Punt To Culture

Abstract

Creative Commons, MedCommons, Connexions Educational Content Commons, and Biodiversity Information Commons are efforts to create collectively managed systems of electronically available and legally re-usable content (music, texts, video, sound, educational materials, scientific data, medical data, etc.). All of them share certain imaginaries-small-scale society, sharing, community, openness, collaboration, and collective stewardship-but do so principally in most high-tech, globally far-flung and legally arcane manner. All see themselves as inheritors of a tradition of free exchange of ideas as basis of scientific, technical, and economic progress. Most speak of information environmentalism, copyright conservancies and preserves, or open, free, and collaboratively managed repositories of intangible but valuable content. None of them are anti-commercial, nor even anti-intellectual property-indeed, they all rely on existence of intellectual property to create and maintain commons that are an inevitable part of their names, even as they occupy a position of challenge or resistance to dominant forms of intellectual property in circulation today. Despite fact that these people are elites, relatively affluent, highly technically sophisticated people who are generally found at centers of power in North and West, they nonetheless share something with Native Americans, Peruvian farmers, or diasporic peoples so commonly studied in anthropology: they seem vitally concerned with developing new strategies for maintaining a threatened way of life, which they see both as legitimate and as in need of innovative means of defense-it is their culture. At first glance, comparison may seem absurd; I suggest it because these commoners, like many indigenous peoples, have an increasing tendency to use (some variant of) anthropological concept of to defend themselves, to agitate for rights or goods, to distribute blame and praise, to critique anthropology and even perhaps to explain themselves to themselves. Marshall Sahlins, for example, suggests this kind of self awareness is a worldwide phenomenon of late 20th century. For ages people have been speaking without knowing it: they were just living it. Yet now it has become an objectified value-and object too of a life and death struggle... (Sahlins 2000:297). It is specifically second-order or re-doubled use of concept of culture by people I refer to here that justifies comparison-and not any scale of oppression, imperialism, or entitlement. It is not first articulation of I am interested in, it is its operationalization-the strategies by which various, overlapping, even contradictory, articulations of culture serve as strategies for changing particular technically, legally, and corporeally embedded practices. Such practices, seen from second-order position may well be labeled culture by anthropologist (indeed, Sahlins argues persuasively that if they were so labeled and understood, culture could never be said to disappear), however to do so is a methodological nuisance. Articulation and operationalization need to be at least provisionally understood as separate, in order to make any practical headway out in field. I suggest here that lawyers and activists I study are both more savvy about nature of such separations, and less hung up on them than anthropologists like myself tend to be. While studies, literary studies, film and media studies, education, and popular media continue to speak of the of x or cultural logic of y, anthropologists increasingly disavow ownership of these theories-especially when they encounter them in transformed or re-appropriated forms. It is as if theories had been renounced into some vast public domain of ideas, from which they have been transformed by various peoples into explanations, weapons, critiques, legal briefs, sacred rituals, and justifications. …