Land and Social Life

This introductory chapter frames land politics and introduces the handbook. Land is understood here as a key element in production and social reproduction, which are taken as an inherently connected whole. Social reproduction, in turn, is used in a broad sense to mean not only labor reproduction, but also socioecological, sociocultural, and sociopolitical reproduction. This treatment brings us to the multiple meanings of land: soil, farmland or grazing land, home lot, landscape, socio-agroecological zone, territory, and homeland. The chapters do not deal in either-or dichotomies, such as privatization versus commoning, farm plot versus agroecological zone. Rather, they take a whole-to-the-parts and parts-to-the-whole relational view, focusing on the structural, institutional, and political glue that binds dierent fragments and layers of social relations and human and nature relations. They see, in other words, a mosaic of land access, or social relations. Land in production and social reproduction is key to the incessant renewal of life and society. In this sense, land and land politics shape social life, and vice versa. Struggles for land are objectively linked to systemwide political struggles, and the reverse is also true.