Dispossession in the Past and Present Tense
Abstract
From the “global land grab” to ‘green grabbing” and the “global water grab”, dispossession has been increasingly recognized as a prominent feature of our times. Yet it has also long featured in colonialism and state-building. Its ubiquity is not confined to specific geographies. Understanding its contours can therefore benefit from both a diachronic and comparative perspective. This paper embarks on such an undertaking through a comparative analysis of dispossession across three continents, bringing Native American studies into dialogue with postcolonial/global South literatures and history with anthropology. We use this birds-eye view of the phenomenon to ask, “How similar and persistent are techniques of dispossession over distinctive geographies and temporalities?” While context and contingency always shape the contours of history, the paper finds the organizing logics and techniques of dispossession to have a remarkable degree of persistence and commonality over space and time. We conclude by drawing out these parallels and looking at the variable ways that human communities have framed and enacted relations to place as a way to de-naturalize constructs that have long masqueraded as solutions to this phenomenon.
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