Item – Thèses Canada

Numéro d'OCLC
979423081
Lien(s) vers le texte intégral
Exemplaire de BAC
Auteur
McAllister, Karen Elisabeth,
Titre
Shifting rights, resources and representations : agrarian transformation of highland swidden communities in northern Laos
Diplôme
Ph. D. -- McGill University, 2017
Éditeur
[Montreal] : McGill University Libraries, [2017]
Description
1 online resource
Notes
Thesis supervisor: John Galaty (Supervisor).
Includes bibliographical references.
Résumé
"Swidden communities in Laos are undergoing rapid transformation as highland resources are used to fuel national development. Development in Laos is largely conceived as a modernising project involving rationalised planning, scientific management, and the imposition of new 'impersonal' legal frameworks. Mountainous forest-farm landscapes are being ecologically zoned into abstract categories, property rights are being clarified and privatised, remote villages are being resettled to roadsides, and new laws are being established to restructure the relationship between society and nature. These policies are intended to make Lao territory 'legible' for state management and to reshape the behaviours and desires of Lao citizens in support of market-oriented intensive agriculture. Such programs for development are reinterpreted, resisted and adapted by villagers and state officials alike according to specific socio-ecological conditions, cultural understandings and/or particular interests. Modernising projects articulate with customary and informal practices, social power dynamics and struggles over resources and provide new justifications to support competing claims to land at different socio-spatial scales. This thesis examines the process of agrarian transformation in highland Laos, the evolving struggles over land and resource rights, and the impacts on different ethnic groups. I explore how development projects and market opportunities articulate with the pre-existing agricultural practices, customary property institutions and knowledge systems of different ethnic groups by examining state land formalisation and titling programs, the introduction of commercial rubber trees from China in concession and contract farming arrangements, and a participatory agricultural research project intended to help swidden farmers intensify their agricultural systems. These projects are transformed and resisted by villagers and state officials within place-based informal practices, socio-ecologies and epistemologies, and contribute to processes of accumulation and dispossession that are influenced by pre-existing relations of socio-economic inequality that often overlap with ethnic identity."--
Autre lien(s)
digitool.Library.McGill.CA
escholarship.mcgill.ca
escholarship.mcgill.ca
Sujet
Anthropology