Property and Persons: New Forms and Contests in the Era of Neoliberalism

The past few decades have witnessed an eruption of property claims worldwide. The new form of cultural property has emerged. There has also been a marked growth in claims of intellectual property that are now applied to an expanded array of things and contexts. Older property forms, such as landownership, are deployed in new contexts, generating novel contests about the capacity of land to be exclusively owned. The ideology of neoliberalism and new technologies of biology, information, and communication are central to these transformations in property relations. In their distinctive ways, each has contributed to the expansion of property claims while continually disrupting the division of persons and things central to property. The article considers how contests about new and old property forms are simultaneously generative of new forms of persons, such as indigenous persons, whose outlook and conduct potentially undermine the legitimacy of conventional property claims.