Access and Alienation: the Promise and Threat of Stewardship on Mokil Atoll

Oles, Bryan (March 2007). "Access and Alienation: the Promise and Threat of Stewardship on Mokil Atoll". Human Organization. 66 (1): 78–89. doi:10.17730/humo.66.1.at624737t3751451. ISSN 1938-3525 0018-7259, 1938-3525 .

Abstract: Land tenure on Mokil Atoll, an island in Pohnpei State, Federated States of Micronesia, is undergoing a notable shift from an emphasis on individual ownership of land to a system of collective, kin-based ownership. This alteration in the jural dimension of land tenure is intimately related to historical changes in the region’s political economy that have entailed significant population movements and concomitant transformations in the values assigned to land, subsistence farming, local resources, and the atoll itself. This paper explores these changes by focusing on the system of stewardship that emerged as a means of protecting the ownership rights of emigrants. It examines how the system of stewardship ironically increases the threat to absentee ownership rights. This threat, coupled with economic and political forces that are compelling further emigration, and a fundamental transformation in the meaning of land, is a driving force in the transition to collective, kin-based ownership rights that secure both resident and absentee use rights to atoll property. In the course of describing these changes, the paper reveals tensions among Mokilese residents and absentees who, as a result of maintaining different relationships with the land, rely on competing definitions of identity, inheritance, and land tenure.

Extra details:

QID: Q125520088
MAG: 1984489216
CorpusID: 144089559
OpenAlex: W1984489216