Interdisciplinary Workshop on Land Mortgage

By Daivi Rodima-Taylor

The workshop “Mortgage across Cultures:  Land, Finance, & Epistemology” took place on April 14, 2016 at BU African Studies Center. The all-day workshop was funded by the BU Center for Finance, Law and Policy, and co-organized with the African Studies Center and the Anthropology Department.  The BU Working Group on Land Mortgage and Financial Inclusion studies land mortgage and its regulation in a comparative perspective, exploring how the subject of mortgaging arose in agrarian settings and how it has developed in different economies, regimes, and cultures.  The workshop included presentations by a group of renowned scholars from the United States and Europe, offering interdisciplinary insights into land tenure and rural borrowing issues. The workshop was co-organized by Daivi Rodima-Taylor, senior academic researcher of BU CFLP and research affiliate at the African Studies Center,  and Parker Shipton, a professor of anthropology and research fellow in African Studies.

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The goal of the workshop was to study these novel potentials and challenges that surround the topic of land mortgage, and to achieve a human-centered view of expanding rural financialization.  The presentations explored the topics of land mortgage from diverse angles,  including the relationships between land mortgage and land inheritance in Ghana, the issues of land taxation in Senegal, protecting the borrower in rural India, ideas of land loans and investments in Northern Uganda, the cultural construction of home as patrimony in Mexico, and reinventing land mortgage in post-socialist Romania.

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Going forward, the initiative will continue building on that diversity of interdisciplinary and geographical perspectives and combine the ethnographic as well as broader theoretical insights discussed during the sessions. Several collaborative publications of varying formats are in the works.