Nullius: The Anthropology of Ownership, Sovereignty, and the Law in India by Kriti Kapila (Chicago: HAU Press, 2022)
Reviewed by Ali Malik, Drake University
In Nullius: The Anthropology of Ownership, Sovereignty, and the Law in India, Kriti Kapila subjects the concept of dispossession in India to anthropological inquiry to study the mutually constitutive relations between the social relations embedded in regimes of property ownership and practices of sovereignty-making enacted by the colonial and postcolonial Indian state. Nullius contains fascinating ethnographies while adding theoretical value to the concept of dispossession in anthropology by showing the myriad of ways in which dispossession is bound to practices of state-making. Relying on structural anthropological theory developed from the study of Amazonian or Melanesian societies, Kapila’s conceptual apparatus utilizes exchange, gift, hospitality, predation, debt, and slavery to understand the relations involved in state-led dispossession. This is contextualized within Indian constitutional history and specifically the abolished fundamental right to property, once understood as a bulwark against arbitrary state confiscation of anyone’s land.
Chapters 2 and 3 draw upon thnographic fieldwork to explore the relations between culture and modern state law’s aspiration to work as a force of modernization in a postcolonial setting. Read together, these provide a framing for the subsequent chapters “that follow on why the force of law in India lies in its promissory nature…especially in relation to sovereignty” (p. 27). Chapters 4 and 5 make use of historical archives, while Chapter 6 relies on current primary sources to investigate the state’s work of dispossession within three paradigms: terra nullius (in relation to indigenous title in land), res nullius (in the acquisition of museum and heritage goods), and corpus nullius (in the relations between citizens and India’s digital system of citizen identification, Aadhar, which is the world’s largest national biometric identification system).
Chapter 2’s ethnography focuses on changes to marriage and inheritance laws in light of caste-killings in Northern India, with the aim of reframing the relationship between law and culture outside of Euro-American societies that understand law as a reflection or codification of culture. Kapila focuses on the Hindu Marriage Act and the Hindu Succession Act. Both sought to deliver formal legal equality in marriage and inheritance relations, but as Kapila shows, the laws failed in their aspiration as a modernizing force in society due to the inclination of modern law towards flattening the complex relationalities embedded in kinship-based cultural subjectivities.
In asking what dispossession is and why it is sovereignty-making, Chapter 3’s ethnographic focus is on the Gaddis, a pastoralist community in the Western Himalayas who were officially recognized as a scheduled tribe in the Indian Constitution in 2003 and whose relations with the state have been premised on negotiation. When dealing with instances of state-initiated enclosure, the Gaddis have consistently threatened to enter into voluntary dispossession by relinquishing their flock, which is their primary source of wealth and possession. In so doing, “they perform self-dispossession as communicative action and not as sacrifice” (p. 75), enacting a particular form of political engagement with the state. Their repeated success is predicated upon challenging the state’s “sovereign monopoly on dispossession” (p. 76). Sovereignty is not fully encompassed by the state’s monopoly on violence, Kapila argues, but extends to the state’s capacity to dispossess.
Chapter 4 engages with terra nullius through a case study of the colonization of the Andaman Islands, followed by the postcolonial state’s attempted incorporation of the islands’ self-isolated Indigenous tribes (the Jarawa and Sentinalese). Kapila relies on historical documents and debates over indigeneity in the Indian Constituent Assembly to show how terra nullius aimed to produce a fresh start by erasing prior social orders, land titles, and settlements. The postcolonial state attempted to refashion indigenous subjectivities through recognition within a cultural register and exercises of state authority. Indigenous claims to property ownership were partially recognized by the state, but also distilled to mean a claim to resources within the territories excluding the territory itself. In reading the Jarawa and Sentinalese’s refusal to bestow recognition on non-Jarawa and non-Sentinelese life worlds through the lens of reverse anthropology, Kapila argues that their non-recognition of the state and its modes of interpellation renders the state meaningless.
Chapter 5 moves to a case study of res nullius in the transfer and colonial ownership of museum and heritage goods cataloged in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Kapila examines official communications between private individuals and colonial officials regarding the ownership status of museum-bound objects. Dispossession as a sovereignty-making practice was not simply a linear act of enforced state expropriation. Kapila instead illustrates how dispossession was enacted through a series of obfuscations and misrecognitions through which sovereignty was produced; “res nullius was achieved through the leeching away of proprietary title” (p. 126).
Chapter 6 explores the relations between Aadhar and the Indian citizen. Kapila shows how the laboring body is crucial to Aadhar’s functioning and expansiveness, rather than an object of its control. Relying on interviews with various government officials involved in the creation of Aadhar, Kapila explicates its inner-workings and then theorizes its effects. Data is collected through biometric identification of each citizen, which is necessary to receive state services and welfare provisions, as well as in commercial transactions such as opening a bank account or purchasing a cell phone. These transactions are further aggregated with existing biometric data to provide new insights for each citizen. This is where the data becomes commercially valuable: routine human actions compounded continuously each day generate predictive insights that can be utilized by a wide range of private actors. The citizen, Kapila asserts, is thus laboring in contributing their unique biometrics to Aadhar and then as an actor that instigates changes in data sets by engaging in commercial transactions. This connection between the digital and the corporeal keeps the data raw and lively and therefore valuable for capitalist exchange. The state becomes the data-appropriator while leaving the citizen’s body “permanently integrated into the network of the state with enhanced visibility and traceability…from which there is no escape” (p. 149), where “the usurpation of the citizen’s biometric labor as tantamount to slavery (corpus nullius)” (p. 22). The laboring body under Aadhar is the newest terrain of sovereignty-making for the Indian state.
Chapter 6 would be strengthened with some of the precise analyses that comprise the preceding chapters. Kapila is correct in claiming that appropriation of the body renders persons into things, a key facet in the logics of corporeal bondage. Yet the reader is left with an unclear understanding of who is the citizen that is the subject of Kapila’s analysis. Aadhar’s appropriation of data-making labor might unfold in an identical fashion in a technical sense, but the essence of the labor involved varies if one is considering the landless subaltern, or the middle class, or the urban elite, for example. How do we further make sense of the labor of data-making in the rural countryside, where data collection is proliferating in Indian agriculture? Is the labor of data-making replicated in smart cities, on farms, or within special economic zones?
Kapila’s work reveals the many depths of state-led dispossession beyond a grid of monopolized violence and political economic calculations: “sovereignty lies in the power to take, but also the ability to create illusions” (p. 155). While the book is structured in a way that makes it somewhat difficult to condense to a single broad argument, its key contributions are in showing how an anthropology of the state can be revived outside of Agambenian-Foucauldian frameworks that animate much of the recent work on sovereignty and state-subject relations. Kapila’s commitment to an anthropological grounding produced a welcomed and refreshing piece of scholarship at a moment when many of us are wading into the waters of transdisciplinary work.