ABSTRACT
Legal initiatives have encouraged the recognition of small houses as citizens in their settlements rather than temporary offshoots of the main house. This chapter focuses on national initiatives. This modernisation initiative was known as a land settlement. The chapter introduces the settlement took place between 2008 and 2010, provoking extensive negotiations about property claims and obligations, in the village. As Jane Guyer has shown, an archaic form of the household “still lives, thrives, gets protected and projected forward, within the ongoing platforms of economic and social life”. Guyer’s exploration of the continuing purchase of highly anachronistic images of a hearth or property-holding taxpayer subject to a feudal lord resonates with this material from Ladakh. The chapter also focuses on how an apparently empty house animated? Ladakhi smallholdings have been formed by landlords and governments as well as through local practices of domestic and village life, but most forms of state taxation ended in the second half of the 20th century.
