Category talk:Property

"The advent of the institution of property is arguably the incest taboo. " OK, it's arguable, so I'd like to argue. :) I submit that even in a world with the incest taboo, or even without sexual reproduction, the notion of property would evolve similarly to our world. -- Gonzoron 14:52, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Do you mean "without" actually?

Well, you knock sexual reproduction and/or the incest taboo out of existence and who is to say. Every culture and every historical period known to us has had both. But by analogy, parallel morphology can immerge in species that are unrelated. So you can get to the same or similar ends by different means. But the experiment does make the interesting point that property relations could conceivably be substanially different, entirely absent, or essentially the same with some abberations or other such things that don't reproduce sexually. In other words, its suggests a way, among others, to make alien cultures properly alien.Cure 15:26, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I meant without. I realize it's hard to say what the absence of any particular element would have done to culture. But what I'm getting at is that I think it's a big stretch to say that the concept of Property has anything at all to do with the incest taboo. The idea of "This sharp rock is mine, go get your own" seems to me a much more fundamental idea than any taboo. Heck, my dog understands property, and was spayed before her first heat. I don't think she has any taboo against incest or even any real concept of mating at all. But she knows which toys are hers and doesn't want other dogs touching them. -- Gonzoron 19:43, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

On a completely unrelated note, dogs are awesome. Give your dog a hug today! --ChrisNichols 20:24, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Many human institutions have antecedents in nature. But human institutions are born of profound mutations in those antecedents that render the resulting orders all but unintelligible to those on the outside looking in.

Dogs bark and, we can say metaphorically, talk. Dog barking is certainly communication, but its capacities do not permit of poetry let alone countless other useages that make human speech, which is to say language, categorically different from anything else that is known by us to exist.

Equally, your dog is convinced that her food is hers. Well and good. Under what conditions is it culturally obligatory among dogs for her to enter into exchanges concerning her food? Is not consuming her food and trading it for something else a practice she engages in?

Or going to the heart of the matter, if a father owns his daughter like your dog owns her food, based on "nature's concept of property", why on earth does he bother not consuming her and instead bothers trying to trade her? Whatever nature may be telling him, his daughter is not his property to consume according to culture, or more exactly according to the difference between nature and culture. Property, properly speaking, is as much about what is not mine to consume, even when it is otherwise my property, as it is about what is mine to consume. Property is a system of differences between owners. In that system a wife and a daughter are not the same thing just as a father and a husband are not the same thing. Whereas for your dog food is always food to be eaten. There is no such thing as food that is not to be consumed but instead traded and that on being traded becomes again food that is food to be consumed. For her, like the zombie, all flesh must be eaten. There is no dog or zombie equivalent of the daughter who must be traded away in a ceremony and of a husband who is such and who acquires the right to consume her only by becoming a son-in-law.Cure 21:57, 28 April 2010 (UTC)