INDIGENOUS CONTESTATIONS OF SHIFTING PROPERTY REGIMES: LAND CONFLICTS AND THE NGOBE IN BOCAS DEL TORO, PANAMA

This study investigates how shifting property regimes produced by global inequities in power affect indigenous groups’ access to land. Further, it explores the various means that indigenous populations use to legitimate their claims to land in a climate of shifting property regimes, when other differentially empowered claims to land may also be morally and/or legally legitimate. The study addresses these issues by using the example of the indigenous Ngobe’s experience of land conflicts produced in a context of tourism boom and neo-liberal land privatization reforms in Bocas del Toro, Panama. It showcases the pertinence of the Ngobe experience to the above questions by exploring the causes of land conflicts involving the Ngobe since the rise of the tourism industry over the last two decades, and the Ngobe responses to the stressors introduced by the tourism industry and neoliberal land reforms. It argues that Ngobe vulnerability to land loss and land conflicts stem from the combination of: legal and bureaucratic framework of the neoliberal land reforms in Panama; the political economy of information flows and Ngobe position within Bocatorenean society that limits their access to crucial information; and differing conceptions of inhabited property as opposed to `natural’, `unused’, `uninhabited’ land between the local Ngobe and immigrant Western expatriates. At the same time, the study demonstrates how the social agency of individual actors produces an individualized micro-politico-legal ecology that shapes the force-field in which the actors are embedded and displaces the intended effects of legal and institutional property constructions. In so doing, the study will problematize the usual associations between indigenous peoples and their claims to land, delineate the processes through which structural and cultural forces produce indigenous marginality and vulnerability, challenge indigenous essentialisms, demonstrate how the concrete practices of property relations may shift legal and ideological conceptualizations of property, and argue that academic research on indigenous peoples needs to include the issues faced by un-territorialized indigenous populations in urban and semi-urban regions.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Anthropology

Grantor dc:publisher

The Ohio State University

Year dc:date

2013

Author dc:creator

• Thampy, Gayatri S.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Cohen, Jeffrey

• Caribbean Studies
• Cultural Anthropology
• Economic Theory
• Latin American Studies
• Legal Studies
• Land Use Planning
• Land tenure
• land conflicts
• property rights
• indigenous
• neo-liberal
• Ngobe
• Panama
• Bocas del Toro
• tourism

Statement dc:rights

• unrestricted
• This thesis or dissertation is protected by copyright: all rights reserved. It may not be copied or redistributed beyond the terms of applicable copyright laws.

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1365428854

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:etd.ohiolink.edu:osu1365428854