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20 Iowa L. Rev. 304 (1934-1935)
Ownership and Inheritance in an American Indian Tribe

handle is hein.journals/ilr20 and id is 326 raw text is: OWNERSHIP AND INHERITANCE IN AN AMERICAN INDIAN TRIBE ERNEST BEAGLEBOaiJ t O NE USEFUL purpose that the ethnologist may perform in contributing to a symposium such as the present one is to give an example of the manner in which the institution of property, particularly those aspects relating to the ownership and inheritance of goods, functions in an exotic culture with the patterns of which the ethnologist is personally familiar. I propose then to present a brief summary of the rules governing the ownership and inherit- ance of property-the two aspects of course, not being understand- able, the one without the other-in a North American Indian tribe of which I have a first-hand acquaintance. This tribe is the Hopi, a sedentary, agricultural pottery-and-basket-making people living in pueblos on rocky mesas high above the desert of north-eastern Arizona. The Hopi are organized into a number of matrilineal clans. The men raise corn and other agricultural products; they also hunt and weave. The women attend to the domestic tasks and make baskets and pottery. The religion of the Hopi is highly ritualized and is concerned principally with the production of rain, increasing the fertility of the fields and the curing of specific illnesses. The patterns of ownership and inheritance in any community, whether high or low in the gamut of cultures, are essentially those which regulate the behavior of an individual or group of individuals in relation to the objects of material culture, the natural resources and the more immaterial goods such as songs, designs or privileges which are at the command of members of a stably organized social unit. The psychological bonds between the individual and the property he'controls, with all its personal and group symbolisms or overtones of meaning, are of first importance for a deeper insight into the functioning reality of property institutions in any society, but with these aspects of Hopi property I am not now con- t Research Fellow of the B. P. Bishop Museum, Honolulu; author of Prop- erty; A Study in Social Psychology (1932).

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