The Evolution and Ecology of Land Ownership

Abstract

Land ownership norms play a central role in social-ecological systems, and have been studied extensively as a component of ethnographies. Yet only recently has the distribution of land ownership norms across cultures been examined from evolutionary and ecological perspectives. Here we incorporate evolutionary and macroecological modelling to test associations between land ownership norms and environmental, subsistence, and cultural contact predictors for societies in the Bantu language family. We find that Bantu land ownership norms likely evolved on a unilinear trajectory, but not necessarily one requiring consistent increase in exclusivity as suggested by prior theory. Our macroecological analyses suggest that Bantu societies are more likely to have some form of ownership when their neighbors also do. We also find an effect of environmental productivity, supporting resource defensibility theory, which posits that land ownership is more likely where productivity is predictable. We find less support for a proposed link between agricultural intensification and land ownership. Overall, we demonstrate the value of combining analytical approaches from evolution and ecology to test diverse hypotheses on land ownership across a range of disciplines.

Ownership psychology as a cognitive adaptation: A minimalist model

“…He effectively reviews ownership's foundationhood criteria: (a) Ownership is strongly present in third-party normative judgments (e.g., ; (b) consistent with the Social Intuitionist Model , intuitions about ownership come quickly and without much deliberation; (c) ownership intuitions and norms are culturally widespread; (d) schemas of ownership appear in human infants (e.g., ; and (e) human intuitions about ownership (not just of land and objects, but of mates and children) have obvious parallels in other animals, and respect for property is an evolutionarily stable strategy. Boyer's model also offers a novel account of the evolution of ownership intuitions (which can interact with ecology and historical dynamics; see Bowles & Choi, 2013;Haynie et al, 2021).…”