Property and property relations
Property has become an important topic in more or less all social and environmental sciences, even though it has not been a major focus of economic anthropology in the recent past. Property today is a significant part of economy, it is important for understanding evolution, production, consumption, and exchange. Property rights legitimate control over the means of production, they can be an important basis for the social continuity of groups, and are a source of individual power and prestige. In my paper I will describe and analyse the meaning of property in chapter two, underlying, that there has been little agreement among the authors on what property is in history. I will introduce some authors who best described property; the authors Hoebel, Hunt, Hann, Neale and Bell and show, that even though they analysed property in different places and time, their idea of property was the same or at least similar, which shows us, that today we are getting closer to a broader accepted definition. I will explain property as a concept and how it relates to other social and cultural phenomena in chapter three. Four general property regimes will be explained: Res nullius, Res communes, Private property, and State property. Each of these property regimes involves social units, rights, duties, and objects that are owned. In chapter four property in the context of human social evolution will be explained, further analysing the concepts of ˇ§real propertyˇ¨, ˇ§people of placeˇ¨ and ˇ§place of personˇ¨. ... Since there is no universal analytic concept of property my paper aims to explain property in terms of the local cultural system on the example of the Simbu case study. A closer look will be taken at the relations of land, territory, ownership, inheritance, and assessment of property among the Simbu. Property has a very complex history and there exist many different definitions and theories of and about property. Property is important in at least three areas: economic, political, and legal. ... Property relations are consequently seen as social relations between people. A textbook anthropological definition of Hoebel runs as follows: ˇ§The essential nature of property is to be found in social relations rather than in any inherent attributes of the thing or object that we call property. Property, in other words, is not a thing, but a network of social relations that governs the conduct of people with respect to the use and disposition of thingsˇ¨ (Hoebel 1966: 424) Robert C. Hunt explores the concept of property, creating theories about phenomena and the relationships between those phenomena. He discusses the relationship of property rules to other phenomena. ... He explains property as good or bad, and he explains that property is necessary for economic efficiency, it produces social inequality and it promotes social welfare, or it promotes distributive injustice.