Freeze-framing territory: time and its significance in land governance

Abstract

This paper explores how temporal symbolism is used to construct land as an object of enduring value. Using anthropological and ethnographic sources, I highlight how different practices of landholding are informed by different understandings of “permanence”. I elaborate on how institutions of landholding employ “temporal signposts” to mark out land allocation and access arrangements over time. In conclusion, I explore the political roles of inter-temporal land governance, positing a link between codified “permanences” of landholding in land laws and the entrenchment of socio-spatial power. I suggest that the temporal dimension of land governance demands interrogation alongside the spatial.

Keywords:

• land
• territory
• tenure
• time
• law

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Thembela Kepe, S. Ryan Isakson and Tania Murray Li for their invaluable comments on an earlier version of this paper, as well as those involved in the refereeing process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

David Fisher is a recent graduate from the department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. His current research focuses on land tenure, land governance, political economy, and development.

Notes

1. I refer the reader to Jones and Phillips (2005) for a detailed, and fascinating, discussion of how oft-ignored pre-modern and non-Western histories can be directly relevant to contemporary political and political-economic issues.

2. For instance, the “freedom to roam” over others' land that is common in Nordic countries.

3. Here I wish to be clear that broad categories such as “nomadic” and “sedentary”, while describing similar traditions of dwelling, are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they represent a spectrum of survival strategies on which individuals and groups can shift, due to necessity, Expedience, or, quite commonly, coercion (Bar-Yosef, 2001; Diamond, 1997; Scott, 2009).

4. I present this as the converse of Harari’s (2015) non-moralizing assertion that nomadic peoples, for their own reasons, simply “discounted the future” (chap. 6).

5. Importantly, this type of co-existence should not be understood as an idealization, nor as a quirk of “primitive” peoples, but simply as one tradition of humanity that, in historical perspective, has been as successful as any other at ensuring survival and social continuity. I use it to illustrate the there are multiple ways in which humans have related to time and space.

6. Powelson (1988) reviews the historical land-tenure politics of Ancient Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, post-Roman Europe, the post-Roman Middle East and North Africa, China, Japan, India, Mexico, the Ancient Incan Empire, sub-Saharan Africa and Vietnam. Here, I refer to his comprehensive synthesis of the anthropological record, rather than his hypothesis on land reform.

7. I follow the lead of Bang Petersen and Skaaning (2010) in accepting Tilly’s historically inclusive definition of states as “coercion-wielding organizations [sic] that are distinct from households and kinship groups and exercise clear priority in some respects over all other organizations within substantial territories” (1992, pp. 1–2). I assume as they do that this form set the stage for the much more recent formation of the modern state as we know it.

8. It must be noted that Foucault (2007) considered the notion of population to be an “absolutely modern” one, and I am cognizant of the dangers of a-historically applying his thought. Still, in my view Foucault is clear in seeing progenitors to the technologies of governmentality in pre-modern societies, and in understanding the rise of modernity as a crystallization, rather than an absolute origin of such governmental techniques.