Changing Properties of Property

by BENDA-BECKMANN, FRANZ VON; BENDA-BECKMANN, KEEBET VON; Wiber, Melanie G.

• ISBN13: 9781845451394
• ISBN10: 1845451392
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-07-31
• Publisher: Berghahn Books

Summary

As an important contribution to debates on property theory and the role of law in creating, disputing, defining and refining property rights, this volume provides new theoretical material on property systems, as well as new empirically grounded case studies of the dynamics of property transformations. The property claimants discussed in these papers represent a diverse range of actors, including post-socialist states and their citizens, those receiving restitution for past property losses in Africa, Southeast Asia and in eastern Europe, collectives, corporate and individual actors. The volume thus provides a comprehensive anthropological analysis not only of property structures and ideologies, but also of property (and its politics) in action. Franz von Benda-Beckmannis head of the project group "Legal Pluralism" at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology at Halle, Germany. He is professor for law in developing countries at Wageningen University, the Netherlands and honorary professor at the University of Leipzig. His research in Malawi and Indonesia focuses property and inheritance, social security, decentralization and legal anthropological theory. Keebet von Benda-Beckmannis head of the project group "Legal Pluralism" at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology at Halle, Germany. She is a professor of Anthropology of Law at Erasmus University Rotterdam and honorary professor at the University of Leipzig. Her research focuses on disputing, decentralisation, social security, and natural resources in Indonesia and the Netherlands. Melanie Wiberis Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. Her research focuses on new forms of property, economic and legal anthropology, natural resource management and especially agriculture and the fishery

Table of Contents

List of Maps, Figures and Tables	vii
The Properties of Property	1	(39)
Franz von Benda-Beckmann
Keebet von Benda-Beckmann
Melanie G. Wiber
Ownership in Stateless Places	40	(18)
Charles Geisler
The Romance of Privatisation and its Unheralded Challengers: Case Studies from English, Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet History	58	(26)
Esther Kingston-Mann
Beyond Embeddedness: a Challenge Raised by a Comparison of the Struggles Over Land in African and Post-socialist Countries	84	(22)
Pauline E. Peters
Land as Asset, Land as Liability: Property Politics in Rural Central and Eastern Europe	106	(20)
Thomas Sikor
Property, Labour Relations and Social Obligations in Russia's Privatised Farm Enterprises	126	(21)
Oane Visser
Cooperative Property at the Limit	147	(23)
John R. Eidson
Who Owns the Fisheries? Changing Views of Property and its Redistribution in Post-colonial Maori Society	170	(24)
Toon van Meijl
How Communal is Communal and Whose Communal is It? Lessons from Minangkabau	194	(24)
Franz
Keebet von Benda-Beckmann
Moving Borders and Invisible Boundaries: a Force Field Approach to Property Relations in the Commons of a Mexican ejido	218	(25)
Monique Nuijten
David Lorenzo
`The Tragedy of the Private': Owners, Communities and the State in South Africa's Land Reform Programme	243	(26)
Deborah James
The Folk Conceptualisation of Property and Forest-related Going Concerns in Madagascar	269	(24)
Frank Muttenzer
Property Rights, Water and Conflict in the Western U.S.	293	(16)
Edella Schlager
Appropriating Family Trees: Genealogies in the Age of Genetics	309	(21)
Gisli Palsson
Cultural Property, Repatriation and Relative Publics: Which Public? Whose Culture?	330	(19)
Melanie G. Wiber
Notes on Contributors	349	(6)
Index	355