Ownership and Appropriation

Veronica Strang, Mark Busse

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781847886842
• eBook ISBN: 9781000181579
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In a world of finite resources, expanding populations and widening structural inequalities, the ownership of things is increasingly contested. Not only are the commons being rapidly enclosed and privatized, but the very idea of what can be owned is expanding, generating conflicts over the ownership of resources, ideas, culture, people, and even parts of people. Understanding processes of ownership and appropriation is not only central to anthropological theorizing but also has major practical applications, for policy, legislative development and conflict resolution.Ownership and Appropriation significantly extends anthropology's long-term concern with property by focusing on everyday notions and acts of owning and appropriating. The chapters document the relationship between ownership, subjectivities and personhood; they demonstrate the critical consequences of materiality and immateriality on what is owned; and they examine the social relations of property. By approaching ownership as social communication and negotiation, the text points to a more dynamic and processual understanding of property, ownership and appropriation.

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Introduction

Ownership and Appropriation

Mark Busse and Veronica Strang

In a world of finite resources, expanding populations, and widening structural inequalities, the ownership of things is increasingly contested. Not only are the commons – such as water and airwaves – being rapidly enclosed and privatized, but there are also growing conflicts over the ownership of ideas, culture, ‘heritage’, people and even parts of people. Understanding how human groups understand and decide ownership is therefore both central to anthropological debates and of enormous practical consequence. In 2008 a joint international conference in Auckland brought together the anthropology associations of the UK and the Commonwealth, New Zealand and Australia to consider the theme of ‘Ownership and Appropriation’. The goal of the conference was to extend the area of anthropological theorizing which had been dominated by the term property by shifting the focus from property and property relations to notions and acts of owning and appropriating which precede, underwrite and inform property relations. This volume presents some of the ideas that emerged from that event.

Anthropology and Property: A Brief Historical Overview

Chris Hann (1998, 2005, 2007) and Caroline Humphrey and Katherine Verdery (2004) have recently traced anthropology’s long interest in property, which stretches back at least to Lewis Henry Morgan and Marcel Mauss. Morgan associated the development of ideas of property with social evolution, suggesting that ‘dominance [of property] as a passion over all other passions marks the commencement of civilization’ (Morgan 1974:6). Hann (2005:112; 2007:291) cogently observes that Mauss’s study of The Gift (1990 [1925]), in its examination of changes in how people relate to one another via things, can be read as a history of changing ideas of property. In the 1930s Bronislaw Malinowski (1935) and Raymond Firth (1939) provided early treatments of individual and communal ownership, while three decades later Max Gluckman (1965) demonstrated the close relationship between Barotse land ownership and social structure.

The sixth edition of Notes and Queries on Anthropology, originally published in 1951, includes elements which have gained new relevance in contemporary anthropological discussions of property and ownership, including the essays in this volume. It begins with the observation that: ‘The concepts of property and ownership are closely linked. Ownership is best defined as the sum total of rights which various persons or groups of persons have over things; the things thus owned are property’ (1967:148–9). Definitions of ownership in terms of rights continue (e.g. Hann 2005:111–12; 2007:291) despite critiques of the sometimes ethnocentric assumptions that the language of rights makes about what constitutes a person (Humphrey and Verdery 2004:6). Most contemporary anthropologists and legal scholars, however, define property as a social relationship between persons with respect to things, which includes, for example, rights to exclude others (Macpherson 1978:3–5; Hann 1998:4–5, 2005:111; Humphrey and Verdery 2004:5).

Notes and Queries goes on to state that ideas about property vary both cross-culturally and within single societies ‘according to the nature of the property and the type of ownership right involved’.¹ Anthropology has played, and continues to play, a critical role in relativizing property, in documenting cross-cultural variations both in persons and things, and in relationships between persons and between persons and things. It has also demonstrated the ways in which the materiality (or immateriality) of objects of ownership affects the character of relations between people with respect to them, a point taken up in detail in this volume by Veronica Strang, Monica Minnegal and Peter Dwyer, and Michael Wilmore and Pawan Upreti.

The last twenty years has seen renewed anthropological interest in property, coinciding with the rise of neoliberal ideology and its emphasis on free markets and private property, and the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The latter event led to a scramble for previously state-owned resources, a process that has been extensively documented by anthropologists (Cartwright 2001; Eidson 2006; Hann 2006, 2007; Humphrey 2002; Verdery 2003).

Over the last decade, theoretical writing by Hann (1998), Strathern (1999), and Humphrey and Verdery (2004), among others, has demonstrated the relevance of anthropology to articulating the complexity of property relations. Anthropology has also made significant contributions to global debates about intellectual, biological and cultural property (Brown 1998, 2003; Coombe 1998; Geismar 2005, 2008; Hirsch and Strathern 2004; Kalinoe and Leach 2004; Posey 2004; Ziff and Rao 1997). These include examinations of the role of creativity in the construction of intellectual property (Leach 2004; Moutu 2009), and the movement of intellectual property out of national and international legal realms and into local and everyday discourses (Geismar 2005; Strathern and Hirsch 2004; Van Meijl 2009). They have also exposed the reification of intellectual and cultural property: for example, the reification of culture in cases of claims over ‘expressions of culture’, and the reifications of peoples, as new ‘interest groups’ emerge through processes of claiming (Strathern and Hirsch 2004:8; cf. Busse 2009; Coombe, this volume; Recht 2009).

The Dynamics of Owning

In her essay ‘Possession as the Origin of Property’, Carol Rose (1994:11–23) asks how ownership comes about. Some things are owned as a result of exchange or inheritance, but how do never-before-owned things come to be owned? How do new ideas, newly discovered resources, or previously unowned resources such as minerals, water, or radio frequencies, come to belong to particular persons, groups, or corporations? John Locke classically proposed that the owner of a thing is the person who uses her or his labour to modify a previously unowned thing and, in so doing, establishes ownership of it. In the case of land, Locke argued, the labour that justifies ownership is cultivation or development (Garnsey 2007:144; cf. Ryan 1984:14–48). But as Rose notes (1994:12), Locke’s theory of ownership raises questions: how much of something can be owned by virtue of labour – for example, why should the cultivation of a piece of land give rights to that land, rather than just to the crops produced?

In contrast, eighteenth-century theorists such as David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant argued that possession or occupation, rather than labour, is the basis of property. As Kant observed, the development of land can only happen if there is prior possession. Hence he objected to the dispossession of indigenous peoples from their land because this ignored their prior possession of it (Garnsey 2007:148; cf. Ryan 1984:81–2). Pierre-Joseph Proudhon echoed Kant’s position and wrote, ‘To labour it is necessary to occupy’ (Proudhon 1970 [1840]:84; Garnsey 2007:146–8, 155–73). Occupation and possession here are examples of social action, an idea further developed by Rose and a significant theme of the papers in this volume.

The ideas of Hume, Rousseau and Kant – and not those of Locke – provide the basis for Anglo-American common law about property which locates the basis of property in possession or occupancy. But, Rose asks, ‘what counts as possession?’ and ‘why does possession count as a claim to title?’ (1994:12). At the centre of these two questions lies what Rose terms the ‘clear-act principle’: to possess something requires both a declaration of an intention to appropriate and an on-going assertion of ownership (1994:13). From this point of view possession is a statement or an act of communication, and it is the labour of communicating claims and maintaining this communication that constitutes the ‘labour’ justifying ownership. Rose’s position assumes both an audience and a symbolic system in which understandable statements of appropriation and on-going ownership can be expressed, and she writes, ‘It is not enough … for the property claimant to say simply “It’s mine”, through some act or gesture; in order for the statement to have any force, some relevant community must understand the claim that it makes and take that claim seriously’ (1994:18).

The chapters in this volume extend the central observation contained in Rose’s analysis: that ownership is a culturally and historically specific system of symbolic communication through which people act and through which they negotiate social and political relations. This perspective highlights ownership as a set of processes through which people assert and contest rights rather than a static bundle or structure of rights.² The acts which constitute possession – which announce it and continue to assert it – need not be verbal, but their intelligibility is critical to their success, as is the power and social positions of the actors making such statements. Anthropology, with its long history of documenting the cross-cultural diversity of ideas of personhood and agency, of power relations, and of symbolic systems and social processes, is particularly well placed to examine ownership and appropriation as on-going processes of symbolic communication and negotiation.

Appropriation – the act of making something one’s own – is fundamental to a claim of original ownership. But such acts are not confined to laying claims to things that are previously ‘un-owned’. Appropriation is also part of the process of owning objects obtained through exchange or inheritance, as actors make fully their own objects that previously belonged to others. In this expanded sense, appropriation covers a range of actions, from those that can be framed positively in terms of agency and creativity (Hirsch and Strathern 2004; Kalinoe and Leach 2004; Strang 2005), to others (such as theft) that are more negative, and still others (such as enslavement and appropriation through violence) that are nefarious (Bales 1999).

What emerges is a sense that acts of appropriation, and acts of communicating and upholding ownership, are processual rather than static in their form. This presents property relations not only as ‘social relations between people’ (Hann 1998:4) but also situates them more within wider processes of interaction between people, and between people and the physical environments that they inhabit. The purpose of this volume, therefore, is to highlight the fluidity of ownership and appropriation, exploring these as social actions rather than as legal categories. This brings to the fore a reality that there are multiple ways of owning and appropriating, some of which run counter to and thus challenge dominant frameworks. Clearly a willingness to encompass subaltern and alternate forms presents a risk that recognizable concepts of ownership will simply dissolve. At the same time, it helps to illuminate the complex realities of ownership as fluid and ephemeral processes of ‘holding things’ that – though temporarily crystallized through legal artefacts – can also be undermined and appropriated in a range of ways. The chapters therefore focus on the fluidities inherent in owning and appropriating, including their conceptual undercurrents.

Thus Marilyn Strathern considers the conceptual flows in notions of ownership, exploring how concepts do their work in relation to one another rather than as isolated, well-bounded ideas. To the concepts of ownership and appropriation, she adds theft, borrowing, sharing, belonging (rather than belongings), identification and self-realization. Concepts in such ‘constellations’ both work together and ‘work upon one another’ (Strathern, this volume, pp.27, 29). Strathern argues for the intellectual value of looking at what happens when concepts reach their limits, at which point other concepts emerge from the shadows. Taking a concept to its limit means finding the concept’s possible extent or reach, rather than searching for its ‘essence’. The trope of ‘shadow concepts’ suggests a temporal and conceptual foregrounding and backgrounding of concepts that are always present, and thus always potentially in play, rather than thinking of concepts as bounded essences belonging to alternative or opposed systems. The essays in this volume push the concepts of ownership and appropriation to their edges in the interest of seeing the shadow concepts that emerge.

There are other shifting elements to consider. The established anthropological view of property as relations between persons with respect to things has worked well, but it can also be considered more dynamically. Humphrey and Verdery (2004) have recently quest...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction: Ownership and Appropriation
• Part One - Subjects, Personhood and Peoplehood
• Part Two - Materiality and Immateriality
• Part Three - Ownership as Social Communication
• Index