ABSTRACT
The study of property rules in general, and of land tenure in particular, is the study of relationships between people. Such relationships ‘about property’ are not sui generis; they are - to put the matter at its weakest - consistent with relationships about other things and activities. Apart from the intrinsic interest of studying land tenure there, the principle of analysis is a useful one; it enables people to emphasize features of social structure which might have received less than their share of attention if the author had studied, say, manipulative and often ephemeral political relations. Property is of different kinds in town and in country: houses in the one, land in the other. These have different qualities: land is divisible and summable; houses are not. They have different rules of transfer: both are transmitted predominantly at marriage, but houses go to women, and land to both men and women.
