Real acts, imagined landscapes

Abstract

Why do we want land and agrarian reform? Why should its policies be supported? Much can be said about its stated purposes and goals, but why do those goals matter — and to whom? If, as James Ferguson remarked earlier in this colloquium (Ferguson 2011), ‘land’ can have a multitude of functions — if it is true that we can’t just assume we know what ‘land’ is for — do we necessarily know what ‘land reform’ is for? Perhaps, following Ferguson, we could think of land reform itself as rather like one of John Austin’s ‘speech acts’. Austin thought we could learn a lot by exploring just how many things we can ‘do with words’ (Austin 1962): perhaps the same is true of land reform itself.