ABSTRACT
Livelihoods are diverse, poverty has many faces and land has manyuses. The parameters for recognition of women as owners of land have perhaps been set by the formal state structures, which support individual rather than collective or lineage-based rights (recognizing the dangers to the state inherent in the collective). Nevertheless, it has led to an enhanced legitimacy for women’s claims at the local level and opened the possibility for assertion. The logic however is different for women from that of the state. Rather than an isolated independent resource, the control over land is seen in terms of the linkages between their productive and reproductive selves.
