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Property, rights ans community in a South African land‐claim case (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate )
Author(s) -
Nustad Knut G.
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
anthropology today
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.419
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1467-8322
pISSN - 0268-540X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8322.2011.00784.x
Subject(s) - compromise , property rights , land law , ideology , reification (marxism) , land reform , land tenure , context (archaeology) , property (philosophy) , nonpossessory interest in land , political science , government (linguistics) , sociology , law and economics , law , political economy , politics , public administration , geography , philosophy , linguistics , archaeology , epistemology , agriculture
In the context of South Africa's land reform programme, the concepts of ‘property’ and ‘rights’ carry a heavy ideological baggage. This is evident in the country's land reform policies, which have sought to reach a compromise between differing and often contradictory histories involving both rights and property. A shift in government policy, from treating land reform as a question of rights to a question of the transfer of land, has been accompanied by a reification of the idea of community. The result is a policy that is seriously out of touch with the complex legacy of dispossession that the land reform programme was meant to address. As shown by the case presented in this article, these problems become exacerbated when the land in question is part of a conservation area.