BiblioVault - Books about Land tenure

Cartographic Mexico

A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes

Raymond B. Craib

Duke University Press, 2004

In Cartographic Mexico, Raymond B. Craib analyzes the powerful role cartographic routines such as exploration, surveying, and mapmaking played in the creation of the modern Mexican state in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such routines were part of a federal obsession—or “state fixation”—with determining and “fixing” geographic points, lines, and names in order to facilitate economic development and political administration. As well as analyzing the maps that resulted from such routines, Craib examines in close detail the processes that eventually generated them. Taking central Veracruz as a case in point, he shows how in the field, agrarian officials, military surveyors, and metropolitan geographers traversed a “fugitive landscape” of overlapping jurisdictions and use rights, ambiguous borders, shifting place names, and villagers with their own conceptions of history and territory. Drawing on an array of sources—including maps, letters from peasants, official reports, and surveyors’ journals and correspondence—Craib follows the everyday, contested processes through which officials attempted to redefine and codify such fugitive landscapes in struggle with the villagers they encountered in the field. In the process, he vividly demonstrates how surveying and mapmaking were never mere technical procedures: they were, and remain to this day, profoundly social and political practices in which surveyors, landowners, agrarian bureaucrats, and peasants all played powerful and complex roles.

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Cattle Bring Us to Our Enemies

Turkana Ecology, Politics, and Raiding in a Disequilibrium System

J. Terrence McCabe

University of Michigan Press, 2004

An in-depth look at the ecology, history, and politics of land use among the Turkana pastoral people in Northern Kenya

Based on sixteen years of fieldwork among the pastoral Turkana people, McCabe examines how individuals use the land and make decisions about mobility, livestock, and the use of natural resources in an environment characterized by aridity, unpredictability, insecurity, and violence. The Turkana are one of the world's most mobile peoples, but understanding why and how they move is a complex task influenced by politics, violence, historical relations among ethnic groups, and the government, as well as by the arid land they call home.

As one of the original members of the South Turkana Ecosystem Project, McCabe draws on a wealth of ecological data in his analysis. His long-standing relationship with four Turkana families personalize his insights and conclusions, inviting readers into the lives of these individuals, their families, and the way they cope with their environment and political events in daily life.

J. Terrence McCabe is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Colorado at Boulder.

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The Clay We Are Made Of

Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River

Susan M. Hill

University of Manitoba Press, 2017

Colonial Lives of Property

Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership

Brenna Bhandar

Duke University Press, 2018

In Colonial Lives of Property Brenna Bhandar examines how modern property law contributes to the formation of racial subjects in settler colonies and to the development of racial capitalism. Examining both historical cases and ongoing processes of settler colonialism in Canada, Australia, and Israel and Palestine, Bhandar shows how the colonial appropriation of indigenous lands depends upon ideologies of European racial superiority as well as upon legal narratives that equate civilized life with English concepts of property. In this way, property law legitimates and rationalizes settler colonial practices while it racializes those deemed unfit to own property. The solution to these enduring racial and economic inequities, Bhandar demonstrates, requires developing a new political imaginary of property in which freedom is connected to shared practices of use and community rather than individual possession.

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Community of Peace

Performing Geographies of Ecological Dignity in Colombia

Christopher Courtheyn

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022

Achieving peace is often thought about in terms of military operations or state negotiations. Yet it also happens at the grassroots level, where communities envision and create peace on their own. The San José de Apartadó Peace Community of small-scale farmers has not waited for a top-down peace treaty. Instead, they have actively resisted forced displacement and co-optation by guerrillas, army soldiers, and paramilitaries for two decades in Colombia’s war-torn Urabá region. Based on ethnographic action research over a twelve-year period, Christopher Courtheyn illuminates the community’s understandings of peace and territorial practices against ongoing assassinations and displacement. San José’s peace through autonomy reflects an alternative to traditional modes of politics practiced through electoral representation and armed struggle. Courtheyn explores the meaning of peace and territory, while also interrogating the role of race in Colombia’s war and the relationship between memory and peace. Amid the widespread violence of today’s global crisis, Community of Peace illustrates San José’s rupture from the logics of colonialism and capitalism through the construction of political solidarity and communal peace.

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Competing Norms

State Regulations and Local Praxis in sub-Saharan Africa

Edited by Mamadou Diawara and Ute Röschenthaler

Campus Verlag, 2016

States in sub-Saharan Africa, as anywhere else, are vested with the authority to implement laws and sanction their application. But in spite of a growing emphasis in Africa on participatory approaches to legislation, little research has focused on the extent to which the public has become involved in policy making and whether the state regulations that have been produced have proven publicly beneficial. Offering a new anthropological perspective, Competing Norms fills that gap by exploring how people in sub-Saharan Africa view new regulations in the light of preexisting local norms with which new regulations often compete. A collection of international, interdisciplinary contributors discusses the competing local, state, and international norms as they have evolved over time, unfolding the intricate ambivalences and contradictions that often characterize state regulations.

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Conflicts over Coca Fields in Sixteenth-Century Perú

María Rostworowski de Diez Canseco

University of Michigan Press, 1988

Many archaeologists and ethnohistorians use historic documents to help interpret prehistoric archaeological sequences. A sixteenth-century Spanish document called Justicia 413 has been instrumental in helping researchers understand conflict among the prehistoric polities of coastal Peru. Volume 4 of the subseries Studies in Latin American Ethnohistory & Archaeology.

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Conservation Through Cultural Survival

Indigenous Peoples And Protected Areas

Edited by Stan Stevens

Island Press, 1997

For more than a century the establishment of national parks and protected areas was a major threat to the survival of indigenous people. The creation of parks based on wilderness ideals outlawed traditional ways of life and forced from their homelands peoples who had shaped and preserved local ecosystems for centuries.

Today such tragic conflicts are being superseded by new alliances for conservation. Conservation Through Cultural Survival assesses cutting-edge efforts to establish new kinds of parks and protected areas which are based on partnerships with indigenous peoples. It chronicles new conservation thinking and the establishment around the world of indigenously inhabited protected areas, provides detailed case studies of the most important types of co-managed and indigenously managed areas, and offers guidelines, models, and recommendations for international action. The book:

discusses the goals and development of the global protected area system
assesses the strengths and limitations of a range of different types of indigenously inhabited protected areas
discusses key issues and indigenous peoples' concerns
recommends measures to promote conservation
suggests international actions that would promote co-managed and indigenously managed areas

Contributors who have been actively involved in projects around the world provide in-depth accounts from Nepal, Australia, New Guinea, Nicaragua, Honduras, Canada, and Alaska of some of the most promising efforts to develop protected areas where indigenous peoples maintain their rights to settlement and subsistence and participate in management.

Conservation Through Cultural Survival will be required reading for environmentalists, protected area planners and managers, and all who care about the future of indigenous peoples and their homelands.

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Constellations of Inequality

Space, Race, and Utopia in Brazil

Sean T. Mitchell

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Winner of the 2018 Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Brazil Section Book Prize

In 1982, the Brazilian Air Force arrived on the Alcântara peninsula to build a state-of-the-art satellite launch facility. They displaced some 1,500 Afro-Brazilians from coastal land to inadequate inland villages, leaving many more threatened with displacement. Completed in 1990, this vast undertaking in one of Brazil’s poorest regions has provoked decades of conflict and controversy.

Constellations of Inequality tells this story of technological aspiration and the stark dynamics of inequality it laid bare. Sean T. Mitchell analyzes conflicts over land, ethnoracial identity, mobilization among descendants of escaped slaves, military-civilian competition in the launch program, and international intrigue. Throughout, he illuminates Brazil’s changing politics of inequality and examines how such inequality is made, reproduced, and challenged. How people conceptualize and act on the unequal conditions in which they find themselves, he shows, is as much a cultural and historical matter as a material one. Deftly broadening our understanding of race, technology, development, and political consciousness on local, national, and global levels, Constellations of Inequality paints a portrait of contemporary Brazil that will interest a broad spectrum of readers.

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Contested Territories

Native Americans and Non-Natives in the Lower Great Lakes, 1700-1850

Charles Beatty-Medina

Michigan State University Press, 2012

A remarkable multifaceted history, Contested Territories examines a region that played an essential role in America's post-revolutionary expansion—the Lower Great Lakes region, once known as the Northwest Territory. As French, English, and finally American settlers moved westward and intersected with Native American communities, the ethnogeography of the region changed drastically, necessitating interactions that were not always peaceful. Using ethnohistorical methodologies, the seven essays presented here explore rapidly changing cultural dynamics in the region and reconstruct in engaging detail the political organization, economy, diplomacy, subsistence methods, religion, and kinship practices in play. With a focus on resistance, changing worldviews, and early forms of self-determination among Native Americans, Contested Territories demonstrates the continuous interplay between actor and agency during an important era in American history.

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Courage Tastes of Blood

The Mapuche Community of Nicolás Ailío and the Chilean State, 1906-2001

Florencia E. Mallon

Duke University Press, 2005

Until now, very little about the recent history of the Mapuche, Chile’s largest indigenous group, has been available to English-language readers. Courage Tastes of Blood helps to rectify this situation. It tells the story of one Mapuche community—Nicolás Ailío, located in the south of the country—across the entire twentieth century, from its founding in the resettlement process that followed the military defeat of the Mapuche by the Chilean state at the end of the nineteenth century. Florencia E. Mallon places oral histories gathered from community members over an extended period of time in the 1990s in dialogue with one another and with her research in national and regional archives. Taking seriously the often quite divergent subjectivities and political visions of the community’s members, Mallon presents an innovative historical narrative, one that reflects a mutual collaboration between herself and the residents of Nicolás Ailío.

Mallon recounts the land usurpation Nicolás Ailío endured in the first decades of the twentieth century and the community’s ongoing struggle for restitution. Facing extreme poverty and inspired by the agrarian mobilizations of the 1960s, some community members participated in the agrarian reform under the government of socialist president Salvador Allende. With the military coup of 1973, they suffered repression and desperate impoverishment. Out of this turbulent period the Mapuche revitalization movement was born. What began as an effort to protest the privatization of community lands under the military dictatorship evolved into a broad movement for cultural and political recognition that continues to the present day. By providing the historical and local context for the emergence of the Mapuche revitalization movement, Courage Tastes of Blood offers a distinctive perspective on the evolution of Chilean democracy and its rupture with the military coup of 1973.

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Culture and Inference

A Trobriand Case Study

Edwin Hutchins

Harvard University Press, 1980

This book takes a major step in psychological anthropology by applying new analytic tools from cognitive science to one of the oldest and most vexing anthropological problems: the nature of "primitive" thought.

For a decade or more there has been broad agreement within anthropology that culture might be usefully viewed as a system of tacit rules that constrain the meaningful interpretation of events and serve as a guide to action. However, no one has made a serious attempt to write a cultural grammar that would make such rules explicit. In Culture and Inference Edwin Hutchins makes just such an attempt for one enormously instructive case, the Trobriand Islanders' system of land tenure.

Using the propositional network notation developed by Rumeihart and Norman, Hutchins describes native knowledge about land tenure as a set of twelve propositions. Inferences are derived from these propositions by a set of transfer formulas that govern the way in which static knowledge about land tenure can be applied to new disputes. After deriving this descriptive system by extensive observation of the Trobrianders' land courts and by interrogation of litigants, Hutchins provides a test of his grammar by showing how it can be used to simulate decisions in new cases.

What is most interesting about these simulations, generally, is that theyrequire all the same logical operations that arise from a careful analysis of Western thought. Looking closely at "primitive" inference in a natural situation, Hutchins finds that Trobriand reasoning is no more primitive than our own.

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Culture and the Question of Rights

Forests, Coasts, and Seas in Southeast Asia

Charles Zerner, ed.

Duke University Press, 2003

This collection of ethnographic and interpretive essays fundamentally alters the debate over indigenous land claims in Southeast Asia and beyond. Based on fieldwork conducted in Malaysia and Indonesia during the 1980s and 1990s, these studies explore new terrain at the intersection of environmental justice, nature conservation, cultural performance, and the politics of making and interpreting claims.
Calling for radical redefinitions of development and ownership and for new understandings of the translation of culture and rights in politically dangerous contexts—natural resource frontiers—this volume links social injustice and the degradation of Southeast Asian environments. Charles Zerner and his colleagues show how geographical areas once viewed as wild and undeveloped are actually cultural artifacts shaped by complex interactions with human societies. Drawing on richly varied sources of evidence and interpretation—from trance dances, court proceedings, tree planting patterns, marine and forest rituals, erotic poems, and codifications of customary law, Culture and the Question of Rights reveals the ironies, complexities, and histories of contemporary communities’ struggles to retain their gardens, forests, fishing territories, and graveyards. The contributors examine how these cultural activities work to both construct and to lay claim to nature. These essays open up new avenues for negotiating indigenous rights against a background of violence, proliferating markets, and global ideas of biodiversity and threatened habitat.

Contributors. Jane Atkinson, Don Brenneis, Stephanie Fried, Nancy Peluso, Marina Roseman, Anna Tsing, Charles Zerner

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