Call for papers, two-day workshop
25-26 Novembre 2016 – University Grenoble Alpes
Land, an interdisciplinary object of study between rupture and continuity
During the last few decades the spectacular growth of global demand for
natural resources has considerably increased the pressure on land access
and management across the world. From mobilisations against fracking in the
USA and Europe to opposition to mining and oil extraction in Latin America,
Asia and Africa, divers contexts attest to an increase of
social-environmental conflicts as a consequence of current modes of soil
and subsoil use. Land provides a base for different regimes of property and
patterns of use, as well as for rural and urban social structures.
Evolutions and major changes in land use have stemmed legal debates such as
those concerning big estates, agrarian reforms or the adoption of
extractive economic strategies. While the former involve the issue of soil
property, the latter question sovereignty over the subsoil. The issue of
land is central to understanding socio-economical and political processes
and therefore constitutes a privileged perspective of analysis for current
global processes.
“Land”, as an object, is characterised by its interdisciplinarity. Very
early on, the importance of different social groups’ relationship to land
raised the interest of researchers in human and social sciences. The works
of early ethnologists inspired early XXth century British anthropology
(Malinowski (1935), Lucy Mair (1934 ; 1957)), who brought attention the
plurality of soil property and use systems. In doing so, their work called
into question the strict dichotomy between collective and individual
property, which marxist theory had so far looked upon as a result of the
capitalist accumulation process. Land is therefore now considered through
the lens of social organisation (John Davis 1973 ; Gluckman 1965 ; Goody
1980 ; Humphreys 1983). In historical research, forms of spatial
appropriation and land tenure have been analysed by the the Ecole des
Annales and the field of rural and urban history or history of tax systems
(Bloch, Braudel (1979) ; Le Roy Ladurie, 1966). In this same line or
enquiry, american historiography turned to land tenure systems in order to
historicise the process of State formation and social relations since the
colonial period. North American processes of internal colonisation
(Shannon-Shafer Simler, 1930 ; Turner, 1962) and issues raised by the
Mexican revolution (Knight, 1986) are only two of many examples. Latin
America remains today one of the regions of the world where land access is
the most unequally shared. In the 1950s-1960s, at a time when many
governments were implementing land redistribution reforms, the topic of
land tenure, in the form of research on agrarian structures and peasant
movements, came to occupy an important role in social sciences
(Chevalier,1969 ; Piel, 1983). The the decolonisation process also gave new
relevance to land property studies in Africa and Asia. In this context,
geographers first started to bestow a new look on the issues of territorial
planning and agrarian structures in the global south. Legal and development
anthropology followed, taking interest in local land rights, especially in
sub saharan Africa, in the context of so-called « plans fonciers ruraux » (E.
Le Bris, E. Le Roy, F. Leimdorfer, 1982 ; P. Lavigne-Delville 1998).
Since the 1980s, researchers in social sciences have reconsidered the scale
of their focus, influenced by the circulations of globalization. The last
decades have seen the appearance of transnational studies, entangled or
connected histories (Werner, Zimmerman, 2004 ; Gruzinski, 2004 ; Saunier,
2009 ; Rodgers, 1998) that highlight the circulation of people, knowledge
and practices. (Espagne, 1994 ; Detienne, 2000). Shifting scales allows to
renew our perspective on both the national and the local. Understood as one
of the ways in which power is wielded, space and resource management
raises the issue of how States intervene on territories and plan their use
as a way to structure the social body (Foucault, 1976 ; Sécurité,
territoire et population, Cours au collège de France, 1978). However, the
role of the State has to be studied in relation to new actors and
institutions, ranging from local inhabitants to "global governance"
organizations (NGO, experts, international organizations etc), as well as
in the context of new means of land tenure (norms, practices, etc.).
Responding to those changes, geographers have shifted to an approach in
terms of "land governance" that highlights new forms of interaction,
regulation and reglementation without hiding the power relations which
underlie them.
This workshop aims to offer a contemporary reading of land-related issues
in a global perspective, to which we hope to provide insight from both a
conceptual and methodological point of view. We welcome presentations on
modern and contemporary land issues, as well as on their longue durée,
with the objective of identifying forms of continuity, discontinuity and
rupture. The aim will also be to identify individual and collective actors
and their strategies, and to question the representations they promote in
order to bring out underlying forms of power and knowledge.
This workshop will be dedicated to presentations of recent or ongoing
research, but also to making an inventory (as complete as possible) of
sources available on the field. It is meant to be a first step towards the
creation, on the long term, of a research group able to draw up a
several-year research project in France and abroad. Papers should explore
one of the four main themes, which we propose in order to start the
discussion. These four general topics have the advantage of putting the
issue of land at the heart of political practices:
1. Economic dynamics and land commodification : papers will focus on
tensions between economic “valorisation”, “natural resource
financiarisation” and access to land or other strategic resources. Which
are the economic/market logics and power relations which today affect land
property or the access and management of natural resources? Who are the
actors, the public or private institutions who intervene? What is the role
of the State in the management and regulation of tensions? Proposals in
this axis can also focus on the spatial dimension of phenomena under study,
as well as on the relations between actors, in order to avoid presenting
institutions, such as markets or governmental organisations, as compact and
coherent structures.
2. Codification and legal practice of property regimes : papers will deal
with the legal dimension of land rights in different spaces and at various
scales, in order to analyse the actor networks at the origin of legal
systems. In these systems, which were themselves constructed on major
conflicts, and marked by the adoption of the cadastral principle and a
challenge to collective property regimes, what happens with the
introduction of large-scale mining and agricultural activities? How does
law react, and at which scale(s) does the relation between land/underground
use and property evolve? Papers can also focus on the circulation and
competition of land rights’ systems, by dealing for example with the legal
reconfigurations which emerge from lawsuits, stemming in turn from
“bottom-up” practices. Which is and which was the reactivity of law faced
with protest? Law also constructs new categories of socio-political actors.
How do populations appropriate the categories elaborated by international
law, such as indigeneity? How do they bypass them by inventing or
re-configuring other, “local” legal frameworks?
3. Representations and social construction of resources : Processes of
economic “valorisation” often concern territories formerly marginal to
national identity and economy (rural territories, woodlands or
semi-desertic areas, highlands, border zones). The geographical and
socio-political marginality of these territories - and their populations -
was first translated by positivist liberal discourse into a rhetoric of
“unproductiveness”, “barbarity” and “empty territories”, characterizations
which under neoliberalism turn into the language of poverty and
underdevelopment. Far from unchanging, these representations are
historically constructed and are/were the object of continuous negotiation,
opposition and re-signification, especially in the form of the global
politics which the underlie. Indigenous, peasant and alter-globalist
struggles are illustrative cases. Contributions to this panel could attempt
to historicise representations and their weight in terms of territorial and
political integration. Particular attention could also be devoted to
cartographical representation. To what extent does globalisation
reconfigure the margins and their representations? How do new “centers”
emerge? And finally, how are these representations
appropriated/opposed/reworked by local actors in favor or opposing global
dynamics?
4. Political uses of land : The fourth panel will aim to understand how
issues of land and resource extraction become (or don’t) the order of the
day at different levels of formal politics. Papers will focus for example
on the genesis of international norms following local mobilisations, such
the international indigenous rights movement (Bellier 2013, 2014). The
agenda-setting may come from protests and social movements as well as from
political parties, which present themselves as the spokespersons of
inter-class social groups. Such mechanisms can be analysed from different
angles : legal and social approach to law, institutional analysis (debates
within political parties, parliamentary debates, government archives) or
social movement studies. Papers must avoid a purely descriptive perspective
limited, for example, to studying the place that land occupies in this or
that political program. Various research questions can be imagined : How
does the issue of land and extractives come to be at the heart of the
public debate? Which actors contribute to it and what are their means to do
so? As of what moment can we speak of public policy concerning land
property? And finally, are there forms of circulation, cooperation, or
re-appropriation of different “models”?
Mode of submission and deadline
-
Paper proposals (including a C.V, a title and a half-page resume in
french, spanish or english) must be sent by the 15th of June 2016 to :
[log in to unmask]
-
Open to Videoconference.
Dates and location for the Workshop : 25-26 November 2016, Grenoble, France.
Organisation committee:
Maura Benegiamo (IUAV University Venice )
Ombeline Dagicour (University Paris 1 - Geneva University)
Irène Favier (University Grenoble Alpes)
Kyra Grieco (CERMA/Mondes Américains - EHESS, IFEA))
Emmanuelle Perez-Tisserant (CENA-EHESS)
Scientific committee :
Jeremy Adelman (Princeton University)
Claudia Damasceno (CRBC/Mondes Américains)
Sylvie Duvillard (Pacte/UGA)
Allan Greer (McGill University)
Marc Hufty (IHEID)
Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud (LARHRA)
Nadine Vivier (CERHIO)
Sandrine Tolazzi (ILCEA4)
--
Kyra Grieco
Antropóloga
Doctoranda CERMA/Mondes Américains, EHESS - Paris
Doctoranda Asociada IFEA - Lima
Anthropologue
Doctorante CERMA/Mondes Américains, EHESS - Paris
Doctorante Associée IFEA - Lima
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