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- Convenors:
-
Jennifer Day
(The University of Melbourne)
Monica Minnegal (University of Melbourne)
Barbara Andersen (Massey University)
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- Discussant:
-
Benedicta Rousseau
(University of Melbourne)
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Thursday 25 November, -
Time zone: Australia/Sydney
Short Abstract:
This panel asks how people think about the nation as they negotiate uses of urbanised land. We invite papers from any geographies where custom mingles with introduced law, to describe how relational and categorical identities are mobilised in narratives about urban life, dispossession, and change.
Long Abstract:
This panel asks how people think about the nation as they negotiate uses of urbanised land in places when custom forms part of governance. In particular, we ask how people balance notions of nation against the 'right to the city'.
Cities, as sites of state power, pull into relief the tensions between nationhood and urbanisation. People without a customary claim to urban land are beginning to demand governance that recognises their place in the city - while at the same time valuing national narratives of indigenous landownership and customary governance. The idea of the nation, then, adapts and shifts in urban spaces. The relevance of the national narrative may be different for those autochthonous populations with an acknowledged birthright to the city, compared to those who must negotiate a right to the city by buying in or using custom.
We take an expanded interpretation of the term, nation, referring to narratives of national identity and sub-national or territorial identities. At the same time, we recognise the importance of the institutional apparatus of statehood: courts, laws, police, and government departments - the elements that mediate between and sometimes conflict with national identities. We recognise, too, that similar contradictions may be in play at other scales, wherever a central place (camp, village, town, city) emerges as the locus for aspirational futures.
We invite papers from any geographies where custom mingles with introduced law and institutions, to describe how relational and categorical identities are mobilised in narratives about urban life, dispossession, and change.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 25 November, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I propose that the state is a guest in Solomon Islands context to depict that the state does not have control over customary land and resources. This has an implication on the governance of rural and urban spaces.
Paper long abstract:
The Weberian or Westphalian state model serves as a frame for shaping narratives about the state in Solomon Islands. However, such narratives do not realistically reflect how the state operates spatially in terms of territory, politics and governance. In this paper, I propose that the state is a guest in Solomon Islands context to depict that the state does not have control over customary land and resources. This has an implication on the governance of rural and urban spaces.
NOTE: Jennie is not a co-author. I am just submitting this on Joe's behalf.
Paper short abstract:
Our research starts with the observation that people living under threat of eviction retain an apparently-universal faith in the customary landowner. We ask why people seeking to establish places of belonging in the city rarely if ever call for mediation of customary landowners’ land management.
Paper long abstract:
Our research starts with the observation from a recent series of interviews conducted in February 2021, that people living under threat of eviction retain an apparently-universal faith in the customary landowner and customary processes. Again and again, people are evicted from these kinds of lands, as customary landowners themselves appear to be much more ambivalent and to take varied positions on managing squatters and customary tenants. Landowners sometimes seek to honour ancestral agreements and customary arrangements— but also often seek to remove customary tenants when better opportunities for their land come along. The state – the Government of Vanuatu – is a central player in these evictions: customary landowners usually initiate evictions, and then state courts issue eviction orders, which are then carried out by police and paramilitary force.
People in urban Vanuatu negotiate tenure in myriad ways, from longstanding agreements via ancestors to contemporary rental practices. The state’s role in codifying land rights and customary land management is largely invisible, and people attribute their tenure security to the relationships between tenant and landowner. The relationship between the state, tenants, and landowners becomes legible at the point of eviction. When it comes time to decide whether a landowner’s interests should prevail over a tenant’s, people appeal to nationalist struggles that sparked the independence movement. The nation in urban Vanuatu, then, is seen as a source of potential settledness and calm amidst a backdrop of land-grabbing by international elites. This signals that the nationalism that gave rise to the state in 1980 is still strongly-felt by people resisting the state’s processes of dispossession.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores shifts in the articulation of ideals of political emplacement and landownership in Kundiawa, PNG. Anxiety about losing land to “foreigners” sits alongside a future-oriented, entrepreneurial hospitality that seeks to expand patronage networks by bringing in high-status tenants.
Paper long abstract:
Customary landownership is widely held up as the basis for national belonging and political recognition in Papua New Guinea. The citizen-as-landowner, while far from a universal reality, is a persistent ideal in political rhetoric, particularly among those outside major urban centres, for whom the possibility of being recognised as landowners is one of the few tangible promises of citizenship. This paper explores historical shifts in the articulation of ideals of political emplacement and landownership among residents of Kundiawa, Chimbu Province. Chimbu traditions, anthropologist Paula Brown wrote, tell of “fights, migrations, dispersal, and resettlement” (1979:124), frequently emphasising these stories of contestation over claims of occupation from time immemorial. Traditional ownership of Kundiawa has been disputed since before the arrival of the first Australian government patrol in 1933. As town development has intensified, tribal leaders on the town fringe have sought to leverage their status as makan nem (landowners, papa graun) to build a place for themselves in the provincial administration, embracing settlement processes and leases of customary land insofar as they allow members to develop patronage relationships and strengthen the tribe’s prestige. A persistent anxiety about losing land to “foreigners” sits alongside a future-oriented, entrepreneurial hospitality that seeks to expand patronage networks by bringing in high-status tenants. I consider how these political imaginaries are shaping the ambitions of young Chimbus aspiring to future leadership roles.
Paper short abstract:
Febi people dream of building a city on their land in a remote part of PNG. In thinking through what they imagine this city would be and would bring, we explore connections between new collective identities and the central places that may come to embody these as a locus for aspirational futures.
Paper long abstract:
‘Nation’ and ‘City’ are exemplars of much more general phenomena – categorical identities (language group, province) and the central sites (village, town) through which connections among and beyond the members of that category are channelled. Drawing on examples from Western Province, Papua New Guinea, we look at how relational logics of kinship and categorical logics of citizenship are articulated around such sites, regardless of scale. We begin with tales of imagined cities. Then, from the hamlet of Gwaimasi to the village of Suabi and the town of Kiunga, we trace how the emergence of these sites as loci for aspirational futures has changed the ways people assert or contest rights to a place in these assemblages.
At each scale, we see the work entailed in ‘cutting the network’ of kinship, with its sense of unbounded connection, to construct bounded groups of exclusive rights-holders. And we see, too, the tensions that may then emerge when bounded rights-groups operating at different scales (landowners, nations) are mobilised in assertion of rights to the same place: "I'm not a landowner here but I am a citizen".
Recent calls for residents of towns like Kiunga to return to their ‘own’ place (in other provinces, or in other regions of the same province), and resistance to those calls through assertions of a ‘right’ to remain, replicate discourses we have seen at smaller scales. They strategically play with relational and categorical logics, in ways that render the idea of custom as a distinct form of governance problematic.
Paper short abstract:
Following extensive urban expansion, Ulaanbaatar residents accessing property engage in forms of dwelling to assert rights to land. Temporary possession provides avenues for residents to reconceptualise place and belonging, challenging manifestations of power within municipal and national politics.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will examine how residents in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, conceptualise and diversify understandings of political power and influence in Ulaanbaatar. Following varied postsocialist land tenure reforms after 1990, the capital of Mongolia has become a space whereby mobile pastoralist usufructuary land access has shaped the unfolding of postsocialist urban land privatisation. There now exists gradations of legal categories of land access, spanning forms of temporary possession or ezemshil to outright ‘permanent’ ownership or ömchlöl. Within these larger categories exist other use rights, including protecting land as a way of ‘holding’ it in place. In practice, what has arisen is a malleable urban space whereby forms of ‘holding’ land in place through the act of dwelling on land or having other dwell on it for you, have become paramount ways in which residents exercise land use rights. Dwelling forms a fundamental way people acquire and keep land as a type of expanding investment or höröngö, whether financial or as a home.
Following extensive forms of outsourced private development as well as increasing land prices over the past decade, Ulaanbaatar residents negotiating access to property have heavily drawn on forms of dwelling in order to assert the right (erh) to land. Here, forms of temporary possession provide avenues for residents to reconceptualise space, place, and belonging in different areas of the city. Dwelling forms part of residential political counternarratives that can challenge developers, bureaucrats and manifestations of power within interlinked municipal and national political spheres.