عنوان

The right to belong to the land :

Number

TLets742236

Title Proper

The right to belong to the land :

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Duer, Mara

Title Proper by Another Author

coloniality and resistance in the Araucanía

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

University of Warwick

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2017

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

Ph.D.

Body granting the degree

University of Warwick

Text preceding or following the note

2017

Text of Note

This project focuses on the formation of the countryside in the violent encounter of extractive capitalism and resistance movements. My case study looks at land contestation in the Araucanía (centre-south of Chile) between forestry corporations, state agencies and Mapuche rural communities. The project questions the narrow approach to understandings of land in the Western canon as a relation of exclusive ownership. I examine how land is changing its role as a provider of the quotidian and an environmental regulator to become a disciplinary technology of displacement. Through different deployments of notions of land (i.e.: property, territory and patrimony) I developed a typology of land resistance based on the perspective of the communities actively resisting land dispossession and claiming ancestral land. To date, a considerable body of research has sought to explore the restructuring of the countryside in the Global South through political-economy approaches. Instead of using a quantitative analysis to think of global capital expansion over rural peripheral lands, this thesis explores the changing qualities of land in relation to the advancement of land commodification. Thus, I take a relational approach to land, first, to fill a gap in how the production of land has been theorised to date, and second, to show how its contested determination (as a resource) affects the formation of the rural social space. This study will demonstrate how property relations are losing dominance over the management of the ground with the arrival of other landed relations showing that land is more than a thing to be owned. By using the case of the forestry sector in Chile, I explore the corporate takeover of rural lands as a continuation of a long history of expropriation and exploitation of racialized peoples and lands. In order to give context to the current period, I revisit the history of racialized landed relations in the Araucanía arriving to its current forms. This new period of modern-colonial relations will show a new calibration between fixes and dispossessions at the encounter between global corporate interest in land on one hand and indigenous ancestral land claims on the other.

HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform

K Law (General)

Duer, Mara

University of Warwick

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y