Too poor to own: Landlessness and the politics of surviving rural Nepal.

摘要

Why do some squatter settlements survive, even thrive, while others are forced off the land? The inconsistency of eviction is an opportunity to examine the effects of the uneven penetration of state policy on local communities and national resources. Set amidst the volatility of party politics, a struggling economy and an ongoing Maoist insurgency, squatting is a lens into the bumpy terrain that is contemporary Nepal and its broader cultural and political climate.; My conceptual and methodological point of entry into the causes, maintenance and deterrents to squatting is the notion of claims, or the justification for occupation that squatters invoke. Claims to land obtained without legal right of tenure have traditionally been honored based on the occupants' purported landless status. As demands for land collide with reconfigurations in the political landscape, competition for land---even that which is illegally occupied---has forced squatters to expand their repertoire of claims and manner of deployment to accommodate changing social priorities, new possibilities of entitlement and state responses to encroachment. In the final moments before an eviction, however, it was not the veracity of claims, legality of tenure, authenticity of identity or the intensity of need that determined access to state property but the appearance of maintaining local authority and government legitimacy.; The most troubling finding of my research is that genuinely landless households without material recourse did not fully own their own poverty: their identity was coopted to legitimate the status and advance the interests of other encroachers. Such cooption has eroded the legitimacy of landlessness in Nepal as an identity and as a cause, and over time sukumbasi (landless individuals and families) are divested of the very thing they know best: the poverty articulated by their landless status.