Genealogies of the Juridical: Law, Land, Property
Embargo until
2025-12-01
Date
2021-10-26
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Publisher
Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
The dissertation is an ethnographic inquiry into how property rights are claimed in land/ how land is claimed as property in India. The specific site of study is the courts of law in Bangalore, Karnataka, India. From more than four years of fieldwork in lawyers’ chambers, law courts, corridors of government, and the intricate network of interstitial spaces that connect the three, and the methodological choice to study cases not as discrete bounded entities but to study them instead as expanding webs of claims, three key claims emerge. One, the project reevaluates the anthropological common sense that, in the west, rights over things mediate relations among people, while in the non-west, relations among people mediate rights over things, to argue that what subtends the two seemingly diverse accounts is a common notion of domination and control. If in the west, the domination/ control is seen to be exerted by persons over the object, in the non-west, it is assumed that such domination/ control is exerted by persons over persons. Two, the project reevaluates this notion of domination/ control as power that one “has” over an object/ person, to argue that power, like rights, is not self-fulfilling. This brings us to the third claim of the project, which is to reevaluate rights not as self-fulfilling, ready-at-hand, “objects” but as that which are constantly novated in the process of claim-making. “Claiming” rights then is a scene of constant creativity, which is not necessarily or even uniquely positive – it is capable of being as dark and regressive as it is of being subversive. What would it mean then for us to radically reimagine property – beyond the conventional east-west divide by which property is seen as either a mode by which the self perpetuates itself (east) or by which the self returns to itself (west) – as a mode by which the self radically stakes itself, risking annihilation as a mode and condition of being? In other words, as a site of tactical engagement that can dispense with the terra nullius of our conceptual imaginaries.
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Keywords
Law, Land, Property, India, Bangalore