‘A wolf in sheep’s clothing’: settler voting rights and the elimination of the Indigenous demos in US Pacific territories

Settler colonialism eliminates Indigenous sovereignty, enthrones itself, and thereby makes Indigenous land ‘ours’. It may do this meta-politically, by absorbing ‘them’ into ‘us’. This article explores three recent lawsuits brought by settlers against Indigenous demoi in US Pacific territories. I show that in each lawsuit, settlers brandished a novel ‘tool of elimination’: individual voting rights. I trace how settlers wielded this tool to deliver a ‘one-two punch’, first condemning as ‘illiberal’ restrictive voting laws flowing from Indigenous sovereignty and then championing race-neutral laws that would in effect enthrone settlers. I show that courts hearing these cases were faced with choosing the appropriate ‘framing of justice’ – with whether the relevant rights-bearer was the universal individual voter or the ‘constitutionally prior’ Indigenous demos. Finally, I show that, because the courts ultimately framed these disputes as individual-rights cases, settlers extended control of meta-politics on the US Pacific frontier.     

Gendered struggles over land: shifting inheritance practices among the Serer in rural Senegal

Although women’s land rights are often affirmed unequivocally in constitutions and international human rights conventions in many African countries, customary practices usually prevail on the ground and often deny women’s land inheritance. Yet land inheritance often goes unnoticed in wider policy and development initiatives to promote women’s equal access to land. This article draws on feminist ethnographic research among the Serer ethnic group in two contrasting rural communities in Senegal. Through analysis of land governance, power relations and ‘technologies of the self’, this article shows how land inheritance rights are contingent on the specific effects of intersectionality in particular places. The contradictions of legal pluralism, greater adherence to Islam and decentralisation led to greater application of patrilineal inheritance practices. Gender, religion and ethnicity intersected with individuals’ marital position, status, generation and socio-ecological change to constrain land inheritance rights for women, particularly daughters, and widows who had been in polygamous unions and who remarried. Although some women were aware that they were legally entitled to inherit a share of the land, they tended not to ‘demand their rights’. In participatory workshops, micro-scale shifts in women’s and men’s positionings reveal a recognition of the gender discriminatory nature of customary and Islamic laws and a desire to ‘change with the times’. While the effects of ‘reverse’ discourses are ambiguous and potentially reinforce prevailing patriarchal power regimes, ‘counter’ discourses, which emerged in participatory spaces, may challenge customary practices and move closer to a rights-based approach to gender equality and women’s land inheritance.     

Villagizing the city: turning rural ethnic heritage into urban modernity in southwest China

This paper examines the rural ethnic heritage-inspired transformation of the built environment of a relatively small county town in China. The paper explores the ways village-based ethnic heritage is being repositioned by local leaders as a resource for tourism-oriented revenue generation and for ‘improving’ the ‘quality’ and behaviour of town residents. Viewing heritage as a ‘technology of government,’ the paper provides an analysis based on three interrelated themes: the discourses by which town leaders and planners have conceived the heritage development project as one of improvement, the spatial practices by which those discourses have been realised in the built environment, and the ways residents themselves have appropriated and ‘inhabited’ this new ‘villagized’ city as they go about their everyday urban lives. Based on ethnographic field work, a survey, and extended interviews over a period of four years, the paper finds the town leadership’s faith in the ability of the built environment to shape and improve the conduct of citizens to be overstated. While the town’s transformation has generated a new sense of urban modernity among residents, their ways of inhabiting and using urban space have little relevance to the ‘heritagized’ environment in which they now live.     

Está listo (Are you ready)? Gender,race and land registration in the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve

Geographers and political ecologists are paying increased attention to the ways in which conservation policies disrupt indigenous customary tenure arrangements. However, much less attention is given to the particular ways protected area management shapes natural resource access for indigenous women. With this in mind, this article examines how a recently proposed state land project in Honduras, Catastro y Regularización, requires that Miskito residents individuate collective family lands in the interests of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘biodiversity protection’. In the debates that followed the project's announcement, Miskito women feared that such measures would erase their customary access to family lands. As the state's project seeks to re-order Reserve land, intra-Miskito struggles intensified among villagers. Such struggles are not only gendered but are shaped by longstanding processes of racialization in Honduras and the Mosquitia region. Drawing upon ethnographic research, I argue that Miskito women's subjectivity and rights to customary family holdings are informed by their ability to make ‘patriarchal bargains’ with Miskito men inside the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve. Such findings suggest that scholars and policy makers continue to reflect on the ways global conservation and sustainable development practices may undermine indigenous customary tenure securities, whether intentionally or not.     

Modernizing Insecurity: The Land Titling Project in Honduras

The Honduran land titling project (the Proyecto de Titulación de Tierra para los Pequeños Productores), initiated in 1982, was intended to enhance security in land rights, to facilitate credit and to improve agricultural productivity. This study explores how the project has operated in one village, and concludes that it has attained none of its objectives; instead, it has triggered new sources of land conflicts, thus adding to the existing complex of local rules and laws. The authors argue that the failure of the project is not solely a consequence of the organizational incapacity of the bureaucracy, as some evaluations suggest, but that it is rooted in mistaken assumptions about the social organization of property rights and the causes of insecurity. The land titling project is founded on a contradiction: although based on the ideology of the capitalizing family farm in the context of a withdrawing state, its implementation actually requires strong and repressive state intervention. Rather than reducing insecurity in property rights, the project has merely ‘modernized’ the sources which can be used to contest rights in land.     

Struggles of recognition: adverse effects of China’s living human treasures program

ABSTRACT

Heritagization processes have resulted in struggles of recognition across the globe. Scholarly work has demonstrated that determining what and whose cultural architecture, objects and practices are to be considered ‘heritage’ results in inclusion and exclusion effects which deprive some individuals, communities or ethnic groups of recognition. Many of these studies build on Western theories of recognition as developed by Axel Honneth or Nancy Fraser. However, due to the Western origin of these theories and – in most cases – application to democratic nation-states, the question arises whether Western theories of recognition can in fact be applied to non-Western authoritarian states. Taking the Chinese LHT system, the so-called ‘representative ICH Inheritor program,’ as a case study, I explore to what extent Western theories of recognition explain struggles of recognition in PR China. I argue that while these theories are useful in explaining the effects and purposes underlying struggles of recognition, authoritarian regimes like China may exacerbate struggles of recognition since their ‘institutional patterns of value recognition’ can more openly and forcefully use recognition and misrecognition as a tool to foster political and economic objectives. However, citizens respond by resigning, contesting or circumventing official decision-making processes.     

Third Wave Evangelism and the Politics of the Global in Papua New Guinea: Spiritual Warfare and the Recreation of Place in Telefolmin

Third Wave pentecostalist theology envisages a global struggle against satanic forces as ‘spiritual warfare.’ Here I examine an instance of spiritual warfare that targeted the village of Telefolip as part of a national campaign. Embracing evangelical doctrines of the dependence of ‘physical development’ on ‘spiritual development,’ villagers burned ancestral relics and purport to have found ‘uranium gas’ on the site of a former spirit house. This discovery is held to be full of promise for the future: as a valuable (if imaginary) resource in Israel's struggles, uranium gas offers villagers wealth and a means of asserting local centrality in global terms. I conclude by arguing that an understanding of the conjunction of spiritual warfare's aims with villagers' hopes for a place in the world beyond the village is crucial to analyzing the dynamics of pentecostalist world‐breaking and world‐making.     

Land titling and poverty reduction in Southeast Asia: realising markets or realising rights?∗

AusAID has supported land titling projects in Southeast Asia with the World Bank for over two decades. These involve the first-time issuance of a land title in cases where the ownership rights of current occupiers are largely assured. Reflecting neoliberal thinking on private property rights and development, the rationale is that titling builds land markets and increases tenure security, investment and access to institutional credit. However, international research indicates that land titling can be neither sufficient or necessary to deliver such benefits and, under some circumstances, can harm poor landholders’ wellbeing. In this respect, attention is paid to political factors in addition to property rights per se which influence their tenure security. It is argued that the value which neoliberalism places on the exclusivity of ownership of land, to enable its efficient use and allocation, can be in conflict with the importance to poor people of secure access and use rights. If AusAID is to fully commit to poverty reduction goals, then there will need to be more attention paid to the social justice dimensions of land distribution in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.     

New Boundaries of Influence in Highland Papua: ‘Culture’, Mining and Ritual Conversions

This article considers the new boundaries of influence among Fuyuge speakers in the Udabe Valley (Central Province, Papua New Guinea [PNG]). These new boundaries have arisen through the conjunction of epochal shifts implicating the PNG State, and local forms of ritual. On the one hand the PNG State's particular advocacy of widespread resource extraction is coupled with its need to comply to signed agreements of international bodies such as the World Trade Organization. Both have consequences for the way boundaries are newly conceived with respect to the ‘land’ (‘landowners’) and with respect to ‘culture’ (‘cultural property’). On the other hand, peoples such as the Fuyuge create and recreate local boundaries of influence through the performance of ritual conversions ‐ as regards persons, place names, or collective names. At the same time a local Fuyuge perspective on ‘culture’ suggests that its boundaries be delineated, analogous to the definitions of boundaries for ‘landowners’ compelled by mining operations. The article highlights connections between these local changes and the current concerns of PNG academic scholars to mandate the protection of localised PNG cultural property, an outgrowth of current epochal alterations.     

‘If You Can't Pronounce My Name,You Can Just Call Me Pride’: Afro‐German Activism,Gender and Hip Hop

The history of the black German minority, now estimated at around 500,000, goes back several centuries. It is only since the twentieth century, however, that Germans of African descent have been perceived as a group. This did not lead to their recognition as a national minority, but rather, from the 1910s to the 1960s, they were defined as a collective threat to Germany's racial and cultural ‘purity’. When a sense of identity emerged among Afro‐Germans themselves in the 1980s, the majority population continued to deny the existence of ethnic diversity within German society. At the turn of the twenty‐first century, Afro‐Germans seemingly suddenly appeared as a new, ‘hip’ minority. This appearance was largely focused on the immense public success of the Hip Hop collective ‘Brothers Keepers’, conceived as an anti‐racist, explicitly Afro‐German intervention into German debates around national identity and racist violence. This article explains the success of ‘Brothers Keepers’ by contextualising it within the tradition of two decades of Afro‐ German feminist activism and the transnational Hip Hop movement of European youth of colour.     

Intertextual relations: The geopolitics of land rights in Thailand

This paper explores the geopolitics surrounding the “modernization” of the formal property rights regime in land in Thailand (formerly Siam) from the mid 1850s to the late 1930s. The paper argues that this weak, peripheral state, in pursuit of international recognition of territorial and jurisdictional sovereignty, employed a strategy of “counter-spatialization” in order to mitigate or deny claims for control over natural resources and population groups by imperial powers. The intertextual dimensions of this “spatial” mode of resistance are elucidated through a close reading of the ways in which diplomatic negotiations of a series of unequal treaties, beginning with the Anglo-Siamese treaty of 1855, shaped—and were shaped by—the formulation and implementation of regulations governing formal property rights in land in Siam. The political economy of land rights at the large scale (local implementation of land titling) and the medium scale (enactment of national land laws) was nested within a process of geopolitical contestation over land rights at the small scale (international recognition of Siamese territorial sovereignty).     

Caring for Country: History and Alchemy in the Making and Management of Indigenous Australian Land

This paper traces the history of ‘caring for country’ tropes in writing about indigenous Australian land and land management. While ‘caring for country’ initially referred to dynamic land use and ownership practices, it progressively became a less historical, more primordial, conception of indigenous land ownership, use, and management. In reviewing constructions of ‘land’ in scholarly literatures and policy debates, I seek to explain how they interact with local indigenous practices and idioms. Drawing on examples from the cultural and linguistic fields of A?angu, speakers of Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara, I examine a variety of concurrent uses of ‘country’, ‘caring’, or ‘nurturance’ and ‘caring for country’. A cross‐linguistic perspective on these objectifications – in English, Aboriginal English, and central Australian indigenous languages – shows how they may attend selectively to the historical specificity of indigenous experience. But this, I argue, may be the key to their efficacy in intercultural projects. Coded messages in bilingual documents reflect a kind of agency whereby A?angu choose to leave equivocal histories unstated and thereby reconstitute government projects in terms that work for them. The referential flexibility around idioms of land and nurturance is a kind of alchemy in language and social life that is the condition of the success of actual land management activities. Terms including ‘country’ and ‘caring for country’ elide the socio‐political dynamics that otherwise complicate actual rights and uses of land. That is why they can form the social basis of common activities, the production of ‘congeniality’ both within A?angu social life and at the interface with outsiders, in land management and other fields.     

Territory and lithium extraction: The Great Land of Lipez and the Uyuni Salt Flat in Bolivia

The Uyuni salt flat in Bolivia is a strategic location with a vast deposit of lithium; a key mineral for the production of Li-ion batteries for electric vehicles and energy storage. Over time, the Uyuni salt flat has become a space of contestation and grievances over its mineral resources, its territorial limits and for the most ambitious State-led project for lithium extraction and industrialization in Bolivian history. The paper aims to interrogate how notions of space ownership are intertwined with the governance of strategic resources such as lithium. Using qualitative primary data collected in Bolivia between 2014 and 2017, I explore the case of the Uyuni salt flat and the territorial arrangements of the nearby region (southwest region also known as the Land of Lipez). By examining the geo-spatial history, this case, I argue, illustrates geo-spatial delimitations are inherently political, contested and co-produced by the surrounding communities to define forms of access to and control of resources and the territory. The co-production of territory and the governance of its resources produces new spatial and political configurations in which there is a growing tension in terms of the recognition of indigenous land rights in spaces where the extractive frontier is expanding and the State maintains and perpetuates power imbalances in the sphere of decision-making. As this case shows, the history, the struggles over the governance of its resources and the land titling process behind reveal a territorial project in constant making and entangled in a political project to control mining of lithium in Bolivia.     

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.     

The Politics of Disciplining Water Rights

This article examines how the legal systems of Andean countries have dealt with the region's huge plurality of local water rights, and how official policies to ‘recognize’ local rights and identities harbour increasingly subtle politics of codification, confinement and disciplining. The autonomy and diversity of local water rights are a major hindrance for water companies, elites and formal rule‐enforcers, since State and market institutions require a predictable, uniform playing field. Complex local rights orders are seen as irrational, ill‐defined and disordered. Officialdom cannot simply ignore or oppress the ‘unruliness and disobedience’ of local rights systems: rather it ‘incorporates’ local normative orders that have the capacity to adequately respond to context‐based needs. This article examines a number of evolving, overlapping legal domination strategies, such as the ‘marrying’ of local and official legal systems in ways that do not challenge the legal and power hierarchy; and reviews the ways in which official regulation and legal strategies deny or take into consideration local water rights repertoires, and the politics of recognition that these entail. Post‐colonial recognition policies are not simply responses to demands by subjugated groups for greater autonomy. Rather, they facilitate the water bureaucracy's political control and help neoliberal sectors to incorporate local water users’ rights and organizations into the market system — even though many communities refuse to accept these policies of recognition and politics of containment.     

Gender,Identity and Agency in Philippine Upland Development

Conventional feminist political analysis has considered male interests as historically institutionalized by the state, thereby claiming that women are largely ‘edged out’ in state programmes. By studying a state programme of granting ancestral domain tenurial rights to the Kalanguya in the northern Philippines, this article argues instead that women also edge themselves out. Kalanguya village women have linked with markets and are less interested in tenurial struggles with the state since such struggles underscore their indigeneity and their special role as resource managers, an identity they wish to discard. Men, for their part, attach themselves to the past and identify themselves as being ‘indigenous’ to make claims on land in the present, strategically aligning themselves with the state agenda on sustainable resource management. This article explores perspectives that provide more nuanced understandings of the different ways in which women and men may position and identify themselves as ‘indigenous’ as they engage with state programmes and markets, and argues that, under certain conditions, women through their agency may not be the natural constituency for natural resource management‐related programmes that they are often assumed to be.     

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.     

The socionature that neo-extractivism can see: Practicing redistribution and compensation around large-scale mining in the Southern Ecuadorian Amazon

In this article I address the complex processes of transformation taking place due to industrial mineral extraction in the Ecuadorian Amazon through a focus on state and company led practices of redistribution, social investment and compensation. The analysis of three empirical examples related to the Mirador industrial mining project is viewed in relation to a more extensive assembling of a mining surface. I introduce the concept ‘surfacing’ to refer to discursive and material practices that state and corporate actors make use of to manage, facilitate and enact a redistributive economic policy, and at the same time produce value in and for the global capitalist market. A main argument is that these practices make certain socio-natural relations visible to the project of large-scale mining while obscuring affected peoples' ‘place-based life projects’. Restricted by neo-extractivist modes of recognition, of ‘seeing’ and ‘not-seeing’, indigenous Shuar, and mestizo livestock peasants, colonos, respond to mining intervention based on their differentiated engagements and trajectories with the Amazonian landscape and ecology. The paper is an intent to understand geosocial transformations and the differentiated practices of non-recognition while analyzing these responses.     

Governmental extractivism in Colombia: Legislation,securitization and the local settings of mining control

This paper analyzes the previous decade of governmental extractivism in Colombia, designed and imposed through two main power mechanisms: legislation and securitization. In examining the government's disposition and the territorialized settings of mining control, I identify two official architectures of rights: one supporting the private accumulation of capital through the foreign exploitation of mining resources and the other aiming to concede ethnic rights. While the two architectures compete in the juridical arena, a violent dispute has developed in the overlap between the geographies of mining concessions and the geographies of ethnic communities within the territorial settings of mining control. Legal and illegal military securitization has emerged as a complementary mechanism for territorial control. By looking at the case of La Toma in the Alto Cauca region, I conclude that the country's previous two presidencies have actively promoted differentiated access to and control over land-based resources, excluding Afrodescendant communities from accessing the environmental goods in their territories while favouring private actors.