Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

Introduction
Part three considers the third moment of property where law and administration
meet the social world of production. In the grid of a register individual names
are set against categories of objects subject to different types of right; on the
ground men and women work with others (invisible in the grid) in households
and wider groups.
The relation between the administration of property and the social systems
of production in villages is explored at two levels.
Chapters 9 and 10 concern four villages: Chapter 9 Bait Ra’s and Hawwara
in the Hauran plain and Chapter 10 Kufr ‘Awan and Khanzira in the Kura hills.
The analysis charts both the organization of village production and the relation
of villagers to the administration of property over the roughly three generations
covered by the study. Beyond shedding light on village land history, the chapters
address three issues. First is how to understand, in relation to the changing forms
of property, the formation of social groups between government and production.
The second concerns the analysis of agency. Unlike a purely discursive analysis,
in which the desiring subjects of power-knowledge embrace the categories of
government, here more contradictory and finely structured agencies may be
observed in the different village histories. Third is the relation between title and
tax. According to an ideology of private property, the former should determine
the latter; in fact, tax payment remained crucial to actual claims to title.
Chapters 9 and 10 proceed from dry entries of names, objects and quantities
in registers. The reader must expect technical analysis involving tables, field maps
and genealogies. We think that the resulting reconstruction of agrarian relations
and administration merits such attention to detail.
By contrast, Chapters 11 and 12 draw on personal interviews and allow easier
narrative reading. The testimony of older villagers in two of the four villages,
Hawwara and Kufr ‘Awan, offers insight into how rights inscribed in registers
were negotiated in real life. Two theoretical issues come to the fore. First, the
character of marital and family life in households appears complexly determined
by the specific political economies in a manner distant from notions of a modular
Muslim family. Second, in Tanzimat law, entitlement to inheritance of miri land
was equal for sons and daughters and the holder of right was not a gendered
category. But the negotiation of this law led to quite different outcomes in the
two distinct political economies. To make sense of these patterns we examine
the work of both women and men and the rights they claimed in the course of
their lives.
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