A World-Systems Frontier Perspective to Land: Exploring the Uneven Trajectory of Land Rights Standardization in the Andes
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2017.698Keywords:
Frontier, Incorporation, Land Rights, Commodification, BoliviaAbstract
This paper proposes a world-systems frontier perspective by approaching frontiers and frontier zones as analytical tools in indicating and understanding the uneven local-global interactions underlying world-systemic incorporation processes. It argues that the notion of frontier can highlight the role of ‘peripheral agency’ in local-global interactions, revealing incorporation as a negotiated process. Based on research on the implementation and contestation of land reforms in Andean peasant communities, this paper applies a world-systems frontier framework to the analysis of historical processes of land rights commodification. An assessment of the formation and reorganization of a centralized land regime in Bolivia over the last five centuries demonstrates how this trajectory was shaped by the interplay of the modernizing aspirations of public authorities and strong communal land claims. This complex (re)negotiation over rights and resources drives the creation and movement of (new) frontiers of land control, materializing in an uneven trajectory of land commodification. The presented frontier perspective is instructive to questions on the expansion, the limits and the contradictions of the capitalist world.
References
Achtenberg, Emily. 2013. “Bolivia: The Unfinished Business of Land Reform.” NACLA report. Published electronically 1.4.2013. http://nacla.org/blog/2013/3/31/bolivia-unfinished-business-land-reform
Adelman, Jeremy. 2004. "Latin American and World Histories: Old and New Approaches to the Pluribus and the Unum." Hispanic American Historical Review 84(3): 399-409.
Antezana Ergueta, Luis. 2006. La Política Agraria En La Primera Etapa Nacional. La Paz: Plural Editores.
Araghi, Farshad, and Marina Karides. 2012. "Land Dispossession and Global Crisis: Introduction to the Special Section on Land Rights in the World-System." Journal of World-Systems Research XVIII(1): 1-5.
Arrighi, Giovanni. 1994. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London and New York: Verso Books.
Assies, Willem. 2009. "Land tenure in Bolivia: From colonial times to post-neoliberalism", pp. 293-323 in Ubink, Janine M. , Andre J. Hoekema, and Willem J. Assies, eds. Legalising Land Rights: Local Practices, State Responses and Tenure Society in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Leiden: Leiden University Press.
Barbier, Edward B. 2011. Scarcity and Frontiers. How Economies Have Developed through Natural Resource Exploitation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barragán, Rossana. 2012. "Los Títulos de la Corona De España de los Indígenas: Para una Historia de las Representaciones Políticas, Presiones y Negociaciones entre Cádiz y la República Liberal." Boletín Americanista 65: 15-37.
Benton, Lauren. 2009. A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bunker, Stephen G. 1984. "Modes of Extraction, Unequal Exchange, and the Progressive Underdevelopment of an Extreme Periphery: The Brazilian Amazon, 1600-1980." American Journal of Sociology 89(5): 1017-64.
Bunker, Stephen G., and Ciccantell, Paul S. 2005. Globalization and the Race for Resources. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Carlson, Jon D. 2001. “Broadening & Deepening: Systemic Expansion, Incorporation & the Zone of Ignorance.” Journal of World-Systems Research 7(2): 225-264.
Chumacero, Juan Pablo. 2012. “Una Mirada a la Estructura de Tenencia de Tierras en Bolivia en los Últimos 60 Años.” Published electronically 2.8.2012. www.ftierra.org
———. 2015. “Dinámicas cíclicas de la ejecución del saneamiento de tierras en Bolivia.” In La problemática de la tierra a 18 años de la Ley INRA. Territorios, minifundio e individualización, edited by TIERRA. La Paz: TIERRA.
Cole, Daniel H., and Elinor Ostrom. 2012. "The Variety of Property Systems and Rights in Natural Resources." In Property in Land and Other Resources, edited by D.H. Cole and E. Ostrom, 37-66. Cambridge: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Cottyn, Hanne. 2014. “Renegotiating Communal Autonomy: Communal Land Rights and Liberal Land Reform on the Bolivian Altiplano: Carangas, 1860-1930.” Unpublished PhD thesis. Ghent: Ghent University.
De Janvry, Alain. 1981. The Agrarian Question and Reformism in Latin America. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Diamond, Jared. 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking.
———. 2012. The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? London: Penguin Group.
Dunaway, Wilma A. 1994. “The Southern Fur Trade and the Incorporation of Southern Appalachia into the World-Economy, 1690-1763.” Review 17(2): 215-242.
Engerman, Stanley L., and Jacob Metzer. 2004. Land Rights, Ethno-Nationality and Sovereignty in History. London: Routledge.
Field, Thomas C. 2014. From development to dictatorship : Bolivia and the alliance for progress in the Kennedy era. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Fundación TIERRA. 2015. “Ampliación responsable de la frontera agrícola.” La Razón, 15 May 2015.
Gidwani, Vinay. 2008. Capital, Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gotkowitz, Laura. 2007. A Revolution for Our Rights: Indigenous Struggles for Land and Justice in Bolivia, 1880-1952. Durham: Duke University Press.
Grieshaber, Erwin P. 1980. "Survival of Indian Communities in Nineteenth-Century Bolivia: A Regional Comparison." Journal of Latin American Studies 12(2): 223-69.
Guillet, David. 1981. "Land Tenure, Ecological Zone, and Agricultural Regime in the Central Andes." American Ethnologist 8(1): 139-56.
Hall, Thomas D. 1989. Social Change in the Southwest, 1350-1880. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
———. 2000. "Frontiers, Ethnogenesis and World-Systems: Rethinking the Theories." In A World-Systems Reader. New Perspectives on Gender, Urbanism, Cultures, Indigenous Peoples, and Ecology, edited by Thomas D. Hall, 237-70. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
———. 2012. "Incoporation into and Merger of World-Systems." In Routledge Handbook of World-Systems Analysis, edited by Salvatore Babones and Christopher Chase-Dunn, 47-55. London: Routledge.
———. 2013. "Lessons from Comparing the Two Southwests: Southwest China and Northwest New Spain/Southwest United States." Journal of World-Systems Research XIX(1): 24-56.
Hall, Thomas D., and James V. Fenelon. 2009. Indigenous Peoples and Globalization. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.
Harvey, David. 1982. The Limits to Capital. Chicago: University of Chicago press.
Hopkins, Terrence, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1987. “Capitalism and the incorporation of new zones into the world-economy.” Review 10(5-6): 763-779.
INRA. 2008. Breve historia del reparto de tierras en Bolivia. De la titulación colonial a la reconducción comunitaria de la Reforma Agraria: Certezas y proyecciones. La Paz: INRA.
Kardulias, P. Nick. 2007. “Negotiation and Incorporation on the Margins of World-Systems: Examples from Cyprus and North America.” Journal of World Systems Research 13: 55-82.
Kaup, Brent Z. 2013. “In Spaces of Marginalization: Dispossession, Incorporation, and Resistance in Bolivia.” Journal of World-Systems Research XIX(1): 108-29.
Kay, Cristóbal, and Miguel Urioste. 2007. “Bolivia’s Unfinished Agrarian Reform: Rural Poverty and Development Policies.” In Land, Poverty and Livelihoods in an Era of Globalization: Perspectives from Developing and Transition Countries, edited by A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi, S. M. Borras Jr and C. Kay. London and New York: Routledge.
Klein, Herbert. 1993. Haciendas and Ayllus. Rural Society in the Bolivian Andes in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
———. 2003. A Concise History of Bolivia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
LandMark. 2015. “Global Platform of Indigenous and Community Land.” www.landmarkmap.org
Larson, Brooke. 2004. Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810-1910. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Larson, Brooke, Olivia Harris, and Enrique Tandeter. 1995. Ethnicity, Markets, and Migration in the Andes: At the Crossroads of History and Anthropology. Durham: Duke University Press.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.
Linklater, Andro. 2013. Owning the earth. The transforming history of land ownership. New York: Bloomsbury.
McMichael, Philip. 1990. “Incorporating Comparison within a World-Historical Perspective: An Alternative Comparative Method” American Sociological Review 55(3): 385-397.
———. 2000. “World-Systems Analysis, Globalization, and Incorporated Comparison” Journal of World-Systems Research VI(3): 68-99.
Mendoza, Teófilo, and et al., eds. 2000. Caminando por el Territorio de los Ayllus y Markas... Del Qullasuyu. Manual de Exposición sobre Propiedades Agrarias. La Paz: CDIMA.
Mitchell, Timothy. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Moore, Jason W. 2008. "Ecological Crises and the Agrarian Question
in World-Historical Perspective." Monthly Review 60(6): 54-63.
———. 2010a. "'Amsterdam Is Standing on Norway' Part I: The Alchemy of Capital, Empire and Nature in the Diaspora of Silver, 1545-1648." Journal of Agrarian Change 10(1): 33-68.
———. 2010b. "Cheap Food and Bad Money. Food, Frontiers, and Financialization in the Rise and Demise of Neoliberalism." Review 2-3.
______. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life. Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso.
______. 2016. “The Rise of Cheap Nature.” In Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason Moore, 78-115. Oakland: PM Press.
Mumford, Jeremy. 2012. Vertical Empire: The General Resettlement of Indians in the Colonial Andes. Durham: Duke University Press.
Murra, Jhon V. 1975. "El Control Vertical De Un Máximo De Pisos Ecológicos En La Economia De Las Sociedades Andinas." In Formaciones Económicas y Políticas del Mundo Andino, edited by John V. Murra, 59-115. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.
O’Hearn, Denis. 2005. "Cycles of Accumulation, Crisis, Materials, and Space: Can Different Theories of Change Be Reconciled?". Research in Rural Sociology and Development 10: 113.
Ostrom, Elinor, and Charlotte Hess. 2007. "Private and Common Property Rights." In Working paper series: SSRN.
Ovando Sanz, Jorge Alejandro. 1985. El tributo indígena en las finanzas bolivianas del siglo XIX. La Paz: Comité Ejecutivo de la Universidad Bolivar.
Oxfam et al. 2016. Common Ground. Securing Land Rights and Safeguarding the Earth. Oxford: Oxfam, International Land Coalition, Rights and Resources Initiative.
Peluso, Nancy Lee, and Christian Lund. 2011. "New Frontiers of Land Control: Introduction." Journal of Peasant Studies 38(4): 667-81.
Platt, Tristan. 1982. Estado Boliviano Y Ayllu Andino: Tierra Y Tributo En El Norte De Potosi. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.
———. 1984. "Liberalism and Ethnocide in the Southern Andes." History Workshop Journal 17(1): 3-18.
———. 1987. "The Andean Experience of Bolivian Liberalism." In Resistance, Rebellion and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World 18th-20th Century, edited by Steve J. Stern, 280-326. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Quijano, Aníbal. 2000. "Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America." Nepantla: Views from South 1(3): 533-80.
———. 2008. "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Social Classification." In Coloniality at Large. Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, edited by Mabel Moraña, Dussel, Enrique, and Jauregui, Carlos A. Durham: Duke University Press.
Richards, John F. 2009. "Toward a Global System of Property Rights in Land." In The Environment and World History, edited by Edmund Burke and Kenneth Pomeranz. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rights and Resources Initiative. 2014. "Lots of Words, Little Action. Will the Private Sector Tip the Scales for Community Land Rights?" In Annual Review 2013-2014. Washington D.C.: Rights and Resources Initiative.
Rights and Resources Initiative. 2015. Who Owns the World’s Land? A global baseline of formally recognized indigenous and community land rights. Washington, D.C.: RRI.
Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. 1991. “Pedimos la revisión de límites: Un episodio de incomunicación de castas en el movimiento de caciques-apoderados, 1919-1921.” In Reproduccion y transformacion de las sociedades andinas, XVI-XX, edited by Segundo Moreno and Frank Salomon. Colección 500 Años. Quito: Movimiento Laicos para América Latina.
———. [1984] 2010. Oprimidos pero no vencidos. Luchas del campesinado aymara y qhechwa. 1900-1980. 4th ed. La Paz: La mirada salvaje.
Rodríguez, Jaime E. R. 2005. Revolución, independencia y las nuevas naciones de América. Madrid: Fundación MAPFRE TAVERA.
Rojas Calizaya, Juan Carlos. 2010. "Agrarian Transformation in Bolivia at Risk." BIF Bulletin 22.
Sassen, Saskia. 2013. "When the Center No Longer Holds: Cities as Frontier Zones." Cities 34: 67–70.
Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Serrão, José Vicente. 2013. "Institutional Encounters: European Property Rights in Colonial Contexts." Paper presented at the Rural History conference, Bern.
Sevilla-Buitrago, Álvaro. 2015. “Capitalist Formations of Enclosure: Space and the Extinction of the Commons” Antipode, 47(4): 999-1020.
Stern, Steve, ed. 1987. Resistance, Rebellion and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World 18th-20th Century. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Turner, Frederick Jackson. 1920. The Frontier in American History [in English]. New York: H. Holt and Co..
Ubink, Janine M., Andre J. Hoekema, and Willem J. Assies, eds. 2009. Legalising Land Rights : Local Practices, State Responses and Tenure Society in Africa, Asia and Latin America. edited by Janine M. Ubink, A. J. Hoekema and Willem Assies, Law, Governance, and Development. Research. Leiden: Leiden University Press.
Urioste, Miguel. 2005. “Bolivia: La Reforma Agraria abandonada. Valles y altiplano.” La Paz: Fundadción TIERRA, ILC, IDRC.
———. 2008. "Nuevo Ciclo De Reformas Agrarias En América Latina?". Pulso semanario 23.11.2008-29.11.2008: 4.
Urioste, Miguel, Rossana Barragán, and Gonzalo Colque. 2007. Los nietos de la Reforma Agraria. Tierra y comunidad en el altiplano de Bolivia. La Paz: Fundación TIERRA, CIPCA.
Van Bavel, Bas J. P., and Richard W. Hoyle, eds. 2010. Rural Economy and Society in North-Western Europe, 500-2000. Social Relations: Property and Power. Turnhout: Brepols.
Vanhaute, Eric. 2012. "Peasants, Peasantries and (De)Peasantization in the Capitalist World-System." Chap. 9.3 In Routledge Handbook of World-Systems Analysis, edited by Salvatore Babones and Christopher Chase-Dunn, 313-21. London: Routledge.
———. 2013. World History. An Introduction. London: Routledge.
Vanhaute, Eric, Hanne Cottyn, and Yang Wang. forthcoming “Peasantry”. Forthcoming in Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2nd edition.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2003. Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization. London: Verso.
———. 2012. "Land, Space, and People: Constraints of the Capitalist World-Economy." Journal of World-Systems Research XVIII(1): 6-14.
Webb, Walter Prescott. 1964 (reprint). The Great Frontier. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Webber, Jeffery. 2017. “Evo Morales, transformismo, and the consolidation of agrarian capitalism in Bolivia” Journal of Agrarian Change, 17(2): 330-347.
Weis, Tony. 2007. The Global Food Economy: The Battle for the Future of Farming. London: Zed Books.
Young, Kevin A. 2017. Blood of the earth : resource nationalism, revolution, and empire in Bolivia. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- The Author retains copyright in the Work, where the term “Work” shall include all digital objects that may result in subsequent electronic publication or distribution.
- Upon acceptance of the Work, the author shall grant to the Publisher the right of first publication of the Work.
- The Author shall grant to the Publisher and its agents the nonexclusive perpetual right and license to publish, archive, and make accessible the Work in whole or in part in all forms of media now or hereafter known under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License or its equivalent, which, for the avoidance of doubt, allows others to copy, distribute, and transmit the Work under the following conditions:
- Attribution—other users must attribute the Work in the manner specified by the author as indicated on the journal Web site;
- The Author is able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the nonexclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the Work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), as long as there is provided in the document an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post online a prepublication manuscript (but not the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version of the Work) in institutional repositories or on their Websites prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work. Any such posting made before acceptance and publication of the Work shall be updated upon publication to include a reference to the Publisher-assigned DOI (Digital Object Identifier) and a link to the online abstract for the final published Work in the Journal.
- Upon Publisher’s request, the Author agrees to furnish promptly to Publisher, at the Author’s own expense, written evidence of the permissions, licenses, and consents for use of third-party material included within the Work, except as determined by Publisher to be covered by the principles of Fair Use.
- The Author represents and warrants that:
- the Work is the Author’s original work;
- the Author has not transferred, and will not transfer, exclusive rights in the Work to any third party;
- the Work is not pending review or under consideration by another publisher;
- the Work has not previously been published;
- the Work contains no misrepresentation or infringement of the Work or property of other authors or third parties; and
- the Work contains no libel, invasion of privacy, or other unlawful matter.
- The Author agrees to indemnify and hold Publisher harmless from Author’s breach of the representations and warranties contained in Paragraph 6 above, as well as any claim or proceeding relating to Publisher’s use and publication of any content contained in the Work, including third-party content.
Revised 7/16/2018. Revision Description: Removed outdated link.
