Titling Indigenous Territories: ambivalences, conflicts, legacies (Session 1)

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Recent decades have seen a wave of collective indigenous land titling initiatives across Latin America. Emerging from complex articulations between grassroots indigenous rights activism and an evolving neoliberal development agenda, such titling projects were fraught with ambivalence from the outset. Not only did global discourses of “ethnodevelopment” obscure the hybrid realities of these postcolonial spaces, but legal recognition often coincided with their integration into capitalist circuits of resource exploitation. This panel explores how such contradictions have played out in concrete experiences of indigenous mapping and land titling – and with what consequences for indigenous decolonial struggles and broader development processes. Session 1 focuses on discursive and cartographic constructions of indigenous territory, Session 2 on struggles over land rights and territorial governance.

Sub Track

• Afro-Latin/Indigenous Peoples

Session Organizer

• Penelope Anthias, University of California, Berkeley

Chair

• Penelope Anthias, University of California, Berkeley

Individual Presentations

• Indagar despojos desde la imagen: contrastes territoriales en la Sierra Rarámuri, Chichuahua, México. Fotografías decimonónicas y registros visuales actuales - Eugenia Macías Guzmán, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

• The Role of Shamans in Shifting Constructions of Territory and Territorial Governance - Juliet S Erazo, Florida International University

• Revisting the nature-culture connection: Landscapes, land rights, and sustainable development - Kiran Asher, Clark University

• Teetering Capital: Totonac Territoriality in the Wake of Neoliberal Capitalism - Korinta Maldonado Goti, University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign