Paper short abstract:

Narratives on a past of land relations often have a certainty or constancy about them. This is challenged by looking at how temporality shape perceptions in accounts. Based on cases from Kenya, this paper explores the implications on people’s perceptions of identity and possibilities for the future.

Paper long abstract:

Narratives connected to a past of land relations often have an air of certainty and constancy about them, e.g. “we have been living here since…”. However, this certainty can be challenged by interrogating how temporal experiences shape and implicate perceptions of the past, present and future in individual people’s accounts on land relations. To this end, this paper draws on case stories from Kenya, analyzing the wide-ranging implications that multitemporal layers of land relations hold for people’s perceptions of their lives, identities and possibilities for the future. Specifically, we argue how narratives tying land relations to a subjective past inhibits certain future scenarios from taking form. Paying attention to temporality in narratives thereby emphasizes the continuity and open-endedness of what field-based researchers attempt to distill, while at the same time illustrating how future scenarios can become off-limits for narrators. The paper thus intends to affect analyses of the tricky terrains where narrated pasts become instrumentalized for unresolved land relations.