Publication
Who Owns the Hills? Ownership, Inequality, and Communal Sharing in the Borderlands of India
Across the uplands of Northeast India, sedentary forms of agriculture are gradually replacing shifting cultivation. In the process, land holdings are becoming “privatized.” As commonly held land becomes inaccessible or dis- appears, and mechanisms that formerly called for the redistribution of wealth transform, social inequality increases. The location of the Garo Hills at the border with Bangladesh renders the area a peripheral borderland, in which the Indian state exerts its presence.
- Author
- Erik de Maaker
- Date
- 17 February 2021
In his historical analysis of upland societies of the Zomia massif, James Scott (2009) emphasizes how the modern state strives to control and “make taxable” all of its subjects. For Tania Murray Li (2014), the development of neoliberal markets is the primary driver of change, as she shows based on long-term research in rural Central Sulawesi (Indonesia). While the effects of both these transformative forces can be clearly felt, in the Garo Hills the ongoing dissolution of communally managed land and the creation of privately owned plots is nonetheless held in check by the persistent social obligation to maintain at least a certain degree of communal sharing.
Who Owns the Hills? Ownership, Inequality, and Communal Sharing in the Borderlands of India
By Erik de Maaker (included in a special forum on “Agrarian Change in Zomia,” guest-edited by Erik de Maaker and Deborah E. Tooker), published in the journal Asian Ethnology.