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- Convenors:
-
Xenia Cherkaev
(Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Gustav Kalm (Sciences Po)
Amiel Bize (Cornell University)
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- Panel
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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.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This paper examines how planters moving deeper into the US South after the international slave trade ended used enslaved people as collateral in mortgage transactions with banks while living as bi-racial and multi-racial families to show how intimate relations complicated commercial aspirations.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines a series of violent contradictions that emerged after the slave trade to the US was abolished in 1808. Merchants moving to the Deep South used slaves as collateral in financial transactions and mortgage agreements that gave them access to land in places like rural Virginia and Louisiana. In this context, a merchant’s assets might include a woman he had purchased several years prior, and raped, as well as their bi-racial offspring. In other words, establishing families with enslaved people did not prevent planters from claiming them as financial assets. Wielding violence in the most intimate ways, these merchants capitalized on the commercial value of their children and intimate relations. Some of these planters would eventually draft wills that bequeathed assets to the women and children they simultaneously treated as family and held in bondage, fostering social and economic mobility for these newly freed people of color in a peculiar paradox. I examine the indeterminate boundaries concerning property and partnership for a an idea of slavery that is not merely defined by social death and an anthropological theory of economy that is not merely transactional.
Paper short abstract
Amid nationalist framings of property in divided Cyprus, northern assets remain frozen while southern heirs face housing precarity. Highlighting these tensions, this paper problematizes non-transactionality and suggests that, in certain contexts, regulated exchange can foster conflict resolution.
Paper long abstract
Cyprus has remained divided for over fifty years, rendering Greek-Cypriot properties in the island’s north inaccessible to their owners and heirs. Although many retain legal title deeds, the Turkish Cypriot administration denies access and use rights. These properties are thus symbolically powerful and politically mobilised, yet materially unavailable—frozen assets within an unresolved conflict. The Greek-Cypriot administration frames these properties as national assets that must remain inalienable, withholding them from gainful exchange to sustain sovereignty claims. Occupied property is therefore never merely private but an idiom through which sovereignty is enacted at the micro level (Rakopoulos 2022).
However, ethnographic evidence reveals tensions within this nationalist fusion of property and sovereignty. While property in the north is treated as a frozen political problem, the housing crisis in the south is framed as a separate social problem despite their entanglements. Many young Greek-Cypriots facing housing precarity are heirs to land in the north that they cannot use or sell. Moralized discourses demanding that property be withheld for a future return often clash with young Greek-Cypriots’ aspirations for present stability and secure lives in the south. These dynamics complicate transitional justice in Cyprus: while non-transactionality sustains righteous claims, it constrains pragmatic responses to everyday precarity. Some interlocutors cautiously suggest that regulated transactional mechanisms may offer a way forward, even if these remain publicly contested. The Cypriot case thus problematizes non-transactional theories of property, showing how indeterminate properties, although ethically imbued and politically charged, can also reproduce impasse.
Paper short abstract
Exploring a moral economy of electricity in a region with chronic energy poverty in Northern Pakistan, the paper conceptualizes the contested ‘ownership’ of vital goods, defined through their everyday necessity and material political-economic conditions.
Paper long abstract
This paper analyses diversions of and moral claims to electricity in a context of chronic electricity shortage (20h of load-shedding/daily blackouts) and political marginalisation in the Aliabad, a small-town in Pakistan’s Kashmir region. In Aliabad, a load-shedding plan by the government determines which neighbourhood gets electricity when, structuring production and social reproduction. This is challenged by unbilled 24h ‘special lines’ of the local elite as well as more wide-spread informal ‘second lines’ and daily tinkering with grid transformers that allow a few more on-grid hours in one’s neighbourhood. Residents legitimise their informal grid access and occasional public protests for more energy with the region’s fragmented integration into the Pakistani state and lack of basic civil rights such as voting for the national assembly.
In Aliabad, various actors try to impose their understanding of what electricity is: a commodity, a right, a gift, or a common good? I explore these tensions around electricity access that refute simple categorisations of ownership. Reciprocity does not apply if actors have a different understanding of the property in question. Instead, inbuilt inequalities and small-scale line hooking manifest and morally charge electricity differently. Analysing the production of electricity through small-scale hydropower plants within Aliabad’s micro-grid in relation to the Kashmir conflict shows how justifications of access to energy compete. The socio-material specificities of electricity as limited resource, political infrastructure, and vital good offer insights into how indeterminate properties are made, appropriated, contested and diverted.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores the indeterminacy in the relationship between common grazing shares and property formation in the Scottish Highlands through the mutable unit of the ‘souming.’ The souming determines the right of each tenant to use the common grazing but only through indeterminate boundaries.
Paper long abstract
Crofting is a small-holding tenure system in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, characterised by diverse agricultural activities and the tenancy of parcels called crofts under the regulation of a specialised body of law. Crofters of a given township have shares in the local common grazing. These shares are calculated using the ‘souming.’ The souming is a mutable unit which in sum determines the carrying capacity of the land. One souming is either the number of livestock a crofter can graze or the area they can use to graze a certain number of livestock. Neither iteration of the souming unit entirely maps onto the common grazing land because all of the crofters' animals graze together. I argue that the souming, at once a right and a measure that predates the establishment of crofting tenure in 1886, organises crofting land use. How so? I understand crofting as a set of relationships that appear and disappear through a palimpsest of parcels. Crofters use parcels of non-croft land to make their crofting viable. They also divide parcels out of their croft land to build houses and agricultural structures and apportion their common grazing shares. Parcellisation then becomes a complex process of indeterminate, transient, and temporary property making. Through my ethnography of a crofting township and the historical debates on whether souming can be used as evidence of stocking levels, the souming folds into the moving picture of parcels that make up a world of crofting in the Highlands.
Paper short abstract
This paper investigates family land possession and its interface with bureaucratic ownership. Based on research in Kathmandu, it explores the reliance of financialized markets on non-transactional land possession and examines how this reliance produces transgressive modes of wealth accumulation.
Paper long abstract
It has been established that family or communal landownership often forms a disjuncture with private property regimes. However, the reason for this disjuncture remains a matter of debate. While many have argued that it stems from either incommensurable valuations of land’s importance or from local resistance to market incursion, this paper explores how communal and kin-based landownership relies upon a kind of distributed management that transaction-based models of property cannot capture. Based on ethnographic research in Kathmandu’s booming land market, it explores how the nation’s formal ownership system was often at odds with family landownership, even though this formal system codified land as the communal property of the kin group, thereby mimicking the land management practices of the traditional Hindu joint-family. To analyze this surprising disjuncture, the paper proposes a dichotomy between closed and open land possession, in which individual rights to land are either made explicit (as is necessary for private property) or are purposefully left ambiguous (as was the case with most families I followed). It then investigates how this dichotomy became central to the financialization and inflation of Kathmandu land market It argues that not only are non-transactional modes of possession important to late capitalism’s systems of circulation, but that, within this disjuncture, new and transgressive approaches to wealth accumulation are emerging. To make this final point, the paper ends by examining the figure of the land broker, and their unorthodox approach to managing the interstitial spaces between family and market.
Paper short abstract
French farmland regulation has historically granted farmers strong land rights while sidelining ownership and market exchange, as long as farmers pursue intensive farming. This regime, shaped by a productivist definition of righteous use, is now challenged by neoliberal and environmental critiques.
Paper long abstract
Theories of property have often begun with land, treating it as a determinate object that can be owned, exchanged, and accumulated. Building on critiques that emphasise land’s indeterminacy, this paper examines a case in which land value rests not on transferable property titles but on historically situated and collectively judged notions of “righteous use”.
I present research on France’s “Land Parliaments”: regional commissions that adjudicate land conflicts and allocate farming rights. They bring together farmers’ unions, agribusiness representatives, state officials, and environmental stakeholders to evaluate competing land claims. In these settings, land does not circulate as a commodity but is governed through collective deliberation. These institutions explicitly claim to govern land democratically: taking these claims seriously as an object of analysis, I examine how these arenas exercise authority on what farmland is by choosing who to allocate it to.
Established in the 1960s, this regulation has granted farmers strong, durable land rights while completely sidelining landowners, on the condition that land be used “productively”. This has rendered landowners irrelevant and has protected farmland from market exchange, achieving a form of land justice for farmers as long as they commit to intensive farming. However, this arrangement is now being fragilised as environmental critiques challenge productivist definitions of “righteous use”.
By analysing Land Parliaments as institutions of collective valuation, this paper makes a contribution to agrarian studies and the anthropology of property by theorising land beyond exchange-based and ownership-centered paradigms.