ABSTRACT
To assert that property is plural is to say that its material, social, and semantic aspects are dynamic and give rise to ‘multiple and overlapping bases for claims’. Many studies of plurality in property focus on the ways different claims about the content or source of property rights are taken into account by the courts, but sociological and ethnographic maintain a ‘stronger’ version of legal pluralism in which property relations can exist empirically in spite of a lack of recognition by the state, for example, in the customs of Indigenous peoples or other polities. Rhetorical and jurisdictional approaches further highlight the lack of unity and homogeneity of both state and non-state law regarding property, and the degree to which ‘property’ is both a discursive resource mobilised in complex struggles for territory, resources, and political authority, and the embodiment of a specific ontology or form of life.
