Property was a key subject in the *evolutionist arguments of several of the greatest pioneers of anthropology. For *L.H.Morgan (1877:6), ‘A critical knowledge of the evolution of the idea of property would embody, in some respects, the most remarkable portion of the mental history of mankind’. However, property has been a casualty of increasing specialization in intellectual practice in modern anthropology. It tends to fall between the sub-disciplines of *economic anthropology and the anthropology of *law, and much of the work on property has been polemical: e.g. †Leach’s (1961) investigation of whether property relations should take priority over *kinship relations. The true significance of property is precisely that it supplies the necessary link between material economic factors on the one hand and ideal or ideological factors on the other. Understood in this way it could again become a central integrating concept for anthropology.
Following †Morgan (1877), †Engels ([1884] 1972) provided a cogent outline of the role of property in an evolutionist perspective. The decline of communal property and the rise of its antithesis, bourgeois private property, are here associated with the origins of the *state and of *class society. The clarity and radicalism of this vision have been largely lost in the twentieth century, as most anthropologists have worked with shorter time frames or †synchronically. *Malinowski, the main instigator of such approaches, attacked the crude dichotomy between individualist and communal that animated so many studies of colonial *land tenure. His lack of sympathy with communist agendas led him to exaggerate the individualist aspects of Trobriand property rights, and to argue that collective use of tribal land was no different in essence from rival businessmen making common use of the streets of New York. Other *functionalists, notably †Max Gluckman, argued from a rather different perspective that all property relations were ultimately social and political relations. Gluckman revived †Sir Henry Maine’s insistence that property be understood as a ‘bundle of rights’. He rejected the standard †Notes and Queries definition, which viewed property in terms of the relations of persons to things. Whatever the language in which we convey our sense of ownership, most anthropologists would now agree that rights over things are better understood as rights between people. In Gluckman’s terms, ‘ownership cannot be absolute, for the critical thing about property is the role that it plays in a nexus of specific relationships’ (1965:45). There is a clear continuity here with the Morgan-Engels critique of bourgeois property relations, though Gluckman was cautious in developing such links (perhaps understandably, given the conservative climate in the subject as it was by now consolidated in universities).
Thus an anthropological analysis must go beyond the formal, legalistic definitions of property rights to penetrate ‘real’ distributions of rights. Concepts of ownership must be related to ideologies of distribution and sharing, and supplemented by analyses not just of position in the status hierarchy, as emphasized by Gluckman, but of control and *power. Although the subversive potential of this anthropological tradition has been made explicit in some recent Marxist work (Bloch 1975), this potential has not been fully realized. †Jack Goody, paying particularly close attention to the rights of women, is perhaps the only modern researcher to investigate the mechanisms for the ‘devolution’ of property on a broad comparative basis (1962, 1977). The importance of inheritance practices is now widely recognized for the understanding of agrarian societies, but there has been little anthropological treatment of property in industrial societies. This is regrettable, for the subject has considerable practical as well as theoretical importance. For example, it is argued by some economists that a failure to specify private property relations rigorously lies at the heart of the failure of socialist attempts to organize industrial economies. The current reconstruction of such economies throughout Europe and Asia along capitalist lines provides a unique research opportunity for anthropologists interested in studying the relationships between changes in property relations and changes in productive systems and in *social structure.
Property rights need not, however, be exclusively understood in terms of social relationships concerning material objects. For example, the recent work of Harrison (1990) on prestige economies in Melanesia marks an exciting revival of interest in what †Lowie called ‘incorporeal property’. There has been a radical questioning of the concept of property in other recent work, including feminist studies. The Marxist critique of bourgeois property theory does not challenge the basic Western assumption that an individual has property rights in his or her own *person; indeed this is the basis of the labour theory of value. If it is established that persons are quite differently constituted in many non-Western cultures, the comparative value of the property concept may be seriously undermined. But if property is broadly understood to refer to the social organization of rights and entitlements over resources, both physical and intellectual, there is no reason why it cannot regain the central place it used to occupy in anthropological enquiry.
Bloch, M. (1975) ‘Property and the End of Affinity’, in M.Bloch (ed.) Marxist Analyses in Social Anthropology, London: Malaby Press: 203–28
Engels, F ([1884] 1972) The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, New York: Pathfinder Press
Gluckman, M. (1965) Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society, Oxford: Basil Blackwell
Goody, J.R. (1962) Death, Property and the Ancestors; A Study of the Mortuary Customs of the LoDagaa of West Africa, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press
——(1977) Production and Reproduction; A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Hann, C.M. (1993) ‘From Production to Property; Decollectivization and the Family-Land Relationship in Contemporary Hungary’, Man 28 (2):299 320
Harrison, S. (1990) Stealing People’s Names: History and Politics in a Sepik River Cosmology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Hirschon, R. (ed.) (1984) Women and Property: Women as Property, London: Croom Helm
Leach, E.R. (1961) Pul Eliya: A Village in Ceylon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Morgan, L.H. (1877) Ancient Society, New York: Henry Holt
This is the complete article, containing 977 words
(approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page).
