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- Convenors:
-
Maurice Said
(Durham University)
Alice Stefanelli (Durham University)
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- Stream:
- Displacements of Power
- Location:
- Julian Study Centre 1.03
- Sessions:
- Friday 6 September, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Across various contemporary contexts, land is at the centre of highly contested processes of patrimonialisation, restructuring and new boundary creation.These have resulted in far-reaching restructuring of material and social life, and in a sense of 'disruption and disorientation'.
Long Abstract:
Across various contemporary contexts, land is at the centre of highly contested processes of patrimonialisation, restructuring and new boundary creation, whether it be the erosion of commons, the establishment of new borderlands, and the creation of new economic zones. These have resulted in far-reaching restructuring of material and social life, and in a sense of 'disruption and disorientation' amongst the groups most affected by them.
In this panel, we are concerned with the politics surrounding such 'dislocations', which we understand with Harvey and Krohn Hansen as a phenomenon that implies 'spatial movement, but it also refers to other senses of disruption or disorientation, such as the sentiment of feeling out of place, or of losing your bearings or sense of self as things move and change around you' (ibid. 2018: 12).
In this regard, we seek contributions that engage with the following questions:
1. How does dislocation manifest itself ethnographically? What are its causes, and its consequences? (E.g. changes in policy and legislation, local manifestations of larger processes; dispossession, encroachment).
2. How do contested claims over land result in a sense of misplaced justice, voicelessness and political alienation? What strategies do actors mobilise to navigate, counter and mitigate these conflicts?
3. In what ways do land contestations expose cleavages between different interest groups, otherwise subsumed under the tenuous categories of public/private?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 6 September, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
From the analysis of judicial decisions of state courts of justice, the article discusses the use by the brazilian state of its penal system as an instrument of ethnic deconstitution of indigenous populations for the expropriation of lands and its inclusion into the agroindustrial production system
Paper long abstract:
The indigenous question in Brazil has always been an agrarian issue, indissociable from the economic purposes sought by the agrarian policy adopted in each political period. If in past times the conversion of "brave indians" into "meek indians" was carried out for the purpose of expanding colonial occupation over brazilian territory, the state treatment given to indigenous people today seeks to create means that enable the incorporation of their lands into the production logic of agroindustrial capitalism. In order to do so, it is necessary first to deconstitute the "indigenous land" and make it just "land", which, in turn, requires that the ethnic specificity of the indigenous being who inhabits it be disregarded. In this sense, the deindianization operated by the penal system is an inseparable part of the ethnocide machine of the contemporary brazilian state. Through this operation, although the indigenous person does not lose his/her ethnic self-identification, there is a kind of ontological transfiguration of the legal status used by the state to exempt itself from recognizing and enforcing indigenous rights, especially land rights. From an arbitrary judicial approach on who is indigenous or not, based on assumptions of a cultural essentialism clearly aimed at the inevitability of complete assimilation, it can be argued that the criminalization and imprisonment of indigenous people in Brazil currently serves this purpose as a neocolonial policy to eliminate indigenous identities, with the ultimate goal of opening up lands of traditional occupation to agroindustrial exploitation.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I trace how relationships to land have been formed, reformed and reimagined in the Madaba region of Jordan in the face of Bedouin settlement and social change. I historicise contemporary land regimes, contestations and protests through ethnographic life-histories and archival research.
Paper long abstract:
In Jordan as elsewhere, attempts to reform the nation-state also seek to reform land. In this paper I consider the role of land settlement in Jordan in efforts to build, reform and contest the nature of the nation-state, particular in relation to its putatively tribal or Bedouin subjects. I draw upon my doctoral fieldwork in the Madaba region, interweaving ethnographic material and oral life histories recorded in the villages of the Bani Sakhr and Bani Hamida Bedouin with archival material and secondary historical sources. I do so to historicise contemporary land conflicts and protests, tracing the emergence of ideas around land ownership historically. I consider the ways overlapping and often competing claims, usage rights and responsibilities to land have been the target of various developmental initiatives seeking (with only partial success) to create a legible system of absolute, individual and alienated ownership, expunging or de-legitimising other conceptions of land. The discourse of Jordan's relative stability is often explicitly linked to land as part of a wider moral economy tying together the country's Hashemite monarchy and the supposedly tribal East-Bank Jordanians, at once sustaining the symbolic significance of Bedouin/tribal heritage, while also pacifying and entangling them within the framework of the Nation-State - a moral economy increasingly seen as fraying in the face neo-liberal economic reforms. I critically examine this picture through a fine-grained analysis of political economy and social change in the area east and south of Madaba, including in light of recent protest movements.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses the factors that have led to tribal land alienation in South Asia and how Adivasis' struggles for autonomy constitute a response to their dispossession, based on a comparative study of the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh and of the tribal territories of Central India.
Paper long abstract:
This paper aims to analyse the various factors that have led to tribal land alienation in two South Asian countries and how indigenous struggles for autonomy constitute a response to the dispossession of Adivasis (original inhabitants of India and Bangladesh). These populations are neglected and discriminated against in both countries, where the Hindu and Bengali nationalist governments, respectively, have been contesting the very concept of indigeneity. In the official terminology, "scheduled tribes" form 8% of the Indian population, while in Bangladesh "small ethnic groups" are estimated around 2%.
While critical scholars have made extensive use of the concepts of primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession to analyse the so-called "global land grab", the everyday acquisition of tribal lands by the state, domestic corporations, local elites and mainstream agricultural settlers has received less attention in the literature on dispossession. More than forceful seizures taking place through extra-economic coercion, tribal land deals initiated by locally powerful groups often involve fraud, debt or false promises, all mechanisms on which there is little conceptual work and that this paper explores.
Based on a comparative study of indigenous movements for autonomy in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, and of the struggle for a separate tribal Gondwana state in Central India, this paper also tries to determine the extent to which autonomy constitutes a response to the dispossession of Adivasis.
Paper short abstract:
This paper documents the ways in which the ancestral land of the indigenous Pälawan is being threatened, appropriated and controlled by external actors. While environmental changes are leading to rises in malaria, malaria is also implicated in efforts by the Pälawan to resist and reclaim their land.
Paper long abstract:
For 16th century Spanish invaders, the forested uplands of Palawan island in the Philippines were to be avoided, teeming with "mal' aria" - fetid emanations from the mists and miasmas of decomposing vegetation where clusters of indigenous people lived. Although this offered inhabitants some initial protection from colonisation, over time, the forests were penetrated for cash cropping, disturbing the equilibrium between parasite, mosquito and humans. By the end of the 19th century, fever was the biggest killer among indigenous peoples. Today, struggles over land continue as political confrontations between governments, non-governmental organisations and businesses are at the centre of everyday life for the indigenous Pälawan that inhabit the southern tip of the island. This paper documents some of the causes and consequences of contemporary dislocation resulting from activities such as migration, conservation, tourism and mining. As in the past, land changes are also a significant factor in maintaining malaria transmission. However, this paper also shows how malaria presents opportunities for indigenous people to engage in strategic political tactics of their own to counter the effects of dislocation. For example, the increase in malaria and fever provides some panglimas (leaders) with a means to resist efforts to turn forests over to mining and presents a chance to hold on to land that has been theirs since 'time immemorial". As land degrades, relations are intensified between balayan (healers) and the spirits that imbue forest plants they use to treat 'traditional' fever. As such, they provide increasingly important services that "modern" professional cant.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses the interactions between boundary creation, capitalist enculturation and changing notions of land tenure in the context of tourism development zones along coastal Sri Lanka.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyses the interactions between boundary creation, capitalist enculturation and changing notions of land tenure in the context of tourism development zones along coastal Sri Lanka. Following the devastating Asian tsunami in 2004, the government of Sri Lanka introduced a no-build buffer zone along the coastline of the disaster affected areas. Whilst the policy placed restrictions on the repair of damaged homes and local businesses, the tourist industry was, however, exempt from the no-build buffer zone and was given special permissions to build hotels and restaurants within the no-build buffer zone. Such a policy has since invited a wave of land grabs and outsider-driven development spearheaded by representatives of the aid and tourism industry, foreign investors and urban Sinhalese entrepreneurs. As a result, construction taking place along the coast, the resultant privatisation of land and the removal of locals from their ancestral land has resulted in a sense of dislocation among coastal Sinhalese. This paper investigates coastal Sinalese's negotiation of land tenure across increasingly tenuous socio-political boundaries resulting from the rise of tourism development zones. I posit that through the negotiation of coastal development, simultaneously manifested through acts of resistance as well as acts of collusion, coastal Sinhalese establish the bases for novel patterns of kinship between themselves and 'outsiders' in a bid to retain control over ancestral land.