Using court records of legal disputes over transfers of land, this article explores the way transfers of landed property have impacted social relationships and the governance of land rights in Ghana in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As urbanization, commercial agriculture, and natural resource extraction pushed up the value of land, disputes over land ownership have multiplied. In adjudicating such disputes, courts are often confronted with claims based on unverifiable oral histories invoking events of the distant past. Rather than simply dismiss such forms of evidence as hearsay, judges have often supplemented them with documentary and/or oral evidence on recent histories of land use. By doing so, they have tended to sustain customary forms of ownership, effectively recognizing the authority of landholding collectivities such as families and stools alongside that of individual owners. In effect, they are inferring ownership from land use, inverting the standard economic argument.

中文翻译：

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像主人一样行事：二十世纪加纳的土地索赔和司法实践

本文利用土地转让法律纠纷的法庭记录，探讨了在 20 世纪和 21 世纪初，土地财产转让如何影响加纳的社会关系和土地权利治理。随着城市化、商业化农业和自然资源开采推高了土地价值，土地所有权纠纷成倍增加。在裁决此类纠纷时，法院经常面临基于无法证实的口述历史援引遥远过去事件的主张。法官不是简单地将此类证据视为传闻，而是经常用关于最近土地使用历史的文件和/或口头证据来补充它们。通过这样做，他们倾向于维持习惯的所有权形式，有效地承认家庭和凳子等土地集体的权力以及个人所有者的权力。实际上，他们是从土地使用中推断所有权，颠倒了标准的经济论点。