KREGG HETHERINGTON University of Toronto Privatizing the private in rural Paraguay: Precarious lots and the materiality of rights ABSTRACT In this article, I look at the apparent contradiction of Paraguayan peasants who live on privately titled homesteads but who oppose the “privatization” of their land. The changes against which they are fighting are massive upheavals in the peasant landscape and subtle legal shifts that undermine the basis for land redistribution. I argue that the problem with privatizing the private reveals an underlying tension in liberal theories of property between a conception of a right as an abstract relation between people and one in which a right is a relation between people that is mediated, and troubled, by the frailty of material things. [Paraguay, property law, land reform, peasant movement, liberalism, privatization, agrarian transition] J oel Jara, a young cotton farmer from eastern Paraguay, was the first person I met who really challenged my understanding of the word privatization. We were sitting on his parents’ front lawn, passing around a terere gourd with his cousin and talking about the upcom- ing cotton harvest. 1 Drought had seriously damaged Joel’s crops, and it was unlikely he would be able to pay off his debts, much less make any money that year. What was most troubling about this, for Joel, was that others were in similar straits, and in recent years his bankrupt neighbors had been leaving the area after selling their land to Brazilian soy farmers from down the road, just east of where we were sitting. His fear was that this season’s drought would bring many more land sales. Complaining loudly about the Brazilians’ push into what he considered peasant cotton coun- try, Joel declaimed, “Oprivatizapase la oreyvy!” [They want to privatize all of our land]. At the time, this comment made little sense to me. Joel uttered it while sitting on what I considered his parents’ private property, a homestead they had cut out of the bush during the settlement of this area by campesinos, 2 small farmers who had been lured to the community by the promise of gov- ernment land reform in the 1970s. And, like many other pioneers, Joel’s father had received title for the land he had settled. For Joel’s generation, the promise of land reform had failed, and Joel worried constantly about whether he would be able to take over this homestead someday or find land somewhere else on the frontier. From the cotton field behind the house, the horizon to the northeast looked like a green blanket of beans. With soy- beans came deforestation, clouds of pesticides, and police and private vig- ilante groups ready to force nearby smallholders to sell their plots. Clearly, they had reason to be concerned. But Joel’s family and most of their neigh- bors did hold state-recognized property rights, backed by title. Was priva- tization the right name for this process of violently forcing people to sell their own, titled property? Over the following two years, I frequently encountered people talking about privatization in this way. 3 I came to see this talk as a complex com- mentary on economic changes facing the country and also as signaling AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 36, No. 2, pp. 224–241, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C  2009 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2009.01132.x