Contemporary research is increasingly focusing on commons beyond natural resources such as forests and pastures. Instead, the ‹commons› are understood as common goods that are conceived in terms of actors and their practices and therefore include very different types of collectively owned and managed goods.
The spectrum ranges from corporately maintained infrastructures to militia and disaster protection, the cultivation and the development of vernacular legal traditions, legal spaces and group privileges as well as religious and ritual practices with their essential symbols and moral implications. Specific forms of collective action are just as much a part of this as persuasive self-images and meaningful historical narratives in connection with jointly claimed and exploited spaces. Immaterial goods such as knowledge, social and financial credit, collective efforts for social welfare, security, commemoration of the dead and the salvation of souls, the avoidance of taxes plus fair and reliable procedures for the distribution of goods are as important as electoral procedures that, at least superficially, grant equal opportunities to all participants (e.g. drawn by lot). As a result, a finely branched cooperative self-governance emerges on site and helps even small people to achieve agency in the capillaries of society and territory. This not only holds society together but it also legitimates the “commons state” at it’s best.
The power and the agency of historical commons, cooperatives and communities as basic units of the society, the state, the constitution and the extremely federalist political institutions characterize Swiss history since the Middle Ages – far beyond the example of “Törbel” made world-famous by E. Ostrom. Thousands of communities and cooperatives that have existed for centuries in the territory of today’s Switzerland have in common that the commoners have always seen their common properties as a highly precious heritage of their ancestors. And they understood themselves as trustees of a historical legacy to the benefit of future generations.
The panel will look at comparable phenomena and figurations from around the world from all epochs in which one or several of the aforementioned manifestations of commons have been cared for, managed and inherited over transgenerational periods of time, so that the goal of sustainable resource preservation became paramount. It is about strategies of physical and discursive valorization and the inventiveness of smart groups that achieved to preserve their collective resources in the long term despite fundamental historical upheavals such as colonialism, technical innovations, social conflicts and political revolutions.
The panel will take place on the occasion of the XIX Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) in Nairobi (Kenya).
Proposals for papers can be submitted via this link until December 12 2022: https://2023.iasc-commons.org/piotnetforms/abstract-submission-sub-theme-4-commons-between-colonial-legacies-and-the-anthropocene (select panel 4.4).