Customs, Commons, Property, and Ecology: Case Studies from Oceania

Wagner, John, Talakai, Malia, Human Organization

In this introduction and the collection of papers that follows, common property theory is critiqued on the basis of its frequent conflation with customary property systems. Case studies from throughout the Island Pacific are used to demonstrate the many ways in which customary systems do not correspond to common property systems and to argue that the application of common property theory in such settings leads to distortion and misrepresentation. As an alternative, we propose an approach that stresses the idea of property as a set of social relations arising out of increasingly complex interactions of people and processes at local, national, and global scales. We also stress the close …

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Publication information: Article title: Customs, Commons, Property, and Ecology: Case Studies from Oceania. Contributors: Wagner, John - Author, Talakai, Malia - Author. Journal title: Human Organization. Volume: 66. Issue: 1 Publication date: Spring 2007. Page number: 1+. © Society of Applied Anthropology Winter 2008. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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