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The ethnography of egalitarian social systems was first met with sheer disbelief. Today it is still hotly debated in a number of fields and has gained sophistication as well as momentum. This collection of essays on "property and equality" acknowledges this diversification by presenting research results in two complementary volumes. They bring together a wide range of authoritative researchers most of whom have worked with hunter-gatherer groups. These two volumes cover existing ethnographic and theoretical ground while maintaining a clear focus on the relation between property and equality. The book consists of the most recent work of prominent members of the original group of researchers in hunter-gatherer studies among them James Woodburn and Richard Lee, and very recent ethnography on hunter-gatherers and other egalitarian systems.
“These excellent books enrich our understanding of immediate return societies and the persistence of immediate-return arrangements in delayed-return societies. I was reflecting recently that anthropologists have not given sufficient attention to Woodburn’s theoretical framework. These contributions go a long way towards filling that gap.” · Jérôme Rousseau in Anthropological Forum
Thomas Widlok obtained his PhD in Social Anthropology at the LSE and has taught anthropology in the universities of London, Cologne, Kyoto, and Heidelberg. He was a member of the Max Planck Cognitive Anthropology Research Group in Nijmegen, Netherlands. Currently he is a research staff member at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany.
Preface
Introduction
Wolde Gossa Tadesse
Chapter 1. Power and Property in Twenty-First Century Foragers: A Critical Examination
Richard Borshay Lee
Chapter 2. Money Makes the World Go Round? Commodity Sharing, Gifting and Exchange in the Baka (Pygmy) Economy
Axel Köhler
Chapter 3. Whose Forest Is It Anyway? Mbendjele Yaka Pygmies, the Ndoki Forest and the Wider World
Jerome Lewis
Chapter 4. The Significance of Trade in an Immediate-Return Society: The Batek Case
Kirk Endicott
Chapter 5. The Road to Equality? Landscape Transformation and the Batek of Pahang, Malaysia
Lye Tuck-Po
Chapter 6. Equalising Processes, Processes of Discrimination and the Forest People of Central Africa
Justin Kenrick
Chapter 7. Delay, Return and Hierarchy: Six Aboriginal Marriage Systems Compared
Ian Keen
Chapter 8.8 The Power of Women in an Ostensibly Male-Dominated Agro-Pastoral Society
Jean Lydall
Chapter 9. The Incorporated Ground: The Contemporary Work of Distribution in the Kutubu Oil Project Area, Papua New Guinea
James F. Weiner
Chapter 10. Sharing the Land: Kalahari San Property Rights and Resource Management
Robert K. Hitchcock
Chapter 11. The Professionalisation and Commoditisation of the Contemporary Bushman Trance Dancer and Trance Dance, and the Decline of Sharing
Mathias Guenther
Chapter 12. From Humility to Lordship in Island Southeast Asia
Thomas Gibson
Notes on Contributors
Index