Browsing by Author "Netting, Robert McC."

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Communal Labor as a Common Property Resource: How Smallholders Work Together
(1993) Netting, Robert McC.
"Communal work groups or labor parties may well be seen as a crucial aspect of common property management. As Robert Hunt has pointed out, maintenance and repair of common property facilities such as irrigation systems or roads may require organized efforts by all members of the corporate group, and certain officers may have supervising and monitoring functions. Mandatory communal work may also be called out for reciprocal labor on the private land of members. I will analyze the communal labor of Swiss alpine villagers on the summer grazing alp, the forest, and the communal vineyard of their community. This institutions will be compared with the beer party labor in private cash-crop fields of the Kofyar in Nigeria. My argument will be that under the stress of population pressure and resulting intensive land use, smallholders develop common property rights in labor, and that these institutions may persist even as wage labor becomes more frequent."
Smallholder Property and Tenure (Chapter 9 from the manuscript draft of 'Smallholders. Householders')
(1989) Netting, Robert McC.
"Smallholders have private property. Rights in resources--farmland, livestock, fruit trees, firewood, irrigation water--as well as the technology that renders these resources productive--granaries, barns, plows, wagons, and hand tools. Some continuing, socially recognized rights in the land and animals belong to the cultivation. These rights of tenure are what smallholders hold. Such rights may be embodied in deeds, tax valuations, and wills, they may be enforceable by courts under the jurisdiction of the state, or they may depend on customs relating to the acquisition, use, and social transmission of certain resources and technologies within the little community. Though rights may be formally assigned to certain individuals and nested within more inclusive systems of rights belonging to lineages, villages, landlords, nobles, estate owners, and the political administration of the county, district, or state, they are associated in a fundamental manner with the farm household and reflect its on-going relationship with productive property. Household members work on a particular farm, they derive appreciable benefits from it, and their investment of labor and capital over time establish and sustain valuable property rights that may pass to close kin by inheritance. Intensive agriculture under circumstances of population pressure and market demands emphasizes well defined, defensible, and enduring private property rights in a qualitatively different manner from hunting and gathering, fishing, or shifting cultivation. Though we are accustomed to thinking of land tenure as a set of rural concepts or legal rules externally formulated and enforced by political bodies, we will examine property rights here as part of a local agro-ecosystem, testing the hypothesis that, other things being equal, land use by and large determines land tenure. Private individual or household property, frequently accompanied by corporate group rights in common property, are regularly and systematically associated with smallholder intensive agriculture."
Unequal Commoners and Uncommon Equity: Property and Community among Smallholder Farmers
(1993) Netting, Robert McC.
"Common property rights, falling as they do somewhere between private property and state territorial control, are an anomaly. They appear as part of recurrent institutions, widely distributed through space and time, and governing local access to such necessary resources as marginal grazing areas, swidden fallows, inshore fisheries, and irrigation water. But common property is supposedly doomed to pass away. For Louis Henry Morgan, the Rochester lawyer, railroad investor, and New York State legislator, the 'idea of property' emerged as a key factor in the evolution of the human mind, and 'its dominance as a passion over all other passions marks the commencement of civilization' (Morgan 1963:5-6). Clearly this kind of property is something more defined, more legally specific, than a Seneca hunting ground or corn patch. Common property may even be a threat to the environment as it is in Garrett Hardin's (1968) 'tragedy of the commons' where economically rational herdsmen increase the number of livestock on the common pasture, thereby gaining individual benefits from each additional cow while sharing the costs of overgrazing with all the other members, and eventually destroying the resource. 'It is usual to assume that resource degradation is inevitable unless common property is converted into private property or government regulations are instituted' (Berkes et al. 1989). Though the heedless herdsman may be an appropriate analogy for industrial air pollution or tourist crowds in Yosemite, it neglects the historic fact that European community grazing lands were never open access and endured for centuries without apparent degradation. The summer alp pastures of the Swiss village of Torbel where I did field research have operated under written rules of use, prohibiting noncitizens from sending their livestock there, regulating the number of beasts each member of the commune can feed there, and requiring annual labor for maintenance since 1483 (Netting 1981). I would speculate that the Celtic Swiss settlers did much the same thing in the Late Bronze Age that they do now in their assemblies and work groups."