Because of the importance of land for the livelihood of the peoples among whom anthropologists have traditionally worked, the ways in which it is held, by persons and by groups, have long been an important subject of enquiry. Well before the end of the colonial period the study of non-Western forms of land tenure had begun to escape the confines of Western ideological debate that emphasized a stark contrast between ‘individualist’ and ‘communal’ systems. Besides being an area of considerable theoretical interest, for a long time this was one of the most important areas of work in applied anthropology. It has been less prominent in the post-colonial period, but remains a topic of great importance for economic anthropology and development.
Nineteenth-century attempts to understand non-Western land tenure, notably those of British administrators in South Asia, typically proceeded either in terms of familiar European ideas of ownership (such as the pattern of private ownership established by English landlords in Ireland), or their presumed antithesis, communal ownership. This dichotomy remains powerful in Western thought, and receives one of its strongest formulations in the Marxist account of the evolution from primitive communism to progressively more exclusive forms of private property.
Twentieth-century anthropologists who base their accounts on prolonged fieldwork have painted a more complex picture. Much of this work was carried out for practical purposes, in the spirit of ‘indirect rule’, but it was also designed to faciliate a transition to cash-cropping and the commercialization of land (Meek 1946). Colonial peoples (or at least some of them) were to be allowed to ‘hold’ their land in ‘traditional’ ways. In practice this required all kinds of intervention that altered previous practice, sometimes dramatically. For disputes to be settled, the authorities needed to work out a full legalistic understanding of ‘traditional land tenure’, and anthropologists helped to construct this hyposta-tized tradition. The importance of land tenure for anthropology was clearly recognized by Malinowski, who insisted on the need to transcend the legal standpoint. He defined land tenure as ‘a relation of human beings, individuals and groups, to the soil they cultivate and use’ (1936: 376). Distinguishing between narrower and broader senses of the term, he advocated a broad approach in which investigation of how people related to the soil would reveal all the ‘invisible facts’ on which tribal society was founded. Numerous later students of agrarian societies attempted to follow this advice: for example, John Davis argued in the very different context of a small town in southern Italy that ‘Rules about land, how it is allocated to different purposes, how it is distributed within the population, and how it is then transmitted reveal the basic structure of Pisticci society’ (1973: 162).
This stance is best demonstrated in a large number of tribal ethnographies, particularly in Africa, where rights to use land were shown to form part of a series of reciprocal duties and obligations between subjects and their political superiors. The most elegant theoretical formulation was that of "Gluckman (e.g. 1965), who explained land tenure among peoples such as the Lozi in terms of ‘hierarchies of estates of administration’. The number of such estates would depend on the complexity of the group, but typically a king or paramount "chief would be the ‘ultimate owner’ of all the land; he would delegate to village headmen the responsibility for allocating sufficient land to household heads, who might in turn allocate plots to individual wives. What Gluckman termed the ‘estate of production’ was generally farmed in an individualized way (though for many purposes individuals combined to form cooperating groups). Individuals could not alienate the land: any land not required for cultivation would revert up to the next level of the hierarchy for potential reallocation. Such a system of ‘serial’ rights was neither communal nor individualist as these terms are normally used in Western ideologies.
Gluckman developed this schema as a general model, but it clearly works better in some cases than others. Lozi cultivators may have depended on their headman for plot allocation, but in other groups where land was more plentiful it may be misleading to imply any process of allocation: people such as the Bemba, studied by Audrey Richards, seem to have had considerable freedom in the selection of their sites. Yet it can still be argued that Bemba subjects held land in virtue of their general social and political status, and again there was no freedom to alienate. The usefulness of Gluckman’s schema extends similarly to acephalous societies where, in the absence of a central ruler, rights over land revert up to the groups as a whole. This model is confirmed in J. Goody’s analysis (1980) of conflicts over land in Northern Ghana, when members of an acephalous society reacted strongly to attempts to convert collectively held land to a modern form of private ownership. But it is equally confirmed in the well documented attempts to promote the communal use of land in the name of ‘African socialism’. The ‘collecti-vist’ element in traditional land tenure systems did not mean communal use of the land; when the policies of post-colonial governments, such as ujamaa in Tanzania, failed to recognize this, they encountered resistance among farmers and most such schemes were costly failures.
Rights over land are not equally important in all societies. Some hunting and pastoralist peoples attach greater importance to rights over animals than to rights over specific territories. But even groups that are otherwise disengaged from property frequently acknowledge not only general territorial rights but also more specific rights, such as access to scarce water-holes. However, to the extent that such rights are shared by all members of the group, land tenure practices among some hunting and gathering peoples lend support to the theory of primitive communism.
Land is often considered, for example, by substantivist economic anthropologists, as one of the last resources to be transformed in the course of capitalist commoditization processes. However, even when the market in land is apparently active and commoditization complete, it generally remains the focus of strong loyalties and sentiment among family farmers. And of course, ownership rights are never in fact absolute: they remain subject to social and political constraint in all societies, as is regularly demonstrated in controversies concerning road-building schemes, or the rights of Gypsy travellers to occupy ‘private property’. It is interesting in this context to examine the ex-socialist countries as they abandon their collectivized systems of land tenure. Caroline Humphrey (1983) has provided an ingenious application of Gluckman’s model to the hierarchy of a Soviet collective farm. Just as this differed in its working from the ideal type of communal farming, so the new systems of land tenure, whatever the rhetoric used to promote them, will not in fact be based on individuals and absolute private ownership. Rather, it is likely that families will be reaffirmed as the main unit of production, but many kinds of cooperative links will remain important, and the operation of farms and the use and transmission of the land will be closely regulated by various levels of political authority.
This remains a field of importance for applied anthropology at various levels. It is insufficient to rely upon the technical data provided by other disciplines in seeking the optimum forms of land tenure for particular crops in particular environments: anthropological exploration of past local practices and indigenous knowledge can ensure smoother adjustments when changes are introduced. The establishment of the main features of a ‘traditional’ land tenure system has been a vital part of political strategy in the defence of ^indigenous peoples: for example in Australia, where Aboriginal groups have been threatened by the exploitation of mineral wealth on their territories, anthropological expertise has sometimes assisted groups to work out more satisfactory compromises in such situations. Land reform projects have attracted anthropological attention in many parts of the world, and it is at least arguable that many projects might have had greater success in achieving the aims of greater equity and greater efficiency in land use patterns had more anthropologists been involved in the actual implementation of reform packages. Gradually this point has been recognized by agencies such as the World Bank, and anthropologists are now regularly involved in rural resettlement schemes. However, involvement in land disputes can also raise serious ethical and political dilemmas for the discipline (see e.g. Whiteley and Aberle 1989). In contexts of increasing threats to natural and human environments, anthropological interest in the management of common property resources seems sure to increase (see McCay and Acheson 1987). The question of how land tenure principles relate to general development aspirations as well as to conservation is a vital one almost everywhere. In promoting a better understanding of these relationships, anthropologists may be able to contribute to informed decision-taking, not just by bureaucrats and politicians but also by the ordinary people most directly concerned.
