The seminar, “The Emergence of Property Concerns’” by Dr. Federico Rossano (University of California, San Diego), was held on 16th November 2021. It was co-organized by the IAfP office, Center for African Area Studies, and “Natural and cultural history of landscape formation in contact zones between hunter-gatherers and agro-pastoralists in Africa (Grant-in-Aid for Scientific
Research(A), Principal investigator: Dr. Akira TAKADA ).” It was held virtually, with Zoom as its platform, and was attended by 29 participants.
In the seminar, Dr. Rossano discussed the similarities and differences of property concerns between humans and non-human primates. He explained the changes in property concerns during the developmental stages of human children using video examples of everyday child-rearing situations and psychological experiments. He also showed the cultural differences on the property, such as the first possession heuristic that is not universal, using a cross-cultural comparison of phycological experiments conducted in the U.S., Germany, Namibia, Kenya, Argentina, and India. Finally, he indicated the uniqueness of the human property, or the supposedly social norms of property, by comparing the results of the experiments with primates. In the Q&A session, a lively discussion ensued, covering various perspectives, including primatology, interactionism, and developmental psychology.
