Property and the Matter of Belonging

ABSTRACT Belonging and matter serve as entry points into the conceptual and political stakes of this inquiry into property. The articles in this collection explore relations of belonging as they occur through forms of property, as objects and subjects gather and are gathered together amid and by differentials of power. We suggest that the matters of belonging that unfold through property also constitute terrains of struggle, in which belonging is held in tension in its dual sense: about what might count as a belonging that might be owned and simultaneously about who belongs—who is included in the polity, who gets to be part of human society, or who has sovereign control over their bodies or the political choices that are made. The articles do not simply challenge property as a Western category but make arguments affirmatively about other regimes of ownership and belonging—other gatherings of things in the world that was and could be. They illustrate the political indeterminacies and historical contingencies of property's unfolding within and shaping of social and material worlds in ways that allow us to revisit the terms of anthropological debates around property.