Maps and memory, rights and relationships: articulations of global modernity and local dwelling in delineating land for a communal-area conservancy in north-west Namibia
2020
Mapping new administrative domains for integrating conservation and development,
and defining rights in terms of both new policy and the citizenry governed thereby, have been
central to postcolonial neoliberal environmental governance programmes known as Community
Based Natural Resources Management (CBNRM). Examples now abound of the complex,
ambiguous and sometimes contested outcomes of CBNRM initiatives and processes. In this
paper I draw on historical, oral history and ethnographic material for north-west Namibia,
particularly in relation to indigenous Khoekhoegowab-speaking Damara / ≠Nūkhoen and
||Ubun peoples, to explore two issues. First, I highlight the significance of historical colonial and
apartheid contexts generating mapped reorganisations of land and human populations for
memories of access and use that exceed these reorganisations. Second, I foreground a nexus of
conceptual, constitutive and affective relationships with lands now bounded as CBNRM
administrative units or ‘conservancies’ that have tended to be disrupted through both past events
and as economising neoliberal governance approaches have taken hold in this context.
Acknowledging disjunctions in conceptions and experiences of people-land relationships may
assist with understanding who and what is amplified or diminished in contemporary globalising
trajectories in neoliberal environmental governance. In particular, oral histories recording
individual experiences in-depth, especially those of elderly people prompted by return to
remembered places of past dwelling, can historicise and deepen recognition of complex cultural
landscapes that today carry high conservation value.
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