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.

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.

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.

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.