Private Property first emerged in sacred rituals

Private property may feel normal to us, but exclusionary control over stuff or land or people isn't natural. At some point(s) in human history, property rights had to be invented.

Probably, property first emerged in rituals.

Rituals are spaces for both rules and play

Rituals are containers for accumulated social learning. And rituals create space for social experimentation. They are the laboratories and libraries of cultural knowledge.

This dual role explains why rituals can be both formal and chaotic. Formality preserves old knowledge. Chaos promotes new ideas.

For example, Yuletide is a chaotic ritual. The Lords of Misrule and Abbots of Unreason flipped the hierarchy of medieval Britain, and sometimes became the basis for popular revolts.

In contrast, Catholic High Mass is a formal ritual that fixed a relatively singular understanding of God across hundreds of years.

Totalitarianism is an attempt to make rituals last forever. Ancient Egypt's pyramids, like other cultures' massive monuments, were the Pharaohs' attempts to make their ritual power eternal.

Private property began as sacred property

Sacred rituals, led by holy men holding sacred objects and practices, may have been the origin of exclusive property rights.

For many surviving Indigenous groups, including the Forest People of Central Africa, Aranda, and American Indians, sacred rights imply a duty to care for the land. (And it might not be entirely accidental that cultures that felt a duty to care for the land survived.)

The Forest People of Central Africa's phallic and intellectual property

Among the otherwise free Forest People of Central Africa certain phallic music instruments (flutes and trumpets, physical property) and ritual practices (intellectual property) are kept secret.

These sacred instruments and practices are the only things which any individual or group can lay exclusive claim to. Women or children who use them can be raped or killed.

(Ethnographer: James Woodburn)

Aranda's violent initiation into manhood and property ownership

For the Aranda, in the Australian Western Desert, adult men have the right to protect certain land. Their ownership is signified by churinga, smoothed and inscribed relics of wood or stone.

The Aranda have carefree childhoods; they are spoiled and undisciplined. But the initiation from boyhood to manhood is oppressively violent. Boys may know of the churinga only after they undergo circumcision and sub-incision, and show complete, automatic obedience to elders. A duty to care for the land is conveyed through rituals of terror and torture.

(Ethnographer: Emile Durkheim.)

Indigenous American property established a duty to care

Indigenous Americans (despite some of Kandiaronk's more hyperbolic claims) also had property rights.

For example, among some Northwestern Americans ownership of a certain bowl implied the right to harvest berries from a particular patch.

And for Totemic societies, including Plains Indians and Kwakiutl, membership in a clan (Bear clan, Raven clan, etc...) implied the exclusive rights to perform rituals meant to promote the abundance of those animals. At the same time, clan membership also meant you could never hunt that species.

Abusus, the right to destroy

For Europeans, property rights imply a right to destroy.

This goes back to the Roman tradition. Roman property rights are actual a bundle of 3 core rights:

1. Usus - the right to use;
2. Fructus - the right to enjoy the products; and
3. Abusus - the right to destroy.

Usufruct, the right to use and enjoy, is incomplete. To have complete property rights you must have the right to destroy.

John Locke relied on the Roman tradition when he provided the intellectual basis for dispossession of Americans. In the Second Treatise on Government (1690) Locke basically argued:

"They're not really working."

Locke (wrongly) held that European-style agriculture and property was the only way to care for a landscape.

Roman property rights were based on slavery. Roman legal theorists developed the concept of land ownership based on their experience as slave owners. The relationship between master and slave was the model for the relationship between owner and land.