Nullius is an anthropological account of the troubled place of ownership and its consequences for social relations in India. The book provides a detailed study of three doctrinal paradigms where proprietary relations have been erased, denied, or misappropriated by the Indian state. It examines three instantiations of negation, where the Indian state de facto adopted the doctrines of terra nullius (in the erasure of indigenous title), res nullius (in acquiring museum objects), and, controversially, corpus nullius (in denying ownership of one’s personhood in citizens’ data collected through biometric identification).
Nullius contends that even though property rights and ownership are a cornerstone of modern law, they are a spectral presence in the Indian case. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of the anthropology of the state, law, data, museums, legal history, intellectual property, cultural property, heritage, historical anthropology, and South Asia. It will also be of interest to non-academics working in the fields of data, data ethics, cultural property, intellectual property, and museum collections.
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Industry Reviews
"In this context, Nullius' originality is to set the concept of dispossession (not necessarily the extant body of work addressing it, and for good reason) as the counterfactual to that of the gift; its success is to take the ethnographic imagination the whole nine yards to flesh out the theoretical possibilities of this counterfactual that could have easily remained a superficial witticism." * Anthropology Book Forum *
"A far-reaching theoretical-and ethnographic-feat for anthropology at large. Animating the breadth of scholarship that animates it, this book sets free the concept of property to reconfigure some startling legacies of the dispossession implied. A profoundly original composition of multiple dispossessions transforms the concept: 'property' is never going to be quite the same again." -- Marilyn Strathern, author of Relations: An Anthropological Account
"Kriti Kapila's study of sovereignty in India brilliantly connects the strange absence of the right to property, in the Indian Constitution, to the special relationship between sociality, (dis)possession, sovereignty and exchange in everyday life. This highly original ethnography of the Indian state reveals the distinctive cultural logic of its ability to recode hierarchy as relationality." -- Arjun Appadurai, author of Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance
"Kapila slices through decades-centuries!-of political thought to provide a distinct and consequential new grasp of sovereignty, detailing its foundation in modes of ownership that range from the brutally real to the tragically illusory. Starting with a shockingly neglected question- what is the obverse of the hau of the gift?-this daring book pushes us to ponder the hidden scaffolding of state sovereignty." -- Gustav Peebles, author of The Euro and Its Rivals: Currency and the Construction of a Transnational City
"Kapila's work reveals the many depths of state-led dispossession beyond a grid of monopolized violence and political economic calculations... Its key contributions are in showing how an anthropology of the state can be revived outside of Agambenian-Foucauldian frameworks that animate much of the recent work on sovereignty and state-subject relations. Kapila's commitment to an anthropological grounding produces a welcomed and refreshing piece of scholarship at a moment when many of us are wading into the waters of transdisciplinary work." * PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review *
