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82 2 Staking Claims Earth Shrines, Ritual Power, and Property Rights Creating a peaceful order on the frontier can be a bloody affair. In their attempt to establish new settlements, Dagara frontiersmen often resorted to violence toward previous inhabitants or competing immigrants. However, if their newly founded homes were to endure, prosper, and attract more settlers, they also needed to create a peaceful social order that ensured, among other things, that villagers could feel safe from human and spiritual hazards, and that provided a degree of material security by allowing them to enjoy the fruits of their labor. In the Black Volta region, as in many other parts of the West African savanna, such an order centered on the earth shrine and its custodian. Earth shrines were created from stones or other objects assumed to be potent, such as iron rods or clay pots, and usually taken care of by a member of the first-comers’ lineage. The frontiersmen and their allies often established other shrines for the spirits of the bush, hills, and rivers, but generally the earth shrines were, and continue to be, regarded as more powerful. In exchange for sacrifices that the earth priest offered on behalf of the community, the earth god was believed to grant the local community permission to exploit the natural resources and guarantee its material and spiritual well-being. Most important, however, earth shrines and their custodians not only provided for spiritual protection and fertility, but were, and still are, central to the definition of property rights regarding the land and related resources. Earth priests had no political authority and could not enforce their rules through violence or other secular means. But their control of the most important spiritual resource gave them a form Staking Claims | 83 of power, or at least substantial influence, in the regulation of access to the land and related resources and, more generally, in village affairs and relations with neighboring settlements. Earth shrines thus simultaneously constitute territorial cults and economic, social, and political institutions. In a literal sense, they are containers for the earth deity and the spirits of the pioneers’ ancestors that need to be regularly appealed to for blessing. And they are symbolic vessels that embody the local community’s inextricable link with the land. “Shrines are,” as Allan Dawson puts it, “physical manifestations of a group’s claim to a particular piece of land and thus markers of identity. . . . [T]he shrine is autochthony made real.”1 In a context of mobility, however , autochthony is constantly challenged and redefined, and shrines are not locally fixed, but can travel with the pioneers or depart together with the previous inhabitants whom these pioneers displace. Shrines can be abandoned in one place and reestablished or created anew in another location; they can be destroyed, neglected, or revitalized, redefined or newly legitimized; in short: they can be adjusted to the needs and claims of the new inhabitants of the territory, and they can become objects of intense contestation. That earth shrines are central to religion and land tenure in the Black Volta region was already noted by colonial administrators and anthropologists, but scholarly attention focused either on the earth cult as religious institution2 or on the secular , economic system of land rights connected with it, not on the complex connections between these two aspects. A case in point for the latter perspective—that came to dominate “applied” research since the 1950s, often commissioned by governments with the aim of boosting agricultural productivity, are the perceptive descriptions of customary land rights by R. J. H. Pogucki on Northern Ghana and Jean Louis Boutillier on what was then Upper Volta. They highlighted the importance of earth shrines as embodiments of particularly strong property titles, but their rights-oriented view led them to overlook the importance of ritual politics for defending, challenging, or redefining land tenure. Such an overly structuralist perspective on indigenous land tenure continues to dominate much of the newer policy-oriented literature on land rights.3 On the other hand, the overly romanticist image of the earth priest as a noble “high priest” or “priestly king,”4 or as a religious “recluse” uninterested in wealth and worldly power5 that colonial officers developed and that persists among some contemporary development experts and land planners is just as misleading. In order to understand how first-comer claims, control over earth shrines, and property rights come together on the historical frontier as well as in current land conflicts , we need to...

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