NATURE AND SOCIAL RELATIONS: THE FORM OF PROPERTY OF A JAPANESE MURA

Abstract

Using both historical and current data, this paper considers how the residents of a traditional Japanese village (mma) community on the shores of Lake Biwa in Japan experience their ambient “nature, “focusing on the contrast between modern (Western, as adopted by Meiji) property rights and traditional “primitive property” perspectives. Primitive property does not differentiate between resources and the people who are recognized by the community as entitled to use them. Hence relations between people and nature are also between people within a community and are validated as well as sustained by the gaze (visual monitoring and validation) of the mura. They are also premised, especially for women, upon membership in the community as a “full-fledged person “. It would seem that traditional villages managed their resource base sustainably because they did not externalize “nature “from society in the way that modern property rights allow.