Mapping new administrative domains for integrating conservation and development, and defining rights in terms of both new policy and the citizenry governed thereby, are central to current neoliberal environment and development programmes known as Community Based Natural Resources Management (CBNRM). Examples now abound of the ambiguous and frequently contested outcomes of such initiatives and processes. In this paper I draw on historical and ethnographic material for north-west Namibia, and particularly in relation to Damara/≠Nū Khoen, to explore two issues. First, I highlight an historical context of multiple displacements and mapped reorganisations of landscapes and human populations, and an associated politicising of alternative memories of land access and use. Second, I consider a nexus of constitutive and affective relationships with landscape that tend to be displaced by the economistic ‘culture complex’ of neoliberalism. Acknowledging epistemological and ontological disjunctions in conceptions and experiences of people-land relationships might go some way towards generating nuanced understanding regarding why conflict emerges in these contexts; as well as constituting a frame for thinking through who and what wins or loses given contemporary globalising trajectories. Keywords: maps, memory, identity, rights, community-based natural resource management (CBNRM), neoliberalism, neoliberal conservation, phenomenology, cultural landscapes, Namibia.