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Abstract
Property—an often taken-for-granted construct—significantly shapes broader socio-ecological relations. Revisiting property’s conceptualization and practice is timely given that property is embedded within myriad contemporary issues and proposed solutions to these issues. This dissertation re-examines property’s conceptualization in social theory through both theoretical and empirical analyses and posits a few possibilities for enlivening property theory. It draws on institutional property theories, socio-material approaches in the social sciences, insights from Indigenous and African scholars, and diverse feminist writings. Rooted in this framework, Article I identifies a problematic social/material dichotomy that underpins many contemporary theoretical approaches to property. This dichotomy, it argues, undermines analytical clarity of how property is practiced in an entangled and dynamic world. As a corrective, it conceptualizes property as a socio-material phenomenon nested within particular circumstances, relations, and structures. This novel conceptualization forms the foundation for the dissertation’s empirical analyses of Limba property relations in northern Sierra Leone. Article II contrasts the ways property is deadened in modernist abstractions with the everyday practices and more-than-human relationships that make property real within Limba communities. The paper identifies a Limba orienting framework of values and relational-ontological dynamics that underpins people’s property practices. Limba property emerges from an array of more-than-human relations and daily practices, and connection to place. Yet, as the article highlights, people may cultivate and value more-than-human relations while ultimately prioritizing human needs. Article III queries neoliberal Women’s Land Rights (WLR) discourses that are often deployed to justify land tenure formalization. These discourses tend to identify culture as a primary impediment to WLR while relying upon implicit cultural, political, and economic hegemonies. Article III crafts a counternarrative to WLR that draws upon intersectionality, African feminist and humanist scholarship, and ethnographic case studies from Sierra Leone. Rather than cultural determinism, a convergence of social position, land loss, political dynamics, and patriarchal norms variously shape women’s property relations in Kalanthuba. Case studies of three Limba matriarchs highlight not only the great diversity in women’s experiences with patrilineal land relations, but also how their agencies are variously empowered or restricted by the intersection of their multi-faceted positionalities with broader structural conditions.