(Dis)embedding technologies: Documents, kinship, and the hybrid regulation of land markets in rural Tanzania

Keywords: market governance, land tenure, agrarian change, gender, bureaucracy, Tanzania
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 18

Abstract

Land has been considered stubbornly difficult to detach from place. This paper traces efforts to disembed land from kinship relations in Iringa, a rural region of Tanzania that is undergoing intense commodification. Over four decades, cash-based land rental and sales have grown exponentially in this region, along with the presence of non-resident buyers acquiring land as investments. These shifts have been accompanied by the increasing use of letters, contracts, and title deeds to document property rights, while professional land brokers increasingly facilitate sales. Yet these market devices have not entirely supplanted kinship-based mechanisms for regulating and legitimizing land transfers, nor has individual property replaced the multilayered rights of family members. Despite the efforts of state authorities and international development projects to standardize property forms and market practices, what has emerged is a hybrid system. Subordinated women and junior men contest and preempt land transfers using statutory documents and combining market and customary legitimation practices. Connecting research on the (dis)embeddedness of markets (Muellerleile 2013; Cohen 2018) with work on the evolution of hybrid land tenure regimes (Li 2014; Chimhowu 2019), this paper reveals how the very practices that disembed land as a commodity can be repurposed in efforts to re-attach land to local social relations.