Session #6: Sunday, 11 January, 10.00 - 11.45 (CSLG)
Panel coordinator(s): Karine Bates, Assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Montreal (karine.bates@umontreal.ca)
Chair/discussant: Dipankar Gupta, Professor of Sociology, Centre for the Study of Social Systems, JNU (dipankargupta@hotmail.com)
Panel description
Panelists, paper titles, and abstracts
This panel examines property in different domains of law and life. It examines property rights of women; What are the new challenges faced today in thinking through property rights and discourses? What are some new forms of property emerging through new phases of economic reform?
The empirical study of access to justice from village to court discloses that disputes over property are shaped by various perceptions of women’s rights, along with ideals of gender relationships and inter-generational organization. My research aims at understanding the relationship between property rights, gender and kinship. More precisely, it focuses on the impacts of the Hindu Succession Act of 1956 on Hindu women of Pune district, Maharashtra, by looking at how women interpret and use their inheritance rights. Drawing on the analysis of the data collected during three extensive fieldworks in rural and urban Pune district between 1998 and 2005, complemented by the case studies gathered in Pune tribunals, my study presents methodologies used to grasp various and competing views of the idea of justice. Overall, my work proposes elements to be considered – or reconsidered – to enhance our understanding of the social dynamics influencing access to property and justice.
By granting inheritance rights to daughters and widows, and not exclusively to sons, the Hindu Succession Act of 1956 proposes a gradual transformation of patrilineal “Hindu joint family”, henceforth initiating changes in women’s status through property rights reform. However, although aware of the fact that they have certain rights to their father’s and husband’s property, women who participated in the research project do not see any advantage in claiming their inheritance rights. Overall, it is difficult for them to reconcile claiming rights with their duties as daughters or as daughters-in-law, as well as with the social restrictions associated with widowhood. In this context, before choosing a forum of justice, most women will first opt for conflict avoidance within their household in order to maintain their social security network.
When women decide to claim their property rights, the complex relationships with the state bureaucracy, court system and its actors (mediators, lawyers, judges), often prevent them from accessing justice or discourage them from pursuing their quest for justice. The ethnological study of the intricacies of the legal arena through various property cases exposing the complex procedures to be followed, the relationship with lawyers and the exchanges taking place in court, exposes the necessity to include these aspects in order to fully contextualize the impact of familial organization on women’s property rights.
This paper will discuss inheritance practices of dairy farmers in a Dutch village from a legal pluralism perspective. Although according to the Dutch state law all presumptive heirs have equal rights to the estate, the family farmhouse and the bulk of the land are usually transferred to one successor, typically a son, and sons usually get larger shares than daughters. Yet, while the heirs (the rights holders) negotiate and sometimes acrimoniously quarrel over their share of the property, they rarely go to court and instead accept, however reluctantly and resentfully, such ‘unequal’ and ‘unfair’ inheritance practices. State law constructs the estate in terms of its economic value and equal rights of heirs. But from the perspective of family members and their community, the farm is more than just an ‘estate’ as constructed by state law. Customary law of many parts of rural Netherlands constructs the ‘estate’ as family house and land (ancestral property in South Asian terms), which to be sure has economic value but which more importantly has symbolic, moral and emotional meanings and which is the basis for a complex system of rights and obligations not so much between ‘rights holders’ as between family members. There are thus different legal constructions of property and inheritance on the one hand and family and gender relations on the other. It will argue that state law is not as hegemonic and powerful as is often assumed, even in the Netherlands because state law is always confronted by and in competition with other laws that comprises the legal field. It further argues that all laws are local and that the local legal field is constituted by a mélange of plural laws – customary, religious, international, and emerging laws – without privileging beforehand the importance, relevance and power a specific law or combination of laws. The practices of and negotiations over inheritance are better understood simultaneously as strategies about which law or combination of laws are to be considered relevant on the one hand and over the meanings of property, inheritance and family on the other for that particular case. In other words, it is argued that struggle over law and property is at the same time struggle over meanings and that both laws and meanings are always plural. The paper raises more a general question about the power and limitations of state law (and international law) to effect social change and more specifically to ensure and actualize better rights for women and other marginalized groups in the (universal situation) of legal pluralism. This question may be of some interest in the South Asian contexts where thanks largely to the many well meaning activists, there seems to be an efflorescence of (progressive) state laws without much effect on practices.
This paper will discuss the politics of land and land reform in Sri Lanka, through a critical reading of literature and legislation on the question of land. It will attempt to shed light on the discourse of land in light of the youth insurrections, the majoritarian politics of the post-colonial regimes which mobilized Sinhala Buddhist nationalism and the militarized call of Tamil nationalism. It will look at how the war, armed insurrections and militarization more broadly have silenced or displaced the relationship of the question of land to issues of caste, gender, class and at times even ethnicity. Sri Lanka’s post-colonial history is replete with debates on colonization, evictions and challenges to inter-ethnic coexistence around the issue of land. A critical reading of the literature on land spanning attempts at State reform and democratization preceding and following independence will help raise questions about the genealogy of the concept of land, in relation to ideological and historical claims of territory, homeland and nation. Such a reading will also critically engage the conceptual terrain on which the neoliberal discourse of development and security continues to transform the political economy of Sri Lanka.