Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

11 | A village of the plains: Hawwara
Tapu registration entailed a grid where the person and object of property title
were laid out in columns. The person so registered was identified by name, but
beyond what a name might express in itself, the category of owner was not
gendered in the law and the register. The object owned was entered in the register
as a bounded and measured stretch of land, or frequently, in recognition of a
different form of abstraction, as shares in land. In law and in the register, the
reproduction of both person and object were guaranteed. A name was substituted
for another in case of sale, gift or succession after a death. Equally, an entry in the
column of land would continue against the name of the new owner, subdivided
perhaps, but traceable backwards through a chain of references to earlier entries
in the registers.
It is only in the register that person and object appear in such individualized
legal genealogies; in the village, they belonged to skeins of different density:
households, co-cultivating groups, networks of marital exchange, and village-level
institutions. These were the frameworks for production, on which rested taxation
and therefore ultimately property. To chart these social networks we have had to
draw on other sources: the civil register (nüfus) arranged by households, court
records, including those derived from the court hearings in a village at the time
of the Mandate cadastre, the tax register where different forms of real property
are listed under a single holder, and lastly, the memory of older villagers.
On the basis of these sources, the next two chapters trace the history of particular
families, their property and production, in Hawwara and Kufr ‘Awan.
Farming in Hawwara
One share of land in Hawwara required two plough teams of oxen; thus
the 12 holders with two shares in 1876 would each have needed four plough
teams of cattle, and for each team a strong man as ploughman. These are large
exploitations. It is the plough team or faddan which provides the idiom for land,
a full share or rub‘a being a double faddan. 1 In the words of two farmers, ‘As
for ploughing, a faddan, that is, a thumna or 12 qirat, took about 25 days to
plough with an ox team; with one horse, it took about 25 days to plough nine
qirat of land. Six qirat took 10–12 days with an ox team. But the land was laid
out in strips, a mi‘na being the length of a stretch ploughed at one go, about
50–60 metres long, as people divided up the very long strip into sections (al-maris
yaqta‘u-hu qit‘a qit‘a).’ 2
Cultivating units held many plots: 31 in 1895 and between five to nine in the
1933 cadastre. The work schedule of pre-planting and seeding was demanding of
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