As regards secrecy, ads follow a curious cycle. While being planned they are kept secret, lest ideas bestolen and used before they are scheduled to appear. Once published or shown on TV, they enter the public domain, they become, as it were, negative models that reduce the value of similar ads that appear later. There is no room in advertising for ancient wisdom’s loss or recovery, no place for the hermeneutic motives that drove both Malinowski and the Taoist Canon’s compilers as they gathered and arranged their texts. There is, at most, nostalgia. Coming full circle again, history is merely historical, something to be either exploited or simply avoided in the endless search for something new.

The central question I address in this chapter is the following: Which is the better metaphor for advertising, religion (as John Sherry suggests in an article that mirrors Geertz on religion in The Interpretation of Cultures) or magic (as Malinowski suggests in Coral Gardens and Their Magic). I summarize the argument as follows,

In the cases examined here, magic shares with advertising the tensions of a highly competitive business, the rewards of success, the fear of defeat, the quiet pleasures of craftsmanship, and the sheer love of the game. Ads, do, indeed, articulate cultural categories and principles (McCracken, 1990). They rarely, if ever, form the basis for solidarity groups; they are public but not collective acts (Schudson, 1993, pp. 159-160). Ads speak for products, companies, or candidates, more rarely on behalf of the public good. They are not produced as ends in themselves. Where religion suggests self-sacrifice and the muting of private wants and desires in favor of ultimate values, magic is selfish, competitive, contested. So is advertising. If we had to choose religion or magic, it feels like magic to me.

This is the context in which I find myself asking, are the secrets that the IPR movement seeks to protect truly collective property to which a people as a whole have a special right, or are they, as Trobriand garden magic was, the property of specific individuals or elites? If the latter is the case, is, for example, a struggle between a shaman who claims to be the discoverer of the potency of a particular herb and a pharmaceutical company that invests in isolating the chemistry of the active ingredient, more or less a human rights issue than, say, the claims of Japanese corporate employees to extra compensation for inventions that have earned their companies billions?

Please note: I am not attempting to adjudicate the rights or wrongs of any particular case. The question is directed at what I see as the underlying assumption in the casual discussions of IPR with which I am only modestly familiar that the rights in question are religious, in a classic Durkheimian sense. They belong to everyone in the affected group. What of the possibility that traditions are being invented to serve particular interests instead of the public good?

P.P.S. In response to Rex: I know of at at least one case of an anthropologist who works in Central America, who was asked by the Native Americans with whom he works to testify on their behalf in a case involving their claim to land now occupied by descendants of black slaves. He was, he told me, forced to decline because his ethnohistorical research demonstrated clearly that the descendants of black slaves had got there first. His people were aiming to acquire land to which their own had become adjacent only in subsequent generations. It was, he confessed over a beer, a tough situation for the anthropologist.

I think they were (and are) under threat; it’s not the realness of risk I question. But the going discourse about the sources of the risk (researchers, and their attention to marginal environments/knowledges/persons) seemed, over time, to me to be entirely misidentified. It was like the anxiety was being focused on agents that happened to be available (and, in fact, vulnerable) while more serious—and more seriously impervious—structural threats were entirely absent from the discussion.

Alex: I am pretty sure that the PTC group would not deny the idea that Melanesians are absolutely invested in making claims to their creations and/or resources. I think the PTC emphasis has been on the enormous diversity of forms of transactability in Melanesia as possibly providing conceptual resources for thinking through problems of transaction and recognition in the hyper-transactional realm of contemporary mass mediated global capitalism. I am pretty sure Michael will want to address some of this.

Michael and Others: ‘Secrecy’ is like a test case for thinking about the problems of cultural appropriation because the terms of the debate are so extreme. Even acknowledging the existence of the secret in a sense might already be to violate its secrecy. I think protocols of secrecy are a special case of the larger or wider problem of public recognition (of either remunerative or simply symbolic kinds) of the sources of value in the cultural creativity of marginal, tribal, indigenous, native, disempowered folks.

btw, so nice to see you at SM Professor Brown!

I hasten to add that I don’t dispute the right of sovereign communities to deny access to ethnographers, nor do I think that anthros have a God-given right to publish whatever we want. Fundamental decency requires attention to local values and sentiments, to say nothing of the safety and reputation of the individuals about whom we write. But for compelling ethical reasons, as well as professional self-respect, we should be prepared to walk away from situations in which fundamental standards of accuracy are compromised.

Admittedly, defining those standards is no easy task. I recall intense conversations many years ago with a colleague who simply refused to write about sorcery-related social strife in a prominent Native nation despite its salience in everyday life. Did his silence about such a prominent feature of their social world constitute a misrepresentation? It’s a tough call.

Suppose, however, that the collaborators in question are, as mine are, employees of one of the world’s largest advertising agencies—or executives of major corporations, or politicians or government officials, members of the Bush administration, or even academic VIPs. Our collaborators assert that they “own” their secrets, and that it would be wrong of us to expose them without their permission. In these cases, when we start to talk about allowing people to vet what we write and start leaving out information or interpretations that they find uncomfortable, when we start keeping their secrets for them, what comes to mind is that fine old phrase “selling out.”

Has any one raised similar issues in discussions of native peoples’ IPR?

That said, I’m still hopeful about prospects for hammering out an acceptable balance between the legitimate needs of groups, including indigenous communities, for some degree of collective privacy and the widespread desire for (reasonably) open access to information. I only remain skeptical about heavy-handed attempts to impose top-down, necessarily bureaucratic “solutions” in the name of heritage protection. I’ll say more about this soon.

In general, yes, security through obscurity is no longer an option. If framed this way, I wonder whether we might get traction on the IPR problem by reconsidering in light of the literature on the death of privacy that flourished in the days of the Internet boom?

Indeed, the onus of making the Internet safe for traditional knowledge is on the putative possessors of “traditional” knowledge themselves; for better or worse it is they who must propose and create alternative ways to control, restrict or circulate that knowledge—and the important part is that the Internet allows them to do this (at least for the time being)—it’s about as agnostic with respect to innovations and possibilities as any technology in memory. But by the same token, this is a huge, difficult challenge which practically speaking most indigenous and traditional groups can’t take on without the help of people who see and understand their dilemma, of which there are clearly too few…