Decolonizing the Gender and Land Rights Debate in India
Considering Religion and More-than-Human Sociality in Women's Lived Land Relatedness
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3363017 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Catrien Notermans (0000-0003-3752-0264, Radboud University Nijmegen, corresponding author), Luna Swelsen (0000-0003-2717-9373, Wageningen University & Research) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 254 |
| Publication date | 2022-03-17 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Religions (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2077-1444 • E-ISSN: 2077-1444 |
| Publisher | MDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT) |
| DOI | 10.3390/rel13030254 |
| OpenAlex | W4220882169 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 22 |
This article links the feminist debate on women's land rights in India to the current academic debate on critical human-nature relationships in the Anthropocene by studying how married Hindu women weigh the pros and cons of claiming land in their natal family and how they practice their lived relatedness to land in rural Udaipur (Rajasthan, North India). The article disentangles the complex issue of why women do not respond eagerly to Indian state policies that for a long time have promoted gender equality in the domain of land rights. In reaction to the dominant feminist debate on land rights, the authors introduce religion and more-than-human sociality as analytical foci in the examination of women's responsiveness to land legislation. Their ethnographic study is based on fieldwork with married women in landowning families in four villages in Udaipur's countryside. The authors argue that women have well-considered reasons not to claim natal land, and that their intimate relatedness to land as a sentient being, a nonhuman companion, and a powerful goddess explains the women's reluctance to treat land as an inanimate commodity or property. Looking at religion brings to the fore women's core business of making land fruitful and powerful, independent of any legislation. The authors maintain that a decolonized perspective on women's land relatedness that takes religion and women's multispecies perspective seriously may also offer a breakthrough in understanding why some women do not claim land
Agriculture · Environmental ethics · Geography · Hinduism · Human rights · Land law · Land tenure · Legislation · Political science · Sociality · Sociology · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Gender Studies · Land Rights and Reforms · Law · Ecology
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After Kinship
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Coloniality, Ontology, and the Question of the Posthuman
The Hindu Succession act
Women's Land Rights and the Trap of Neo‐Conservatism
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The benefits of land registration and titling
Animal Intimacies
Rethinking Relations and Animism
A critique of "religion" as a cross-cultural category1
Disowning Dependence
Prayers of Cow Dung
A Theory of Access
Kinship Matters
Between Gender and Kinship
Gender Analysis of Land
Gender and Land Rights Revisited
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 3 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |