Guest Researcher: Elísio Jossias

Elísio Jossias completed his PhD at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, working on land rights and dynamics of property relations and natural resource management and use, focusing on northern Mozambique. He is a co-founder of the Mozambican Association of Anthropology and director of the newly established Master´s Programme in Social Anthropology at Eduardo Mondlane University (Faculty of Arts and Social Science). His areas of interest include Mozambique, social identities, land rights, the historicity of land and property relations, and the uses and representations of the Indian Ocean.

At SGS, Elísio will be working on the impacts of changing systems of land governance and land acquisitions in northern Mozambique. The aim is to assess how tenure regimes operate in practice in the context of rapid transformation that implicates large-scale national and international investments in land. He studies the governance of land systems, including land allocations, rights, and restrictions of use, exclusion, rules of inheritance, and sharing of crops. His approach is to follow the ethnographic significance of land uses and land possession, with an emphasis on the historicity of the land and the changing notions of property and belonging.

His visit is financed by the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA), in collaboration with Eduardo Mondlane University, as part of the program “Gender and Territory under the conditions of climate change”.