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The implementation of large scale industrial farming investment involves land deals thatare not only being navigated through regulated practices, but state and non—state actorsalso employ a strategy to ‘grip the minds of the masses’ to enable the deals. ‘Gripping theminds’ involves articulatory practices within the terrain of ideological struggle, whichput land deals always in process. This paper argues that ‘the owner of land’ as a culturalidentity that was constructed historically by determining forces, and not confinedmerely as form of rights, is articulated in three competing positionings toward landdeals: rejection, renegotiation and acceptance. The state and non—state actors or NGOsbroker the process of identification toward modernismby constructing representationsof capital as the good and bad Other. These representations of capital provide ‘logic’which connected meanings of modernism with ‘the owner of land’ identity. ‘Grippingthe 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 renderconnected chain of meanings unstable. |
