The truths of dispossession in the Western Himalaya

Abstract

In this chapter I focus on the distinctiveness of the notions of property among the Gaddis, a pastoralist community in the western Himalaya, to understand the encompassment of property and ownership in structures of ordinary life, the different scales at which ideas and relations of ownership become manifest, the variety of modes, the temporalities and axes of ownership and accumulation and why ownership matters. I discuss Gaddi categories and concepts of property to explore not just the relational possibilities made by ownership but also to understand the obverse: dispossession and its political charge. I examine the different modes, scales and temporalities under which ownership works and property is accumulated and disaccumulated among the Gaddis, to understand the limits of the law and, in turn, the limits of the state