Alexander Goldenweiser on intellectual property

I am newly back from the blog, having been duly Merged and Acquired. I’ll post reading notes on our next slice of Tsing soon, but just thought I’d take a second here for a hobby of mine — tracking down the Boasians as they write about intellectual property. I’ve mentioned Robert Lowie’s take on this, and many of the early textbook writers included something about IP in the ‘property’ section of their book. The other day I checked out Goldenweiser’s 1937 volume Anthropology: An Introduction To Primitive Culture from my uni’s library (the first person to do so in over thirty years!) and found this little passage on page 149…

Another conspicuous fact regarding primitive property is the extension of proprietary ideas to things other than material and the apparent ease with which this extension is achieved. Primitives own not only houses and boats, pots and baskets, tools and weapons, but also such things as dances, songs, stories, magical rites and formulae, individual names, and even guardian spirits. Here again individual instances need not be cited because the fact is universal. Myths, rituals, medicinal practices, dances, songs, are owned among the Pacific Coast Indians in teh same sense in which they own material property; the same is true among Malinowski’s Trobrianders, and what applies to these two regions is true everywhere. This spirtual or functional property, like its material counterpart, refers either to groups or to particular individuals. Thus a religious society will own its ritualistic technique, its stories, myths, dances and songs; but certain songs, dances, stories, and magical rites will also be owned by individuals.
This extension of the proprietary domain to things other than material is especially interesting in so far as it illustrates the characteristic facility with which the primitive mind travels from the material to the psychic, the relatively slight distinction it draws between things which exist as substance and others that are mere acts or ideas.

This last sentence has a footnote which reads:

This is, of course, a field made familiar in more recent days by the problems arising in connexion with the right to the products of one’s own mind, the right of authorship with its accruing benefits, the right to an invention, both as idea and as its material embodiment, the right to a thougth or an expression used in writing. The fact that there are such things in the modern world as infringement of a patent or copyright, stealing of someone’s play, plagiarizing another’s ideas, quoting from another’s writing without quotation marks, and the further fact that these things or acts are generally condemned by the modern conscience, indicate that the concept of ownership of property other than material has gained recognition among us, or is headed that way. It mae be added, however, that this entire field of our culture, as well as the fights and litigations to which it has led, would impress the primitives as very strange and perhaps incomprehensible. To them these things are prefectly obvious, and they might well be inclined to condemn us as crude, undiscerning, or unsophisticated, for making so much fuss about it.

Rex

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His book Leviathans at The Gold Mine has been published by Duke University Press. You can contact him at rex@savageminds.org

5 thoughts on “Alexander Goldenweiser on intellectual property

  1. You will have to pardon my ignorance of your field (I am an engineering student), but I was curious as to your take on the Goldenweiser quote? He was my great-grandfather, and I have recently been discovering his writings… what are your thoughts on this excerpt, especially in the context of Boas and the rights of “primatives” to their cultures?

  2. Well I think the distinction between ‘primitive’ people and ‘civilized’ people and its implications is morally disgusting. That said, Goldenweiser really was one of the most outre of the Boasians — which is saying something! When I was at Reed there were still stories about him and it had been 60 years since he had taught there! That textbook also includes a section called “the white man’s burden” which is about the crippling effects of colonialism on the colonized, which is unusually vocal, even for Boasians.

    What I find amazing, analytically, is that in the quote Goldenweiser manages to somehow use the example of intellectual property existing in both ‘civilized’ and ‘primitive’ societies as a way of differentiating the two, rather than seeing them as similar. I think maybe this is partially the result of Goldenweiser’s ignorance of the long history of intellectual property laws in the anglophone tradition, which was about 220 years old when he was writing.

  3. A prototype theory explanation might be more apropro. When Goldenweiser was writing the prototype of property, even in that anglophone legal tradition, was still real estate and its most immediate extension gold or heavy machinery. The movies were still new and still confined to celluloid film and theaters. TV was still a pipe dream and the Internet unimagined. The explosion of interest in intellectual property law in the last couple of decades that makes Goldenweiser’s amazement that intangibles like songs and stories could be treated as property sound so out of it–that was still a long way in the future.

    Do you know by the way the now out of print classic The Knowledge Executive by Harlan Cleveland? It was this wonderful little book that first alerted me to the impending collision between traditional property law–a law of “things”–and ownership issues raised by exchanges of information.

    The problem is that a thing is something such that if I give it to you, I no longer have it. A bit of information is something such that if I give it to you, then we both have it. The ramifications are endless.

  4. I’m very interested in The Knowledge Executive — thanks for the reccomendation.

    I’m not sure it’s so easy to write off Goldenweiser’s amazement as ignorance, though. He was a serious musician himself and I’m sure he’d have run into the various royalty schemes that arose in the publication business with the rise of (among other things) player pianos. Additionally, he was author, so copyright wouldn’t have been unknown to him. And also this was written during and after the movie industry’s migration to California for IP reasons (among others).

    Just because something is a good does not mean it is necessarily a rivalrous good. A song is still a thing even if anyone can learn it. Nonrivalrous goods raise interesting questions — especially our ability to MAKE them rivalrous even when the means of distribution (hearing) don’t entail it. But the thingness of a thing and its ability to be shared are two different subjects. Or so I think.

  5. I’m not that familiar with him, but my take…

    I guess it depends on how you interpret the last few sentences. If we take for granted that the ‘primitive’ people do not draw a distinction “between things which exist as substance and others that are mere acts or ideas” (whether that is true or not is another question), then they can be constrated to so-called ‘civilized’ societies. Even now, with “intellectual property” becoming a common term (interesting to note it does not appear as a phrase in the quote AT ALL), there is still debate about whether you can own ideas/music/etc and what that means. So, its not unreasonable to see how the example could be used as a contrast–especially since a Boasian (badly caricaturing) would be interested in cross-cultural difference rather than anything suggesting a “universal”.

    As far as the ‘primitive’… kind of makes you cringe now, but that is really anachronistic i think. It was just how anthropology was written at the time. Now people would probably write “traditional societies” and nobody would blink.

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