Shifting Sands, Land from the Sea

A Microhistory of Coastal Land Titling in Thailand

Bibliographic Data

ID2143284
AuthorsRiamsara Kuyakanon Knapp (University of Cambridge, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume89
Issue3
Pages438-458
Publication date2024-05-26
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEthnos (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0014-1844 • E-ISSN: 1469-588X
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00141844.2023.2213852
OpenAlexW4384038450
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited52

This microhistory of a shoreline place in Thailand details the socio-natural process by which a piece of coastal land came to be recognised as private property by the state. It demonstrates that intimate and long-term attention to specificities of how property comes into being has more explanatory power than synoptic theorisations of accumulation and dispossession. Using ethnography, archives and affective co-narration, this paper probes the shifting ground of water and land to show how the fluidity of water plays a key role in the politics and legal procedures of enclosure, and how fluctuating boundaries become an ambiguous arena for property claims contestations amid entanglements of slippery legal semantics. It argues that the expanded notion of agency in the Anthropocene presents new challenges for thinking about property relations, and that thinking from a shoreline place of shifting water-land boundaries engenders novel questions to do with fluid dispossessions at a time of rising oceans

Agency (philosophy · Art · Epistemology · Geography · Microhistory · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Property (philosophy · Shore · Social science · Sociology · Geology · Law · Oceanography · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies · Water Governance and Infrastructure

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Open DOIOpen Access