The ideological symptom of tenure insecurity : peasant experience of formalisation between dispossession and neoliberal discourse in rural Tanzania

Abstract: This thesis describes the peasant experience of land tenure formalisation in a context of repeated and continuous dispossession, from the introduction of colonial land legislation to current processes of alienation of land in favour of large-scale investment, and in the presence of a strong neoliberal discourse. Taking a stand against measuring the success of land tenure formalisation simply based on statistics and numbers and advocating a stance whereby experience is explored in the presence of a strong neoliberal discourse, a qualitative infield interview study was executed over nine weeks in Bugaga village, Tanzania. The thesis describes how the peasant experience is expressed in the local narrative and draws on the combined ideas of Marx, Bloch and Žižek on the function of ideology to analyse this narrative as a symptom. The analysis showed that the local narrative on land tenure formalisation is divided in the sense that the villagers both embrace and reject the formalisation and revealed the paradoxical fact that even though the villagers fear the formalisation might lead to dispossession, they ultimately also embrace it as a way to protect themselves from dispossession. This conclusion could not have been reached simply by consulting statistics and numbers.