about
This seminar explores specific ways that land has figured as both instrument and object of power during the past several centuries within a global context. Of central importance will be questions of how political rights have been grounded in structures of land tenure and ownership; and how land management has transformed under processes of economic liberalization, colonialism, state-building, and neo-colonialism. We will examine technologies, ideologies, and aesthetics of land management, while keeping in mind how conceptions of citizenship continue to be linked to issues of territory, land "improvement," and land ownership.
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In recent centuries, new conceptions of land management, ownership, and improvement (often in contexts of colonization or nation-building) were complicit with ways of organizing population into categories of race, class, nationality, and gender. Land became the figure-ground against which a population could be represented as a nation, and, conversely, against which people without a legally recognized claim to land could be excluded from nationality or from economic rights. In this class we will discuss: How has the governance of population assigned novel ideological and economic functions to land, whether through methods of representation and calculation, through agricultural and extractive technologies, through physical and communicative infrastructures, or through new cultural, legal, and social structures? Given how ancestral connections to land are often construed as a fundamental criterion in distinguishing citizens from non-citizens and indigenes from non-indigenes, we will explore how relationships between land and population have been and continue to be developed and promulgated through aesthetic, legal, military, and cultural practices.
readings
assignments
For Seminararbeit (5 KP), students will give a 20-minute oral and visual presentation of a research project. In addition to guest respondents who will attend the presentations, each of the presenters will be assigned one student as a respondent. Throughout the semester, students will work with feedback from the instructor to develop the research project.
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For Seminar (3KP), students will be evaluated according to their attentiveness to readings and their class participation. Students are permitted to miss two class sessions, unless they have a valid medical excuse.
This class assumes that reading and discussion are absolutely fundamental to education. To function as well-informed, articulate, and politically mature adults, university graduates must be able to read efficiently and incisively, and they must be able to express their positions and judgments to others. Crucial to developing effective practices of reading and debate is the ability to read across texts. Hence, two texts will be assigned each week, which will be available via ADAM. The reading schedule is as follows:
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SECTION I: Settlement and Unsettlement
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1: Introduction to Course: read in class together: John Locke, “On Property” from Second Treatise on Government.
2: Places and Non-Places
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Severin Fowles, “Movement and the Unsettling of the Pueblos”, Rethinking Anthropological Perspectives on Migration, ed. Graciela Cabana and Jeffrey Clark (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2011): 45-67.$$
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Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London; New York: Verso, 1995): Ch. 3 “Anthropological Place.”
3: International Law and the Non-Nation-State
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Antony Anghie. Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press): Ch. 1 “Francisco de Vitoria and the colonial origins of international law.”
Benjamin C. I. Ravid, “The First Charter of the Jewish Merchants of Venice, 1589” in AJS Review, Vol. 1 (1976): 187-222.
4: Redistributing Land and Power
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Claude F. Oubre, “‘Forty Acres and a Mule’: Louisiana and the Southern Homestead Act” in Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Spring, 1976): 143-157.
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James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1998): Ch. 7 “Compulsory Villagization in Tanzania.”
5: Frontiers
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1991). Ch.3, “Pricing the Future: Grain”.
Malcolm Lewis, “William Gilpin and the Concept of the Great Plains Region,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, March 1966.
6: Infrastructures: Connecting Country, City, World
Richard Wittman, “Space, Networks, and the St. Simonians” from Grey Room no. 40 (Summer 2010): 24-49.
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962): 11-51.
SECTION II: Property and Expropriation
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7: Agrarian Expropriation
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957): Ch. 3, “Habitation versus Improvement.”
Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I ( ): Ch. 27 “Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land.”
8: Colonial Cartography
Barbara Bush and Josephine Maltby, “Taxation in West Africa: Transforming the Colonial Subject into the ‘Governable Person’” in Critical Perspectives on Accounting: 15 (2004) 5–34.
Roger J. P. Kain and Elizabeth Baigent, The Cadastral Map in the Service of the State: A History of Property Mapping (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1992): Ch. 8 “Colonial Settlement from Europe” up to p. 289.
9: Improvement
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Vittoria di Palma, Wasteland: A History (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2014): Ch. 2, “Improvement”.
Eugene Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870-1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976): “Roads, Roads and Still More Roads”.
10: Urban Capital
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David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (London; New York: Routledge, 2003): Ch. 4, “The Organization of Space Relations.”
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Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1998): Ch. 2 “Uneven Development: Public Art in New York City.”
11: The Institutionalization of Informality
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Timothy Mitchell, “The Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes Its World,” European Journal of Sociology, 46, no. 2 (2005): 297-320.
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Hernando De Soto, The Other Path (New York: Harper and Row, 1989): Ch. 2 “Informal Housing.”
SECTION III: Land, Belonging, and Territorial Sovereignty
12. Citizens without Territory?
Giorgio Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights,” Cities Without Citizens, ed. Eduardo Cadava and Aaron Levy (Philadelphia: Slought Books, 2003).
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Charles Maier, “Transformations of Territoriality” from Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006): 32-55.
13: Land and the Invention of Indigeneity
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James Clifford, “Indigenous Articulations” in The Contemporary Pacific , Vol. 13(2), 2001: 468-490.
Avinoam Meir. As Nomadism Ends: The Israeli Bedouin of the Negev (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997). Selections: Ch. 7: “The Role of Public Services”.
14: Flows and Fixities
Etienne Balibar, We the People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Translation/Transnation) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003): Ch. 2, “Homo Nationalis: An Anthropological Sketch of the Nation-Form.”
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Michel Agier, Managing the Undesirables: Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Government, trans. David Fernbach (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2011). Selection: Part I: “A World of Undesirables, a Network of Camps”.
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