Land Fictions in the Longue Durée

This chapter argues that the book is dependent on Karl Polanyi and commodity fictions but also pushes well beyond empirical definitions of commodities, entering the sanctum of the fetish broadly construed. It notes that the Land Fictions lays out a rather broad palette of fictions. Sometimes it is not clear whether and how they share family resemblances. The chapter then presents the largely contemporary land fictions explored in the preceding chapters in a longer historical context: specifically, Marxian reflections on the commodity fetish, the historical challenge of peasant production to agroindustry (the agrarian question), and the biological underpinnings and specificities of agriculture. The chapter focuses on the longue durée of the creation of land as a commodity and its various fictional expressions. It indicates ways in which the study of land fictions might be productively expanded from viewing land as a horizontal domain of property into closer consideration of land's vertical properties, including both the subterranean and the aerial.