The link between place and subjectivity has been established theoretically and empirically by a number of authors (for example, Altman and Low 1992; Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995; Feld and Basso 1996; Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003), and in relation to farming has been explored in most detail by Gray (2000, 2003) in Scotland and Dominy (1992, 1993, 2001) in the New Zealand high country. The ethnographies of Dominy and Gray focus on the ways in which farmers come to selfhood through an experiential and embodied knowledge of the land they farm. There has, however, been less attention paid to other aspects of the formation of farmer subjectivity. Things such as policy and regulation, legal structures and politics tend to be constituted as context, as shaping what farmers might do, but essentially as external to their selves. In this chapter, I focus on land tenure. Rather than thinking of tenure as an element of context, however, I will argue that tenure is in fact one of the building blocks of farmer subjectivity. As McNay (2000:76) writes, ‘individuals do not passively absorb external determinations, but are actively engaged in the interpretation of experience, and therefore, in a process of self-formation’. Different forms of tenure attach people to land in different ways, providing different understandings of the relationship between land and people and producing different forms of being in those worlds. As such, changes in mode of tenure will necessarily result in alterations in identity. I explore the ways in which the legal matrix of land tenure is productive of high country farmer identity. Currently, land tenure in the high country is changing from leasehold to freehold. With tenure review, a previous identity, grounded in place and legitimated through a particular relationship with the Crown, is under threat (or is at least being destabilised), as one of the key modes through which that identity has been authenticated is being removed. Changing land tenure, in reordering the connection between farmers and the State, is producing a new form of farmer subjectivity, and an oppositional subjectivity. Farmers are reimagining themselves in relation to the State and to the nation. In turn, this change in tenure is part of a transformation of the place of high country farmers in the polity and the nation.