Contenu du sommaire : Gouverner les hommes et les ressources. Dynamiques de la frontière interne

The article examines the dynamics and forms of production of the social order in the Winye of Burkina Faso. The analysis is based on a study of the distribution of rights over natural resources. Issues of collective action that allow a frontier society to establish itself and reproduce are shown to be resolved by means of setting up altars associated with a particular space and a diversified property regime that makes resources a possession that is at once common and private.

This paper deals with the way in which land rights and their transfer emerged in a context of interstitial microfrontier, whose colonisation process fell outside the autochthonous people/migrants relationship system which tends to govern land rights in Ivory Coast. Historical analysis of how agricultural colonisation took place shows that this context is not, however, linked to any real institutional vacuum, in that principles shared by the pioneers of different origins exert a regulatory effect on initial access to land. The frontier character has consequently facilitated land transactions, in that the pioneer's rights over land did not stem from any customary inheritance. It therefore enabled him to transfer land as his own property. Such land transactions can, in contrast to what is often observed in the forest zones of Ivory Coast, be considered as “full” sales. The initial conditions governing access to land (absence of customary holders of land rights, no trusteeships, rights founded on the fact of land clearance), the absence of any local land ownership issues and the nature of land transactions as outright sales are all factors that explain why these land rights are not called into question, even in the current socio-political situation.

The article explores the relation between ritual hierarchy and land rights in a regional situation which was little influenced by the political changes brought on in the colonial era and to which neither the State nor agents involved in development have paid much attention. Phuo society was faced with a historical situation marked by considerable mobility and fluidity, and by an ethos of inclusion. It used, as it still does, a wide stock of argumentative resources regarding jurisdiction over land. The principle of “first comer” at a given place plays a role, as do hierarchical relationships between lineages, who are characteristically highly specialised in their rituals. These specialisations are handed down the generations through the paternal line. However, certain competences can be transferred or even put up as pledges to other lineages who can gain access in this way to the cult governing land rights. The various modalities of transferring the cult of the land give some land chiefs a legitimacy that is unstable and contested, as in the case study described in this article.

The logics that govern the construction of territory and frontier fall irrevocably into the sphere of ideologies. A case study conducted among the Basoga of south-eastern Uganda serves as a means of highlighting the conceptual and metaphorical framework on which basis populations socialise nature and construct their spatial and territorial imagination. This imagining structures land relationships and deeply influences the meaning that ongoing merchandisation of these relationships can embrace. Special attention is paid to the impact of these ideologies on the management of fallow land, the atomisation of production units, the recolonisation of abandoned land and on monetary transactions and agricultural contracts.

The Mexican agrarian reform between 1920 and the beginning of the 1980s led to the redistribution of nearly half the country's land. Such change was also at the core of the process of construction and propagation of the political system and the consolidation of the State's presence in the rural world. Its implementation paved the way for the establishment of new collective farming structures and a reconfiguration of political territories for the benefit of categories of actors seeking to free themselves from old political and land ownership structures represented by the Indian community and the hacienda system. This article describes the background to the co-production of the land-rights policy, closely linked to the logic of autonomisation of local actors, and realised in forms that recall the internal frontier process analysed by Kopytoff in African contexts. The paper suggests a widening of this model by focusing in particular on the role played by the State and its representatives during the course of the process. The agrarian reform in Mexico can be interpreted as resulting from two superimposed frontier logics. On the part of the rural actors, the search for “interstitial frontiers” capable of withstanding the divisive dynamics at work in farming communities; and for the State, the construction of an “internal political frontier” enabling it to draw these communities within its sphere of control. These two logics reinforce each other up to the point where depletion of spaces to colonize calls their functional complementarities into question.

Forest reserves are a political creation of frontiers between the uninhabited and the inhabited based on the idea that reservation is necessary for the protection of the integrity of natural resources. Forest policy in post-Independence Ghana has been characterised by centralisation, exclusion and restrictive legislation. However, the lands seized by government for reserves were not always properly acquired, and consequently land was, and is, still owned by the original owners, though they have formally been denied access to their property. The actual governance of resources of the forest reserves in northern Ghana differs quite dramatically from declared policies. A much more subtle, negotiated and politically sensitive form of arrangement has prevailed and prevails today. Administrative and political authorities have long tolerated that significant areas of the forest reserves have been (re-)colonised by local farmers. The frontier is porous and provides a context for monetary and political rent seeking for political agents when protecting and indulging people's exercise of rights granted them by customary authorities. This creates a complex layered tenure system tightly connected to issues of local politics and produces a continuous re-definition of legality and property rights.

This article explores the pioneer frontier situation created by gold diggers in West Africa. Since the 1980s, a wave of gold digging and panning, linked to the development of new deposits or revival of old extraction sites, has provided the opportunity to observe the emergence of a culture of itinerant gold-digger camps. Depending on the state of resources, the gold-diggers and the associated traders move from site to site, continually establishing new camps, transporting and reproducing the standards and regulations of a particular community, adapting partly to local conditions. This type of frontier is characterised by rapid changes in the local economy, high spatial and social mobility of participants and often conflict-ridden relations gold-diggers have with the central government and neighbouring rural societies. The article also discusses the specific character of these frontiers of gold-exploitation in comparison with those associated with agrarian colonisation.