Paper short abstract:

My paper examines the emergence of issues of ownership and of (mis)appropriation of intangible cultural heritage at different local, regional and international levels with Fiji’s National Inventory Project and Traditional Knowledge and Expressions, of Culture Bill; the ‘Pacific Model Law’; and the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage adopted by UNESCO.

Paper long abstract:

The flow of new legal ideas associated with traditional knowledge and cultural expressions (TKEC) in an era of cross-national ideologies of culture, tradition and authenticity represents a real challenge for the modern ethnographer, in terms of following their agency, architecture and effects. Multiple ideas, voices, agendas, and interests produce contemporary engaged ethnographic practices. A few centuries ago, indigenous songs, dances, performances, rituals and ideas did not need any intellectual property protection, for people maintained 'physical control' over their identity and cultural heritage. The issue of ownership of cultural property is becoming a prime moral issue in legal anthropological parlance, a condition sine qua non to understand the sociocultural evolution of TKEC. The combination of the two notions, cultural heritage and cultural property, is particularly relevant to the reification of identity in the case of intangible, immaterial TKEC ownership. Pacific islanders had their concept of 'intellectual property' for centuries. Several landmark cases recognize a pre-existing system of law among indigenous peoples inseparable from the concept of 'identity'. These cases also suggest that neglected non-western epistemologies may provide us with new concepts and modes of organizing and protecting the appropriation, misrepresentation and misuse of their cultural heritage. Collaboration with the stakeholders, and legal anthropological research points to an intensification of the meta-locale, cross-border interactions and growing interdependence between local, national and transnational actors through a de-localizing process in which social spaces, borders and customs lose some of their previously overriding influence.