Tag Archives: Culture Notes

Anthropology does IPR, Part 2

A curious development in the struggle to protect traditional knowledge (TK) from unwanted exploitation by outsiders is a strategy called “defensive publishing.” This largely applies to the realm of the patent, not copyright or trademark, because patents are supposed to be granted only for processes, substances, or devices that are truly novel. (There are other criteria as well, but they needn’t concern us here).

If you can prove that something isn’t novel, that it has been known and used for a long time, then it can’t be patented.

To defend traditional knowledge from exploitative patenting, then, there are two basic and fundamentally opposed choices under existing law: define it as a trade secret or protect it in plain view. The goal of the latter is to establish that patent applicants who make use of this information fail to meet the novelty standard.

Although the trade-secrets approach sounds promising, and some legal scholars argue that it’s the way to go for the protection of traditional IPR, it has certain problems. For one thing, a lot of TK isn’t especially secret. It is, almost by definition, in wide circulation within a society. Trade-secrets laws typically say that anyone who can duplicate trade secrets independently–say, through reverse engineering–is free to use them. Still, one can argue that the Aboriginal “keeping-places” emerging in Australia, repositories for TK that have strict rules of access, follow something like a trade-secrets approach. To a more limited extent, protocols for the use of Native American TK in American archives are moving in a similar direction.

The plain-view approach has been adopted in a few important cases–notably, that of Ayurveda, which is documented by the Indian government in the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library. (Site is publicly accessible but requires a simple registration.) The idea is to establish “prior art” and therefore refute claims of novelty.

Yet as the sociologist Sita Reddy has argued in a provocative essay, “Making Heritage Legible,” just published in the International Journal of Cultural Property, the conversion of Ayurvedic tradition into a database generates all manner of contradictions and conflicts.
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Ten Canoes

Ten CanoesRadio Australia had a nice feature about the film Ten Canoes last week (unfortunately, I can’t find the program online). It is the first feature film made entirely in an indigenous Australian language. The film is based in large part on the work of Donald Thomson and the program I heard included relatively long readings of Thomson’s ethnography. Ten Canoes won a special jury prize last year at Cannes and is Australia’s entry for ‘Best Foreign Language Film’ at the Academy Awards this year.

The producers maintain a pretty cool website here. The site includes interactive media, press, and background materials that are interesting. I haven’t seen the film but I really look forward to doing so.

Other Developments in the Modernity of Kinship

Apart from questions of prescription and description (or representation and practice) embedded in such questions as what counts as ‘cousin marriage’ here and there, and to what extent endogamous marriage strategies have property as the primary motivating interest, styles of reflexively-apprehended ‘kinship’ come to stand for whole sets of values and traditions, as noted below in Kerim’s post and responses.

As, for example, in places like the United States. The semiosphere (I really hate the term ‘blogosphere’) has lately been aflame with debates about gay parenting, prompted especially by Mary Cheney’s announcement that she and her partner are having a child. The symbolism is profound of course: here, at the very heart of one of the most consequentially anti-gay administrations in U.S. history (rivaled on anti-gay terms I think only by the Clinton administration), is a gay family. It’s rather uncanny how gays keep erupting on the putatively anti-gay Republican scene (Mark Foley, anyone?).

The properness of gay parenting was recently the subject of a controversial piece in Time magazine by James Dobson, who runs the conservative moralist group Focus on the Family (and who recently had his own uncanny encounter with the homo when his ‘friend’ Ted Haggard was forced out of the closet). The piece is controversial not only because it constitutes something of a personal attack on Mary Cheney and her decision to become a mother, but also because it misconstrues social research in order to argue that same-sex parental couples damage children. Carol Gilligan has released a letter calling on Dobson to cease citing her work in support of his argument that children can only properly be raised by their own biological father and mother. (To my mind, a rather odd gesture, since one of the hazards of publishing is that people are free to read and interpret your work as they like.) I actually think the best response to Dobson’s piece has been Saletan’s at Slate. (Saletan’s ‘Human Nature’ column is consistently fascinating.) Saletan points out that the real danger to children isn’t gay parents, it’s men.

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Witches and Boxes

As I am not teaching this year my engagement with ideas is coming largely through the things I am reading , rather than through dialogue with students. Its actually the need to understand something in order to explain it to another person which provides me with a good starting point for an ongoing engagement with a topic or theme, an engagement which generally goes way beyond whatever the original class topic was about. My tendency to drift along avenues of interest now runs relatively unchecked without the discipline of having to refocus on the core issues which I would have to address in a course. There are losses from this, a certain fragmentation in reading and thinking which may seem to jeopardize the likelihood of having any coherent thoughts about anything. But there have been enormous gains in the sense of freedom from the constraints of normative connections which one usually makes, enmeshed within the silos of what have come to count as discrete topics and issues in anthropology which have become entrapped within particular discursive frameworks and literatures.

I have written here before about the problem of witchcraft, the way in which anthropology has construed this as primarily an intellectual problem, as a problem of interpretation. Partially escaping the closed circuits of anthropological approaches to the phenomenon is enabling me to embark on some different thinking in relation to witchcraft, different at least in terms of my own approaches to it. I gave a paper last week looking at witchcraft as an instance of moral re-categorization- so far so usual. But by comparing the social effects of this reordering of obligations and households with social policies in nineteenth century Britain and France a clear parallel emerges in relation to transformations in the kinds and content of social relations which go into making up, literally, modern economies. So witchcraft appears (or is made to appear) not so much as a critique of capitalist reordering, as a modality for its achievement.

My freedom to think outside the box comes by making my boxes bigger, and situating them in different stacks of other kinds of boxes. Interestingly, this expansionary capacity is what anthropology seemed to have once effected for other disciplines, particularly, and perhaps paradoxically, at the very time when anthropology was at its most insular and when its representation of the Other was most totalising. Perhaps this was because it seemed to offer such solid alternative propositions of different cultural worlds. In the current context of course these multiple worlds are invoked within and outside anthropology. Given the increasing singularity of anthropology today it may be that its only outside of it that we can get different takes on how these may be perceived and apprehended.

Marriage Today

I have been intending to keep my kinship course moving between contemporary concerns and classic theory. We have been carefully tracking kinship theory from its beginnings in Morgan (19th century) to its apotheosis in a text dedicated to him (Lévi-Strauss’s Elementary Structures). A question remains: How does this stuff relate to debates in the world today?

Our reading this week spotlights concerns that feminist anthropologists have articulated in relation to gender and especially gender inequality. Today, debates the world over swirl around relations between men and women in neoliberal (yep!) and/or postcolonial contexts. For example, ‘kinship’ or ‘domestic relations’ are often seen to be the locus classicus of ‘tradition’ in rapidly modernizing societies. New found freedoms for women often run up against calls to maintain tradition in particular ways, calls that are not infrequently resisted by those who are subject to them. How are women ideologically positioned (often) as embodying tradition?  What do they say about that?

I am highlighting two themes for going forward:

1) “Choice” / “Agency”

Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of alliance challenges ‘enlightenment’ or ‘liberal’ views of the human subject: Is the subject a person who is author of his/her own actions, as one who ‘owns’ oneself? The challenge presented by prescriptive marriage systems for those of us raised in Euro-American cultures is precisely to imagine a version of humanity in which the exercise of agency is not necessarily equated with ‘choice.’ Do people make their social worlds (author them) or are they made by those worlds?

2) “Nature” / “Substance”

Lineage theory relates ‘natural’ relations (genealogy) to political structure. Putatively ancestral relations give form to political disputes and their resolution. In large part, lineage theory was motivated by the attempt to find state-like regulative functions in societies without states. Can this theory and its interests be re-applied to our understandings of government in places like Europe or North America? Segmentation can be abstracted to talk about alliances between political units in broad contexts. More concrete, perhaps, are the ways in which familial metaphors and notions of ancestry give form to the imagination of ‘nations.’ One can think about lineage theory in the context of nationalism and ethnicity for example (and see Horowitz or Lakoff).

These issues come together in contemporary debates about reproductive technologies and reproductive rights. Finland is presently debating legal limits on artificial insemination. To whom should this technology be made available? Single women? Lesbian couples? How are debates about its legality framed? I suggest that ‘nature’ and ‘marriage’ as they are conceived and critiqued in anthropological kinship theory can be brought to bear on these questions. Debates about alternative family forms often rest on notions of what is naturally human, spiraling nature from the question of bodily relations of particular (as modified by technology) kinds up into the domain of the putative structures that allow for the emergence of ‘culture’ (or Culture).

Separately, I am sure that I wasn’t the only one who noticed the recent New York Times piece on minghun marriages in China. Here we have questions of tradition, gender norms, and religious practice played out in an ‘exotic’ context. A link is here.
The ‘modernity of kinship’ (cf. the modernity of witchcraft) is found in debates about ‘ghost marriages.’ Society is reordered. But are the ancestors?

Identification Overload

Paltrow

This strikes me as a rather silly/heavy photo: Gwyneth Paltrow with face paint embracing the cause of AIDS in Africa. When I first encountered the “I AM AFRICAN” campaign, it was Brazilian supermodel Giselle making the statement. There is a news story about the campaign — designed to promote a charity that will pay for anti-retrovirals in poor countries — here. Yesterday, thumbing through GQ magazine, I saw Sting proclaiming “I AM AFRICAN,” with golden dust scattered across his face. It’s around.

Earlier on SM, I asked what kinds of persons and publics HIV (as a virus laden with meaning) summons. Here’s one: the sympathetic celebrity in ‘cross-cultural,’ possibly ‘cross-racial,’ drag. To me, this campaign echoes Kenneth Cole’s “We All Have AIDS” campaign for awareness. Some kind of shift has occured, we’re not in the 80s anymore, or even the 90s. People now identify with the virus, people who may or may not have it. Clearly the goal of these campaigns is to combat the stigma associated with HIV so that people might more readily get tested and seek treatment. These days, as one friend reported to me, people without HIV are even wearing “HIV+” t-shirts at international conferences. Is HIV fashionable? And what configuration of fashion/celebrity/global concern has yielded this image? What has made HIV safe for this sort of identification? What does it mean? A few more questions here: to what extent does this imagery hail a public that already has HIV in it? Is the infected public imagined to be elsewhere or is it imagined to be ‘here’? How are people with HIV addressed? To my mind these are important questions for thinking about HIV prevention because campaigns and images like this one exist in a field of messages that also includes calls to get tested and to use condoms, among other things.

In the Flesh in the Museum

Representations of Indians in American Natural History Museums

Preface: The recent posts on Ota Benga and the popular museum reminded me of an essay I had wanted to post last year when Kerim posted about the Bavarian village in display in Africa. I had prepared it for posting last year, but for some reason never did. The essay deals with the display of living people, and particularly native North and South Americans, in ethnographic/educational contexts — not the sideshow, but the museum and the culture fair.

“There are Indians in the Museum of Natural History,” writes Danielle LaVaque-Manty (2000: 71) “And there aren‘t any other kinds of people.” The particular Museum of Natural History LaVaque-Manty is speaking of is the Ruthven Museum of Natural History at the University of Michigan, but she could easily be describing any number of natural history museums throughout the United States—the American Museum of Natural history in New York City, the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, the Peabody Museum at Harvard, the Phoebe Hearst Museum in Berkeley, the Field Museum in Chicago, and so on. Since their respective inceptions, mostly in the latter half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, the American natural history museum has played a privileged role in the presentation and representation of American Indians1 to an American public largely defined in ambiguous counterpoint to the savage mannequins held at bay behind the plate glass of the museum display. Whether cast as the noble Redman sadly disappearing before the onslaught of civilization or as the savage heathen to be forcibly converted or eliminated entirely, the removal or disappearance of American Indians was a necessary prerequisite to the occupation by white settlers of the American land. The museum became, oft times literally so, the last refuge of the “wild” Indian, at the same time that the possession of the Indian in the museum came to stand for exactly the possession of the land that made the “wild” Indian an anachronism, an echo of a time not before the settlers came, but of a time entirely removed from the history of America, a time when America was, indeed, an entirely different and new world.

This paper deals with the presentation of Indians in the American museum. Continue reading →

Grand Theft Auto music survey

A former acquaintance, Kiri Miller, is conducting “a study at the University of Alberta on radio stations in Grand Theft Auto”:http://www.ualberta.ca/~kmmiller/gtasurvey.html. If you’ve ever played GTA and listened to the radio, please spread the word about the survey and fill it out yourself!

The End of Marriage

The idea that marriage is under attack and needs defending is a central tenet of the so-called “culture wars”. The meaning and importance of marriage is central not only to efforts to ban same-sex marriage, but to pro-life politics, father’s rights advocacy, abstinence-only sex education, the “mommy wars”, and pretty much the entirety of contemporary conservative politics. The (wholly imaginary) good old days that conservatives want to conserve is essentially a time when (straight, lifelong, twin-bedded) marriage was the fount of all that is good in society. And everything that is bad about today’s society – teen pregnancy, street violence, welfare dependency, the spread of STDs, sexual predators roaming the Internet, even terrorism, is traced by said conservatives, directly or indirectly, to the decline and degradation of the institution of marriage.

Now, to anthropologists, the way marriage is discussed and deployed in these debates is laughable. We know that marriage as conceptualized by the American religious right at the dawn of the 21st century is neither the only – or even a particularly common – form of marriage in the world, nor the way marriage has always been in our own society. The Biblical marriage that religious conservatives hold up as their example and guiding principle would be (and is) almost universally condemned by today’s Christians. Jacob, the central patriarch of the Biblical Hebrews, would be jailed as a bigamist today; the acceptance of Utah into the Union on the condition that they outlaw polygamy is demonstration enough that we view Biblical marriage norms as literally un-American. Marriage today is drastically different than it was even a century ago, even a half-century ago. A small extremist fringe contingent apart, few Americans would consider the marriage-as-property-arrangement attitude of the 19th century to be truly reflective of our modern notions of freedom and individual fulfillment. And hardly anyone would advocate a return to the way marriage was in the 1950’s, when teen pregnancy was at its peak and fully 1 of 3 marriages involved a pregnant bride. Whatever one thinks of single parenting, I find it unlikely that most Americans would prefer marriage to be thought of primarily as something teenagers do when they get knocked up.
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30 Days of Cinétrance

One of the hardest things to do when teaching visual anthropology is to get students to understand the constructed nature of reality. Although still difficult, this is easier to do when talking about written texts. Students are inclined to believe what they see with their own eyes. One reason for this might be the fact that students are regularly asked to produce written texts, but rarely asked to manipulate images. Reality TV is not the phenomenon here in Taiwan that it is in the US, but one strategy I often use is to discuss the efforts of reality TV writers to unionize. As one union official put it:

“The secret about reality TV isn’t that it’s scripted, which it is,” Mr. Petrie said in a statement. “The secret is that reality TV is a 21st-century telecommunications industry sweatshop.”

Such scripting doesn’t entail writing dialog so much as fitting existing dialog into a standard three-act narrative arc. Or even creating situations designed to ensure that the narrative moves in a certain direction.

Despite the fact that one of the prime motivations for producing reality TV is saving costs on writers and actors, it does seem to draw heavily from the social sciences. Specifically, experiments in social psychology. Interestingly, while it would now be considered a gross breach of professional ethics to engage in the kind of social experimentation we see regularly on reality TV, it is somehow OK if we do it for the camera. (In much the same way that paying someone to engage in sexual acts is illegal if done privately, but perfectly legal if done for film or TV.)
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The Tablet Computer and the Native Girl

This wacky Taiwanese computer ad features a Westerner with a tablet computer encountering Aborigines in Taiwan’s forest. My students pointed out that the Aborigines are wearing Tzou inspired outfits, dancing Amis dances, and living in Paiwan houses. But somehow they didn’t think it was strange that the Aborigines are living in the past, while the Westerner has a fancy computer. (And I’m not even getting into the strange sexual narrative.) In fact, my guess is that Taiwan’s Aborigines have more computers and cell phones than your average town in rural America.

Via Wandering to Tamshui, who also has a nice post on the surprising economics of “spirit money” in Taiwan.

A Thin Hypothesis About Fat People

Ampersand at Alas, a Blog takes on some recent research about obesity and dieting, shredding to pieces some of the myths that persist about the health effects of being fat. Despite all the efforts of the diet industry — a $30 billion a year industry according to NAAFA (the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance), making it bigger than Hollywood, pro sports, even porn — clinical research repeatedly shows no benefit from dieting (except in specific cases such as diabetes). What’s more, losing weight — any amount of weight, at any time in your life — significantly increases the likelihood of death. In fact, it appears that “healthy” people actually have a higher mortality rate than “unhealthy” fat people — that is, people with lower BMIs (body mass indexes) are more likely to die than even people who are significantly overweight!
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New York London Paris Munich

Everybody’s talkin’ ’bout pop music. We haven’t had any music blogging here of late, and this isn’t particularly culturalogical, but anyway: “Miranda!”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00079LWGU/sr=8-1/qid=1144429421/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-9389056-8219021?%5Fencoding=UTF8 is a great, great, great Argentine pop band if you have a yen for lovely, lovely, lovely pop music (and who does not?). Sin Restricciones is one of the only CDs I’ve bought in years that actually makes a case for the album format: I had two favorite songs that I listened to over and over again; but instead of then getting tired of those two songs and putting aside the rest of the CD, I moved on to two new favorite songs, and then to two others, and then to two others, so that to date I have ended up obsessively loving 8 out of the 12 songs on it, and I wouldn’t rule out the last 4 winning me over in their turn.

I miss America

…when I watch My Name is Earl. Obviously Jason Lee is great, but I heart the genius that is Jaime Pressly in so many ways it leaves me feeling, um, confused. Anyway (and this is more or less apropos ongoing conversations about race in America here on SM), last night there was an episode with scene involving a mixed-race, but mostly redneck, crowd dancing in a honky-tonk to Young MC’s Bust A Move (one of my genteel Southern mother’s all-time favorite pop songs, btw) and how I felt about it was: dayummmm. My country ’tis of thee.

Very Briefly Noted

I just re-read, after a lapse of several years, Marshall Sahlins’ “The Sadness of Sweetness” (1996; Current Anthropology 37 [3]: 395-415). Criminy, it’s an amazing essay. That is all.