ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how land returned after 1989 to its former owners in Transylvania was revalued – made a negative asset, for many land recipients – through privatization that aimed to assign ownership rights but covertly assigned risks and obligations. Ownership for smallholders, by contrast, loaded them with risks they had trouble escaping. Pressed constantly toward assuming monetary obligations rather than social ones, they were having to confront the extent to which their land had become a liability. The problem for village elites was to secure labor through social ties, as had been the norm in pre-socialist times, rather than having to pay for it when cash was so short. For super-tenants, ownership meant reducing their social embeddedness locally, enhancing it extra-locally, and maximizing their control over the few factors they could control, even at the expense of centralizing risk in themselves.
