Property Relations: Renewing the Anthropological Tradition

The anthropological tradition approaches property as a ‘bundle of rights’ and property relationships as social relationships. Rejecting both liberal and socialist approaches, which often neglect the wider social and cultural contexts of property, the contributors to this volume renew and extend the anthropological perspective. The ethnographic case studies include accounts of sharing and intelligence gathering among hunter-gatherers and herders in Africa and in Siberia, land appropriation from native Americans, and the problems associated with the disposal of property in Melanesia. But the anthropological perspective can also illuminate capitalist property relations, and there are fascinating essays on property redistribution in Cyprus and Romania, and on the history of property rights in England and Japan.