To join on-line via MS Teams
We are pleased to invite you to a 222nd Gellner Seminar with Karolina Kania (Faculty of Business Administration, Prague University of Economics and Business & Centre for the Study of Social Movements). The seminar will be held on Monday, December 15th at 5:30 p.m. in the seminar room B1, Kampus Hybernská (Hybernská 4, Praha 1).
Negotiating Development: Customary Law, Colonial Legacies, and Tourism on Indigenous Land in New Caledonia
What happens when a global travel and tourism company aims to create a luxury resort on a small Pacific island where Indigenous authority over land challenges capitalist investment logics and private ownership regimes? This talk examines tourism development on Kanak customary land in New Caledonia as a site where colonial legacies, Indigenous claims to sovereignty, and global tourism imaginaries intersect. After situating New Caledonia as a French settler colony, I introduce Kanak customary law as a political framework governing land, authority, and social interactions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, I analyze two contrasting trajectories on the Isle of Pines: the failed establishment of a Club Méditerranée resort in the 1970s and the subsequent emergence of Indigenous-led tourism projects. I argue that Kanak engagements with tourism involve neither passive acceptance nor unconditional refusal, but the negotiation of political authority over land and resources. At the same time, I show that tourism on customary land remains a field of ongoing contestation, marked by frictions between customary norms, (colonial) governance, and the interests of diverse stakeholders.
Bio:
Karolina Kania is a Polish anthropologist and Assistant Professor at the Prague University of Economics and Business. She holds a PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Her research focuses on the socio-political dimensions of tourism development in New Caledonia (French overseas territory in the South Pacific), with particular attention to Indigenous land governance, colonial legacies, and conflicts over resources. Karolina is a member of the Horizon Europe-funded REMAKING project team, where she applies ethnographic methods to examine remote work and everyday life under conditions of enforced migration caused by the war in Ukraine. Over the past five years, she has worked at the intersection of academia, business, and civil society, developing practice-based research projects that connect students with NGOs, startups, and public institutions. She teaches courses in UX Research and Design Anthropology, emphasizing ethnographic methods in applied research and innovation contexts.