OpenEdition Search Tout OpenEdition AUTOUR DE LA RECHERCHE / BILLETS DE BLOG / IN ENGLISH Racial property – From colonial theft to indigenous reparation in Bolivia PAR BLOGTERRAIN · 2 MAI 2023 Mareike Winchell (Anthropologue – Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago) Mareike Winchell présente ici une partie de ses travaux sur les enjeux relatifs au foncier en Bolivie, entre passé et présent. Un billet qui entre en écho avec la parution récente de l’ouvrage collectif Le foncier rural dans les pays du Sud. Land, and its conversion into private property, is a classic topic of social scientific study. In 1842, a young Karl Marx published a newspaper article challenging new legal codes that secured private property while dispensing with what he termed the customary rights of the poor. While an earlier penal code allowed for the gathering of fruit, berries, and dry wood in areas peasants did not formally own, new laws criminalized such practices, in this way eradicating the “excessive humanity” of the earlier code. Like John Locke, Marx was attentive to property not just as land but as a way that people come to place themselves in the world through their labor. But while Locke celebrated that conversion as a way to “improve” land through greater productive value, Marx lamented the emptying out of both nature and humanity as each are reduced to sheer utility. Against the dehumanizing risks of commodification, anthropologists like Marcel Mauss, Nancy Munn, Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch, Olivia Harris, and David Graeber have highlighted the endurance of alternate exchange relations and more robust ideas of accountability and obligation, asking how such relations can complicate the enclosure of people and things in modern capitalism. These questions assumed new, more complicated, meanings in modern colonialism, which strove to make people into commodities (through transatlantic slavery) and then later to undo that commodification through emancipation and citizenship rights. However, as scholars Saidiya Hartman, Cheryl Harris, and Brenna Bhandar have shown, this process did not displace property so much as lodge it more firmly within people. Self-possession—the idea that one owns and controls one’s body and mind much like one is thought to control one’s own property—became the key standard against which to judge the formerly colonized, and their readiness for modern citizenship. Where such possession was deemed lacking, such as when Indigenous populations did not cultivate land in ways that could be recognized by a Lockean model of agricultural improvement or where they remained vulnerable to the power and violence of overlords, colonists argued they should be rightfully dispossessed of land and, in cases of plantations and encomiendas, remain the property of other human owners (Figure 1).