Contesting the value of household property

Abstract

Working households have never owned so much, but the value of their property—especially in the wake of the recent economic crisis, which has priced people out of their homes and devalued their pension savings—is unstable. Liberal economic thought promotes private property as a self-evident vehicle of investment for the future. In contrast, anthropology highlights the social foundations of property, while value theory foregrounds the exigencies of accumulation. Drawing on the latters’ sensitivities and on my fieldwork in Israel on property divisions upon divorce, I examine contested meanings and uses of household property to argue that financialization, a new regime of accumulation that places property values in flux, amplifies tensions in economic liberalism, thereby exposing its ideological underpinnings.