ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how people form collective identities through land, and through how we treat land as property. The example of the professional petroleum ‘land managers’ shows how a group can develop practices – around property – that cement larger social identities of race, class, gender, sexuality and region. The petroleum ‘landmen’ observed in the American Northwest enact a white, middle-class Western heterosexual masculinity. And they mark their identities through their treatment of property as an object of financial exchange. The author contends that we all develop group identities as we go into debt for property, pay for it, profit from it, sign onto responsibilities for it or yearn for access to it that we do not have. The chapter demonstrates how we might see the ways that people build group belonging through property – even when they do not attach a sense of self to particular objects treated as property.
