The Small Business of Reassembling the World

Ethnography and the Regulation of Land Resources in West Africa
By Pierre-Yves Le Meur
English

The interventions called “rural land plans” aim at both identifying and recognizing land rights as “they are perceived and validated by the populations themselves”. They are implemented through a complex device of inquiry and intervention that mobilizes social theories and concepts in a more or less implicit manner. The different layers of presence of anthropology and anthropologists in the Beninese rural land plans design, understanding and implementation are analyzed on the basis of a plural ethnography combining basic and applied research phases. The analysis of the intervention as a complex chain of translation will be preceded by a discussion of the regimes of enunciation and mediator-concepts organizing the rural land plan.

Keywords

  • land rights
  • policy
  • translation
  • ethnography
  • West Africa
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