Short Abstract

We we are looking for a non-transactional theory of property – one focused on righteous use, instead of gainful exchange. What forms of governance do such property relations avail today and how do we study them without collapsing back into paradigms of exchange, reciprocity, circulation?

Long Abstract

Picking up Anthropology’s long standing attempts to understand social action not organized by self-interested truck and barter, we are looking for a non-transactional theory of property – one focused on righteous use, instead of gainful exchange. Demanding that people take responsibility for managing resources irrespective of ownership, this property relation is justified retrospectively, by collective ethical judgement: it places ends over means. We see it everywhere in our ethnographic sites and our everyday lives, and in broader social discussions. It animates leftist claims for food sovereignty and environmental stewardship, rightist claims for populist maverick self-governance: “He who serves his country violates no law,” Donald Trump insisted in Feb 2025. Such claims are made on resources when the ends are great, or when the stakes are low. We would like to develop a better conceptual analytic to understand them. Following Marx’s observation – in his essays on the Theft of Wood – that the “customary right of the poor” extends to “forms of property [that] are indeterminate in character,” we ask what pragmatic relations such indeterminacy avails today, and how we can study it. Indeterminate property does not give rise to a clear defined title that could be exchanged. Yet it is actionable: it can be claimed, obtained, used and destroyed. We ask how we can make sense of such relations without collapsing our analysis back into transactional paradigms of reciprocity and circulation.

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