Where private property is not so private: the interlegal politics of land titling in the “shadows” of the state

Across southern Africa, land titling programs are set in motion to increase the legibility and legality of customary property, purportedly offering a remedy for the economic marginality of rural economies. This article situates an anthropological critique of titling. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Lenje Chiefdom in central Zambia, I show how the title deed wends its way through multiple institutions, each with its own situated logic, and undergoes revisions outside the scripts of formal law; the title deed becomes a generative site for novel forms of property and legal authority. Building on notions of interlegality and anthropological work on and in the “shadows” of the state, I argue that the title deed is reworked as an instrument of customary authority, redeployed in the maintenance of the Chiefdom as a political body; that it becomes a mechanism by which state-like “officers” write themselves into the land of others; and, once issued, that the title deed refuses to disassociate itself from its paper-y existence and the materiality of land. Land titling, rather than contributing to some linear change toward land as commodity, indulges an excess that betrays its own rational aims, becoming an interlegal drama in its own right. This does not undermine the idea of property law. Quite the contrary, it is the underpinning of property’s interlaw.