Fighting for Lands and Reframing the Culture

Abstract

In contrast to the lack of emphasis on this theme in Americanist ethnology of the last few decades, territory has been the object of much attention in the ethnographies conducted by Africanists and Oceanists and has been part of central theoretical discussions and those that the discipline is founded on.Regarding this aspect, we could begin with the famous essay on the social morphology of Eskimos by Marcel Mauss (1904/5), analysing the interrelations between the forms of occupation of space and the modes of sociability. Although it was based exclusively on written sources and not on fieldwork, it expressed deep concern for the spatial and ecological dimension as an inseparable component of social organisation, something non-existent in French sociology at that time. In defining his refusal of a reductionist determination, which he attributed to anthropogeography (Ratzel, 1882), he reaffirmed his theoretical affiliation to the sociological school, while highlighting the originality of his concerns.In the decades that followed, English anthropologists explored the subject very carefully, initiating the realisation of specialised ethnographies. In fieldwork conducted by Africanists (Wilson, 1936;Malinowski, 1938;Richards, 1939;Barnes, 1954 andColson, 1971), the individual disputes over land and the consequences of policies imposed by the colonial administration (labour migration, urbanisation, the formation of reserves). Beyond the African continent, the anthropologist Edmundo Leach (1961) developed an exemplary ethnography of the relationship between economic practices, kinship and local power in Ceylon.Theoretical and methodological advances should also be recorded. Evans-Pritchard (1974and 1973) [1949 granted great centrality to territory, both in his description of the Nuer, indicating the seasonal displacements in their relationship to a hierarchical structure of lineages, and in the study of the Sanusi, in which he analysed the incorporation of native forms of spatial occupation within colonial structures. This last work in particular paved the way for the historical consideration of broader social phenomena, such as forms of colonisation, wars, and migrations. It is entirely compatible with the author's theoretical postures (Evans-Pritchard, 1962 and1964), explicitly outlined in his essays, where he distances himself from structural-functionalism and interrelates anthropology and history.Max Gluckman, in turn, showed the impact of land disputes in Lozi political life (Gluckman, 1943), as well as in judicial disputes between the Barotse (Gluckman, 1955a), indicating a new path for anthropology through situational analysis (Gluckman, 1955b). He also strongly criticised Malinowski's functionalism, which excludes precisely the broadest historical contexts from the universe of inquiry, thus forfeiting their comprehensive potential and limiting such research to describing intercultural exchanges of strictly local scope.French Africanists have also devoted considerable interest to the subject of territory. An impor...

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