Property relations, production relations, and inequality: anthropology, political economy, and the Blackfeet

Political‐economic concepts that privilege production over other dimensions of social life are inappropriate to the study of non‐Western societies. Concepts suitable for non‐Western societies must be based on the institutional specificity of those societies, just as production‐based concepts (forces and relations of production) derive their analytical value from the institutional structure of industrial capitalism. In this article, “property relations” is advanced as such a concept and is used to explain the emergence of inequality from egalitarian social relations among the Blackfeet Indians on the northern plains of North America. [ political economy, property relations, historical anthropology, legal anthropology, inequality, gender relations ]