1 - Hierarchy and the Hunt for Prey: Early Human Ownership

Summary

This chapter explores the anthropology of early human property. Making use of the ethological distinction between territoriality and social dominance, it argues that norms of social dominance largely governed early human property orders as nthropologists reconstruct them. Rights in land, rather than taking the Blackstonian form familiar from modern legal orders, were “use rights,” granted out in line with the social hierarchical of society. An important form of “ownership” also attached to rights in prey taken in the hunt. The chapter closes by challenging the economistic accounts found in the well-known “tragedy of the commons” literature, as well as economistic theories intended to explain that some societies display the ownership of humans rather than the ownership of land.