Epistemologies of Land: (Global Epistemics)

Land is at the centre of crucial public debates ranging from climate adaptation to housing and development, to agriculture and indigenous peoples' rights. These debates frequently become stuck, though, because the meaning of land in different contexts is poorly understood. Bringing together specialists of epistemology and land, this open access book is a landmark contribution to understanding land knowledge as a complex factor in these debates. Land has been known in astonishingly different ways throughout history, but in recent decades one particular understanding of land as commodity has become increasingly hegemonic globally. This understanding has enormously destructive effects, not only for many people and animals living on and from the land that is increasingly grabbed for extractivist purposes, but also for possible imaginations of how humans can relate to land in the future. In Epistemologies of Land, scholars reconstruct how the understanding of land has come to be reduced to “land as commodity” historically, what the consequences of this epistemological transformation have been, and what alternative ways of understanding land could help establish intellectually abundant and ecologically sustainable ways of relating to the land we live on. Particularly, the book shows how a change in perspective – thinking society through land – can lay the foundation not only for knowing more about land, but for a different kind of environmental and social knowledge that could recover forgotten wisdom of how humans and animals have historically related to land, and by that transform the ways in which land contributes to our daily life beyond its diminished meaning as an economic resource. Contributors include: Eloisa Berman Arevalo, Shailaja Fennell, Inanna Hamati-Ataya, Katarina Kusic, Maarten Meijer, David Nally, Sakshi, Leo Steeds, and Anna Wolkenhauer. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by European Research Council (ERC).

Table of Contents:
Introduction, Felix Anderl Part I: Commodifying (Knowledge of) Land Chapter 1. The Land Organism: On the Multispecies Commons and Its Enclosure, David Nally Chapter 2. Land as Capital: a Genealogy through the Birth and Development of Economic Thought, Leo Steeds Chapter 3. Of ‘False Economies’ and ‘Missing Markets’: An Essay in three acts, Shailaja Fennell Part II: Contesting Land Knowledge through Alternatives Chapter 4. Stories at “Land’s End”: Emplacements and Displacements of Black Women's Land Epistemologies in the Colombian Caribbean, Eloisa Berman Arevalo Chapter 5. What's in a land grab? Knowing Dispossession and Land in South East Europe, Katarina Kušic Chapter 6. Land in Courts: Registers of Memory, Sovereignty, and Justice, Sakshi Part III: Knowing and Unknowing Land Chapter 7. Knowing and Unknowing the Countryside – Epistemological Implications of Rural Social Policy in Zambia, Anna Wolkenhauer Chapter 8. On the EU’s Epistemologies of Soils’ Resourcefulness, or: Why Land and Soil Are Not the Same, Maarten Meijer Chapter 9. From Epistemologies of Land to the Lands of Epistemology: Being and Becoming in the Agrocene, Inanna Hamati-Ataya Index About the Contributors

About the Author :
Felix Anderl is professor of conflict studies at the Center for Conflict Studies, Philipps-University Marburg. His research focuses on conflicts over land, food and rural development. Linking the disciplines of social movement research, international relations, and conflict research, he emphasizes field research, such as participant observation in social movements and the institutions they oppose.

Review :
Anderl’s edited collection is an exciting foray into how land knowledges change through a plurality of meanings of land as a caring subject with histories, relationships, and effects. A terrific resource for all social scientists concerned with social justice and the vital need to rethink human relationships to the environment. An exciting endeavour to bring land, the very material and physically located base of living, back into global studies, where the social world sometimes seems fluid, imagined and detached from its material ground. For something that is central to human history, identity and society, the meanings of land are seriously undertheorized. Epistemologies of Land addresses this glaring lacunae. Within the context of the climate emergency, demonstrating that land-based relations continues to be the foundation of both life on this planet and the contemporary social order is an urgent and important task. This timely book will be read and appreciated by students and scholars alike for its unique insights into the critical role of the knowledge that can be derived from land and the implications of that knowledge for the future.