[This is a twitter thread from @HeavenlyPossum in Sep. 2021 that I archived and am reposting here with their agreement. It is about property as a social construct.]

In his essay “Manners, Deference, and Private Property,” David Graeber made this point:

“A number of authors have pointed out how many languages lack any verb for unilateral ownership, simply identifying some object and some thing.”

This might come as a surprise to you if you’ve spent any time listening to libertarians, who have a habit of asserting that private property — what Graeber calls unilateral ownership — is a sort of self-evident, universal and transhistorical human default.

To support his claim, Graeber cites the anthropological work of Robert Firth on the Pacific island of Tikopia.

If you’ve read Jared Diamond’s “Collapse,” you’ll recall Tikopia among his examples of a society that achieved a sustainable approach to its environment.

In his work “We, the Tikopia,” Firth does indeed make the claim that Tikopians lacked a word for what we would consider ownership, instead using the same word, “tau,” to signify any kind of connection — between people and other people, between people and objects, etc.

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