page_5 < previous page page_5 next page > Page 5 landholding in Africa, that people use land "for many purposes: not just to produce the material conditions of survival and enrichment, but also to gain control over others and to define personal and social identities." Some of the more general scholarship on property in the United States has been cognizant of these issues. For example, Morris Cohen (1978) enunciated the principle of property as sovereignty in a speech at Cornell University in 1927, and Post (1991) explores issues of privacy, personality, and property. But domestic land tenure scholarship has not always been as successful as the popular culture or even journalism (see, for example, Trillin 1976) in getting to the guts of the social relationships of property. In contrast, the international experience in studying land tenure has brought home to us the diversity of property arrangements, the diversity of ways in which struggles over property are conducted, and the diversity of ways we can look at property. Six particularly important lenses emerge from international scholarship: property as social process, customary tenures, common property and community management of resources, gender, the complexity of tenancy relationships, and land concentration. While some of these have been addressed in domestic work, they often appear more consistently and in clearer relief in international work. Property as Social Process Property is process; therefore, to understand it, one must focus on the social processes through which people define and struggle over access to and control of property. Through this lens we can view three interrelated images of property: social networks, definitions, and narratives. Social Networks Not all land and resources can be purchased with cash. Access sometimes depends on social relationships. Perhaps the scholar best known for focusing on investment in social networks as a means through which both groups and individuals jockey for rights to resources, including land, water, and trees, is the economic historian of Africa, Sara Berry (1988), who points out that instead of investing in direct increases in productive capacity, individuals may invest in social relationships in the form of ceremonies, the careers of their children, or cattle for bridewealth in order to establish or reaffirm advantageous identities far themselvesidentities that strengthen their claims to land and other natural resources. In some recent work on Ghana (Berry 1995), she has explored "political economy of indecision," in which  < previous page page_5 next page >

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