Who Owns Native Culture? (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by Jason Baird Jackson Indiana University, Bloomington Who Owns Native Culture? By Michael F. Brown. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi + 315, introduction, 12 illustrations, notes, sources, acknowledgements, index.) A number of folklorists are making valuable contributions at the cutting edge of global debates about heritage policy and the relevance of intellectual property law to the survival of local cultures. Yet I suspect that, for many of us, the current moment is one in which we are often made to pause in the pursuit of everyday professional duties, look up with surprise, and discover that the intellectual landscape has shifted around us in complex ways. One day, we open the pages of our flagship journal and there, amid the thoughtful considerations of expressive culture, are equally nuanced essays reflecting on policies being debated by international bureaucracies in Geneva and other cosmopolitan locales. Such work conjures up images of distant conference halls filled with lawyers and politicians debating the nature and relevance of folklore. Welcome to the strange and contentious new world evoked by unfamiliar, ominous acronyms: WIPO, ICG-GRTKF, IP, TEK, GATT, EoF ("expressions of folklore", of course), CPR, ICH, USPTO, WPPT, WTO, and RAFI. Behind the capital letters and the structures of power and the expert knowledge that they encode are issues, sometimes life and death ones, that matter tremendously to the global communities in which we live and work. Those of us not yet in the vanguard nonetheless have contributions to make to these debates. But where do we begin? For the uninitiated, Michael Brown's thoughtful book, Who Owns Native Culture?, can serve as a welcome point of entry into current debates on cultural property. Written for a general audience in an engaging style, the book offers a virtual fieldtrip in which readers are introduced to the issues through consideration of recent court cases, public debates, and policy developments. Although global in scope, the book's core examples are drawn from the Americas and Australia, where indigenous communities continue to renegotiate their statuses and rights within the nations that encompass them. Despite Brown's use of indigenous examples, the book's relevance is general. Around the globe, cultural forms, practices, knowledge, and even identities are being recast as forms of property and subjected to regimes of legal control in a market context. The struggles of indigenous peoples represent a rich sector within which to consider this process, but such shifts are unfolding everywhere. They bind everyone—from Amazonian healers and French farmers to corporate lawyers and hip-hop musicians—together in a new and often paradoxical web of interrelationship. Globalization, new biotechnologies, indigenous rights movements, and the corporate enclosure of the public domain are among the factors at play in such transformations. In considering how and why cultural expressions are being transformed into commodities, [End Page 492] Brown is especially effective at distilling the paradoxes attendant upon such shifts. Many of his case studies describe legal contests in which general, yet often contradictory, principles emerge. These paradoxes suggest the contours of the overarching debate. What forms can collective rights take in plural democracies? What effects will property-based notions of heritage culture have on communities and on the global society? How can rights to individual privacy be extended to accord protection to groups wishing to shield themselves and their heritage from outside appropriation? What unintended consequences might new protections for culture have on life in a world characterized by cultural flow, digital technologies, international migration, and multinational corporations? While acknowledging a place for law in resolving contests over culture, Brown emphasizes practical, local, and dialogical strategies for negotiating relationships of respect and accommodation. He sees hope, for instance, in the ways that U.S. repatriation law has created a space and a context for wider, more productive dialogues between museums and native communities. He argues for accepting compromise and for the difficult work of negotiation as an inelegant but preferable response to the choice of "total heritage protection"—utopian/dystopian policies...