[DOC] Guide to London's Contemporary Architecture by Kenneth Allinson; Victoria Thornton at Arts-Photography

Description

Across Melanesia; the ways in which people connect to land are being transformed by processes of modernizationmdash;globalization; the building of states and nations; practices and imaginaries of development; the legacies of colonialism; and the complexities of postcolonial encounters. Melanesian peoples are becoming landowners; Stead argues; both in the sense that these processes of change compel forms of property relations; and in the sense that ldquo;landownerrdquo; and ldquo;custom landownerrdquo; become identities to be wielded against the encroachment of both state and capital. In places where customary forms of land tenure have long been dominant; deeply intertwined with senses of self and relationships with others; land now becomes a crucible upon which social relations; power; and culture are reconfigured and reimagined. Employing a multi-sited ethnographic approach; Becoming Landowners explores these transformations to land and life as they unfold across two Melanesian countries. The chapters move between coasts and inland mountain ranges; between urban centers and rural villages; telling the stories of people and places who are always situated and particular but who also share powerful commonalities of experience. These include a subsistence-based community shaped by the legacies of colonialism and occupation in remote Timor-Leste; villagers in Papua New Guinea resisting a mining operation and the government agents supporting it; an urban East Timorese settlement resisting eviction by the nation-state its residents hoped would represent them in the post-independence era; and people and groups in both countries who are struggling for; with; and sometimes against the formal codification of their claims to land and place. In each of these instances; customary and modern forms of connection to land are propelled into complex and dynamic configurations; theorized here in an innovative way as entanglements of custom and modernity. Moving between multiple sites; scales; and forms of collectivity; Becoming Landowners reveals entanglements as spaces of deep ambivalence. Here; structures of power are destabilized in ways that can lend themselves to the diminishing of local autonomy in the face of the state and capital. At the same time; the destabilization of power also creates new possibilities for the reassertion of that autonomy; and of the customary forms of connection to land in which it is grounded.