Front and Back Covers, Volume 30, Number 5. October 2014

Abstract

Front and back cover caption, volume 30 issue 5Front coverYOGA AND IPBikram Choudhury teaching a hot yoga class, California, October 2004. In this image Bikram Choudhury, a Los Angeles‐based yogi and the head of the profitable Bikram Yoga College of India, is assisting a student deepen and lengthen her posture, janushirasana with paschimottanasana, by walking on her back. Since emigrating from Kolkata in the 1970s, Bikram has built a multi‐million dollar yoga fitness empire based upon his signature series of 26 postures and two breathing exercises.Beginning in the early 2000s Bikram registered and attempted to enforce a set of copyright and trademark claims to his famous yoga series in three landmark cases that took place in the United States federal courts. At the core of these disputes, which to this day have never been fully settled, is the question of, ‘who owns what the yogi teaches’? and ‘who has the right to manage the practice’? Since property claims to yoga have been widely perceived as outrageous, Choudhury's lawsuits, the first to litigate this issue, have received international attention from a wide variety of actors.The contribution by Allison Fish to this special issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY explores how other yogis, who like Bikram have committed their lives to the pedagogy of the practice, and Access to Knowledge activists, who are committed to opposing the possessive reach of contemporary intellectual property law, react to the question of whether or not yoga exists in the public or private domain.Back coverBRAZIL: COPYRIGHT AND CANNIBALISMTheodor de Bry's engraving for his book Americae tertia pars, 1592, which republished travel narratives by Hans Staden and Jean de Léry who travelled to what is now Brazil in the 1540s.Popular travelogues and prints created myths about indigenous Americans – as cannibals and ‘noble savages’ living without private property. The figure of the cannibal fuelled European political philosophies about human nature.In the early twentieth century in Brazil, modernist artists and writers reclaimed ‘cannibalism’ as a creative mode of consumption.More recently, ‘cannibalism’ has staged a comeback, of sorts, as a productive metaphor for creative challenges to copyright practices and intellectual property regimes.In this issue, Alexandra Lippman shows how in Brazil open intellectual property and copyright – in which remixing, sharing, and sometimes even piracy are encouraged – has been vernacularized as ‘cannibalism’ for the digital age.This special issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY is devoted to following the ‘opening up’ of copyright worldwide and showing how alternative copyright licensing is being taken up, re‐imagined, and reworked in unexpected ways in a wide variety of vernacular settings.