Property

Property is the socially recognized system of rights that gives a person or group control over a valuable thing, commonly described in Anglo-American legal theory as a bundle of rights: the right to use, alter, share, rent, sell, exchange, transfer, give away, or destroy a thing, or to exclude others from doing so. Anthropologists and sociologists treat property less as a relationship between a person and an object than as a relationship between persons, since one person's right to a thing is defined by other people's corresponding duty to respect it; ownership is among the most enduring dimensions of social inequality, because property confers power not only over things but, through things, over other people as well. Economists distinguish four broad categories of property: private, public, collective, and common. Nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropology treated property as a fixed developmental stage; twentieth-century ethnography instead documented it as a culturally variable social institution, with practical use and caretaking sometimes carrying recognized standing independent of formal legal ownership.