‘Ancestral’ Forms of Proprietary Rights: Comparative Studies on the Right of Ownership and Related Folk Practice

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  • 所有の外延についての比較社会誌的覚え書き
  • ショユウ ノ ガイエン ニ ツイテ ノ ヒカク シャカイシテキ オボエガキ

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Abstract

<p>In developed countries with capitalistic economies, private ownership is protected firmly by legal systems, and appears ‘absolute’. In modern legal systems, in most cases, personal ownership is camprised of three kinds of rights, the rights to use, to earn, and to sell objects at one’s own will. Personal ownership as a monopoly is thus the most basic character of property rights.</p><p>Even today, in many parts of the world, personal ownership is not protected efficiently due to the security, political, and other reasons. As we can see in rural societies in Pakistan for example, such personal ownership of individual properties are quite frequently challenged and less efficiently protected by police and legal systems so that the people must fight for the effective control of their properties.</p><p>Examples from ethnographical surveys in Africa teach us that many societies have invented social institutions to check and to suppress personal ownership. African societies of hunter-gatherers, of cattle herders, and of slash-and-burn farmers, still maintain social institutions which make personal ownership ambiguous or powerless. In some cases, the three components of ownership are often individually separated. As the owners of basic subsistence resources easily keep such technologically simple societies under control, rather rigorous rules are provided in social customs which, as a result, preserve these societies acephalous and autonomous, if not exactly egalitarian, without economically rich ruling class.</p><p>Socially authorized patterns of man-resource interrelation are closely related to the social view of the individual in society. Although societies that stress independence and completeness of the individual give full rights of property to the individual, societies that emphasize the cooperation of members are stingy with distributing rights of property to them. The position of an individual in a given society is reflected in the realm and firmness of individual ownership.</p>

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