Preeti Sampat

This workshop is organized around three central questions: what is land; what does land do; and what do we (as scholars) do with land? We are not only interested in how land is understood, but also in how anthropological knowledge about land is produced and developed. Contributions address how social relations around land are articulated in diverse contexts, through colonial and post-colonial regimes; how they have been conceptualized by various actors; and how these conceptualizations in turn inform the conceptualization of land. We ask, what insights does the ethnographic method contribute to the anthropology of land? As a fundamental affordance for the conditions of life on earth, does land have a life beyond anthropocentric social relations, and under what conditions are such relations made possible? Does land have agency; does its materiality shift, say along fluvial landscapes or through subsoil extraction; how may we conceptualize land as more-than-human nature? As emergent crises around climate change, refugees, pandemics and the rise of the right unfold, a considered understanding of how land is mobilized, materially, discursively, affectually or semiotically, will enable a clearer sense of what is at stake; move us beyond implicit assumptions; identify disciplinary and methodological contributions; and help articulate emergent questions that the category of land foregrounds.