Introduction
Post-socialist Property in Asia and Europe:
Variations on ‘Fuzziness’
Janet C. Sturgeon and Thomas Sikor
This introduction contextualises the set of articles included in this special issue
and discusses their contribution to understanding the observed ‘fuzziness’ of property in post-socialist contexts. Katherine Verdery, among others, has highlighted
ambiguity, or ‘fuzziness’, as a key feature of post-socialist property relations.
Property rights in practice are often quite different from the neo-liberal notion of
exclusive, private property promoted in post-socialist property reforms. This introduction highlights the reasons for fuzziness identified in the individual articles
and contrasts them with the overlapping and flexible property relations reported
from post-colonial arenas in Africa and Asia. It concludes that post-socialist fuzzy
property is similar to post-colonial ambiguous property relations in many respects.
The feature setting the former apart is the ‘lack of routinized rules and crystallized
practices of exclusion and inclusion’ (Verdery 1999: 55). The ruptures caused by
large-scale economic, political and cultural transformations were rapid and destabilising, throwing property, identity and social relations up in the air, and
opening up considerable room for manipulation. Local elite found themselves
operating in somewhat of a vacuum and quickly asserted control over productive
resources or the processes allocating them.
Acknowledgements: This issue would not have been possible without the support of many people.
We thank Lund University, in particular, Michael Schoenhals at the Centre for East and SouthEast Asian Studies, for funding the initial workshop in May 2001. Katherine Verdery, Keebet
and Franz von Benda-Beckmann, and Sara Berry were participants at the workshop, helping us
develop the thematic focus of this volume. Others who wrote papers for the workshop included
David Anderson, Stuart Franklin and Chad Staddon. We thank Katherine Verdery for her insightful introductions, both at the workshop and for this special issue. We are very grateful to Vasant
Saberwal for his patient assistance throughout the production of this volume and appreciate the
helpful comments from an anonymous referee. We finally want to thank our contributors for
their cooperation and effort invested in writing the manuscripts and revising them for publication.
Janet C. Sturgeon, The Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, Box 1970,
Providence, RI 02912, USA. E-mail: [email protected].
Thomas Sikor, Humboldt University Berlin, Junior Research Group on Postsocialist Land Relations,
Luisenstr. 56, 10117 Berlin, Germany. E-mail: [email protected].
Conservation & Society, 2, 1 (2004)
SAGE Publications New Delhi/Thousand Oaks/London
2 / JANET C. STURGEON AND THOMAS SIKOR
Clearly defining land rights during land reforms is key to improving the lives
of poor people—farmers and nonfarmers alike.
Formal land titles create secure and transferable property rights by providing
better information.
In building these [formal land market] institutions, three characteristics should
be kept in mind: clear definition and sound administration of property rights;
simple mechanisms for identifying and transferring property rights; and
thorough compilation of land titles and free access to this information.
World Bank (2001: 35–37)
THIS ESSAY AND the set of articles collected here counter the assumptions of the
neo-liberal paradigm of the ineluctable benefits of exclusive, private property in
rural resources. As the quotations above indicate, the neo-liberal paradigm underlies the World Bank’s efforts in land reform throughout the developing world. As
shown later, this paradigm makes assumptions about cultural values, power relations, legal arrangements and senses of identity that conflict with lived arrangements and understandings in many rural settings. We explore how this paradigm
has intersected with property relations in post-socialist contexts, with a brief comparison with post-colonial settings. Our analysis finds that state impositions of
individuated, exclusive private property rights in land and trees have in many
cases produced the opposite of the World Development Report predictions: insecurity, increased poverty and reduced resource access.
Property relations play a central role in the conservation of natural resources.
Yet research in post-colonial contexts of Africa and parts of Asia also shows that
property arrangements pertaining to natural resources tend to be highly complex.
The arrangements include a wide variety of rights and obligations, which may be
distributed among several social actors and overlap in space and time. The rights
and obligations may be more flexible than presumed by notions of property as a
set of ‘rules’, as they reflect changing patterns of behaviour and ongoing negotiations among multiple actors. Conflicts over rights and obligations may also be
inseparable from symbolic contestations over meanings and values, obfuscating
distinctions between actors, resources, rights and obligations. Property relations
in post-colonial arenas may, therefore, be highly ambiguous, defying simplistic
notions of ownership—private, public, community or state.
This special issue shifts the analytical lens to post-socialist contexts by introducing research on transformations in rural property relations following decollectivisation in Asia and Europe. The issue includes one case each from Albania and
Bulgaria, and two each from China and Vietnam. To frame the analysis, we explore
political-economic changes embedded in local cultures and social networks. Our
focus is on property transformations that involve new meanings for public and
private production, market, ownership and ‘person-hood’. In other words, we use
the ethnographic study of property to discover not only processes of accumulation
Post-socialist property in Asia and Europe / 3
and dispossession in relation to natural resources, but also how property relations
are inseparable from understandings of identity, morality and social connections.
Are property dynamics in Central and Eastern Europe and East Asia comparable,
even if the cases are all ‘post-socialist’? In comparing the articles, a number of
background or historical distinctions become clear immediately. First of all, rural
residents in Albania and Bulgaria have experienced the demise of the party-state.
In China and Vietnam, by contrast, the party-state is very much alive. Second, rights
in land have in principle been ‘privatised’ in Albania and Bulgaria. Yet the Chinese
and Vietnamese states have retained formal ownership on the land or the right to
reclaim ownership. Third, farmers’ experience of land-ownership before collectivisation in Albania and Bulgaria was that property rights were close to absolute.
The cases in Asia, by contrast, portray pre-socialist practices of resource access
involving both collective and household elements and considerable flexibility
based on ecological and social variability.1 Finally, land use in three of the four
cases from Asia relies on regenerative ecological processes in ways different from
the settled agriculture in Albanian and Bulgarian cases. Despite the obvious differences, we discovered from the cases themselves that there are similarities across
the studies related to Katherine Verdery’s (1996, 1999, 2003) conceptualisation
of post-socialist property politics. We decided to explore these similarities, as
well as the differences, to expand on Verdery’s notion of ‘fuzzy’ property.
To accomplish this goal, we asked a series of questions related to the overall
question of whether there is anything unique about property relations in the various
forms of post-socialist experience across cases from Central and Eastern Europe
and East Asia.2 What meanings do different actors attribute to contested natural
resources? What kinds of actors contest and how are they positioned in terms of
their economic, political and cultural resources? What means do actors employ in
contests over natural resources? How are local contestations linked to broader
processes of political-economic and ideological change? What is the role of various
state actors in property relations? Who wins and who loses? Ethnographies of
property transformations in a variety of post-socialist contexts should provide
more general answers to these questions.
Our objective in this introduction is more modest. We focus on the issue of
‘fuzziness’, a term coined by Katherine Verdery to describe the ambiguity of
post-socialist property relations. Verdery asserts that post-socialist property rights
are ‘fuzzy’ in the sense that they lack clarity of borders, owners and exclusion.
The conditions she describes look very similar to the overlapping and flexible access to natural resources related in the literature on post-colonial contexts. We
ask, therefore, if there is a difference between the fuzziness of post-socialist property relations and the ambiguity of rights in land, trees and other resources in the
post-colonial world. We answer this question by looking at the reasons for postcolonial ambiguity and post-socialist fuzziness as well as broader dynamics shaping
property relations in both types of contexts.
To begin with the last question first, we offer a brief discussion about the sources
of ambiguity in post-colonial property relations using the work of Sara Berry and
4 / JANET C. STURGEON AND THOMAS SIKOR
Nancy Peluso to illustrate our points. Next, we summarise the work of Katherine
Verdery and David Stark on the fuzziness of post-socialist property relations.
This short literature review leads into a discussion of the contributions to this issue,
comparing the reasons for fuzziness highlighted in each article. We conclude by
contrasting the ambiguity of post-colonial property, as portrayed by Berry and
Peluso, with the fuzziness of post-socialist property emerging from the contributions to this volume. Our comparison includes attention to both the reasons for
ambiguity/fuzziness and the broader dynamics shaping property relations.
AMBIGUITY
IN
POST-COLONIAL SETTINGS
To assess whether there are identifiable differences between the fuzziness of postsocialist property relations, and the overlapping and contested property in postcolonial settings, we turn briefly to work on Africa and Indonesia. This is not
intended as a review of the literature, but rather as a limited look primarily at the
work of two scholars whose main focus is property rights in rural resources. These
are Sara Berry’s (1993, 1997) writing on Africa and Nancy Peluso’s (1992) study
of Indonesia. These are, admittedly, two very different places, and the authors look
at two different resources—land in the case of Berry and forests in Peluso’s work.
(The two resources are the foci in the case studies here.) The colonial experience
was also different, as British rule in Africa lasted for less than 100 years, while
Dutch influence in Indonesia lasted for over 300. Nonetheless, we can pull out
some similarities in the trajectories of change from pre-colonial to colonial and
post-colonial conditions in Africa and Indonesia.
Sara Berry describes rural people’s access to land in pre-colonial times as coming
through both markets and social relations. African farmers had already been involved in trade networks for a long time. In some cases they could buy land,
while in others farmers gained access to land through membership in social groups
or through a patron (Berry 1993:104). Access to resources depended, and continues
to depend, on social identity and status (Berry 1997:1233). Under British indirect
rule, according to Berry, the colonial regime neither eradicated African customary
property rules nor fully implemented new rules. In the drive to extract valuable
resources, colonial rule intensified the functioning of markets, which was to be
expected, but also inadvertently increased rural people’s use of social networks
to acquire access to resources. Following independence, even with the push from
structural adjustment for privatised property, access to resources continues to flow
from multiplying social networks. Under uncertain economic conditions, including
fluctuating market prices, farmers tap into old and new kinds of social relations,
including with state agents, to acquire goods or negotiate the possibility of acquiring them. The tenure arrangements that result are highly variable, flexible and
sometimes hybrid. They are negotiated among various social actors, sometimes
blurring the boundaries between private and public. Under a structural adjustment
plan for growing tomatoes, for example, among the institutions involved, ‘the
Post-socialist property in Asia and Europe / 5
dividing line between public and private assets and liabilities was permeable, to
say the least’ (Berry 1997: 1232).
In Peluso’s study of forests and forest land in Java she describes pre-colonial
property rights as determined within the local community, which came under the
patronage of a king. Like other South-East Asian regimes, the king claimed territory
in a vague sense, while actually claiming rural people’s labour (Peluso 1992: 33–
34). Rural people could migrate to a new area and gain access to land through a
new patron. Similar to the situation in Africa, farmers acquired resources, including
land and trees, through a social connection. Unlike in Africa, buying land in Java
was not a common practice until independence. The Dutch East India Company
(VOC) was initially only interested in teak for shipbuilding, and only gradually
moved from control over the labour to collect teak, to control over territory where
teak was grown (Peluso 1992: 36–39). Under direct colonial rule beginning in the
nineteenth century, the Dutch introduced a bureaucratic forest service that divided
agricultural from forest land. Even up to 1870, however, there were multiple
claimants on the forest: ‘Local people, regional rulers, and entrepreneurs were
engaged in a “layered” system of rights to control or use the forest and its products’
(Peluso 1992: 48). Increased state control of the forest and forest land proceeded
gradually, with laws that eradicated the ‘layered’ system in 1870, and foresters
planting teak in villages and restricting local access in the 1930s. With independence, the Indonesian government simply took over the forest service, but implemented control over forest land in ways that were much more militarised and
repressive than under the Dutch. In response, forest-dependent villagers resist
state territorial control through either everyday forms of resistance or outright
violence. Local villagers and state foresters at various levels meanwhile collude
in an illegal teak trade, with various actors assuming differing risks and benefits
in the process (Peluso 1992: 201–32). While the local elite participates in this
trade, their position is seriously curtailed by their belonging to local communities.
Their well-being depends on placating local villagers.
In the dynamics from Africa and Indonesia presented here in thumbnail form,
the trajectories of change are quite similar. Before colonial rule farmers and rural
producers gained access to productive resources through patrons and social networks, but in forms different from those today. Under colonial rule markets developed
to enable colonial extraction of lucrative products in ways that prevented African
or Indonesian farmers from enriching themselves. Through colonial times and
after independence, efforts to implement private and exclusive property rights
have essentially been a failure in both cases. In Africa farmers participate in the
negotiation of identities, histories and access claims as a means to ward off exclusive, privatised property (Berry 1997). Similarly, Indonesian forest dwellers
use subversion of state rules and arson to resist the imposition of state control
over forest land.
Assessing the reasons for the ambiguity of property relations in Africa and
Indonesia, we find similarities between the social arrangements described by Berry
and Peluso. First, contestations over single resources complicate the assessment
6 / JANET C. STURGEON AND THOMAS SIKOR
of rights and obligations. Second, rights and obligations tend to be overlapping in
space and time. A common feature is that patrons and other social actors retain
residual rights to land allocated through social networks. Third, contestations
over rights and obligations blur the boundary between private and public. Resulting
property arrangements contain a mix of hybrids combining private and public
property. Fourth, the contestations are as much about the meaning attributed to
resources as they are about material and political resources themselves. And,
finally, different social actors hold conflicting visions of a desirable future and
different values. The Indonesian and Ghanaian states’ views of timber and tomatoes
as commodities contributing to foreign currency earnings are in stark contrast to
local people’s visions and the meanings they attribute to land.
‘FUZZY’ POST-SOCIALIST PROPERTY
Katherine Verdery and David Stark, among others, have highlighted ambiguity as
a key feature of post-socialist property relations in Europe. In her influential 1999
essay, Verdery observes that property rights in practice are often quite different
from the neo-liberal notion of exclusive private property contained in property
reforms. ‘The reason is that neoliberal property notions so often emphasize rights
(entitlement) and obligations (accountability), whose subjects are normatively
individuals (physical or jural) exercising exclusive rights. From this vantage point,
all other arrangements look fuzzy’ (Verdery 1999: 54).
Verdery examines transformations in property relations after decollectivisation
in rural Romania. Agricultural land was restituted in Aurel Vlaicu, that is, returned
to historical owners or their heirs, as in most villages of post-socialist Europe
with the exception of Albania. The implementation of land restitution became the
site of fierce contestations. Conflicts over land created fissures among villagers
and ethnic groups, and divided villagers from local state agents (Verdery 1996:
159–64, 1998: 166–71). Conflicts emerged over specific parcels of land and over
borders (Verdery 1996: 159–64). Collectivisation and modifications of the land
under socialist agriculture had eradicated border markers and blurred people’s
recollections of historical borders. At the same time, property conflicts were as
much about land and other assets as about ‘ideologies of land ownership’ (Verdery
1996: 163). For example, villagers asserted a collective claim to a locally important
granary built under socialism. They based the collective claim on the labour they
had invested in building it (Verdery 1999: 65–75). Their claim found the support
of a local judge, whose ruling emphasised morality and the question of what constitutes the ‘public good’ against procedural issues leading to individuated, private
rights. Local land restitution, therefore, evoked fierce contestations over material
and symbolic resources. Positions of authority and accompanying social networks
gave certain local actors leverage in the distribution of access to land (Verdery
1996: 159–64). Local politicians, the village elite and others involved in implementation emerged as the winners of land restitution.
Post-socialist property in Asia and Europe / 7
Contestations over local property relations did not terminate with the completion
of property restitution, however. The recipients of land faced tough challenges in
turning their newly acquired rights into tangible benefits after restitution. Monopolistic structures in the provision of agricultural machinery and lack of credit and
inputs severely constrained the exercise of the legal rights in practice (Verdery
1998: 173–78, 1999: 59–65; also see Hann 1993a). Commercial middlemen,
simply referred to as ‘sharks’ in Bulgaria, controlled agricultural product markets,
buying low and selling high (Giordano and Kostova 2002: 87–88). In addition,
many small owners contributed their land to agricultural associations, successor
organisations to the socialist cooperative, or ‘super-tenants’, agricultural entrepreneurs engaging in short-term speculative ventures for the production of cash crops
(Verdery 1999: 59–63, 2003; also see Giordano and Kostova 2002: 82–86). The
associations, super-tenants, landowners and subcontractors held overlapping rights
to the products of the land and decisions about its use. The resulting tenure arrangements were a far cry from exclusive private ownership rights. Landowners’ rights
remained highly uncertain as any whim of the market or shift in power relations
could reduce the benefits derived from land titles, or even turn the presumed land
rights into unforeseen obligations.
In her essay here and her most recent book (Verdery 2003) Verdery links the
fuzziness of post-socialist property relations to socialist property concepts and
practices. In a simplified sense, property arrangements under socialism hold that
the state owns all productive resources. To make socialism productive, the state
allocates administrative rights downward to state industries, agricultural collectives
and other collective entities. These lower units in turn can further allocate administrative and production rights to smaller units, such as households and individuals.
Verdery, in common with other scholars of socialism, uses Max Gluckman’s (1972)
‘estates of administration’ and ‘estates of production’ in explaining how rights
get allocated from rulers to managers to land users, including households that
produce from the land (Anderson 1998; Hann 1993a, 1993b; Humphrey 1983).
In this explanation, either ‘the ruler’ or ‘the state’ continues to own all productive
resources, while administration of resources is carried out by various levels in a
hierarchy of production and obligation. State property is inalienable, as administrative rights move back and forth in the hierarchy but remain within ‘the unitary
fund of state property’ (Verdery 2003).
In her 1999 article Verdery highlights four reasons for the apparent ‘fuzziness’
of property. First, different people may hold conflicting claims of ownership to a
single object, causing ownership to be ambiguous. Second, different people may
hold overlapping claims to an object. For example, villagers may hold use rights
to agricultural land; the village collective may enjoy the right to allocate and recover these use rights; and both the village collective and the state might claim
shares of the harvest. From within such a system, the distribution of rights and
obligations may look clear and unambiguous. From the perspective of neo-liberal
ownership, this hierarchical allocation of various property rights within the ‘bundle
of rights’ looks fuzzy, because of the number of social actors and different types
8 / JANET C. STURGEON AND THOMAS SIKOR
Post-socialist property in Asia and Europe / 9
of property claims involved. A third cause of fuzziness emerges, for Verdery, by
including Ashraf Ghani’s (1996) formulation of property as a ‘bundle of powers’
crystallised into practices of exclusion and inclusion within routinised rules. From
this viewpoint, fuzziness ‘will lie precisely in the lack of routinized rules and
crystallized practices around private property in the context of post-communism’
(Verdery 1999: 55). A fourth cause of fuzziness resides in the ‘constraints on
exercising bundles of powers’ (ibid.).
David Stark (1996) adds a fifth reason for fuzziness: the blurring of boundaries
between ‘private’ and ‘public’. Though Stark’s research takes place in an industrial
setting, his account offers insights to the contestations over ‘private’ and ‘public’
during privatisation. Enterprise managers in Hungary reorganise industrial assets
in a decentralised fashion, eventually forcing the central state to assume responsibility for enterprise debts. The resulting ‘kaleidoscope of mixed public and private
property forms’ (Stark 1996: 996) obscures the boundaries between ‘private’ and
‘public’, the organisational boundaries of enterprises and boundaries of ‘justificatory principles’. Stark’s insights resonate with findings in research on Hungarian
agriculture where agricultural managers form profitable businesses out of the
constituent parts of larger socialist enterprises, leaving their unprofitable and indebted remainders in the hands of the state (Lampland 2002: 43–44).
THE CONTRIBUTIONS
TO THIS
VOLUME
The articles in this volume examine transformations in rural property relations
following post-socialist decollectivisation, with an emphasis on understandings
of identity, morality and social connection. When socialist states created collectives, according to Caroline Humphrey (1983: 1), writing about the Soviet Union,
the purpose was ‘the need to integrate local cultures and rural economies at different
stages of development into one national political economy’. Several decades later,
when socialist states either dissolved or reframed the rules of integration, the new
or revised state sought to include households and other production units within a
dramatically different game. That new game, as Verdery observes, involved a
cultural project with new meanings for self, social identities, markets and private
property (Verdery 1999: 103–4). In the articles presented here, that cultural project
produced a dazzling array of variations and permutations on the theme of fuzziness.
Clarissa de Waal’s piece concerns the upland community of Mirdita in Albania,
as well as Mirditan and other upland farmers who migrated to the plains. As de
Waal notes, for much of rural Albania privatisation of cooperative land honoured
original village boundaries, but within those lines, land was allocated to households
based on the number of ‘souls’ in them (see Sturgeon in this issue). In Mirdita,
however, land was officially allocated based on the Kanun, a form of customary
law long in place in the mountains. Villagers’ sense of ownership in agricultural
land under the Kanun was ‘absolute’ and exclusive. Returning formerly held land
accommodated villagers’ sense of identity as well as their absolute claims to farmland. Access to forestry lands had also been covered in the Kanun, with concentric
areas of forest land around the village designated for brothers, the clan, the village
and the district.
By the mid-1990s, in the economic stagnation that encompassed much of
Albania, agriculture could not sustain Mirdita families. To increase incomes,
Mirditans had proposed organising forestry cooperatives to manage Kanun
forest lands, a plan the state turned down. In place of that, beginning in 1992,
state-licensed operators could bid on parcels of forest. In tandem with timbercutting by licensed operators, villagers began felling trees (illegally) based on
Kanun boundaries. These two systems, one official and one informal, operating
on the same pieces of forest, managed to take out most of the trees. In de Waal’s
recounting of events, the driving force behind villagers’ logging was the appalling
economic conditions, which contributed to fuzzy and overlapping ‘ownership’ of
the same forest land.
Mirditan households and other upland farmers who escaped to the lowlands
faced another situation fraught with ambiguity. Government agents held state
farms not yet allocated as a source of bargaining power to get votes. Meanwhile,
those Mirditans and others with an official ‘passport’ allowing them to move to
the state farm squatted temporarily on state farmland with a guarantee of 300
sq.m of land ‘somewhere’ within it. The property relations here are overlapping
claims held by asymmetrical actors. The meaning of land was different for different
actors: a bargaining chip in the hands of officials, and potential security and subsistence for farmers. The unresolved or fuzzy property upheld the power relations
between low-level officials and would-be landowners. The lowland manifestation
of the post-socialist state produced fuzziness through a lack of routinised rules
and crystallised practices, whereas the upland manifestation of state and market
produced overlapping claims to forests.
In her article on forest cooperatives in Bulgaria, Barbara Cellarius focuses on
the contrast between the cooperatives that emerged following the fall of socialism
and the ideal typical neo-liberal notion of property as rights and obligations entailed
to individuals in clearly bounded land. In processes of forest restitution in the
Rhodope mountains, households chose to receive shares in a forest massif (revir)
rather than individual plots of trees. The owners had held property in the massif
before socialism, with the current proportion of shares related to the size of previous
holdings. Under restitution, the location of a household’s trees and the boundaries
around them, however, were unknown, a condition Cellarius refers to as fuzzy
property. Shareholding in a corporation, as practised in neo-liberal venues, may
represent the ultimate in capitalist property, a case of property rights being abstract
but crystal clear. Cellarius carefully elaborates on the nature of the current forest
shareholding to show that property arrangements are not in fact clear. Massif
property rights fall within two other definitions of fuzziness. The first is the slippage
between villagers’ understanding and the arrangements actually in place. Current
forest owners chose to have shares out of nostalgia for different forest cooperative
arrangements in the 1930s. Under the earlier organisation, owners held shares in
the cooperative rather than in the massif, and received regular dividends. Under
10 / JANET C. STURGEON AND THOMAS SIKOR
the present system, shareholders own shares in the massif itself. When owners
talk about the new cooperatives, however, they refer to shares as if they were in a
cooperative and look forward to regular dividends on those shares. The nostalgia
for a time when economic conditions were more stable and secure represents an
aspect of the fuzziness in this case. The second source of fuzziness is constraints
on the ‘bundle of powers’ related to forest shares. First, state regulations on allowable harvesting are vague, allowing differing interpretations or possibly inaction.
Second, under current rules, holdings cannot be divided. Heirs of current owners
who disagree on whether to keep or sell the shares will face difficulties. Third,
there is a rule requiring owners wishing to sell to offer their shares to other massif
owners first. As Cellarius points out, notifying all other owners would be cumbersome. Under these conditions, shareholders experience a set of constraints on the
right to harvest and the right to sell at will. If owners were able to sell to outsiders,
meanwhile, they would face the ‘middlemen’ (Giordano and Kostova 2002). Rather
than the crystallised practices of ownership and sale from the 1930s, they would
encounter the sharks.
In discussing property relations among Black Thai in northern Vietnam, Thomas
Sikor uses Gluckman’s notion of estates of administration and estates of production,
a form of landed property held by a hierarchy of social actors with overlapping
rights. A person’s relation to property is a function of status, with rights to land
tied to labour obligations to the collectivity. As Sikor writes, understanding sociallyembedded land relations helps explain the Black Thai’s total rejection of privatised
land allocations under the 1993 Land Law in Vietnam. Up to that time villagers
had effectively owned shares in wet rice land, which had been periodically reallocated in pre-socialist eras, and which was collectively farmed under socialism.
Depending on shares of land requires strong trust based on social experience,
echoing Bulgarians seeking shares in a forest cooperative in Cellarius’s study.
Under the new Land Law, land was to be allocated to households, giving them
exclusive, individuated private property rights, with state laws and markets determining access to land. Black Thai villagers, however, wanted to keep property relations that emphasised the equity (within the village) of wet rice field distribution,
the negotiation of flexible access to upland fields and a hierarchy of players who
exercised estates of administration and estates of production in relation to the
land. Villagers wanted land rights to be determined within the village rather than
by the state. What is remarkable in this study is that villagers, in collaboration
with various levels of state officials, successfully rejected the state-imposed property allocations. Unlike any other case in this set, Sikor’s local players are the
winners in this contest over who makes the property rules. In this sense, property
relations are relatively unambiguous to villagers and local state officials, although
local practice looks fuzzy from the vantage point of exclusive private property.
What the Black Thai recognised is that through individuated property rights,
vaunted as freeing up farmers to pursue their own plans, the state would in fact
assume greater control of their lands and land uses. Black Thai villagers chose to
keep those decisions, and the social relations in which they were embedded, for
Post-socialist property in Asia and Europe / 11
themselves. As Sikor points out, post-socialist land reforms provoke their own
forms of resistance.
Jennifer Sowerwine’s study, also in northern Vietnam, presents Dao villagers’
responses to multiple revisions of forest policies in two different cases, one close
to Hanoi and the other remote from any urban area. As she notes, with respect to
the north, doi moi (economic liberalisation policy) had three goals: the decollectivisation and titling of forest and agricultural land to households; the fixed cultivation and sedentarisation of ethnic minorities; and the liberalisation of domestic
and foreign markets. In both case studies there was a marked discrepancy between
state forest classifications, and local visions and tenure relations. The encounter
between the two produced what Sowerwine calls innovative customary property
relations. In Sowerwine’s cases, international conservation ideology also plays a
key role in forest categories and allocations, a process that legitimises the state’s
territorial strategies. In different ways in the two cases, local Dao rework previous
claims, including French colonial arrangements, to gain access to agricultural and
forest lands. Property relations are hybrid and ambiguous, as various actors turn
to multiple social networks to stake claims. With the dissolution of the estates of
administration, the local elite were able to claim resources intended for local land
users in ways similar to cases from Albania. In policies close to those in China,
the state designated 60 to 65 per cent of hilly land in northern Vietnam as ‘barren’
and targets of reforestation. In actuality the ‘barren’ lands represent a mosaic of
different land uses with considerable biodiversity. When the forestry department
contracts out barren lands for reforestation, the result is the replacement of complex
and diverse landscapes with monoculture forests, bringing a loss of biodiversity.
In Sowerwine’s cases the discrepancy between state and international forest plans
and Dao landscape visions and practices is the driving force behind multiple kinds
of fuzziness. This contrasts with the kind of fuzziness in Sikor’s case, showing
that property relations may vary considerably even among ethnic minority areas
of northern Vietnam. For Dao farmers, Sowerwine points to overlapping access,
hybrid public–private forms of property, access through social networks and use
of regeneration processes in shaping resource access as sources of fuzziness. For
the most part, the local elite are the winners in her cases, and local farmers are
losing out in forest allocation. In spite of this trajectory, local Dao are creative in
devising new forms of access and land use.
In Janet Sturgeon’s study of Akha in upland Yunnan (China), the sources of
fuzziness reside in two contradictions and one inconsistency. The first contradiction, similar to Sowerwine’s discrepancy between state policies and local visions,
lies in the difference between a state vision of exclusive property rights leading to
greater productivity of fewer crops, and Akha visions of a flexible and changing
landscape producing multiple and changing crops. The Akha are shifting cultivators
who open and fallow fields across the landscape, producing an ever-changing
mosaic of land uses and access rights. The second contradiction derives from two
strands in the state’s mission for economic development—one emphasising poverty
alleviation (benefiting all households) and the other encouraging competition
12 / JANET C. STURGEON AND THOMAS SIKOR
among households. The inconsistency is between agriculture and forestry departments in the degree of emphasis on clear property rights. Unlike in Vietnam, postsocialist allocations of land to Akha farmers conformed to their previous land
uses, with agricultural lands allocated based on household population at that time
(see de Waal in this issue). As the market has opened up, episodes of conflict have
erupted over what natural resources become commodities and who derives the
benefit. Conflicts have also emerged over a wasteland auction, similar to policies
in Vietnam for reforesting barren lands. The fuzziness in Sturgeon’s case derives
from four sources: flexible use of complex ecosystems (see Sowerwine); socialist
communal production that reinforced customary overlapping and sequential uses
of land (see Sikor); current disparities in the goals for forestry and agriculture
departments; and tensions within state plans for economic development related
to conflicting leanings within the ‘socialist market economy’. The current winner
is the administrative village head, a figure who represents the state and calls on
multiple social networks in enforcing his claims. To a surprising extent, however,
Akha farmers contest his predatory moves, basing their claims on both de jure and
de facto property rights, as well as their own inclusion in the greater community
of China. The state of the Chinese state is closely related to the extent to which
the Akha can practise flexible access and land uses in agricultural ecologies based
on regenerative processes.
Emily Yeh poses the contests over property rights in Tibet as a legacy of internal
colonisation, as the People’s Republic of China has struggled to incorporate Tibet
within a socialist state—an incomplete but oppressive project. This claim harks
back to the quotation from Caroline Humphrey cited earlier in relation to the
Soviet Union. While in some ways Tibet fits within the patterns of collectivisation
and decollectivisation experienced elsewhere in China, in Tibet property relationships are more politicised. Yeh argues that Tibetan farmers are more constrained
than their Han counterparts in exercising the ‘bundle of powers’, one of Verdery’s
marks of fuzziness. In exploring how property relations have evolved in Tibet,
Yeh finds multiple expressions of fuzziness. Tibetans, even Party members, have
a limited understanding of their rights and obligations in relation to property. In
decollectivisation, in ways reminiscent of Sikor’s study, rural reform was a forced
change rather than a welcomed one. Land was allocated to households under contracts with an unspecified time period. While Han administrators view the contracts
as generously open-ended, Tibetan farmers fear they could be revoked at any
time (the reverse of Cellarius’s case, where local people’s sanguine assumptions
about forest collectives are belied by written regulations). There have been reallocations of property, again similar to Sikor’s study, which Tibetans would welcome
if they were done fairly, that is to say, based on cultural and historical meanings
of work, self and labour. Tibetans are not interested in how the Chinese state is
implementing private, exclusive property, although in this case, unlike Sikor’s,
farmers have no allies among the administration to collaborate with them in resisting land allocations. Within the village, access to land depends on status.
Another important instance of fuzziness is the state’s ability to confiscate collective
Post-socialist property in Asia and Europe / 13
land for resale, an example of state property being ‘more inalienable’ than other
forms of property, owing to the state’s role as both owner and state sovereign.
Yeh explicitly reminds us to be careful with simplistic comparisons between
Central-East Europe and Asia. The formulation of fuzziness as ‘lack of routinized
rules and crystallized practices around private property’ (Verdery 1999: 55) is
analytically not as powerful in China as in Eastern Europe for the simple reason
that Chinese reforms did not try to institute private ownership rights, but went for
hybrid rights combining state, collective and private forms. Fuzziness in China
lies more in ‘constraints on exercising bundles of powers’ (ibid.), which are aggravated by the lack of political rights in Tibet. As the final article, Yeh’s case, therefore, recalls a theme running through all contributions: the relations between property
and the state of the post-socialist state.
POST-COLONIAL AMBIGUITY VERSUS POST-SOCIALIST FUZZINESS:
SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES
We find on reflection that the fuzziness of post-socialist property does not seem
that different from the overlapping and flexible property relations in post-colonial
arenas. In relation to the forms of fuzziness identified in the articles in this issue,
we can find in Sara Berry’s (1993, 1997) work instances of heterogeneous patterns
of tenure rights, as well as great variation in the allocation, transfer and management of land. We can also find cases of hybrid property and allocation based on
status in relation to a patron. In Nancy Peluso’s (1992) study there are patterns of
allocation based on status. There are also varying practices of property among
Indonesians differently positioned in the forestry department. In sum, property
relations are often ambiguous in both post-socialist and post-colonial settings
because of contestations over single resources, overlapping rights, blurred boundaries
between private and public, different meanings attributed to resources by different
actors and conflicting visions of the landscape. In fact, a quotation from Sara
Berry seems to sum up conditions in post-socialist milieus: ‘The security of tenure
was linked to the overall security of social and political life’ (Berry 1993: 105).
The feature setting most of the post-socialist cases apart from post-colonial
property relations is a process familiar from Verdery’s work on Romania. In the
spaces opened up by restitution and decollectivisation, local and district officials,
whether continuing as state administrators or as new kinds of social actors, have
been able to claim rural resources as they are unhooked from previous moorings
in socialist property. The elite garner for themselves control over either the resources or the processes allocating resources through their previous connections
with government ministries, entrepreneurs and communist parties. Even in cases
where the party and state ministries have been disbanded, the ongoing connections
have enabled many former elite to retool their positions in emerging contexts. In
many instances these are resources (land, forests, equipment) that were earmarked
for local rural people, but got diverted to the local elite with strong social networks
in realms of state, party and market. These local elite have the economic, political
14 / JANET C. STURGEON AND THOMAS SIKOR
and cultural resources to take advantage of the lack of routinised rules and crystallised practices of exclusion and inclusion. Their actions in turn maintain the
absence of routines and more regularised social arrangements. In the bulk of these
case studies, the lower-level elite are the winners, while local land managers or
farmers the losers. It is this common outcome, above all, that unites the articles in
describing a trajectory of change. This trajectory of agrarian change also sets the
cases apart from post-colonial cases in both Africa and Java. The rules and regularised practices clearly favour the local elite, yet they also constrain the room available for manipulation. Peluso’s local elite are ensnared in social relations that
limit the scope for their predatory practices.
Some of the broader processes underlying the complexity of post-socialist property relations appear similar to those reported from post-colonial arenas. The original study of estates of administration and estates of production came from Africa,
so that it is not surprising to find extensive similarities between colonial and postsocialist cases. Pre-colonial and socialist property relations often consist of a series
of allocations among various layers of a social hierarchy, linking rights and obligations to social status. Geographical boundaries are permeable, as the exercise
of state power focuses on control over people and products instead of territorial
control. Patronage and social networks influence access to productive resources
based on the authority positions enjoyed by tribal chiefs and collective managers.
Yet there are still some important differences from the social dynamics underlying post-colonial property relations that permeate all the post-socialist cases
presented. These are in part rooted in socialist property concepts and practices, as
suggested by Verdery in her essay here. First, in socialist regimes, the estates of
administration and estates of production were organised by a ‘modern’ state at
the national level. This is qualitatively different from pre-modern states or even
bureaucratic patrons in either Africa or Indonesia. Socialist regimes produced
socialist citizens enjoined to participate in the development of a new kind of
modernity. Whether that effort succeeded or not, rural people were incorporated
into a national project. Second, socialist regimes created a sizeable class of local
government cadres and agricultural managers. Their sheer number exceeds the
administrators in charge of running local affairs for colonial and post-colonial
states. More importantly, socialist cadres and managers assumed positions of direct
authority over productive resources quite distinct from the more indirect controls
exercised by colonial and post-colonial administrators. Third, the scope of public
ownership under socialism is qualitatively different from colonial states’ ownership
of forests, nature reserves and agricultural plantations. Socialist regimes, with
few exceptions, included virtually all productive resources in the ‘unitary fund of
state property’ (Verdery 2003).
Part of the dynamics setting the complexity of post-socialist property apart
from post-colonial property originates from the contemporary contexts in which
post-socialist property transformations take place. The differences include the
massive scale of property reform, amounting to a thoroughgoing assault of unprecedented magnitude. Another difference is the symbolic power attributed to land
Post-socialist property in Asia and Europe / 15
titles, not only by agricultural producers but in fact by the whole population.
Land titles have become signifiers of citizenship, person-hood and social justice
(Hann 1993b; Verdery 1996, 1999). Yet the most significant difference emerging
from the articles here is that when socialist regimes either ended or moved toward
a market-based economy, the rupture in crystallised practices and routinised rules
was rapid and destabilising. These transformations threw property, identity and
social relations up in the air. The radical disbanding of political controls over
markets also opened up room for considerable manipulation. Local elite found
themselves operating in something of a vacuum, as the lack of rules and practices
played out in their favour.
To understand the appearance of these local elite, we may turn to Anton Blok,
who writes about the conditions under which the mafia arose. In the nineteenth
century, when the modern state tried to impose new property rights and social relations on a largely feudal rural society, power brokers emerged with ‘control
over the paths linking the local infrastructure of the village to the superstructure
of the larger society’ (Blok 1975: 7). In principle, the state was trying to ‘emancipate’ the peasantry from feudal landowning lords. These estate owners recruited
mafiosi from the peasantry to help them control both land and people by a show
of force to both the state and peasants. Blok explains this situation as arising from
a lack of state monopoly on violence, in addition to a vacuum in political practice
in relation to a new set of property relations. While the analogy with post-socialist
conditions is not exact, the major transition to a new form of property rights, entailing new identities, social relations and rules of interaction, is similar to the
break with socialism and transition to new forms of property and market. What is
illuminating about Blok’s study is that the mafia continued in place, playing a
stable, if violent, role in the practices of governance and extraction. Property reforms are intimately tied to larger issues of power and the nature of the state.
The articles included in this issue indicate significant differences in ‘the state
of the post-socialist state’. In fact, the nature of the ‘state’ may be a key factor differentiating property transformations in Asia and Europe examined in the articles.
The processes of economic, political and cultural change were less jarring in
Vietnam and China because the ‘state’ stayed in place, unlike in Bulgaria and
Albania, where de Waal’s villagers claimed that ‘there is no state’ (see de Waal in
this issue). The vacuum in crystallised practices enabled the local elite to pursue
new sets of arrangements that benefited themselves. In a similar way, in Albania
and Bulgaria, where there was a very limited market, middlemen and sharks could
take steps to create markets on their own terms, in some cases through mafia-like
behaviour (Giordano and Kostova 2002: 87–88). In China and Vietnam, though
markets appeared gradually, the local elite were again positioned to take advantage
of each change. Yet their actions were more circumscribed by the continuing
presence of the ‘state’. Sikor’s discussion of Black Thai serves here as a stark
counterpoint to the cases from Albania and Bulgaria, as villagers’ resistance drew
the support of local government officials and preserved relatively equitable access
to land.
16 / JANET C. STURGEON AND THOMAS SIKOR
Given the differences between European and Asian cases, does it make sense
to lump them together in one set of articles? Our answer is yes. Rural people in
post-socialist Asia and Europe have shared similar experiences in terms of socialist
property concepts and practices. They also live in similar contemporary contexts,
characterised by radical economic, political and cultural transformations. This is
not to deny the differences noted at the beginning: the kind of land reform; the
experience of property before collectivisation; and ecological land use dynamics.
More importantly, the comparison highlights a key difference in the Asian and
European experiences of post-socialist decollectivisation discussed here. The
continuing presence of the ‘state’ in China and Vietnam limits the space for manipulation open to the local elite. Though the lack of routinised rules and crystallised
practices is a common feature to most cases, its influence on property, and contribution to fuzziness, appears stronger in the European cases.
Returning to the role of property rights in the conservation of natural resources,
it is remarkable among the cases presented here the extent to which rural people
reject individualised private ownership rights. This would hold true for all cases
presented here (as well as Berry and Peluso). This finding suggests that property
rights, following Verdery, Berry and Peluso, are cultural practices embedded in
local social relations and histories, shot through with power relations. To try to
implement a new property regime based on the individual in relation to state and
market is to attempt to erase the identities, social connections and power relations
that hold crystallised practices in place. Far from being the universal desire predicted by neo-liberalism, as exemplified in the World Development Report quotations at the beginning of this article, such attempts, as shown in the cases here, can
produce complex, hybrid forms of property, complicated forms of resistance and
negotiation, and increased insecurity for rural producers. Impositions of clear
and exclusive privatised property regimes in post-socialist contexts can produce
the opposite of neo-liberal expectations for local resource users: insecurity, reduced
access and uncertain economic prospects.
Notes
1. It is important to note that all the Asian cases focus on ethnic minorities in either upland or
high-elevation locales. The comparison with European cases might look different if we had
case studies of Han or Kinh lowland farmers.
2. What do we mean by ‘post-socialist’? The term includes a set of very different regimes in
which exchange has shifted from administrative decisions towards market allocation, and control
over capital has moved from the state to private actors. At the same time, we do not intend to
reify conditions that are highly complex and variable across space and over time. Each article
in this volume makes clear how the author conceives of ‘post-socialism’ for the case material.
For Bulgaria and Albania, following the 1989 collapse of the party-state, the authors provide
ethnographic studies of ‘what comes next’ (borrowing from the title of Katherine Verdery’s
1996 book), following the restitution and privatisation of agricultural and forest land. In China
and Vietnam the authors present ethnographic cases of local property relations following
Post-socialist property in Asia and Europe / 17
decollectivisation, based in China on policies for economic reform and opening up, and in
Vietnam on the policies collectively known as ‘doi moi’.
References
Anderson, D. (1998), ‘Property as a Way of Knowing on Evenki Lands in Arctic Siberia’, in C.
Hann (ed.), Property Relations: Renewing the Anthropological Tradition, pp. 64–84. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Berry, S. (1993), No Condition is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in SubSaharan Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
——— (1997), ‘Tomatoes, Land and Hearsay: Property and History in Asante in the Time of
Structural Adjustment’, World Development 25: 1225–41.
Blok, Anton (1975), The Mafia of a Sicilian Village, 1860–1960: A Study of Violent Peasant Entrepreneurs. New York: Harper and Row.
Giordano, C. and D. Kostova (2002), ‘The Social Production of Mistrust’, in C. Hann (ed.), Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia, pp. 74–91. London: Routledge.
Ghani, A. (1996), ‘Property and Reproduction of Property as a Bundle of Powers: Afghanistan
1774–1901’, paper presented at the Agrarian Studies Programme. New Haven, CT: Yale
University.
Gluckman, Max (1972), The Ideas in Barotse Jurisprudence. Manchester: Manchester University
Press.
Hann, C. (1993a), ‘From Production to Property: Decollectivization and the Family–Land
Relationship in Contemporary Hungary’, Man, 28: 299–320.
——— (1993b), ‘Property Relations in the New Eastern Europe: The Case of Specialist Cooperatives in Hungary’, in H. de Soto and D.G. Anderson (eds), The Curtain Rises: Rethinking
Culture, Ideology, and the State in Eastern Europe, pp. 99–119. New York: Humanities Press.
Humphrey, Caroline (1983), Karl Marx Collective: Economy, Society and Religion in a Siberian
Collective Farm. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lampland, Martha (2002), ‘The Advantages of Being Collectivized: Cooperative Farm Managers
in the Postsocialist Economy’, in C. Hann (ed.), Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices
in Eurasia, pp. 31–56. London: Routledge.
Peluso, Nancy (1992), Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Stark, D. (1996), ‘Recombinant Property in Eastern European Capitalism’, American Journal of
Sociology, 101: 993–1027.
Verdery, Katherine (1996), What was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
——— (1998), ‘Property and Power in Transylvania’s Decollectivization’, in C. Hann (ed.), Property
Relations: Renewing the Anthropological Tradition, pp. 160–80. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
——— (1999), ‘Fuzzy Property: Rights, Power, and Identity in Transylvania’s Decollectivization’,
in M. Burawoy and K. Verdery (eds), Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the
Postsocialist World, pp. 53–82. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
——— (2003), The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
World Bank (2001), World Development Report 2002: Building Institutions for Markets. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.