After dispossession

Abstract

Since the 1980s globalization has taken on increasingly neoliberalizing forms in the form of commoditization of objects, resources, or even human bodies, their reduction to financial values, and their enclosure or other forms of dispossession. “After dispossession” provides ethnographic accounts of the diverse ways to deal with dispossessions by attempts at repossessing values in connection to what has been lost in neoliberal assemblages of people and resources and thus how material loss might be compensated for in terms of subjective experiences of restoring value beyond the financial. The analytical challenge we pursue is one of bridging between a political economy concerned with the uneven distribution of wealth and resources, and the profound changes in identity politics and subject formation that are connected to these. We therefore argue that any dispossession may trigger acts of repossession of values beyond the financial realm, and consequently that suffering, too, entails forms of agency predicated on altered subjectivities. This move beyond the suffering subject reconnects the study of subjectivities with the analysis of alienation, disempowerment, and impoverishment through dispossession and attempts at recapturing value in altered circumstances.

Rural precarity: relational autonomy, ecological dependence and political immobilisation in the agro-industrial margin

“…In response to dispossession and precarity, people employ various strategies; some use ‘weapons of the weak’ or ‘everyday forms of peasant resistance’ (Scott 1985 ), while others assemble in wider social protests halfway between everyday resistance and ‘revolutionary war’ (Butler 2015 ; Starn and Fox 1997 ). Others deal with dispossession and precarity by repossessing identities, subjectivities and values (Andersen 2016 ; Rasmussen 2016 ; Salemink and Rasmussen 2016 ), or trying to live ‘otherwise’ within the seams of capitalism (Jaramillo 2020 ; Millar 2015 ; Povinelli 2011 ; Tilzey 2019 ). In Colombia, this has taken the form of alternative life projects, drawing on notions of autonomy, community, peasant struggle and nonviolence (Aparicio 2012 ; Baquero Melo 2015 ; A. Escobar 2008 ; Grey 2012 ; Guasca, Vanneste, and Van Broeck 2022 ).…”

“…They have created their own independent livelihoods as scrap-collectors, recyclers, moto-taxistas or by selling foodstuff or daily necessities from homebased convenience kiosks or food stands in the village. As self-employed, they enjoy a certain level of autonomy and independence, and have, akin to Salemink and Rasmussen’s ( 2016 ) point, managed to shape new identities and subjectivities ‘after dispossession’.…”

‘Hunger has brought us into this jungle’: understanding mobility and immobility of Bengali immigrants in the Chittagong Hills of Bangladesh

“…However, our attention is not focused on the narratives of dislocated, displaced and mobile suffering subjects, but on their attempts at repossessing values, both material and immaterial, in accordance with their experience of dispossession (cf. Salemink & Rasmussen, 2016). Here, we want to emphasise an approach that takes into account that the landless Bengali peasants who joined in the population relocation state scheme had individual as well as collective agendas.…”