Ownership and Political Ecology

The studies presented in this symposium demonstrate how sophisticated anthropologists have become in following through the connective linkages in local ecosystems and in specifying the parameters of economic change. The Alps, of course, offer a magnificent laboratory to the ecological anthropologist interested in the ramifications, at any given time and over time, of microvariations in altitude, slope, soil, precipitation, temperature, wind, and in the incidence of sunshine and shade. The papers presented here document the importance of these variations on the distribution of men, animals and plants over the landscape, and on the specification and scheduling of work sites and work tasks. All the papers demonstrate how important it is, for any one household at any one time, to achieve a balance between unimpeded access to an effective combination of resources characterized by such heterogeneity, and the operation of the jural rules concerning who owns what. In fact, much of the data on cultural ecology in the Alps could be phrased as the outcome of a continuing game against a centrifugally organized environment by populations equipped with two sets of ambiguous and often contradictory rules. To survive in such an environment, a population must organize its resources into viable resource bundles, whatever the requirements of property and inheritance. It does so largely, to adopt the parlance used by Robert Netting in his paper, through the development of long-range strategies of expansion, intensification, and regulation. At the same time, the dynamics of ownership by individual households often run counter to these long-range strategies by favoring short-term realignments of resources according to another set of rules, the rules of property and succession to rights in property. The symposium papers take us a long way on the road towards a better understanding of the phenomena involved. Eschewing a static analysis of jural rights, they offer a processual view of ownership, in its varied ecological and social parameters. They thus also point the direction in which analysis must go, adumbrated perhaps most clearly in Berthoud's paper. The property connexion in complex societies is not merely an outcome of local or regional ecological processes. but a