Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

PRIVATE PROPERTY 371
descent, property rights are carefully observed. Within measure, however,
tools etc. may be used by anyone in the absence of the owner. 12 Here
we might recall the communal villages described in the preceding
chapter.
In the kibbutzim, property was communal-indeed, in many of the
settlements to a degree that bordered on the impractical. The American
anthropologist M. Spiro observed that small children, who had grown up
in a completely egalitarian social environment in which their parents
were allowed no private property, would first, while playing in their
communal nurseries, for instance (the children are not brought up by
their own parents), quite spontaneously claim things such as toys,
towels, etc., as private property, although at this stage they could
definitely have no such thing. They quarrelled about whose was what
exactly like property-oriented children in a capitalist society. These
children also showed envy. And they knew just what they meant by
'It's mine!' It was only during adolescence that the official ideology
prevailed, being most marked in adults born on the kibbutz, and that
they would begin, when questioned, to deny that there was any value in,
or justification for, private property. 13
The Hutterites in Canada, an extremely communal people, are in an
even stronger position than the adults in a kibbutzim to educate their
children for the propertyless life. Yet John W. Bennett in his most recent
studies of Hutterian Brethren also found, on closer observation, a drive
to acquire personal property, to have and experience it even if 'the
ideology of communal property is so pervasive that queries assuming an
ideology of ownership are not clearly understood.' Hutterites do have
personal property, cherish it, and it is respected (e. g., things such as an
electric razor or some other fancy tool). Bennett observed instances of
'a pure gift to the self, a reflection of a basic acquisitive residue in its
owner's thinking ... almost every Hutterian male known intimately [by
Bennett] owned a few such unnecessary possessions. ,14
12 Ralph Linton, The Tanala. A Hill Tribe of Madagascar (Publications of the
Field Museum of Natural History, Anthropological Series, Vol. 22), Chicago, 1935,
pp. 127 f.
13 M. Spiro, The Children of the Kibbutz, Cambridge (Mass.), 1958, pp. 373-6.
14 John W. Bennett, Hutterian Brethren. The Agricultural Economy and Social Organization
ofa Communal People, Stanford (Calif.), 1967, pp. 171 ff.