Property in Question

Katherine Verdery Eric R. Wolf Professor of Anthropology and Interim Chair,University of Michigan Caroline Humphrey Professor of Asian Anthropology, University of Cambridge

• Acknowledgments, List of Contributors, Introduction: Raising Questions about Property, Part I: The “Things” of Property, 1. Bodily Transactions: Regulating a New Space of Flows in “Bio-information”, 2. Heritage as Property, 3. The Selective Protection of Musical Ideas: The “Creators” and the Dispossessed, 4. Crude Properties: The Sublime and Slime of Oil Operations in the Ecuadorian Amazon, Part II: Property, Value, and Liability 5 Prospecting’s Publics, 6. The Obligations of Ownership: Restoring Rights to Land in Postsocialist Transylvania, 7. Proprietary Regimes and Sociotechnical Systems: Rights over Land in Mongolia’s “Age of the Market”, Part III: Cultural Recognition, 8. At Home in the Violence of Recognition, 9. Cultural Rights and Wrongs: Uses of the Concept of Property, 10. The Menace of Hawkers: Property Forms and the Politics of Market Liberalization in Mumbai, Part IV: Critiquing Property, 11. Value, Relations, and Changing Bodies: Privatization and Property Rights in Kazakhstan, 12. Economic Claims and the Challenges of New Property, 13. Cyberspatial Properties: Taxing Questions about Proprietary Regimes, Index

'This is a highly stimulating and challenging collection on urgent issues of property, one of the most powerful devices of exclusion and hierarchy. The great contribution lies in its theoretical considerations of new and old property objects and property relationships, as they are socially and spatially grounded. But it branches out into questions of sovereignty, nationality, and the relationship between communities and individuals.' Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology'A brilliant exploration of the transformation of concepts of property and value at the turn of the millennium. Engaging with the emergence of new forms of property in the post-Communist world, in cyberspace, in intellectual property law, and in relations between indigenous peoples and the state, the essays in this volume push the boundaries of our thinking about one of the central categories of our world.'John Frow, University of Edinburgh'In all, this is a very thought