Originally published in GRAIN, Seedling, January 2005 (http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=315)

Aldo Gonzalez is an indigenous person from the Mexican state of Oaxaca, where community organisations are leading a major resistance movement against the contamination of native maize by transgenic seeds. The movement is guided by the ancestral relationships between people and their natural surroundings. Politically, the resistance movement is linked to the struggle for autonomy by and for local communities, and is rooted in a particular indigenous vision of the world. In Oaxaca and in other Mexican states, defending maize is a cornerstone of defending a community’s autonomy.

Bradley Bryan 13 Can. J. L. & Jurisprudence 3 (2000)

In this paper I argue that a comparison of English and Aboriginal property yields insights into the ontologically specific grounds that inform institutionalized socio-cultural practices like property. Where the foundations of English conceptions of property are highly rationalistic, Aboriginal conceptions eschew categorization and are indicative of a highly nuanced and different way of understanding the worldliness of a human being. As such, a comparison of such conceptions becomes not simply a comparison of ways of owning and possessing, but a cross-cultural comparison of ways of relating to the world at large for what are ostensibly economic purposes.