ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on certain styles of anthropological reasoning. The crux is in the title: concepts do their work in relation to other concepts. Yet the terms themselves do not tell you about the relations between them. I invert commonsense understanding that these three must refer to different actions, in order to make another difference, singling out one from the other two. Such analytical choices are at the heart of descriptive endeavour.
This volume asks anthropologists to look specifically at acts of owning and appropriating, with a focus on activities typifying the everyday. Nothing could be more mundane than people standing in a queue or school children losing their things. That two English lawyers have discerned fundamental ideas about property in these acts encourages the anthropologist to take equal liberty. The focus is the activity of ‘borrowing’. Insofar as borrowing implies taking for a time someone else’s property, far from blurring it reinforces the notion of property rights. So if there are situations in which it is not appropriate to talk about property regimes, then is it appropriate to talk about borrowing? It all depends, it seems, on the company that concepts find themselves in. An initial inspiration here is a particular Pacific Island invention that appears to circumvent the implications of thinking in terms of property; as we shall see, it circumvents consequences entailed in other conceptualizations as well.
