‘The Oxford Amnesty Lectures is a registered charity. Its purpose is to raise fiands to increase awareness of Amnesty Intemational in the academic and wider communities. It is otherwise independent of Amnesty International. It began as a fund-raising project for the local Amnesty group in Oxford, and is now one of the world’s leading name-lecture series. To date, Oxford Amnesty Lectures has raised around £100,000 for Amnesty International Land Rights The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2005 Edited by Timothy Chesters OXFORDOXFORD (Great Chrendon Street, Oxord ox: Go ‘Oxford University Presi department of dhe Universi of Oxo eres the Univers abecaive of excellence in research, schol, a edocaon by publishing worldwide a ‘Osford Neve York Auckland Cape Tove Dare Salaim Hong Kong. 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Eng conetming reproduction curl the scope ofthe above thonld be sent to the ighs Deparment, ‘Onford Univenity Pre, at the adres adore ‘You must nt circulate ths book in anyother binding o cover ‘nc you mus impose the same codon on any aequiree ‘Bath Libery Cataloguing in Pblietion Data Dats avalible Library of Congres Cataloging in Publication Das, Data avaible ‘Typaet by SPI Publisher Services, Pondichery, Inds Printed in Gree Brin ‘on acide paper by (Chys Lad, Sees ple ISBN 978-o-15 9545102 Preface The 13th Oxford Amnesty Lectures, on the subject of ‘Land Rights’, were given in January, February, and March 2005, ‘Seven speakers addressed the series: Marilyn Strathern, Misha Glenny, Romeo Saganash, Frank Brennan, Ken Wiwa, Richard Leakey, and Daniel Baron-Cohen. I would like on behalfof Oxford Amnesty Lectures to express my thanks to all of them, Not all the lectures are reproduced in this book. Misha Glenny’s contribution is under copyright; Daniel Baron-Cohen’s was heavily image-based and so, while ex- tremely well-received as an occasion, deemed unsuitable for publication here. That leaves five lectures, with an additional ‘guest contribution fom William Beinart. To him too go my thanks. In the spirit of dialogue and debate traditionally championed by Oxford Amnesty Lectures, this book also includes five responses to each of our speakers. The respond~ ents were: Laura Rival, Ellen L. Lutz, Marcus Colchester, ‘Adam Higazi, and Lotte Hughes. | am grateful to all of them for their thought-provoking and, on occasion, provocative companion pieces. Final thanks go to the other members of the Oxford Amnesty Lectures committee, whose hard work made the lectures, and so this book, possible. They are Melissa McCarthy, Chris Miller, Nicholas Owen, Fabienne Pagnier, Deana Rankin, Richard Scholar, Stephen Shute, Kate Tun- stall, Katrin Wehling, and Wes Williams. T.GC.CONTRIBUTORS resigned in 2001. His books include The Origin of Humankind (1994) and (with Roger Lewin) The Sixth Extinction: Patters of Life and the Future of Mankind (1995). ELLEN L, Lotz is Executive Director of Cultural Survival. She has written widely on human rights and conflict resolution, with particular reference to Latin America. She is author of Serving Survivors of Torture (1991). Lavra Ruvat is a fellow of Linacre College, Oxford, and a university lecturer in Anthropology and Development. Her work centres on the impact of development policies on Amerindian indigenous peoples. She is author of Trekking through History: The Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador (2002). ROMEO SAGANASH is a lawyer, director of Québec relations for the Cree Regional Authority and former Deputy Grand. Chief of the Grand Council of the Crees. Manityn SrrarHeRn is William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and Mistress of Girton College. She is author of Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things (1999) and Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives are Often a Surprise (2005), Ken Wiwa, also known as Ken Saro-Wiwa Jnr, is a Canada based Nigerian journalist and writer. He is author of In the Shadow of the Saint (2000). He currently writes as a columnist for the Toronto Globe and Mail. Introduction Timothy Chesters Indigenous peoples and governments, industrialists and en- ‘vironmentaliss all use—or have at some stage to confront— the language of ‘land rights’. But what does it mean to invoke that language? What kind of problems can it help us to solv ‘The papers collected in this volume, a selection of the lectures given at the Oxford Amnesty Lectures series on ‘land rights’ held in Oxford in Spring 2005, offer a range of reflections ‘on land, rights, and how we might connect the two, This connection is not obvious. Rights ofthe land or rights, fo the land? Genitive or dative? The choice of preposition ‘muddies the stream, and neither has achieved the complete exclusion of the other. Conservationists and ecologists some times call—whether explicitly or implicitly—on the rights of the land: not to be exploited, for example, or polluted or despoiled. Propping up this genitive use is a straightforward derivation from the more usual ‘human rights’: just as human rights’ describes the rights of the human, so ‘land rights’, one ‘ight think, should describe the rights of the land. Logical as this may seem, this kind of transferral requires a bold leap of faith, perhaps a leap even bolder than that which allows us to speak, similarly, of ‘animal rights’. For while an animistic view of land, such as prevails in certain traditional societies and some parts of the environmentalist movement, might happily invest land with a desire to demand its rights (as well a5 its rites), those who defer to the secular, humanist 1INTRODUCTION origins of rights-speak have usually fought shy of extending. that language beyond the purely human sphere. It is notable that only Richard Leakey, in the papers that follow, comes lose to invoking ‘land rights’ as the rights ofthe land. The more widely accepted sense of “land rights’ refers, rather, to rights tothe land. This ‘to’ marks a claim, straight forwardly, on the thing itself. But it also seems to await completion by a verb: rights to inhabit the land, to farm it, build homes upon it, aso to mine it, fell its trees, or extract its oll, Here too a danger lurks. Whereas those who deify the Jand invest it with an agency at odds with the rationalist rights tradition, those who speak in this way risk robbing it of any agency at all. Land becomes something done to and not doing—a passive commodity with no right of reply. Of course, the effects of climate change and environmental catastrophe may yet, through nature's vengeance, provide a painful corrective to this view. In the meantime, however, the language of ‘rights to’ can make life easy for the colon- izer’s dollar. As soon as we make of land a stake passively awaiting claimants, we are already on the way to accepting the ‘equation of land and property, with all the Western legal strictures that property, and ‘property rights’, imply. This development was probably inevitable, and most indigenous. movements have now accepted that their battles must be fought on these terms or not at all. But since this acceptance already marks a considerable concession, it should wam us Against too vaunting a claim for the language of ‘land rights Compounding the problem for those of us in the West is that much current leftist discourse (and not only ‘rights’ discourse) has a determinedly secondary way of talking about land. Postmodem theory as practised in my own discipline, literary and cultural criticism, isa case in point. A quick look 2 INTRODUCTION at the Arts faculty notice-board (or the contents pages of ‘many academic journals) will confirm that those of us with, an interest in identity polities of various kinds have become ‘extremely fluent in the language of space: ‘limits’, ‘margins’, “borders’, ‘deviation’, ‘liminality’, ‘transgression’ or (to take the title of the previous Oxford Amnesty Lectures series), ‘displacement’. Indeed, it seems that in this post-Foucauldian cera, it has become difficult to imagine the relation between. the powerful and powerless in anything other than spatial terms, From this one might suppose that postmodem theory ‘would have much to say on that particular form of space to which we point when we say ‘land’. But postmodern ‘space’ and ‘land’ are not the same. Indeed, our talk of the first may have prevailed at the expense of the second. The postmodern language of ‘space’—understood as the dimension, or theatre, in which subjects fight for power—is ‘metaphorical and superstructural. Metaphorical, because even though postmodem ‘space’ frequently instantiates itself in 4 material environment (as in the notorious panopticon de~ scribed by Foucault in Discipline and Punish), it often floats firee of, even flouts, the physical landscape. For instance, itis primarily 2 metaphor that postmodernist historians intend when they speak of homosexuals, criminals, and the mentally illas ‘marginalized’ subjects. For whereas these characters may at various times throughout history have been consigned to the physical edges of their societies—as when all three were locked up in Bicétre on the outskirts of eighteenth- century Paris —many lived and worked, afterall, at th literal centres of politico-cultural power. In related fashion, post- modem ‘space’ has become, chiefly at least, a superstructural dimension, Even in postcolonial theory (the one area that might have been expected to develop an account of land and 3INTRODUCTION landlessness) there exists a tendency to count the superstruc~ tural costs of land dispossession while showing rather less interest in the material losses at the base. Enquiries into repre sentations of land, labour, and resources were once of great Interest to Marxist literary theorists, such as the Raymond Williams of The Country and the City. Today these have largely ‘been buried beneath questions of colonized ethnic, gender, or linguistic identities. To say as much is neither to devalue the considerable achievements of postcolonial theory nor to be litde the importance of identity politics. It is rather to note how fir the current hegemony of ‘space’-speak has tended to exclude issues of land from (to use another favourite spatial metaphor) the ‘discursive territory’ of postmodern theory. Land is neither a superstructural nor a metaphorical con- cept. For the contributors to this volume, the primary stake in struggles for land rights is economic before it is cultural ‘And, as is clear from the first contribution, by Marilyn Strather, those whose land is under threat tend rather to view it in metonymic terms. Her essay invites us to follow the Troubriand islanders in ‘looking at one thing and seeing, another’. Being looked at are natural resources, trees or yams; being seen is the creative force of the land that produced them, Thanks to this metonymic “double vision’, which Stathern claims to be fundamental to Melanesian ways of seeing the world, the tangible fruits of the land become expressive both of land’s own creative potential and of the complex and intangible social relationships, and sense of personal and communal worth, upon which their harvest depends. In this way the products of the land are experienced as extensions of the land, and ofits human stewardship, just as a book may be seen as an extension of its writer's creativity. This comparison is not an idle one for Strathern, for she usesit 4 INTRODUCTION asa basis on which to argue that the relationship between land and its creations in Papua New Guinea might be construed, in Western terms, a5 analagous to that between authors and intellectual property. This is a tempting possibility, since it offers up a means by which indigenous populations might lay claim to land as a special form of property, and not merely one transactable in the developers’ terms of brute commodity value. Its not without its problems, however. As Laura Rival writes in her response to Strathern’s paper, a fully historicized account of land claims would have to take account of the fact, that, even within indigenous communities, the creative po- tential of land ‘is subject to multiple and overlapping claims ‘of ownership’ by social actors who are ‘not economically or politically equal’. That this situation has arisen at all is testa~ ment to the power of a corporate view of land which has succeeded in fragmenting notions of common land through the ‘rise of exclusive, calculative, modes of valuation’ Romeo Saganash’s lecture ako takes up the theme of individual versus collective claims on land, here in the frame~ ‘work of international human rights. A lawyer and spokesman. for the James Bay Cree people, Saganash contends that at= tempts to incorporate the notion of collective rights in the long-debated UN draft Declaration on the Rights of indigenous Peoples have foundered on what he considers to be the discriminatory objections of (among others) the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office. While succes- sive UK officials have acknowledged the importance of col- lective rights, they have at the same time sought to segregate those rights from the international human rights framework, claiming that human rights can only properly be asserted by individuals, not groups. Saganash takes careful isue with this position, arguing that such an understanding contravenesINTRODUCTION the spirit of the UN Charter, as well as the principles of numerous other working groups on Land Rights, treaty monitoring bodies, and intemational convenants (auch as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination). In her response to Saganash’s paper, Ellen Lutz reports that, in spring 2006, the newly formed United Nations Human Rights Council finalized its draft Declaration on the Rights of indigenous Peoples and for~ ‘warded it to the United Nations General Assembly for approval in December of the same year. In itself great step forward, the Declaration met further difficulties when, at the December ‘meeting the General Assembly declined to approve it. Reasons for this setback were various, Some Affican states regretted that it led to provide a satisfactory definition of indigenous’. They ‘were also nervous that t seemed to promise ‘sef