Ownership

Where does property begin and where does it end? This is a perennial conundrum in the history of philosophy. This question, however, continues to elude the scrutiny of cognitive and developmental scientists, particularly cultural psychologists. Aside from philosophical speculations and psychoanalytical interpretations based on case studies, there is no good account on the developmental origins of entitlement, the claim of ownership, how and why children eventually learn to relinquish property via sharing and negotiation. Aside from “armchair” speculative views, little empirical work exists on the origins of property, nor on the origins of sharing.

More to the point, no systematic research exists on the influence of the great variety of cultural contexts in which children grow. We are interested in documenting the development of the sense of property in preschool age children (between 3 and 5 years of age) growing up in highly contrasted cultural and economic environments. These environments are richer or poorer with markedly different ways of promoting collective values, different ways of relating to others that depend on a more or less individualistic sense of self of the individuals growing up in these cultures and variety of socio-economic backgrounds.

When young children are reported to begin to say “mine!” typically at around 20 months class children, what they say is de facto that “it is not yours”. Property is inseparable from the idea of potentially relinquishing it via sharing and negotiation. By definition, property is the necessary prerequisite and constitutive element of what characterizes social exchanges (by analogy, responsibility and autonomy are the necessary prerequisites of punishment).

Property and sharing are thus two inseparable, mutually defining terms. Pioneer field works of early anthropologists all converge in pointing to the importance of object and people transactions, in particular the importance of sharing and gifts in small, “primitive” societies all over the world (see the seminal writings of M. Mauss, B. Malinowsky, F. Boas, M. Mead, or C. Levi-Strauss).

Gifts, sacrifices, and benevolence are the epitome of active social cohesion and stability maintenance by individuals within a group. However, their forms vary across cultures and it is not clear how children learn the particular forms of sharing within the culture of their parents.

Here we consider that when children refer to when they begin to say “mine!” is fundamentally dynamic, not normative or static. The argument is that early on, children discover the social power of possession and property, in particular the potential for exchange it represents. They discover the power of social control through the claim of ownership. Accordingly, to talk about possession and ownership it is to talk about the self in relation to others. The idea is that without self-consciousness, nor any consciousness of others, there would be no property question, nor any ownership issue. When young children are reported to begin to say “mine!”, what they say is de facto that “it is not yours”. But is it the case in all cultures and for all children growing up in various socio-economic circumstances? The question remains wide open.

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