We the People : An Anthropological Analysis of Property Rights Discourse and Practice

While the everyday rhetoric around property rights tends to focus on land and land rights, I assert that beneath that rhetoric is the set of ideas about what it means to be a person by normative American standards. I look to anthropology to specify what these standards are, as well as review the discipline\u27s other contributions to the concept of property rights. Following Bill Maurer (2003), I will suggest that property is an interesting topic for anthropology to study because of the duality of the concept: it is both ideology and jurisprudence.This dual role of property rights produces social categories of persons and shapes social relations between people