Charles Fogelman is a Research Fellow with the Cultures of Law in Global Contexts Project and a Ph.D. candidate with the Department of Geography and GIS at the University of Illinois. He tweets at @charlesfogelman.

The title of this piece comes from a conversation I had with a senior unelected official for the city of Maseru, the capital of Lesotho. As he described the planned sprawling 18-hole golf course in a village on the outskirts of town, I asked him what would happen to the poor people who currently used the land for small-scale agriculture. “The city is no place for poor people!” he told me. His perspective, in direct conflict with discourses of international development, demonstrates a key tension between the objectives of poverty reduction and economic growth.

My dissertation project investigates that tension via the logics and impacts of a major land reform project in Lesotho. My presentation at the AAG meeting in Chicago will focus specifically on the uses of mapping and other technologies in Lesotho’s land reform, while other elements of my work focus on gender and authority. For this piece, however, I want to talk about my project more broadly to investigate what “development” means in the context of Lesotho’s land.

Land Act 2010 is the centerpiece of legislation that sets the rules for land reform in Lesotho. Together with several other laws, the Land Act set out to make land a more legible and exchangeable resource. The biggest element of the law was that it eliminated customary tenure in urban areas and instead mandated leaseholds (de facto titles). As the government minister responsible for the execution of the law phrased it, “The current land reform program in Lesotho is driven by the desire to achieve social growth and development on the one hand and economic growth and development on the other” (Sekatle 2010). The text of Land Act 2010 is nearly identical to its predecessor, but Land Act 1979 failed to successfully disempower customary authorities in land matters.

The reason Land Act 2010 has been successfully implemented is that a $363 million grant from the U.S.’s new development wing, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), provided the funding to measure, map, adjudicate and deliver the leaseholds that the law requires. In 1979 these expensive logistics were left to individual landholders. Together with wording that removes land allocation power from unelected local chiefs, who were seen as potentially capricious and unsanctionable by their constituents, Land Act 2010 successfully moved urban land tenure to the hands of the market. The goal of making Lesotho’s land an engine of economic growth is consistent with other MCC projects and with the MCC motto – “Poverty reduction through economic growth.” How this market-led land reform works toward economic growth is clear. However, its work toward the goal of poverty reduction is murkier.

The questions I have asked about this reform are rooted in a framework of access. In short, vulnerable people have been granted the right to benefit from their land, but have they been granted the ability to benefit? (Ribot & Peluso 2003). What my work demonstrates is that legal frameworks are necessary but insufficient to provide true land access to vulnerable land users. It is the institutions that govern the execution and application of the laws that are most important. They are the ones who can determine who truly benefits. In Lesotho, the beneficiaries of land reform do not appear to be the poor and vulnerable people said to be targeted by the MCC’s development plans.

That leads to a final point: who are the true beneficiaries of Lesotho’s Land Act 2010 if not the vulnerable people ostensibly targeted? In my research village, two real estate developers are reaping the benefits of secure and exchangeable land tenure. One is building the aforementioned par-71 golf course on half of the village’s former agricultural fields, the other is building a 700-home suburban development on the other half of the fields. Two things are notable about this. First, these developers are empowered by bureaucrats, who are able to influence the votes of the elected officials who are supposed to determine land allocation. The bureaucrats are, like the chiefs before them, unelected officials who can be capricious or corrupt with little ability for public sanction. Second, discourses of “development” that privilege economic growth as the driver of poverty reduction need to be more explicit in how poverty reduction will happen. All the good intentions in the world have not kept economic growth at my research site from trampling on the land access of the poor.

If a development project is to be truly pro-poor, the poor need to truly be at the forefront of planning and execution. These concerns are hardly academic: the MCC is planning a second grant for Lesotho, and their initial plan identifies “Poor land management and allocation systems” as a “binding constraint to economic growth” in Lesotho. A further U.S.-led redefinition of the social relations that govern land access may lie ahead. Poverty reduction and economic growth are very different things. To truly reduce poverty, institutions and development agencies must target reforms and projects that directly help poor people rather than waiting for the fruits of trickle down to accrue to the poor. Trickle down development like Lesotho’s can create a situation where security of land tenure is for golf courses, not the vulnerable, and the city is truly not a place for poor people.

Eric is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Chicago. His research looks at different forms of economic development intervention in Andean Peru’s Colca Valley – from small-scale NGO investments to mining and extractivism – and investigates how they intersect with local conceptions of indigeneity, sustainability, and permanence.

What happens when an Andean family finds gold on its land? Upon my return to the Colca Valley village of Yanque, in Peru’s southern Andes, last year after attending a conference in the United States, my host father Ricardo Flores cautiously approached me.[1] “We may have found some gold on Leonora’s estancia, way up there by Tayta Mismi.” He said this quietly, so as to keep the information a secret.

Because of Yanque’s densely gridded configuration of homes—each of which is the node of a local family’s “archipelago” of properties for dwelling, grazing animals, and growing crops (Murra 1972)—any talk of gold had to be hushed. Property lines aren’t always clear, and this applies both to the horizontal and—as we’ll see just below—vertical dimensions of land. Now, it was certainly clear to the Flores family. Leonora’s birthplace was close to the estancia property, located several kilometers from Tayta (Lord) Mismi, a mountain peak (Apu) that is the village’s main water source and thus a hugely important ritual site. Her family’s alpacas had grazed on that land. But the family did not yet have the documentation to prove it. And based on the Flores’ past experiences with Peruvian bureaucracy, this made the land vulnerable: anybody with better access to experts could easily make a claim to the property.

That was not the main source of urgency for the Flores family, however. Buenaventura, one of Peru’s largest mining enterprises, had been frantically buying up large expanses of land in the area and showed no signs of slowing down. According to the property map that David, one of the Flores’ sons-in-law, drew with marker on a large piece of graph paper (papelote) as he led an October family meeting at the Flores home on how to go about extracting gold from this land, their property was almost completely surrounded. Given the enterprise’s intimacy with state authorities, which have license to claim subsoil rights and set the terms of prior consultation, the estancia was sure to be seized soon if the family did not act.

The global land rush has been particularly pronounced in Peru, whose mineral resources have been largely responsible for the country’s astronomical aggregate growth. Copper, silver, and gold have made Peru the fastest-growing nation in South America for most of the previous decade.[2] Of course, aggregate growth does not tell the whole story, and wealth accumulation from mining profits has disproportionately benefited elites, tracing familiar historical lines of inequality. These elements’ importance for Peru’s growth has also been a source of ambivalence and anxiety, for mining is a perfect example of completely unsustainable development. During the portion of my fieldwork that I spent in the Peruvian cities of Lima and Arequipa, endless academic and NGO conferences were held to address the worry about what will happen to Peru after the mining boom. 2013 and 2014 saw a flurry of books published with titles like “What can be done about Peru?” (Ghezzi and Gallardo 2013). When Lima hosted the 2014 UN conference on global climate change, one of the chants animating the event’s main protest, the People’s Climate March, was this: “There is gold! There is copper! The people are still poor!” (“Hay oro! Hay cobre! El pueblo sigue pobre!”)

Tania Murray Li, in her recent piece “What is Land?”, asks: “why the rush?” (2014: 594). The idea of a land “rush,” Li writes, entails “a sudden, hyped interest in a resource because of its newly enhanced value…Do it now before others spot the value, and profit margins decrease.” For the Flores family in Yanque, Buenaventura was the reason to rush. A second reason to rush was a distinct source of pressure: many of the Flores men, manual laborers and, in one case, an entrepreneur who had just shuttered his video game café business, were unemployed. If Leonora’s estancia really did have gold in its depths, this was the time to find it: mineral prosperity stood to save family members from intense economic desperation.

They snapped into action. They are, at present, engaged in a costly race against time to formalize their property title, constitute the family as an enterprise, and fulfill the other bureaucratic rituals necessary for convincing authorities that they are legitimately entitled to mine the property, against the specter of the state’s usufruct rights and Buenaventura’s profound political advantage.

So this was the Flores family’s first task: get the necessary documents in order. In theory, we can see how land titles serve as protective devices. The Andes and, much more intensely, the Amazonian region of Peru, have seen an “epidemic” of illegal artisanal mining, whose practitioners tend not to meet state regulations or undergo the inspections necessary to be cleared for an extractive activity that poses high risks to substantial parcels of land. These artisanal miners also risk invading territories that belong to others who are often politically weaker than them, and subsequently destroying those territories. If a land title can offer protection, the quest for this protection is another story: state bureaucracy is a significantly more difficult structural obstacle for a small family whose members have limited schooling and even more limited political capital than it is for a large mining corporation.

The Flores family is simultaneously racing to render the site investable by seeking a different kind of permission: the land’s. This permission can be attained through the pago a la tierra (offering to the earth), a ritual fundamental to life in much of the Andes which involves an elaborate process of breathing on and burning, in a highly regulated way, an assemblage of materials including coca leaves and an alpaca fetus. For this ritual, and in order to work the land, a constant supply of chicha (fermented maize and barley) also had to nourish the land, as well as its workers, and making chicha was itself a labor-intensive activity requiring days of preparation. On another of David’s papelotes at the Flores family meeting was a budget, which contained a category he labeled “investments.” Investments here did not only include machinery, the costs of copying and processing documents, gasoline for the truck, and food costs. It also included each of those ritual elements essential to any kind of labor that uses the land to cultivate prosperity.

This second set of tasks was key for rendering the land investable on the family’s—and the land’s—own terms. The consequences of failing to conduct the pago or doing it wrong could be grave, ranging from simply finding no gold to deadly accidents and bad luck on the site and beyond. Even before finalizing the title (something which has yet to happen), Flores family members had made a number of trips to the site lasting up to several days, where they excavated samples for laboratory analysis to attain a better sense of how much gold might be awaiting them. During those trips, they also had to make the place habitable. This means that in a much more mundane way, rendering land investable at the supra-terranean level also has directly to do with transforming the property into a livable space. Labor was required to cook both the chicha and enough food to last each work trip, and to keep the small shelter adequately warm in hostile cold conditions at what was an extremely high altitude. When I accompanied them to the site in January, our project for the day was to re-thatch the small shelter’s old rooftop in preparation for longer stays.

So let’s return to the fundamental discussion question we are each addressing here: What is land? Yes, it is a source of supplies and nutrition, the ground beneath our feet, a commodity, a place, a space, and even that small site on which physical occupation by one person excludes physical occupation by another (Li 2014). But it is also an animated environment, a spirit, a kind of political actor (De la Cadena 2010). The earth and the ground were specifically described as a mother during many rituals I was able to observe in Colca. A patient nurturer and a protector, yes, but also a being personified as somebody who can get hungry and angry and wreak destruction when displeased.

Beyond the simple opposition between “state”/“official”/“secular” and “local”/“spiritual” registers of legitimation, the Flores’ urgent race to render land investable brings multivalent ontologies and ethics into the space of explicit acknowledgment and valuation. And making these things explicit, all together and at once, is not only a common feature of ritual as an interactional genre. This is also a strategy for not leaving anything out, for covering all the bases and pulling out all the stops. In this effort, the Flores family challenges Buenaventura, the state, and just as importantly, the whims of the land itself by recruiting, engaging, and framing on their own terms—while always careful not to resist outright—that which our panel organizers have called “the capitalist-centric framing of rendering land investable.”

References

De la Cadena, Marisol. 2010. Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond Politics. Cultural Anthropology 25(2): 334-370.

Ghezzi, Piero and José Gallardo. 2013. ¿Qué se puede hacer con el Perú? Ideas para sostener el crecimiento económico en el largo plazo. Lima: Universidad del Pacífico/PUCP

Li, Tania Murray. 2014. What is land? Assembling a resource for global investment. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 39(4): 589-602.

Murra, John V. 1972. “El ‘control vertical’ de un máximo de pisos ecológicos en la economía de las sociedades andinas” (pp. 427-476). In Iñigo Ortiz de Zúñiga (1967-1972[1562]), Visita de la provincia de León de Huánuco en 1562. Vol. 2. John V. Murra (ed.). Huánuco: Universidad Nacional Hermilio Valdizán.

[1] All names have been changed to minimize the risk of this post revealing the owners of a property that may have gold on it. Note that “Flores,” which is my anonymizing substitute for a Quechua-language surname, is one of the most widely shared surnames of Spanish origin in Peru.

[2] This piece in The Economist describes Peru’s “Asian-style” growth between 2003-2013, and describes the instability of subjection to a “commodity lottery”: http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21610305-colombia-overtakes-peru-become-regions-fastest-growing-big-economy-passing

Lorenzo continues with his version. This elder had no idea the land would become valuable one day, so he sold it piece by piece, often without papers. Some also say he gambled it away. According to one anthropologist who worked in the community in the early 2000s (see Weiant 2005), the land was informally sold, traded, gifted, and passed around for decades. These practices led to an incredibly complex and confusing land tenure situation, which worsened in the early 1970s when the Mexican government tried to clarify and formalize land titles in preparation for impending tourism and real estate development. This transformation from informal to formal tenure systems led to decades of conflict.

Lorenzo talks about increasing land disputes in Cabo Pulmo, especially over the course of the past ten years. All of these disputes can be tied to rapidly rising land values and real estate speculation. These conflicts include a couple of “land invasions,” the last one in 2009. According to Lorenzo, in that instance, about forty people from outside the community invaded Cabo Pulmo point, cut fence wires, and tried to claim the land. Members of one local family sent their own people, armed with machetes, shovels, and even Molotov cocktails. There was a confrontation. Someone smashed a person’s car. The invaders finally backed down and retreated.

Later, Lorenzo tells me, he saw one of the men who took part in the invasion in the nearby town of La Ribera. “Why are you doing this?” he asked the man. He answered: “Because there’s no work.” Lorenzo thought for a minute, then summed up the whole situation…in terms of money and value. It comes down to the valor de la tierra (land value), he tells me. The conflicts, he explains, are all because “people are walking on money.” He finishes the story with a question: “Who could have guessed that this land would someday be worth so much?”

Who could have guessed?

The Baja peninsula as a whole has been marginalized from Mexican politics — and history — for generations. The East Cape is just one of its many formerly unknown and disparaged hinterlands. It was long seen as an impediment to development, a barren, worthless place (see Alvarez 1987; Krutch 1986). But the people who lived there — descendants of missionaries, native peoples, migrants, 19th century colonists, even fabled castaways — have found ways to survive. They have created places of meaning and community, places with long histories and deeply ingrained values. Still, for many outsiders, much of the Baja peninsula remained worthless, valueless, and undesirable.

Times have changed. Today, small communities along the East Cape, such as Cabo Pulmo, are increasingly recognized by the outside world — not to mention the Mexican government — as high value destinations. They are places worthy of investment (see Li 2014), and exploitation. This change of heart was undoubtedly influenced by the East Cape’s beauty, ecological diversity, and uniqueness. But this is also because it’s a place where many outsiders hope to make money. This reconsideration of the East Cape as a renewed place of value, worthy of effort and attention, has also resulted in a broad “conceptual shift” (see Elyachar 2005). It’s a shift in which the formerly valueless is suddenly recast as vital and important. It’s a shift through which supposedly desolate, barren coastlines become conceptually and discursively transformed into places of solitude, beauty, and luxury — ripe for capitalist investment.

This shift occurs through the work of realtors, developers, government officials, planners, and others who help to inscribe the land, ultimately, as a commodity that is commensurable with other commodities (i.e. real estate) around the world (see Li 2014). The East Cape is in the early stages of this process of commoditization. Los Cabos, on the other hand, has been thoroughly transformed into a location that is dominated by the global tourism and real estate economies. The future of the East Cape has not yet been determined. But will it follow the path of Los Cabos?

The East Cape is no longer depicted as a dangerous, remote place. It’s no longer the worthless, “forgotten peninsula” (Krutch 1986) of the Mexican nation. It’s a place ripe for pride and promotion. It’s a safe, appealing, inviting place that promises high returns on investment. It also promises exclusivity — lonely beaches, wide open spaces, and distance from overdeveloped urban centers. For Mexican businessmen, government officials, and politicians, and a slew of international investors, it’s a place that’s primed and ready for integration into the global market. Suddenly, there’s a lot of money to be made from this place with no value. But at whose expense?

Marx’s task was to expose and radically challenge a system that he felt put things ahead of people. Marx’s theoretical work was meant to reverse this dynamic, to free people from the capitalistic tyranny of things (see Hart 2011:8). As David Graeber explains, Marx viewed the capitalist system as perverse because “it saw human beings primarily as a means to produce wealth rather than the other way around” (2005:223). Most debates about Marx’s theory of value, Graeber continues, completely miss the point. The point of Marx’s theory was to critically question why “we continually recreate a world we don’t like, that we find unjust, and in which we have lost control” (2005:222). Marx’s question was why making money has come to take precedence over making humanity.

Graeber argues that value theory gives us a way to understand that the “ultimate stakes of politics are the ability to define what’s important in life to begin with” (2005:15; see also 2013:226). “In value terms,” he continues, “the question becomes: who has the right to translate their money into what sorts of meaning?” (2005:14). Elyachar writes of the expanding neoliberal market as a process that is “simultaneously a mode of dispossessing the poor” (2005:13). What is being dispossessed, ultimately, is the ability to meaningfully participate in defining value — or, what truly matters in human social life.

The East Cape of Baja California Sur is one more site, among many, of dispossession. In the name of social and economic progress, places and communities are being made subservient to development models and real estate markets that, unmistakably, make the needs of people — and communities — subservient to making money. The slow, grinding process of commoditization continues to push many local residents aside, especially those who do not have access to enough money to stay afloat and survive the rising economic tide.

Money reigns supreme in this new conceptual order. It is the access pass that allows some people in and pushes others to the margins. The East Cape, like Cabo San Lucas, Cancún, and so many places before it, is in the midst of a process in which money is rapidly becoming the defining value system. This dispossession eliminates other possibilities, meanings, and potential values. It all begins when the unique values of a place are subsumed by and transformed into the commensurable, comparable value of global markets.

This process of transformation is incomplete. It is also highly contested. Many residents of the East Cape feel that Cabo San Lucas’s path is their inevitable future. So they prepare their exodus accordingly. Others, however, hold out hope for an alternative future. Because for them, the meaning of their land (and home) goes far beyond money. And yet, despite this resistance, and attachment to place, the speculative draw of the land remains powerful. While some residents continue to hope for that alternative future, others find it hard to resist the feeling that they might indeed be walking on money, and now is the time to sell. Trapped within this tension—between making money and making community—lies the future.

*This is not his real name.

References

Alvarez Jr., Robert R. 1987. Familia: Migration and Adaptation in Baja and Alta California 1800–1975. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Elyachar, Julia. 2005. Markets of Dispossession. Durham: Duke University Press.

Graeber, David. 2005. Preface. In the Carnival of Values and the Exchange Value of Carnival. The Commoner. Link.

—2013. It is value that brings universes into being. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(2): 219–243.

Krutch, Joseph Wood. 1986[1961]. The Forgotten Peninsula: A Naturalist in Baja California. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Li, Tania M. 2014. What is land? Assembling a resource for global investment. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39 589–602 doi: 10.1111/tran.12065

Weiant, Pamela. 2005. A Political Ecology of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs): Case Study of Cabo Pulmo National Park, Sea of Cortez, Mexico. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara.