Introduction -- Customary connection to land and practices of resilience -- Greeting the state -- Landowner groups and the codification of custom in Papua New Guinea -- Making land work? -- Land titling and state building in postconflict Timor-Leste -- Contesting land, city, sta…
Across Melanesia, the ways in which people connect to land are being transformed by processes of modernization--globalization, the building of states and nations, practices and imaginaries of development, the legacies of colonialism, and the complexities of postcolonial encounte…
Across Melanesia, as across much of the world, the ways in which people connect to land are being transformed by modernizing processes of change. Melanesian peoples are becoming landowners, this work argues, both in the sense that these processes of change compel forms of proper…