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Accepted Paper:

“This is a new land”: novelty and territorial possibility on Ghana’s eroding coast  
Netty Carey (University of Florida)

Paper short abstract:

Residents of Ghana's eroding Volta delta resist the conversion of their natal town to a high-class resort. As delta sand accretes and subsides, residents find political possibilities in the novelty of freshly dredged ground.

Paper long abstract:

In 2013, Government of Ghana (GoG) leased land in Kedzi, a Volta estuary fishing village, to Trasacco Estates Development Company Ltd. (TEDC) for resort and marina development. Touted as the Dangme East District’s answer to GoG’s “One District, One Factory” initiative, the project threatens to displace thousands of delta residents and destroy sea turtle nesting habitat on a coast already ravaged by erosion. In the seven years since TEDC’s acquisition, the venture has repeatedly stalled and remains an uncertain possibility. My ethnography thus explores the social world assembled around this project and its prospects. Using the words and stories of the people of Kedzi, this paper recasts the history of this eroding delta and its relationship to the developmental aspirations of the state through the vantage of sand. Sand accretes and subsides with the tides; is heaped, dredged, mined, obstructed, and flattened by a state intent on controlling the water’s movements to save habitats and make profitable property. With each change of this shifting sandscape, residents, entrepreneurs, chiefs, developers, and bureaucrats reterritorialize the land that emerges. This history highlights the difficulty of defining property lines in a place where the boundary between land and water is perpetually in flux. In the novelty of freshly dredged ground, residents find openings in GoG’s natural resource bureaucracy to claim protections from a state that may otherwise allow their displacement.

Panel PHum08b
Toward an elemental anthropology: working through sand II
  Session 1 Tuesday 22 June, 2021, -