Negotiating Territoriality : Spatial Dialogues Between State and Tradition

Territoriality is a key concept in how we understand the interaction between governmentality and the ways in which different communites use and dwell upon the land. However, it is also an unexplored area of inquiry - certainly in terms of comparative ethnography scholarship. This volume addresses the concept of territoriality, providing a broad spectrum of ethnographic case studies of spatial governance, shedding light on different forms of spatial organization and on how modern states have interacted with traditional societies'' ways of using and managing territory.

This edited collection disrupts dominant narratives about space, states, and borders, bringing comparative ethnographic and geographic scholarship in conversation with one another to illuminate the varied ways in which space becomes socialized via political, economic, and cognitive appropriation. Societies must, first and foremost, do more than wrangle over ownership and land rights — they must dwell in space. Yet, historically the interactions between the state’s territorial imperative with previous forms of landscape management have unfolded in a variety of ways, including top-down imposition, resistance, and negotiation between local and external actors. These interactions have resulted in hybrid forms of territoriality, and are often fraught with fundamentally different perceptions of landscape. This book foregrounds these experiences and draws attention to situations in which different social constructions of space and territory coincide, collide, or overlap. Each ethnographic case in this volume presents forms of territoriality that are contingent upon contested histories, politics, landscape, the presence or absence of local heterogeneity and the involvement of multiple external actors with differing motivations — ultimately all resulting in the potential for conflict or collaboration and divergent implications for conceptions of community, autochthony and identity.