Intellectual Property 20 October 2006

Filed under: Anthropology, Economy — keith @ 2:44 pm

In this essay I address anthropologists’ concerns with intellectual property and relate them to the principal conflict in global capitalism today. The drive of corporations and governments to privatize the cultural commons has gained momentum only in the last two decades, a period when neo-liberal ideas and policies have dominated world economy. Most anthropologists intuitively oppose the interests driving this process (Benthall 1999), yet it has some affinity with the pursuit of cultural integrity by indigenous groups, heirs to the nationalism that spawned ethnography as our current method of choice. Once again, in the name of defending the victims of imperialism, anthropologists naturalize an enclosure movement that threatens to become a second feudalism. We need to be more self-conscious about how our ideas and practices are influenced by the interests shaping the current phase of capitalism. It will not do for anthropologists to claim innocence while reproducing the idea of intellectual property (IP) in whatever derivative form. If we wish to understand the wider implications of the key terms we use, there is no substitute for taking a more comprehensive approach to contemporary world history.

(more…)

 
 

On money and method in anthropology 17 October 2006

Filed under: Commonwealth, Anthropology — keith @ 10:55 am

Introduction

This paper started out as an attempt to study the euro from an anthropological point of view; but it has ended up being more about anthropological method and money in general. Even so, a focus on the new European currency leads me to ask how we might study transnational or even global phenomena like this and still call ourselves anthropologists. For when ethnographers are not restricting their research to fieldwork in a particular place, they still tend to be limited in scope to working in one country. Social anthropology was once remarkable for the unity of its object, theory and method; but this disappeared along with “primitive” societies. Anthropologists still cling to “fieldwork-based ethnography” as their professional calling, but the study of money needs more than this. I propose as anthropology’s new object the making of world society, adopting provisionally an eclectic approach to theory and method. Anthropologists must appropriate both common knowledge and that of other specialists, if we are to identify the “historicity” (Foucault, 1973) of our own intellectual practices. (more…)