Preface

Laura S. Meitzner Yoder and Susanna Barnes

This project emerged from persistent questions and quandaries facing a group of scholar-practitioners conducting ethnographic, historical, and legal research on emerging land issues in newly independent Timor-Leste.¹ In our fieldwork, we observed first-hand the profound ongoing impacts of Portuguese (until 1975) and Indonesian (1975–99) land policies and practices on the fledgling nation’s legal systems, public debates over Indigenous practices and customary land, civil service functionality, tenure security, and land access for vulnerable or marginalized groups.² Ongoing influence also came in the form of international land policy experts who carried, promoted, and implemented particular models of land administration worldwide. As a result, the new nation inherited a hodgepodge of legal and political phenomena, ranging from imported laws to multiple successive cadastral programs conducted with support of USAID, AusAID, and a Portuguese company.³ To make sense of what we saw in Timor-Leste, we felt a critical practical need, paralleling a notable scholarly gap, to better understand colonial land policy processes in the dimensions necessary to enable and promote just land relations after modern-day governance transitions.⁴

The effects of land policy mobility across both time and space were clearly evident in Timor-Leste, but we wanted to track the actual mechanisms of this influence. We realized that to illuminate this fundamental aspect, we needed to examine the trajectories and outcomes of land policy formation across other former Portuguese colonies—with their diverse times and circumstances of independence, governance priorities, economic models, and cultural contexts. Formerly, as now, we can trace the mobility of ideas and practices regarding land through regions and systems, so we sought to hold the Portuguese contexts in tandem with perspectives from other post-colonial contexts and their own layered land histories.⁵ In this, Tania Murray Li’s extensive work on Indonesia and across Southeast Asia was particularly influential for us.

These questions were the impetus for the interdisciplinary international symposium Lusophone Land Legacies in Comparative Perspective—hosted by the University of Saskatchewan and held online in May 2021—that lay the groundwork for this volume. The symposium gathered scholars from, and of, Canada, Brazil, Portugal, Mozambique, Angola, Singapore, Timor-Leste, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States of America, to consider how colonial-era land practices continue to shape land classification, policies, administration, and legislation in independent nations. Contributors to this volume include participants in the international symposium, in which we intentionally sought to bridge various boundaries: temporal and geographic in our topics, but also linguistic and disciplinary in our peer-review interactions. The symposium paired established and early-career scholars from different regions as co-readers and mutual commentators on the submitted papers, allowing for the diverse contexts and disciplinary experiences of each participant to inform the questions and discussion. We sought to include a diversity of methodological and analytical approaches of the many disciplines that examine land policy formation and implementation, from law, anthropology, history, geography, and environmental studies. This is also evident in chapter authors’ diverse backgrounds—including nine scholars for whom English is not their primary language. Reviewers noted that this collaboration has produced one of the few publications in English with this range of cases on Lusophone colonialism, making this scholarly work accessible to Anglophone readers.

It is our hope that readers of this volume take inspiration from our orienting questions and glean new insights for and from their own contexts through the cases presented here. We learned a great deal from close engagement with each other’s cases. Most symposium participants specialized closely in one or two of the Lusophone regions, and we found in this rare interaction across continents many productive discoveries of both familiarity and difference in the administrative processes, economic practices, and socio-political creativity of both local populations and implementing bureaucrats with regard to land policy. Lively debates challenged and enriched our own understandings of concepts and practices we thought we understood, such as baldios, registration, and land grants or concessions. And for readers who are new to the world of Lusophone imperial formations, we welcome you to compare and contrast the cases presented in the following chapters with the colonial and modern situations you know best. May this book give you newly expanded perspectives on the importance of land policy formation in today’s world.

Notes to Preface

The editors would like to thank Jessica Jack and Michelle Gowan for their assistance before, during, and after the international symposium from which chapters for this volume are drawn. We also thank Jessica Jack, Alex Smith, and especially Max Pospisil for their assistance in preparing the manuscript for publication. The editors would also like to thank and acknowledge additional colleagues with strong interest in this topic who represented their work on Macau, Goa, São Tomé e Príncipe, as well as additional scholars of Brazil and Timor-Leste whose life circumstances did not allow them to fully participate in the symposium or the production of this volume.

1. 1 Hans Hägerdal, Lords of the Land, Lords of the Sea: Conflict and Adaptation in Early Colonial Timor, 1600–1800 (Brill, 2012); Bernardo Almeida, Land Tenure Legislation in Timor-Leste (Asia Foundation, April 2016), https://landportal.org/library/resources/land-tenure-legislation-timor-lestebernardo-almeida2016/land-tenure-legislation; Bernardo Almeida, “Expropriation or Plunder? Property Rights and Infrastructure Development in Oecusse,” in The Promise of Prosperity: Visions of the Future in Timor-Leste, ed. Judith Bovensiepen (ANU Press, 2018), 99–118; Susana Barnes, “Origins, Precedence and Social Order in the Domain of Ina Ama Beli Darlari,” in Land and Life in Timor-Leste: Ethnographic Essays, ed. Andrew McWilliam and Elizabeth Traube (ANU E-Press, 2011), 23–46; Meabh Cryan, “‘Empty Land’? The Politics of Land in Timor-Leste,” in A New Era? Timor-Lest after the UN, ed. Sue Ingram, Lia Kent, and Andrew McWilliam (ANU Press, 2015), 141–54; Daniel Fitzpatrick, Andrew McWilliam, and Susana Barnes, Property and Social Resilience in Times of Conflict: Land, Custom and Law in East Timor (Ashgate, 2012); Laura S. Meitzner Yoder, “Political Ecologies of Wood and Wax: Sandalwood and Beeswax as Symbols and Shapers of Customary Authority in the Oecusse Enclave, Timor,” Journal of Political Ecology 18, no. 1 (2011): 11–24.

2. 2 Centre of Studies for Peace and Development, Women’s Access to Land and Property Rights in the Plural Justice System of Timor-Leste (Centre of Studies for Peace and Development, 2014); Simon P. J. Batterbury et al., “Land Access and Livelihoods in Post-Conflict Timor-Leste: No Magic Bullets,” International Journal of the Commons 9, no. 2 (2015): 1–29; Meabh Cryan, Whose Land Law? Analysis of the Timor-Leste Transitional Land Law (Asia Foundation, 2016).

3. 3 Bernardo Almeida, “The Main Characteristics of the Timorese Legal System—a Practical Guide,” Verfassung und Recht in Übersee 50, no. 2 (2017): 175–87; Rede ba Rai, Land Registration and Land Justice in Timor-Leste: Culture, Power and Justice (Haburas Foundation, 2013).

4. 4 Daniel Fitzpatrick and Susana Barnes, “Rules of Possession Revisited: Property and the Problem of Social Order,” Law & Social Inquiry39, no. 1 (2014): 127–51; Sandra F. Joireman and Laura S. Meitzner Yoder, “A Long Time Gone: Post‐Conflict Rural Property Restitution under Customary Law,” Development and Change47, no. 3 (2016): 563–85; R. Gerard Ward and Elizabeth Kingdon, “Land Tenure in the Pacific Islands,” in Land, Custom and Practice in the South Pacific, ed. R. Gerard Ward and Elizabeth Kingdon (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 36–64.

5. 5 James Holston, “The Misrule of Law: Land and Usurpation in Brazil,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 33, no. 4 (1991): 695–725; Malyn Newitt, “Formal and Informal Empire in the History of Portuguese Expansion,” Portuguese Studies 17, no. 1 (2001): 1–21; Bridget O’Laughlin, “Class and the Customary: The Ambiguous Legacy of the Indigenato in Mozambique,” African Affairs 99, no. 394 (2000): 5–42; Philip J. Havik and Malyn Newitt, eds., Creole Societies in the Portuguese Colonial Empire (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015); Harry G. West and Gregory W. Myers, “A Piece of Land in a Land of Peace? State Farm Divestiture in Mozambique,” Journal of Modern African Studies 34, no. 1 (1996): 27–51; C. Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (Yale University Press, 1994); José Vicente Serrão, Bárbara Direito, Susana Münch Miranda, and Eugénia Rodrigues, eds., Property Rights, Land and Territory in the European Overseas Empires (CEHC-IUL, 2014).