Timing Property: Temporal dynamics and contradictions of property acquisition and ownership in contemporary capitalism

Across the globe, the acquisition and economic exploitation of property has become a defining feature of contemporary capitalism. A central pillar of middle-class aspiration and ideology, property carries the promise of security – a “safe bet” on the future – propelling its pursuit against the odds as prices rise disproportionally to wages. Yet this drive to own occurs amid highly unequal property markets and contributes to their destabilization - the market volatility produced by financialization and speculation. Arguing that property markets are characterized by divergent and conflicting temporalities, this Introduction directs ethnographic attention to the complex temporal work involved in “achieving” and “fixing” property ownership, specifically of land and housing, among middle class actors across a range of ethnographic contexts. Timing property captures efforts to reconcile the temporal dissonances that property generates, a predicament in which social actors have only limited control.