just when they need them most. The new nation of East Timor is not abundantly endowed with water and inland sources are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of reduced rainfall and groundwater contamination. Recently McWilliam (2003) has suggested that in future disputes over Timorese sea tenures, the recognition of customary access or exclusive property rights to specific water resources will depend upon clearly articulated evidence of longstanding cultural associations and interactions with the aquatic landscape. The ethnographic literature provides substantiating accounts of the centrality of water in the local cosmologies of various East Timorese ethnic groups. This paper extends McWilliam's marine argument to inland water resources by reviewing the salient ethnographic evidence for Bunaq, Mumbai and Eastern Tetum populations to show that water is a key organising metaphor in the expression of Timorese kingroup affiliation, social identity and power relations. Local ritual practices further affirm customary rights of access and water use. There is an urgent need for such customary rights to water to be recognized in the current redistribution and demarcation of internal boundaries in East Timor, as well as in future struggles against vested economic and political interests.     

Claiming indigenous rights through participatory mapping and the making of citizenship

This paper considers how participatory mapping, through the notion of indigeneity, is involved in the making of participants' political agency and the possible implications for local struggles over customary land and resources. Empirically, the paper draws on a field study of participatory mapping as a cartographic-legal strategy for the recognition of the customary rights to land and resources of the Dayak, an indigenous ethnic group in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. In this paper, we use citizenship as a basis for our analysis. On this basis, we discuss how the notion of indigeneity has assembled actors across different scales and how this has enabled indigeneity to develop as a site for claiming customary rights to land and resources through participatory mapping. One of our main arguments is the need to understand indigenous citizenship as a process that develops over time and through networks of actors that transcend the borders of the state and expand the formerly exclusive relationship between the state and its citizens in the making of citizenship. We challenge Isin's clear distinction between active and activist approaches to making claims of citizenship, suggesting instead that these approaches are mutually constitutive.     

State Making and the Politics of the Frontier in Central Benin

Kopytoff's model of the African frontier has opened room for renewed approaches to settlement history, politics, ethnicity and cultural reproduction in pre‐colonial Africa. This interpretative framework applies well to central Benin (Ouessè). Over the long term, mobility has been a structural feature of the regional social history, from pre‐colonial times onwards. Movements of people, resources, norms and values have been crucial in the production and reproduction of the social and political order. The colonial intrusion and its post‐colonial avatars gave way to renewed relations between mobility and locality, in particular in the form of a complex articulation between control over labour force, access to land and natural resources, and out‐ and in‐migrations. This article argues that the political frontier metaphor provides a useful heuristic device to capture the logic of state making, as the changing outcome of organizing practices taking place inside and outside state and non‐state organizations and arenas. Governmentality in post‐colonial central Benin thus results from the complex interplay of mobility, control over resources and state‐led forms of ‘villagization’.     

WHOSE WOODS ARE THESE? COUNTER-MAPPING FOREST TERRITORIES IN KALIMANTAN,INDONESIA

This paper examines the politics of land and forest rights in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo). Forest mapping by government forestry planners allocates rights of resource use and land access according to forest types and economic objectives, only rarely recognizing indigenous occupancy rights or forest territories customarily claimed or managed by local people. As maps and official plans based on them ignore, and in some cases criminalize, traditional rights to forest, forest products, and forest land for temporary conversion to swidden agriculture, indigenous activists are using sketch maps to re-claim territories - a process that requires re-defining many traditional forest rights. The paper considers the political implications of mapping and the implications of a focus on land use rather than forest use.     

The Struggle for La Sierra: Sovereignty,property, and rights in the San Luis Valley

In 2002 the Colorado Supreme Court reversed decades of precedent in Lobato v. Taylor by awarding Hispano heirs to the Mexican-era Sangre de Cristo Land Grant renewed access rights to that grant's former communal land for grazing, timber, and firewood. Placing Lobato in historical context, this paper examines the contingent emergence of sovereignty and private property in the San Luis Valley of Southern Colorado through acts of violence, land loss, and dispossession. The paper argues that sovereignty and property, as forms of boundary drawing, are unfinished and contested projects rather than abstract, achieved universals. U.S. sovereignty in the San Luis Valley has emerged contingently through the iteration of private property, as struggles over resource access have produced sovereign effects. Such a perspective makes visible how Lobato has reiterated private property rights and U.S. sovereignty in ways that create new exclusions, even as the case returns access rights to the commons.     

Land as fictitious commodity: the continuing evolution of women's land rights in Uganda

In sub-Saharan Africa, colonial influences have altered traditional practices as a way to manage that which Polanyi labeled as ‘fictitious commodities’ of land, labor, and money. Land has now become a highly marketable commodity and an intrinsic part of the global economy. Over the past century, Uganda's land rights have evolved from communal rights to that of male-dominated, individual ownership practices that have excluded women. Despite constitutional provisions, which confer title of both a deceased husband's property rights and equal rights to property within a marriage to a wife, postcolonial patriarchal tradition prevails. This article examines historical changes in land rights in Uganda and discusses the impact of shifts in land rights from communal ownership to individual tenure, altering power structures and attempting to create marketable land title. The Ugandan women's movement's opposition to policies and implementation of laws that exclude women has been unable to facilitate the required changes in unbiased access to land rights, despite apparent victories in revisions to the letter of the law. Situated within contemporary interpretations of tradition and pressures of market demand, this article shows that women's access to landownership and use are restricted by misinterpretation of traditional law and a lack of enforcement of contemporary legal rights. To illustrate the impact of a lack of access to land, this article examines an empirical case study of widowed subsistence farmers in southern Uganda. Women in Uganda continue to lose ground, quite literally, decreasing the possibility of gender equity in terms of land.     

Ethnic Emancipation and Urban Land Claims: Disenfranchisement of the Ga of Accra,Ghana

Several Sub‐Saharan African countries have experienced an upsurge of land claims by various ethnic groups whose lands were acquired by both the colonial and the post‐colonial State through compulsory acquisition. Ethnicity has been used as the basis of emancipating some ethnic groups from perceived disenfranchisement and impoverishment caused by the State acquiring their land. In some cases such land claims result in violence that threatens the social fabric of these countries. An urban example of such a land claim has been made by the GaDangme Council (GDC) in Ghana. This paper assesses the land claim by GDC and argues that its claim of disenfranchisement is more a perception than reality. The paper also investigates why GDC perceives the Ga ethnic group as impoverished and disenfranchised. It concludes by providing structural and pragmatic ways for solving problems centred on Ga land acquisition by the State. Resolving the Ga case may provide lessons for other countries experiencing similar problems.     

Unravelling Church Land: Transformations in the Relations between Church,State and Community in Uganda

Christian churches control substantial areas of land in Africa. While intensifying struggles over their holdings are partly due to the increased pressure on land in general, they also reflect transformations in the relations through which churches’ claims to land are legitimized, the increased association of churches with business, and churches’ unique positioning as both institutions and communities. This article presents the trajectory of relations between church, state and community in Uganda from the missionary acquisition of land in the colonial era to the unravelling of church landholding under Museveni. Drawing on long‐term ethnographic fieldwork, the authors argue that claims to church land in contemporary Uganda draw on: 1) notions of belonging to the land; 2) views about the nature of churches as communities; 3) discontent regarding whether customary land owners gave churches user rights or ownership; and 4) assessment of the churches’ success in ensuring that the land works for the common good. The article develops a novel approach to analysing the changing meaning of the landholdings of religious institutions, thus extending ongoing discussions about land, politics, development and religion in Africa.     

“This is our land”: collective violence,property law,and imagining the geography of Palestine

This study seeks to explain the origins of two types of violence occurring on the Palestinian landscape, the erasure of Palestinian farms and the demolition of Palestinian homes. Such violence has two sources. One source derives from an enduring practice of meaning-making about geographical places that has inspired groups with territorial ambitions to seize control of the landscapes they covet and is referred to by Edward Said as the crafting of “imaginative geographies.” The second source focuses on changes in property rights that follow when groups with territorial ambitions succeed in seizing control of coveted land. It is the imagined geography of Palestine as a homeland for the Jewish people, first framed by Zionists of the late 19^th century and absorbed into the practices of Israeli state-building, and the changes in property rights inscribed into the Palestinian landscape following Zionist and Israeli military conquests in 1948 and 1967, that lie at the core of violence directed against the Palestinian farm and home today. This process of imagination, legal transformation, and violence is part of a longstanding lineage of dispossession that includes the English enclosures and the taking of land from Amerindians on the Anglo-American colonial frontier.     

The Politics of Recognition and Redistribution: Development,Tribal Identity Politics and Distributive Justice in India's Jharkhand

This article illustrates how the potential of recognition‐based politics to achieve distributive justice is determined by political structures and the power relations that constitute them. In response to Nancy Fraser's framework of social justice, it shows that the meaningful coordination of identity‐based claims with distributive justice is constrained — not only by the content of the claims themselves, but also because redistributive demands are subverted through competing pursuits for power and legitimacy between rival political factions. The article describes how the separate‐state movement for Jharkhand in Eastern India was de‐radicalized by three instruments, namely, the reservation system, cultural nationalism and state development discourse. This explains why distributive measures do not feature prominently in the Jharkhand state and why recognition politics has taken a disciplined form in the electoral mainstream while distributive politics continues to be pursued through violent and extra‐parliamentary means.     

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.     

2. WRITING POLITICS BACK INTO HISTORY1

This essay examines the writing of history and historiography in early modern south India as discussed in the book Textures of Time. The book argues that a historical and historiographical awareness was prevalent in south India prior to the arrival of a European field of knowledge under colonial rule. However, this essay maintains that the book unwittingly reproduces some of the very same Eurocentric formulations of the writing of history and modernity that it seeks to refute. A liberal conception of modernity is at the core of how society, history, and politics have been imagined in this book. These attributes of modernity, such as history as a set of causal relations, as presentation of facts, as a realm of the real cannot escape their prior formulation in Europe. The liberal social order also underpins the relationship between writing and the world. In Textures, early historians merely represent reality; they are not authors whose practices are constitutive of politics and identity. The conception of modernity overlooks the constitutive role colonial empires played in the very creation not only of the West and non‐West, but also in conceptions of the real, the modern, the universal, and the historical.     

Creating environmental subjects: Conservation as counter-insurgency in Aceh,Indonesia, 1925–1940

This article examines the creation of Gunung Leuser Wildlife Reserve in the highlands of Aceh, Indonesia within the context of the Dutch-Aceh War in the early twentieth century, arguing that conservation was used as a form of counter-insurgency. While the agendas of the colonial military and conservationists diverged at times, they overlapped in their goals to secure Leuser from resident communities, whom they viewed as a threat to colonial order and the ecologies of the region. This article draws together the discourses of militarized conservation with their material implications. It does so by examining the nexus of military and conservation discourses, the historical context of park creation, and the processes by which colonial actors stole rights to land and created new laws and regulations dictating the people's relationships with and access to land. Scholars have shown that conservation discourses continue to normalize human rights abuses, Indigenous dispossession and displacement, and deadly violence against local peoples. These discursive tactics frame expertise and responsibility as residing in the hands of white elites who are tasked with saving imperiled environments from the people who depend on them for subsistence. I suggest that the military and conservation agendas were both operating within overlapping, constructed frameworks of crisis and emergency that constituted the resident communities as anti-environmental subjects. Discourses of environmental crisis in Leuser held a power that justified militarization while concealing the violence from international constituencies at a historical moment when an ideology of Western responsibility for threatened species around the world was growing. Moreover, the history of Leuser as viewed through the analytical framework of militarized conservation helps us rethink the history of Aceh. Through this framework, it becomes evident that the Dutch-Aceh War did not end in 1913, as many historians suggest, but instead continued throughout the colonial period.     

White Settler Society as Monster: Rural Southeast Kansas,Ancestral Osage (Wah‐Zha‐Zhi) Territories,and the Violence of Forgetting

This article provides a critical analysis of the practices and discourses of white settler “men” in Southeast Kansas (Ancestral Osage Territories) by examining the inextricable links rural masculinity has with settler colonialism. I begin by underscoring how efforts in erasing Indigenous histories have been sanctioned through processes of dispossession, bordering, and nation‐state building. I then explore how hetero‐patriarchal rural hierarchies are assembled via capitalistic desires for private property; conservative Christianity's rhetoric of altruism and good intentions; white supremacist conceptions of race; and masculinist perspectives regarding work and gender. Next, I highlight how the spatial assertion of white settler masculinity reproduces colonial oppressions based upon interlocking subject positions and notions of difference. I continue by suggesting denial and disaffiliation are banal exercises of disavowal employed by white settler societies as attempts to forget colonial violence. I then finish by illustrating how a masculinist status quo might be disrupted, resisted, and transformed.     

Reconstructing the Politics of Indigenous Identity in Chile

Current research questions how archaeology has reconstructed social identities based on material culture and ethnic groups. Recently, some Native populations from the Tarapacá region, Northern Chile, have claimed their indigenous rights and recognition as Andean First Nations. Using existing laws and programs developed by the Chilean government, they have redefined themselves as organised local communities. Their claims question archaeological practice in the production and reproduction of scientific knowledge, and its social repercussions in the property of land, water and cultural heritage. Within the Latin American social context, archaeology sometimes has avoided playing a political role, consequently conceding certain histories above others. As a social science, the discipline needs to evaluate its impact on archaeologically based identities which are sometimes politically alienated, modified, and appropriated to create new representations of the past legitimised in present time. This paper furthers a discussion of the politics of identity by focusing on the Chilean Aymara case and the legitimacy of its appropriation strategies.     

Reimagining sustainable cultures: constitutions, land and art

Globalisation is about the interconnection of peoples and places in accelerated ways, but it is also about resistance and adaptation in the face of change. Discussions of sustainability now incorporate both dynamic understandings of culture and the recognition that place matters because the practices that are in need of sustaining, as well as those that pose threats, happen in particular communities and in specific geographic contexts. Culture is codified not only in property rights and legislation, but also in the public artistic expressions of peoples and places. Case studies from Nunavut and Scotland show the interrelationships of sovereignty and claims to identity and community. Art, as a result of creative action in the case of Cape Dorset Inuit printmakers and carvers on Baffin Island, and a millennium tapestry telling the stories of the Isle of Harris, complement matters of property rights. Both discussions show that identity is about material culture and property relations in respect of land. Serious discussions of sustainability, in contrast to the technical practices frequently invoked using the term sustainable development, require considerations of the dynamics of complex cultural arrangements in particular places, rather than assumptions of stability of either peoples or their ecological contexts.     

The Redevelopmental State: Governing Surplus Life and Land in the ‘Urban Age’

This article theorizes changing configurations of development governance emerging as states attempt to reconcile two contradictory pressures of global urbanization: dispossessing capitalist accumulation and demands for inclusive welfare. It introduces the ‘redevelopmental state’ as a dynamic spatio‐political framework for understanding how hegemonic rule is tenuously forged amid potentially volatile urban land struggles. Whereas Northern urban redevelopment theories are less attentive to post‐colonial urbanization processes and most developmental state scholarship has not focused on cities, the redevelopmental state offers an alternative conceptualization. It centres on how emerging regimes of territorial rule, development and political participation contour access to land and social benefits in Southern cities. Forged at key conjunctures of social pressure, these redevelopmental state spaces work through and beyond formal policies and institutions, and articulate with nationalist cultural politics of belonging and aspiration that foster consent for redevelopment while also legitimating exclusions, violence and dispossession. A case study of Mumbai illustrates redevelopmental state spaces that suture ethno‐religious nationalism, urbanized accumulation and populist welfare to unevenly distribute life capacities, garnering both cooperation and contestation. The article concludes by suggesting ways this spatially attuned framing can provide insights into the recent rise of ethno‐nationalism and authoritarian populism around the world.