Agenda

Aaron Kappeler, University of Edinburgh

“Outstretched Hands”: Indigenous Land Rights, Sovereignty, and the Formation of Ethnic Boundaries in Venezuela”

Abstract
This talk explores the ways in which social order is fabricated through the provision of collective property rights. Taking as its object the struggle for indigenous land in the sierra of Perijá, a frontier region in western Venezuela, it investigates the co-production of ethnicity and sovereignty as well as how the efforts of the Venezuelan government to settle longstanding land claims and provide development aid to indigenous communities have resulted in a re- demarcation of the ethnic and territorial boundaries of the nation. In step with Article 119 of the Venezuelan constitution, which recognizes the right of indigenous peoples to traditional forms of land tenure, and in partial fulfilment of the promise of citizenship, the Ministry of Agriculture has returned portions of former ancestral range to indigenous communities in the Andes. But while Venezuelan leaders laud indigenous peoples as a force for the revitalization of the nation, my fieldwork in Perijá shows that interventions negate the effective sovereignty of indigenous peoples over land and that the modes of labour and cultivation which emerge alongside official forms of cultural recognition produce new forms of exclusion.

Nota biografica
Aaron Kappeler is Lecturer in Anthropology of Development and Director of Admissions for the PhD in International Development at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on resource politics, energy, agriculture, food, and environmental struggles in Latin America. For the past fifteen years, he has carried out fieldwork in state enterprises and cooperatives in Venezuela. His latest project explores petro-populism and the redistribution of extractive rents. Before joining the University of Edinburgh, he was Visiting Assistant Professor at Union College, Postdoctoral Fellow in the IAS at Central European University, and Instructor in Anthropology at the University of Toronto.

Partecipazione libera - Seminario valido per il tirocinio DEA/ACEL.
Coordinatrice: Franca Tamisari: tamisari@unive.it