Photo by Rebecca Empson.

Around the world, experiences of ownership are turning toward temporary and contingent forms of possession. This Theorizing the Contemporary series explores temporary possession as both a state imposed by new forms of financialization and governance and a strategy chosen that creates spaces for innovation, experimentation, and world-building. The essays presented suggest that the edges of what is owned and by whom have become blurry and conditional, while the range of ways that people can access resources and assets has proliferated. In light of these diverse forms of temporary possession, the series encourages us to rethink our vocabularies around property and ownership. In doing so, we illuminate the seeds of new worlds-in-becoming within contemporary capitalism.

This series arises, in part, from work carried out by the European Research Council–funded Emerging Subjects Research Group and a workshop at University College London entitled “Rethinking Usufruct in the Global Economy.”

Posts in This Series

Introduction: Temporary Possession

Introduction: Temporary Possession

At a prestigious auction house in London, as the hammer descended to confirm the final offer on a painting, the item in question destroyed itself through a shre... More

Ownership: Changing Concepts and Practices

Ownership: Changing Concepts and Practices

More than a hundred years ago, George B. Newcomb (1886, 598) observed that: Up to the seventeenth century . . . there is frequent mention of societies of person... More

Gleaning

Gleaning

Among the customary use rights that were displaced by industrial modernity, the right to glean is one of the more fascinating. In ancient and feudal societies a... More

High-Frequency Gleaning and Usufruct Freedom

High-Frequency Gleaning and Usufruct Freedom

Bail Bloc is an app that takes about as much computing power as a YouTube video: installed on personal computers, it quietly mines a cryptocurrency called Moner... More

The Properties of Property: Scientific Data

The Properties of Property: Scientific Data

In this essay, I explore how scientific data presents us with a form of temporary possession that calls forth a particular sort of subjectivity. There has been ... More

How Will Temporary Possessions Make Us Happier?

How Will Temporary Possessions Make Us Happier?

It is not just Generation Rent that seeks the flexibility of not owning stuff; all of us living or working in networked cities around the world will have experi... More

Rethinking the Anticommons: Usufruct, Profit, and the Urban

Rethinking the Anticommons: Usufruct, Profit, and the Urban

The lens of usufruct is a productive way through which to anthropologically examine experiences of fast rates of urban growth. Within cities, temporary access t... More

Owning Pets and Possessing Livestock in Indigenous Amazonia

Owning Pets and Possessing Livestock in Indigenous Amazonia

For the Kanamari of Brazilian Amazonia, ownership is the basic relation from which kinship ethics is developed. During interactions with non-Indigenous whites, ... More

On Possession, Use, and Financialized Infrastructure

On Possession, Use, and Financialized Infrastructure

Above is an image created by the activist network Berlin’s Water Table (Berliner Wassertisch) in the lead-up to an unprecedented local referendum in 2011, which... More

Infrastructure-Led Development and the Territorialization of Development Machines

Infrastructure-Led Development and the Territorialization of Development Machines

There is an intensifying geopolitical contest to connect the world by envisioning, financing, and constructing intercity infrastructure. In contrast to the audi... More