Session 13 class discussion - intellectual and cultural property

We opened our discussion with introductory remarks on the session readings noting how most of them (especially Hann) are attempts to situate anthropological discourse on property within the framework of legal theory. This legal discourse separates the individual from the social and we theoretically located this split in the moment that marked the demise of communal property rights and the subsequent rise of the possessive individual. Possessive individualism, we debated was a by-product of industrial revolution in Europe, specifically England. Before such legal institutionalization, property rights were subsumed within kinship systems and relations and individuals did not have independent identities outside of these systems. Ideas of ownership and property claims made within such systems did not rest with ‘autonomous individuals’ as conceptualized by post industrial revolution Western legal discourse. Thus, disposability as one such right of the individual in relation to property is connected more with a post industrial conception of the term. Finally that the notion of ‘individual’ as conceptualized by legal theoretical discourse was in effect ‘dividual’ and property claims made by such ‘dividuals’ were considered ‘bundle of rights’ in objects around them.

The discussion focus then shifted from classical ideas of property and property relations in the context of intellectual and cultural property to circulation and exchange. Property captures people’s relation between themselves and their material environment and thus plays an instrumental role in their attempts at self definition. We also discussed how earlier theoretical engagements with property were always on land whereas contemporary debates on intellectual and cultural property stretches the confines of such boundaries. Property claims and relations in the contemporary world primarily appear to be hegemonic and understood as either hindrances to or promoters of capitalism. We also spoke about how these new notions of IP / CP could be placed within the operational logic of capitalism and seen as powerful capitalist attempts to lay claims over the resources of the third world / Global South and bring them within the capitalist circuit of distribution and exchange of goods, commodities and resources.

 In the second half of the session we engaged with the question of territory and land and discussed how territory was much more than land. In trying to understand this ‘much more’, we grappled with the questions ‘what is territory?’ and ‘how is it different from land?’ Thus how does one attempt to understand territorial claims or cultural claims to territory within a broad and diffused notion of land? In this context we briefly referred to indigenous struggles for rights over land and territory in the face of State oppression and how property claims by indigenous communities seem to be different from territorial claims over land. The questions we asked ourselves while debating this difference were - Is there a difference between notions of place and territory? Can we say a nation state has property rights over its territory? Does a nation state have dispositionary rights over territory? Is territory an abstract concept in contrast with land which appears to be more concrete?

Krupa & Rashmi