Alienation

Alienation is the process by which individuals and communities grasp themselves through external objects and figures in which they have invested their existence. In this account, property is not merely a store of useful things: land, tools, and inheritance become concrete embodiments of identity, enabling human beings to experience themselves as enduring and distinct while binding that self-understanding to systems of possession and descent.

From collective identity to individual possession

Before the individual can claim property as an expression of singular identity, the self must become thinkable as autonomous and separate. In an earlier collective order, people experience themselves through the clan and its shared realities, including the totem, mana, and territory. The discovery of bronze and the labor of making and using tools help a person experience himself as a creator who can master resistance in the natural world. Yet tools alone do not explain the desire for ownership: the subject must already seek to affirm his existence, and must seek himself in something outside himself.

The clan, in turn, encounters its own existence in the totem, mana, and land it occupies. As the individual separates from the community, mana becomes individualized in the chief and then in each member; people also seek to appropriate land, tools, and crops. By losing himself in these possessions, the individual finds a tangible image of himself in them. Property can consequently acquire an importance comparable to life itself: it is both something the person controls and an external form in which that person recognizes his existence.

Land, descendants, and continuity

Settlement and agriculture give this outward investment a durable social form. Where nomadic thought centers on the present moment, agricultural communities conceive of a life rooted in the past and extending into the future. The clan identifies itself with its territory, which persists through time, and with its descendants, who will inherit and cultivate the land. Its unity is no longer only a present gathering: the community seeks to survive beyond its members’ lifetimes through the property it passes on.

This enduring identification helps explain the historical association of clan, family, and property. The ancestor who gives the clan its name is venerated, while descendants embody the community’s continued existence. In this structure, land is not just a resource. It becomes the material form through which a group recognizes itself as continuous, and inheritance the means by which that continuity is projected into the future.

Alienation and women’s subordination

Alienation also clarifies why the account does not treat private property as a sufficient, stand-alone cause of women’s oppression. The rise of agriculture can initially give women considerable prestige: children matter greatly in a settled society, motherhood is made sacred, and women may remain members of their own clans. In communal arrangements, marriage need not create a mystical bond or make a wife a servant; the clan shares its territory and its collective identity. The mother’s importance is reinforced by beliefs that children enter her body through ancestral or sacred forces, and by the fact that children may belong to her clan and bear her name.

With the patriarchal order, however, property and lineage become linked to the father’s continued presence in the world. Property outlasts its owner only if it remains with individuals recognized as extensions of him; heirs therefore have a duty to cultivate paternal land and honor the father’s spirit. The system does not merely transfer possessions. It organizes descent so that a man’s identity, embodied in property, can continue through his family.

This logic excludes women from inheritance and from the transmission of property. If a woman’s children are assigned to their father’s group, they have no recognized link to her birth group; marriage annexes her to her husband’s family, whose domestic divinities she must accept. Her exclusion from succession is presented as a way to prevent her from carrying her paternal family’s wealth into her husband’s line. The result is a reversal of the earlier pattern: because she owns nothing, she is herself treated as part of a man’s patrimony, first her father’s and then her husband’s. Alienation thus illuminates both the human attachment to property and the way patriarchal inheritance turns that attachment into a structure of women’s subordination.