Table Of ContentProperty and Equality
Property and Equality
Volume 2
Encapsulation, Commercialisation,
Discrimination
Edited by
Thomas Widlok
and
Wolde Gossa Tadesse
Berghahn Books
New York • Oxford
WIDLOKvol2-0PRELIMS.qxd:WIDLOKvol2-0PRELIMS.qxd 7/27/11 2:14 PM Page iv
First published in 2005 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com
© 2005 Thomas Widlok and Wolde Gossa Tadesse
First paperback edition published in 2007.
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of Berghahn Books
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Property and equality: ritualisation, sharing, egalitarianism / edited by
Thomas Widlok and Wolde Gossa Tadesse.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 1–57181–616–X (v. 1 : hbk) -- ISBN 1-57181-617-8 (v. 2 : hbk)
ISBN 1–84545–213–5 (v. 1 : pbk) -- ISBN 1-84545-214-3 (v. 2 : pbk.)
1. Equality--Cross-cultural studies. 2. Property--Cross-cultural studies.
I. Title: Ritualisation, sharing, egalitarianism. II. Widlok, Thomas. III. Tadesse,
Wolde Gossa.
HM821.P67 2004
306.3'2--dc22 2004049096
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library.
Printed in the United States on acid-free paper
ISBN 1-57181-617-8 (vol. 2, hardback)
ISBN 1-84545-214-3 (vol. 2, paperback)
Contents
(cid:2)
Preface
Introduction 1
Wolde Gossa Tadesse
1 Power and Property in Twenty-First Century Foragers:
A Critical Examination 16
Richard Borshay Lee
2 Money Makes the World Go Round? Commodity Sharing,
Gifting and Exchange in the Baka (Pygmy) Economy 32
Axel Köhler
3 Whose Forest Is It Anyway? Mbendjele Yaka Pygmies,
the Ndoki Forest and the Wider World 56
Jerome Lewis
4 The Significance of Trade in an Immediate-Return Society:
The Batek Case 79
Kirk Endicott
5 The Road to Equality? Landscape Transformation
and the Batek of Pahang, Malaysia 90
Lye Tuck-Po
6 Equalising Processes, Processes of Discrimination
and the Forest People of Central Africa 104
Justin Kenrick
7 Delay, Return and Hierarchy: Six Aboriginal Marriage
Systems Compared 129
Ian Keen
8 The Power of Women in an Ostensibly Male-Dominated
Agro-Pastoral Society 152
Jean Lydall
vi | Contents
9 The Incorporated Ground: The Contemporary Work
of Distribution in the Kutubu Oil Project Area,
Papua New Guinea 173
James F. Weiner
10 Sharing the Land: Kalahari San Property Rights
and Resource Management 191
Robert K. Hitchcock
11 The Professionalisation and Commoditisation of the
Contemporary Bushman Trance Dancer and Trance
Dance, and the Decline of Sharing 208
Mathias Guenther
12 From Humility to Lordship in Island Southeast Asia 231
Thomas Gibson
Notes on Contributors 253
Index 259
List of Figures and Tables
(cid:2)
Figures
10.1 Ju/’hoansi land use system 194
10.2 Map showing the Ju/’hoan region 197
Tables
10.1 Community trusts in Botswana’s Northwest District and
Conservancies in Namibia’s Tsumkwe District that are
involved in integrated conservation and development activities 195
10.2 Data on the N!oresi(traditional territories) of the Dobe
area, Ngamiland, Botswana 196
Preface
(cid:2)
Property relations have long been considered the key to our understanding of
equality and inequality, not only through the work of thinkers such as
Rousseau, Marx, Engels and others, but also through common everyday
experience. Social anthropologists continue to collect data that are relevant to
the fundamental issue of property and equality, but so far this work has rarely
been a concerted effort. For this two-volume book we have brought together
a wide range of well-known international specialists who have worked on
issues of property and equality. They are the core group of more than fifty
participants who came together at a conference held at Halle/Saale in June
2001. The conference, entitled ‘Property and Equality’, was the basis on
which the present volumes have been compiled. Despite their different back-
grounds the contributors share considerable common ground: all are
anthropologists, all had read James Woodburn’s seminal article on ‘Egali-
tarian Societies’ and have been inspired or challenged by his thoughts on the
matter. Many of the participants had done field research with hunter-gather-
ers in the Arctic, in Africa, Australia or Asia. However, the present volumes
do not deal exclusively with these groups. Some contributors have worked
with pastoralists, with horticulturalists, agriculturalists, in industrial societies,
and with nonhuman primates, comparing their results with the theoretical
ideas that have been developed in hunter-gatherer studies.
The ethnography on egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies sent shock waves
through anthropology in the 1960s’ when ethnographers came forward and
suggested that forager societies worked well without structures of dominance,
without rigid hierarchies, without binding property relations, and without
inherent inequality with regard to gender, age and status. This book brings
together the current work of prominent members of this original group of
researchers and the very recent ethnography of a new generation of
researchers who are dealing with problems of property and equality. In
preparing their contributions to the book the authors have revisited key
debates of the field; they have taken stock, and have tackled issues that
remained unresolved. They have reassessed how the existence of egalitarian
societies still challenges established assumptions about the conditions of
human political and economic life, how it continues to stand much of
anthropological theory on its head and how it relates to research done in
