ASC Land Mortgage Working Group Publishes Research Report
The Boston University African Studies Center’s Land Mortgage Working Group published a collaborative research report “Mortgage across Cultures: Land, Finance, and Epistemology,” edited by Daivi Rodima-Taylor and Parker Shipton. The Working Group
studies the novel potentials and challenges that surround land mortgage, aiming to achieve a human-centered view of expanding rural financialization.
The Research Report is an outcome of discussions and materials first presented at a Boston University Land Mortgage Symposium in April 2015 (funded by a grant from the BU Center for Finance, Law & Policy, and facilitated by the African Studies Center). The Report includes contributions by an international group of scholars, offering interdisciplinary insights into land tenure and rural borrowing issues.
Recent economic and political changes have fueled uncertainties in land access all over the world. Land property has become increasingly central to forging new social identities and modes of belonging, as well as inspiring new kinds of competition and conflict. Land mortgage has emerged as a novel tool for restructuring agrarian relations in many post-authoritarian and post-conflict societies. The papers of the collection explore the social and cultural meanings of pledging and mortgaging, and the relationships of mortgage to existing property and inheritance institutions, local credit initiatives and patterns of indebtedness, and ongoing land tenure reforms such as land titling or restitution. Special attention is on mortgage in the settings of conflict-related mobility and recent post-authoritarian transitions. The interdisciplinary collection involves productive collaboration between anthropologists, historians, economists, social geographers, and legal scholars.
Read the working group research report.