AbstractsHistory

Renegotiating communal autonomy: communal land rights and liberal land reform on the Bolivian altiplano: Carangas, 1860-1930

by Hanne Cottyn




Institution: Ghent University
Department:
Year: 2014
Keywords: History and Archaeology; 20th century; 19th century; Land Reform; Land Rights; Indigenous Communities; Peasants; Bolivia; Andes; World History; Frontiers
Record ID: 1077174
Full text PDF: http://hdl.handle.net/1854/LU-4432196


Abstract

This dissertation is the result of a detailed analysis of the local dynamics generated in the context of an anti-corporatist land reform in a rural region marked by a strong communal control over land. The presented case study is informed by a broader analytical framework that allows for a critical assessment of peripheral agency within a globalizing world. With this research, I aim to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of global-local interactions in which local actors, and particularly rural communities, creatively re-negotiate the terms of their participation and autonomy in the face of state- and market-driven integration processes. This ambition leads to the question of how trajectories of rural transition are shaped by the course of world-systemic expansion and, the other way around, how processes of globalization are “fuelled” by local dynamics of rural change. Do these local-global entanglements constellate a more homogeneous world, or do they feed new trends of ? My assessment of that question seeks to grasp how autonomous spaces for communal organization have been asserted or enclosed throughout the cycles of world-systemic contraction and expansion. In view of the historical oscillations in the erosion and renewal of such spaces, it interrogates the assets and potentials but also the vulnerabilities of communal agency. I address the question on rural change and communal autonomy from the angle of land rights and the imposition of standardized land rights. This process of commodification will be specified for the rural Andes, where the outcome of centuries-long processes of colonial exploitation and post-colonial extractivism entails a remarkable (yet over the centuries increasingly more defied) “margin” for the safeguarding of communal land control. Why could such rights be preserved in certain regions? How were these rights safeguarded throughout cycles of land rights commodification? What implications did this have on the longer term? I confine my examination of these questions to Bolivia’s first land reform project launched by under the name of Exvinculación, referring to the Alienation Act of 1874. This reform emblematizes a longer and conflictive process of liberal legislation and rural transformation that subjected communal autonomy and land rights security to an enclosure operation. The central story of this research, however, tells more about the enclosure’s standstill rather than its advance. The province of Carangas, entirely located on the altiplano (Andean High Plateau), was one of the few rural zones where the land reform made no headway. While this is mainly explained by the region’s protracted marginalization and its little attractive soil for agricultural entrepreneurs, the premise of my research urges to look beyond ecological and demographic factors. The two guiding questions of my enquiry are why and how the imposed land rights reorganization of customary land systems and the related break-up of communities was kept at bay in Carangas; and what impact this had on social…