"The implementation of large scale industrial farming investment involves land deals that
are not only being navigated through regulated practices, but state and non—state actors
also employ a strategy to ‘grip the minds of the masses’ to enable the deals. ‘Gripping the
minds’ involves articulatory practices within the terrain of ideological struggle, which
put land deals always in process. This paper argues that ‘the owner of land’ as a cultural
identity that was constructed historically by determining forces, and not confined
merely as form of rights, is articulated in three competing positionings toward land
deals: rejection, renegotiation and acceptance. The state and non—state actors or NGOs
broker the process of identification toward modernismby constructing representations
of capital as the good and bad Other. These representations of capital provide ‘logic’
which connected meanings of modernism with ‘the owner of land’ identity. ‘Gripping
the mind of the masses’ to smoothen land deals involves correspondences as well as non-
correspondences between modernism and the Marind identity of Anim—ha that render
connected chain of meanings unstable."
