ABSTRACT
Many of us broadly identify groups of people in certain times and places with particular property regimes. Consider the association of communist Soviet Union or China with collective or central control of land; Indigenous peoples of the Americas with the sharing of life, health and spirituality through land; white colonial and contemporary settlers of the capitalist United States with the individual control and financial value of land; and Africans uprooted, transported and enslaved in the Americas, dispossessed and treated as property themselves. In each of these examples, observers connect identities of race, nationality, time and place with particular property rules about land. But we do not just identify others, we also identify ourselves through how we treat property. Here, I explore how each of us might talk, think and act about property in ways that cement larger social identities …
Becher, Debbie, Property and Social Identities (August 1, 2022) in The Routledge Handbook of Property, Law and Society (Graham, Davies and Godden eds, Taylor & Francis), pp 441-52, 2022.
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