Property Regimes

Abstract

Property regimes refer to the political, legal, and economic systems through which soci­ eties order their relationships between people with respect to valued things. Anthropolo­ gists and legal scholars have long been engaged in a dynamic dialogue about the organi­ zation and practice of property regimes. However, whereas legal theory has been unique­ ly concerned with ownership and private property as a system for allocating scarce goods and resources, anthropologists have investigated how property is constructed and shaped by everyday practice, illuminating how the distinctions between law and practice mutual­ ly constitute power relations. This chapter reviews how anthropologists have attended to aporias of property theory by ethnographically analysing conflicts and transformations between property regimes. It surveys anthropological insights into three continuingprocesses of property regime transformation: decolonization, privatization, and enclo­ sure. In addition, it analyses two emergent processes around which property claims are being reconfigured: dematerialization and rematerialization. The dematerialization ofproperty through informational and financial capitalism is occurring at a time when in­ dustrial modes of carbon-dependent accumulation are facing ecological limits brought on by climate change. However, technologies of informationalization and financialization are also rematerializing property regimes by constructing new calculative devices and global markets for increasingly limited natural resources. How these emerging regimes shape social relations between people, the distribution of social entitlements, and the bound­ aries between persons and things offers an important field of ethnographic enquiry.