9 - Sovereignty and distribution amid forceful acquisition

Summary

What are the consequences of forceful acquisition? What does it allow and what does it make more difficult? These questions highlight how important it is to remember acquisition rather than assume that production and management (normative pastoralism in politics and economy) are the only ways in which political-economic processes and relationships play out in the world. Precarity – uncertainty, instability – has rightly become a recent area of attention. But the tendency to focus on post-Fordist/post-industrial and/or urban locales, where precarity is often thought of as a recent invention, reveals a troubling blind spot. In the bush, status instability and forceful acquisition have long gone together, and, while the details have changed, they have persisted for more than a century. The history this book recounts has much to offer in understanding the lived experience of precarity, and may also serve as a guide to the future.