Description
Book Synopsis In the early 21st century, intellectual and cultural resources emerge on all sides as candidates for ownership claims. Members of an anthropological research team investigating emergent conomic relations in a part of the world renowned for its innovative approach to resources and transactions, wish to open up the vocabulary. In this unique volume, they bring an unexpected comparative perspective to global debates on intellectual and cultural property rights (IPR and CPR). The contributors bring from Melanesia their collective experience of people initiating, limiting and rationalizing claims through transactions in ways that challenge many of the assumptions behind the international language.
In a bold theoretical move, “property” is put alongside two other terms: “transactions” and “creations.” The former have a place in the anthropological tradition that now needs to be brought into the foreground. In turn, increasing interest in protecting intellectual and cultural resources means that questions about creativity have suddenly become pertinent to what is or is not being transacted. Yet is creativity a special preoccupation of modernity? How are we to talk about people’s creative practices, when innovation becomes the basis for ownership claims? This book is full of surprises!
Trade Review “…an intellectual coup certain to reorient thinking about the meaning of property and control of cultural production…Together there essays successfully subvert received categories…In this [they] succeed splendidly.” · PoLAR
Table of Contents Preface
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Marilyn Strathern and Eric Hirsch
PART I: PROPERTY
Chapter 1. Property Limits: Debates on the Body, Nature and Culture
Stuart Kirsch
Chapter 2. Legal Options for the Regulation of Intellectual and Cultural Property in Papua New Guinea
Lawrence Kalinoe
Chapter 3. Seeing, Knowing, Owning: Property Claims as Revelatory Acts
Melissa Demian
PART II: TRANSACTIONS
Chapter 4. Transactions: an Analytical Foray
Marilyn Strathern
Chapter 5. Transactions in Perpetual Motion
Tony Crook
Chapter 6. Negotiating Interests in Culture
Karen Sykes
PART III: CREATIONS
Chapter 7. Modes of Creativity
James Leach
Chapter 8. Boundaries of Creation: the Work of Credibility in Science and Ceremony
Eric Hirsch
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography
Index
