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Jun. 27th, 2022 12:50 pmOften, the true ‘owners’ of land or other natural resources were said to be gods or spirits; mortal humans are merely squatters, poachers, or at best caretakers. People variously adopted a predatory attitude to resources—as with hunters, who appropriate what really belongs to the gods—or that of a caretaker (where one is only the ‘owner’ or ‘master’ of a village, or men’s house, or stretch of territory if one is ultimately responsible for maintaining and looking after it). Sometimes these attitudes coexist, as in Amazonia, where the paradigm for ownership (or ‘mastery’—it’s always the same word) involves capturing wild animals and then adopting them as pets; that is, precisely the point where violent appropriation of the natural world turns into nurture or ‘taking care’.
It is not unusual for ethnographers working with indigenous Amazonian societies to discover that almost everything around them has an owner, or could potentially be owned, from lakes and mountains to cultivars, liana groves and animals. As ethnographers also note, such ownership always carries a double meaning of domination and care. To be without an owner is to be exposed, unprotected. In what anthropologists refer to as totemic systems, of the kind we discussed for Australia and North America, the responsibility of care takes on a particularly extreme form. Each human clan is said to ‘own’ a certain species of animal—thus making them the ‘Bear clan’, ‘Elk clan’, ‘Eagle clan’ and so forth—but what this means is precisely that members of that clan cannot hunt, kill, harm, or otherwise consume animals of that species. In fact, they are expected to take part in rituals that promote its existence and make it flourish.
What makes the Roman Law conception of property—the basis of almost all legal systems today—unique is that the responsibility to care and share is reduced to a minimum, or even eliminated entirely. In Roman Law there are three basic rights relating to possession: usus (the right to use), fructus (the right to enjoy the products of a property, for instance the fruit of a tree), and abusus (the right to damage or destroy). If one has only the first two rights this is referred to as usufruct, and is not considered true possession under the law. The defining feature of true legal property, then, is that one has the option of not taking care of it, or even destroying it at will.
--The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow, p. 160
This is a fascinating book that I can't recommend highly enough. It's a tour through all the things Western scholarship has thought about the past and the "development" of societies, and why we think those things, and how the evidence shows that our theories of human development are pretty bonkers, actually.
This particular quote is from a discussion of property and property rights, and how Western Colonial powers have historically argued that since indigenous people don't have property rights, therefore everything was up for grabs. Now, obviously there's racism and colonialism in there, as heavy incentive to not accept indigenous property rights as valid. But part of the issue is that while the vast majority of human societies that we know much about have had property rights, those rights don't look the same as Western property rights do.
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