Land, People and Culture

People, Land & Time, 1998

2020

Examines how Indigenous artists and activists respond visually to issues related to land, power, and social justice. We look at a broad range of media used by Indigenous peoples, including documentary filmmaking, printmaking, photography, and performance. While we focus on case studies in North America, the issues explored are relevant across the globe. We discuss Indigenous epistemologies related to land and mapping, and the ways in which these knowledge systems are mobilized in resistance to settler colonialism. Students leave with an understanding of decolonial social movement culture, equipped with theories and methods used to challenge the legacies of colonial research and representation. They complete several creative assignments and write a final essay.

Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, 2008

A very short paper introducing a few ideas I'd like to develop into a proper research paper (or two).

2016

The interweave of narrative, materiality and identity defines Catherine Harper’s intellectual and practice obsessions. Her visual, material, performic examination of Northern Irish womanhood, her investigation of both intersex and ‘anatomical drag’, and her concern with fabrics of death and desire, each demonstrate a preoccupation with trying to make sense of the complexities of land, cloth, body and culture.

This article explores the geopolitical importance of the word “land” to the field of Indigenous studies. Rather than simply take the word “land” as a given and natural element of the world around us, in this article I suggest a closer interrogation of the multiple social and geopolitical meanings that make land a key concept in indigenous political struggle. The processes of colonialism and neocolonialism resulted in abstracting land as part of making nations that are recognized by the liberal settler nation-states. How have concepts of land changed in this process? How do we make Indigenous spaces that are not based on abstracting land and Indigenous bodies into state spaces, while maintaining political vitality? How are the lived realities of Indigenous peoples impacted by concepts of borders and territories that support the power of the nation-state? I draw on the narrative dimensions of land in the work of Indigenous writers in order to intercede in limiting the meanings of land to those mapped by the state.

Vibrant: Virtual Brazilian Anthropology, 2018

Vibrant v.15 n.2 João Pacheco de Oliveira Vibrant v.15 n.2 Territory as an object of ethnographies In contrast to the lack of emphasis on this theme in Americanist ethnology of the last few decades, territory has been the object of much attention in the ethnographies conducted by Africanists and Oceanists and has been part of central theoretical discussions and those that the discipline is founded on. Regarding this aspect, we could begin with the famous essay on the social morphology of Eskimos by Marcel Mauss (1904/5), analysing the interrelations between the forms of occupation of space and the modes of sociability. Although it was based exclusively on written sources and not on fieldwork, it expressed deep concern for the spatial and ecological dimension as an inseparable component of social organisation, something non-existent in French sociology at that time. In defining his refusal of a reductionist determination, which he attributed to anthropogeography (Ratzel, 1882), he reaffirmed his theoretical affiliation to the sociological school, while highlighting the originality of his concerns. In the decades that followed, English anthropologists explored the subject very carefully, initiating the realisation of specialised ethnographies. In fieldwork conducted by Africanists (Wilson, 1936; Malinowski, 1938; Richards, 1939; Barnes, 1954 and Colson, 1971), the individual disputes over land and the consequences of policies imposed by the colonial administration (labour migration, urbanisation, the formation of reserves). Beyond the African continent, the anthropologist Edmundo Leach (1961) developed an exemplary ethnography of the relationship between economic practices, kinship and local power in Ceylon. Theoretical and methodological advances should also be recorded. Evans-Pritchard (1974 and 1973) [1949 and 1939] granted great centrality to territory, both in his description of the Nuer, indicating the seasonal displacements in their relationship to a hierarchical structure of lineages, and in the study of the Sanusi, in which he analysed the incorporation of native forms of spatial occupation within colonial structures. This last work in particular paved the way for the historical consideration of broader social phenomena, such as forms of colonisation, wars, and migrations. It is entirely compatible with the author's theoretical postures (Evans-Pritchard, 1962 and 1964), explicitly outlined in his essays, where he distances himself from structural-functionalism and interrelates anthropology and history. Max Gluckman, in turn, showed the impact of land disputes in Lozi political life (Gluckman, 1943), as well as in judicial disputes between the Barotse (Gluckman, 1955a), indicating a new path for anthropology through situational analysis (Gluckman, 1955b). He also strongly criticised Malinowski's functionalism, which excludes precisely the broadest historical contexts from the universe of inquiry, thus forfeiting their comprehensive potential and limiting such research to describing intercultural exchanges of strictly local scope. French Africanists have also devoted considerable interest to the subject of territory. An important mark in this regard was the work of Georges Balandier 1 , who had an enormous repercussion and numerous followers, inspiring a revision of the colonial category of ethnie and the social processes that it brings with it (Amselle, 1985). Attention to the territorial dimension, fuelled by the use of Marxist categories, was

Griffith Review 47: Looking West, 2015

The dichotomous framework that characterizes writing about 1948 seems to force all visual and verbal description into a two-dimensional map that only expresses a single demographic and territorial moment in time. The complex, non-linear story – the one with varied shades and details that cannot be disciplined to fit neatly into the lines of either of the two dominant narratives, the one that presents facts and places of settlement with indistinct and undefined contours – is usually left untold.

Indigeneity on the Move, 2018

In this paper I explore the relationship between modes of land ownership, conceptualizations of land and nature, and notions of indigeneity. I proceed from the well known idea that the portrayal of upland communities of Northeast India as ‘indigenous’ depends to a large extent on a presumably inextricable relationship between people and land (Li 2010, Karlsson 2011). Upland people are believed to ‘belong’ to their land, and its forests, in the sense that it is considered sacred to them. One way in which this essential tie to land finds expression, is in joint land ownership. In the Garo Hills of Meghalaya, collective ownership has been legally secured in the colonial period. Whereas its aim is to avoid that villagers lose their land, it cannot counteract disparities in power and wealth that occur, and have always been prevalent, within village communities. Moreover, in much of the Garo Hills there is a tendency towards the privatization of land use, as well as ownership. This commodification of land is unavoidable for the modernization of agriculture, yet challenges Garo notions of indigeity, as well as related perceptions of land and nature. In the paper, I will analyze the transformation of land relationships, the legalities in which these are founded, and the consequences that these transformation have for Garo notions of indigeneity. Judith Pine wrote: "De Maaker provides a detailed description of the mismatch between global and local discourses that communities and activists nav- igate, challenging the assumption, fundamental to global discourses, that indigenous peoples in all cases have a par- ticular relationship with the land. He notes, for example, that Garo people—portrayed as loving the land in promo- tional literature—see it instead as full of danger and dif- ficulty. Cosmopolitan Christian Garo, on the other hand, create a global sensibility within which “authentic” Garo wearing loincloths perform the role of “archetypical con- servationists, driven by the ‘sacrality’ which they locate in nature” (31). There is a temptation to dismiss as inau- thentic the efforts made by these activists to situate them- selves or their rural counterparts as indigenous. Avoid- ing this oversimplification, de Maaker instead describes the complex, historically situated relationships to land, the discourses between traditional religion and Christianity, and the shifting notions of what it means to be indigenous in a South Asian context. This sets the tone for the book." (Pine, J. (2020) American Ethnologist 47(1): 92-94.