Property has become an important topic in more or less all social and environmental sciences, even though it has not been a major focus of economic anthropology in the recent past.
Property today is a significant part of the economy and it is important for understanding evolution, production, consumption, and exchange. Property rights give legitimate control over the means of production, they can be an important basis for the social continuity of groups, and are a source of individual power and prestige.
Property relations have changed throughout time. Firstly property relations changed with the spread of capitalism throughout large parts of the world. Secondly they have changed with a mode of production which promotes exclusive privately owned property.
In many regions of the world, especially during and after colonialism, local and ethnic conceptions of resources and property rights have been confronted by national conceptions and regulations of property that have affected the distribution of wealth.
In the context of a global political economy, the relations between state, individual and group rights and the distribution of private and public rights to property, have made important changes. This can be observed in post socialist states where the state was formerly the key holder and the allocator of property rights. Nowadays the advances in communication and technology such as for example the internet have created new values. So new property rights have emerged in local, national and transnational areas, including intellectual property rights, biopharmaceuticals, and cultural property.
Anthropology has dealt with property for many years. The term property in its original meaning had been in reference to a characteristic of a person. During the 1700s it was understood that property in land was indicative of the social position of the individual who owned it, therefore the linguistic history of the term "property" shows that its actual meaning developed rather recently during the period of mercantile and industrial capitalism.
Most monographs before World War II had dealt with property in terms of material culture and inheritance. If property is a jural relationship, then property is seen as a social relationship between owner and non owners of the object.
An object can be owned by more than one jural unit simultaneously. If there are three or more rights in an object, the rights may belong to different owners. A good example is the privately owned
real estate in the USA, where the owner has many rights, but some are held by the mortgage bank and some by the local community as in the instance of zoning regulations.
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