2023-07-10 20:00:05
Danouta Liberski-Bagnoud, ethnologist. YANN LEGENDRE
Director of research at the CNRS, ethnologist Danouta Liberski-Bagnoud publishes Earth Sovereigntyin which she analyzes the conception of the Earth in Voltaic societies (Burkina Faso) and draws some lessons from it to rethink our ways of inhabiting the world.
According to you, the categories of thought used to apprehend the land question in Africa are inadequate. For what ?
The relationship to land is analyzed primarily through the categories of law and economics, as if they were universal. However, Voltaic societies do not obey the law as we know it but the order of the rite, which should not be confused with the religious and which concerns all areas of social life. Moreover, thinking of the land as a resource is a Western construction of the 18th century, a time when modern property emerged, which made the owner sovereign over his property.
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In Western law, sovereignty and property are intimately linked, contrary to Voltaic conceptions for which there can be no sovereignty over the Earth. It is the Earth that is sovereign and there is no power or figure of authority among men who does not derive their legitimacy from the Earth.
Is that why you say Earth is an instance?
The Earth is neither a good nor a person (it has none of the criteria). But it is an instance of censorship and an instance that guarantees fundamental prohibitions. It is a ritual fiction which organizes the whole life of the village communities, in the way the State organizes our whole life. Finally, it is what binds people together. Living on the same land, giving birth to descendants there, connects people, whatever their origin. The Earth being this third instance, it must remain common to all. These companies are against his property. This is the major prohibition. The Earth belongs only to itself, it is not subordinated to anything or anyone.
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A strong link then emerges between a lineage and a specific territory, to the point that individuals become one with the territory…
Every village is made up of lineages of various origins that a character, the guardian of the Earth, has territorialized, that is to say has ritually inscribed in places (sanctuaries) which become their ancestor. Thus articulated to the village territory, they say that they have “become a single thing”. We would say “citizens”. Beyond the limits of their own body and the enclosure of the houses which preserves intimacy, each integrates those of the village, which is conceived as a space-body in which feelings of stability and security are felt, by contrasts with the bush, a limitless space where man cannot stay long without feeling the loss of his own bodily limits and risking fainting.
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