Netty Carey is a second year MA student in Anthropology. This past summer, she conducted field research in Ghana, dedicating six weeks of her trip to ethnographic research in Ada, a coastal town roughly three hours’ drive outside of Accra, the capital. Netty’s research community are fishermen, fish mongers, and petty traders residing on the Volta River Estuary, who draw their livelihoods from both the river and the ocean. They are the descendants of Ewe migrants living on borrowed land in an Adangme traditional area. Three years ago, they found themselves ensnared in a dispute after the government leased village land to an Italian-Ghanaian corporation for tourism development. As they fought to maintain their land, their arguments were predicated on assertions of ancestry and national belonging. With this background in mind, Netty set out to investigate claiming practices: how are territorial claims asserted and contested, whose claims are valid, and who decides?
Pursuing this line of investigation, she encountered narratives about environmental change, particularly coastal erosion, which has forced residents on this shrinking peninsula to resettle three times in the last 70 years to escape the sea as it swallowed their homes. What emerged was a complex and fragmented story about building and rebuilding, and struggling for autonomy amidst more authoritative claims on the land—whether from a chief, a corporation, or the ocean itself. Netty’s fieldwork experience spoke to the theory that claiming territory entails assertions of belonging and authority. But as she continues on this research project Netty will also consider environmental change, the adaptive strategies deployed in response to these changes, and how these strategies impact how territory is conceptualized and claimed.