The Rights and Wrongs of Land Restitution: ‘Restoring What Was Ours’
offers a critical, comparative ethnographic, examination of land restitution programs. Drawing on memories and histories of past dispossession, governments, NGOs, informal movements and individual claimants worldwide have attempted to restore and reclaim rights in land. Land restitution programs link the past and the present, and may allow former landholders to reclaim lands which provided the basis of earlier identities and livelihoods. Restitution also has a moral weight that holds broad appeal; it is represented as righting injustice and healing the injuries of colonialism. Restitution may have unofficial purposes, like establishing the legitimacy of a new regime, quelling popular discontent, or attracting donor funds. It may produce unintended consequences, transforming notions of property and ownership, entrenching local bureaucracies, or replicating segregated patterns of land use. It may also constitute new relations between states and their subjects. Land-claiming communities may make new claims on the state, but they may also find the state making unexpected claims on their land and livelihoods. Restitution may be a route to citizenship, but it may engender new or neo-traditional forms of subjection. This volume explores these possibilities and pitfalls by examining cases from the Americas, Eastern Europe, Australia and South Africa. Addressing the practical and theoretical questions that arise, The Rights and Wrongs of Land Restitution thereby offers a critical rethinking of the links between land restitution and property, social transition, injustice, citizenship, the state and the market.
1. RESTORING WHAT WAS OURS: AN INTRODUCTION, Derick Fay and Deborah James; 2. PROPERTY, SUBJECTION AND PROTECTED AREAS: THE ‘RESTITUTION’ OF DWESA-CWEBE NATURE RESERVES, SOUTH AFRICA, Derick Fay; 3. ‘THEY SHOULD BE KILLED’: FOREST RESTITUTION, ETHNIC GROUPS, AND PATRONAGE IN POSTSOCIALIST ROMANIA, Stefan Dorondel; 4. THE LIE OF THE LAND: IDENTITY POLITICS AND THE CANADIAN LAND CLAIMS PROCESS IN LABRADOR, Evelyn Plaice; 5. THE ANTITHESIS OF RESTITUTION? A NOTE ON THE DYNAMICS OF LAND NEGOTIATIONS IN THE YUKON, CANADA, Paul Nadasdy; 6. PERFORMING LAW: THE YOLNGU OF BLUE MUD BAY MEET THE NATIVE TITLE PROCESS IN AUSTRALIA, Frances Morphy; 7. ETHNORACIAL LAND RESTITUTION: FINDING INDIANS AND FUGITIVE SLAVE DESCENDANTS IN THE BRAZILIAN NORTHEAST, Fran Hoffman French; 8. THE WILL-TO-COMMUNITY: BETWEEN LOSS AND RECLAMATION IN CAPE TOWN, Christiaan Beyers; 9. THROUGH THE PRISM: ‘SHIFTING ARTICULATIONS’ AND LOCAL REWORKING OF LAND RESTITUTION SETTLEMENTS IN SOUTH AFRICA, Yves van Leynseele and Paul Hebinck; 10 DUEÑOS DE TODO Y DE NADA! (OWNERS OF ALL AND NOTHING): RESTITUTION OF INDIAN TERRITORIES IN THE CENTRAL ANDES OF PERU, Monique Nuijten and David Lorenzo; 11. QUE SUCEDE CON PROCEDE? THE END OF LAND RESTITUTION IN RURAL MEXICO, Kristina Tiedje; 12. 'WE'LL NEVER GIVE IN TO THE INDIANS’: OPPOSITION TO RESTITUTION IN NEW YORK STATE, Brian Blancke
Derick Fay, Deborah James
