Notes for session on intellectual and cultural property

Hann’s 1998 introductory chapter on the embeddedness of property sets out the history and spread of private property in anthropology against the backdrop of capitalism and neoliberalism. He notes that the explicit specification of private property rights is seen as an important condition for improved economic performance and healthy societies. He states that there is no common accepted definition of property – a common definition is to consider it a thing over which one has exclusive ownership but in theory it is not a thing but the rights over things which guarantee a future income stream. He looks at it as distribution of  social entitlements so that it can be investigated anywhere in space and time. Decisive moments in the history of property, atleast in England, he says can be variously attributed to the enclosure  movement (Thompson) or 18 century industrial revolution or the Speenhamland law. The idea of possessiveness originated in 17 century England with Hobbes and Locke, while the anthropological background can be attributed  to Henry Maine who defined property as a ‘bundle of rights’ that defies ‘exact circumscription’. It is only in the late 19^th century in the USA, property ownership became a basic human right and precondition for full  citizenship.

Strathern in the chapter ‘Divisions of Interest and Languages of Ownership’ approaches the question of property in its contemporary form, where the boundaries between things and persons are increasingly getting blurred, and property claims are made on new objects that are brought into existence. She tries to understand the contemporary moment by placing it within the anthropological debates about gift exchange and property relations. Starting off from the proposition that property is a set of relations, she delineates the anthropological complexity of the question by problematizing the categories that anthropologists use as tools of analysis and understanding. Thinking through the question of property within the discipline of anthropology in this chapter, she states that her intention is to historically locate the analytical constructs that are deployed within the discipline to understand property relations as they manifest in different societies. So the problem she grapples with in this chapter is not just the cultural differences but cultural differences punctuated by time and historical change (look at the cultural difference from the contemporary location and time, reflect on the historicity of the analytical frames deployed and see what it does to the anthropological understanding of the exchange relations in the society that one studies). Her chapter on intellectual property elaborates the notion of divisions of interest that she discusses in the earlier chapter. Using the tools of Actor Network Theory and pushing it further to complicate the relations between not only people and things but also relations among people, the chapter offers insights into the workings of property relations as people define and describe themselves in relation to things and people by acting on them. She considers persons as ‘actants’ to “plead a special case not for human agency but for the diversity of social heterogeneities which people create out of extensions of themselves”. By inviting us to look at the nature of property relations in intellectual property, she points to an important shift where the relations are defined not by the nature of possession but creation. In tandem with ANT and its modes of analysis, she shows how social heterogeneities are created out of conflicting and contradictory interests that people have, and the claims those interests give rise to in relation to things. So the controversies that unleash around intellectual property emerge when international interests give rise to different polarizations. The allocation of property rights becomes a contentious problem in which claims are pitted against counter claims and alternative appeals rooted in the notions of cultural knowledge. Thus commodity transaction and commercial interests are pitted against alternative appeals of collective interests and sharing rooted in the cultural values of communities bring to the fore power dynamics between technology rich and technology poor societies. Indigenous community (in this particular case Papua New Guineans) uses the same logic of property to reclaim those aspects of culture and society which are propertied by the powerful international interests. Identity claims to contest the intellectual property rights over certain things uses ‘compensation’ as an organizing and operational logic to mobilize the indigenous populace against the powerful intellectual property regimes.

This last point by Strathern resonates with the ideas put forth by Pearson in his article. The expansion of intellectual property regime through bilateral trade agreements with global South and the notion of defending life against IP (central to the Costa Rican campaign) is one such contestation where social heterogeneities claiming expertise of various kinds put forth conflicting claims and counterclaims while articulating the nature of property relations for natural resources. Strathern’s insights are also helpful in understanding the controversy involving New Zealand toy stores and Maori lawyers representing indigenous Polynesian cultures.

The essay by Coombe echoes the ideas discussed by Strathern in her post script to the chapter on intellectual property. Coombe looks at indigenous people or rather communities. Her concern  is with property holders (not necessarily owners) being constituted as social actors and political  agents.  She uses the example of the Andean term ‘ayllu’ which is often glossed as ‘community’ to make the point  that grassroots priorities end up being shaped by foreign/global actors. She is alive to the fact that indigenous people may have their own agenda to fulfil while they ally with international bodies against their domestic authorities. Further the need to position themselves as free autonomous agents in the neo-liberal world has  resulted in indigenous people positioning their land, resources and knowledge as values in an environmental market (Astrid Ulloa – her work on Columbian SNSM). Consequently systems of IP were developed to extend the market mechanism into an ever-wider range of cultural activities in the name of  obtaining benefits to local people as well from the market led ‘social capitalisation’ of traditional  knowledge. Paradoxically while neo-liberalism aspires to foster globalization, entrepreneurship and marketisation, it seeks local partners inciting the articulation of diverse sites of community that emphasise collective citizenship. She acknowledges that community as a concept, though (neoliberal?) construct, a naturalised and normative term, a dangerous fiction, needs to be acknowledged. She likes to use the term 'community' for its political and legal purchase it offers.

By Krupa and Rashmi