So at this point Widerquist and McCall start looking at the actual truth of property relations between pre state people, and finds that they had a wide variety of arrangements, and that variations of communal approaches to property were common. Territoriality was very lax in places of low population density, while in places of higher population density, people would be a bit more aggressive. Still, most people worked out differences relatively peaceful and claims against actual land were rare. Among hunter gatherer groups, sharing was the norm, and highly expected, while contributing to the group was a bit more lax. It's common in our society to enforce work requirements on the basis that they're functional and if you didn't, people wouldn't work, but generally speaking, if you hunted small game for yourself, that was considered acceptable if you ate it yourself, but larger game would expect to be shared more widely with no enforced reciprocity expected from future beneficiaries. This is very different from modern society where everyone is expected to work for themselves, and sharing is evil and forced labor and blah blah blah, and we need to live this way because if we didn't no one would work.
Widerquist and McCall also through around the idea at one point that these appropriation theories that we westerners have seem to be designed to exclude hunter gatherers from their definition of appropriation, and that it's like these ideas were created by colonizers to defend their colonization. Like these ideas didn't come from sound principles, but the rules were made up just to justify whatever scheme they had going. I believe it. And we're forced to live with the result hundreds of years later. I know later on they'll be discussing the privatization of land so I expect to have a lot to say on that, but for now, yeah. I would agree with their assessment.
And yeah, I don't have much else to say here. Kinda preaching to the choir here.
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