Premium
The Spirits are Crying: Dispossessing Land and Possessing Bodies in Rural Cambodia
Author(s) -
Beban Alice,
Work Courtney
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
antipode
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.177
H-Index - 98
eISSN - 1467-8330
pISSN - 0066-4812
DOI - 10.1111/anti.12073
Subject(s) - negotiation , possession (linguistics) , politics , state (computer science) , sociology , certainty , land tenure , consumption (sociology) , political economy , political science , environmental ethics , law , social science , history , archaeology , linguistics , philosophy , epistemology , algorithm , computer science , agriculture
Abstract In 2009, a land spirit disrupted plantation development within a contested Economic Land Concession in Cambodia. The spirit, along with efforts of a monk and NGO, ultimately persuaded state officials to return 5 ha of land to the local temple. In this paper, we bring together literature on the anthropology of religion, political economy of land possession, and critical development studies; we demonstrate that land spirits continue as members of political patronage chains at both the state and the local level, and show how the non‐capitalist logics of spirit negotiations both challenged and legitimized large‐scale land acquisition projects. The spirit was not subsumed by, but rather shaped, contemporary capitalist expansion in ways that call for a critical examination of the ontological certainty that all land is designed for human production and consumption.