Abstract
The lens of U.S. popular culture provided by country and western music and horror films reveals an understanding of property in the United States as complex, contested, and fluid. International scholarship has analyzed property in similar terms. U.S. property relationships are explored here through application of six themes found in the international literature: (1) property as social process, (2) customary tenures, (3) common property and community management of resources, (4) gender, (5) the complexity of tenancy relationships, and (6) land concentration.