Land

Abstract

Land means very different things to different people. Yet it is only by recognizing that there are common conceptual underpinnings around the meaning of land that critical agrarian studies can start to interrogate the centrality of land in rural lives, and as a result its power in agrarian politics. There are currently two different overarching understandings of land. The dominant one is that of enlightenment modernism, in which land is a scarce resource to be exploited for private profit. A minority view witnesses land working through people and their self-identification. It is a result of the latter that land has yet to be fully captured by the dynamics of enclosure so central to capitalist development.