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Paper short abstract

This paper investigates family land possession and its interface with bureaucratic ownership. Based on research in Kathmandu, it explores the reliance of financialized markets on non-transactional land possession and examines how this reliance produces transgressive modes of wealth accumulation.

Paper long abstract

It has been established that family or communal landownership often forms a disjuncture with private property regimes. However, the reason for this disjuncture remains a matter of debate. While many have argued that it stems from either incommensurable valuations of land’s importance or from local resistance to market incursion, this paper explores how communal and kin-based landownership relies upon a kind of distributed management that transaction-based models of property cannot capture. Based on ethnographic research in Kathmandu’s booming land market, it explores how the nation’s formal ownership system was often at odds with family landownership, even though this formal system codified land as the communal property of the kin group, thereby mimicking the land management practices of the traditional Hindu joint-family. To analyze this surprising disjuncture, the paper proposes a dichotomy between closed and open land possession, in which individual rights to land are either made explicit (as is necessary for private property) or are purposefully left ambiguous (as was the case with most families I followed). It then investigates how this dichotomy became central to the financialization and inflation of Kathmandu land market It argues that not only are non-transactional modes of possession important to late capitalism’s systems of circulation, but that, within this disjuncture, new and transgressive approaches to wealth accumulation are emerging. To make this final point, the paper ends by examining the figure of the land broker, and their unorthodox approach to managing the interstitial spaces between family and market.