Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Unsettling Land brings together anthropologists and geographers examining land relations across South Asia, the Americas, Northeast Africa, Eastern Europe, and Oceania to show how land’s forms, affordances, and meanings shift across diverse historical contexts and uses. Land is not a fixed, passive surface or static resource but a dynamic entity with agency that is shaped by social, historical, and material relations. As such, land is crucial to understanding contemporary political challenges around climate change, capitalism, and conflict.
Unsettling Land offers vital conceptual and methodological tools that challenge the familiar sociomaterial binaries centered on nature/culture, indigenous/capitalist, and land/water dichotomies. Scholars make land sensible across its diverse relational forms through a relational scholarly practice that places land at the center of contemporary politics. Land’s relationalities manifest in animal sanctuaries, wetlands, plantations, forests, conflict zones, urban settlements, and extractive, infrastructural, and national frontiers and are tied to financialization, assetization, rent, extractivism, and as identities mobilized through historical, social, and institutional relations of power.
Accessible and theoretically ambitious, Unsettling Land investigates new and old political projects based on questions of care, solidarity, identity, rights, and power across the world. It is essential reading for students and scholars of anthropology, geography, political ecology and economy, and environmental, development, Indigenous, urban, and agrarian studies, as well as readers interested in climate justice and the future of land politics worldwide.
“Readers of this superb volume will encounter new understandings of land that challenge conventional wisdom. Land emerges not just as a bundle of resources, an asset, a space, or an object of the global ‘land rush’ but as a central dimension of diverse social relations and identities and human-nonhuman interactions, and a source of livelihoods, contested claims, and profound meanings. The broad geographical scope and theoretical richness remind us that even in the urbanizing twenty-first century, land remains an unresolved yet burning global question.”
—Marc Edelman, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York
“Unsettling Land dissects land’s multiple meanings and uses, digs into its composition, and unpacks the fields of relations that constitute and transform it. The rich, varied, empirically grounded chapters succeed admirably in ‘making the familiar strange,’ opening fresh terrain for critical reflection and practical engagement.”
—Tania Murray Li, University of Toronto and National University of Singapore
“A remarkable intellectual project that provides a wonderful example of multiscalar, ethnographic, and conjunctural work on land and territory, Unsettling Land is a productive and exciting contribution to scholarship and political praxis.”
—Thomas Cowan, University of Nottingham
Preeti Sampat is associate professor of sociology and social nthropology at Krea University in India. She is currently finalizing her monograph titled Rentier Lands: Economic Growth, Urban Development, Law and Resistance along the Indian Infrastructural Frontier.
Andrés León Araya is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Delaware. He is the author of The Coup and the Palm Trees: Agrarian Conflict and Political Power in Honduras.