Genetic reductionism allows biopolitical control to be internalized—colonialism and patriarchy become tools of the biopolitical state for mass discipline and control

Rosemary J., Professor, Canada Research Chair, Graduate Program Director of Anthropology in Law & Society (LASO), Socio-Legal Studies (SLST), and Social and Political Thought (SPTH) @ York University; Susannah, PhD Anthropology from University of Georgia, research fellow @ University of Queensland. “Ethnographic Explorations of Intellectual Propertyfree,” Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Anthropology. 27 August 2020. LJS

Anthropological attention to the extension of IP into new jurisdictions sparked interest in legal constructions of personhood. Recognizing property and personhood to be dialectically related, anthropologists took great interest in the modes of subjectivity that IP relations to intangible cultural goods legitimated, tracing the introduction of the Western concept of individual authorship in diverse societies.5 Anthropologists considered how legal technologies fabricated the categories of persons and things that ownership serves to naturalize (Pottage 2004a). New policy emphasis upon communities and traditional goods fostered the articulation of collective identities. Ethnographic work on the extension of IP demonstrated that the global policy contexts in which IP was debated also enabled new subject positions of stewardship to be articulated (e.g., Brosius 1999). Where varieties of IP such as publicity rights allowed recognizable features of identity to be claimed as private property, anthropologists explored the social construction of celebrity and emerging public personas. Similarly, the growth and extension of branding practices to social collectives from villages to nations, militaries, and even militias opened new avenues of inquiry. Property and Personhood If the introduction of IP in new regions sparked general anthropological interest, its arrival in Melanesia prompted an especially rich body of scholarship exploring encounters between radically different and sometimes surprisingly similar understandings of personhood, ownership, and cultural circulation (Hirsch and Strathern 2004; Strathern 1999). Moving beyond early disciplinary preoccupations with individual versus communal rights, this work explored how selves were differentially “dividuated” in the region and how people, rather than things, were regarded as “owned” by virtue of their kinship relationships (Strathern 2001). When persons are partible, their relations to others become visible when they take on certain roles that are understood to be “images” both created and controlled by their clans (Strathern 2004). To fulfil kinship obligations, and in ritual practices, people in the region internalize and visualize themselves as images owned or carried by others (Harrison 1992). In Papua New Guinea, for instance, people seemed to entertain understandings consonant with IP’s protection of celebrity personas, commercial trademarks, and patented technologies in performative activities of symbolic exchange, valuation, and commemoration (Strathern 2001). Although concepts of owning humans are morally repugnant to many religious traditions, body parts and genetic materials are increasingly owned in significant ways (Strathern 1999, 2005). Human genomics raises questions: how and why are some human genetic materials considered inalienable aspects of a human universal heritage available to science, while others are personally alienated and may be economically exchanged? Legal techniques that claim merely to reflect divisions between norm and nature normatively institute the nature they claim (Pottage 2004b). Efforts to protect “our genetic patrimony” against commodification, for example, suggest that the genome is a resource existing independently of the means and activities through which it is visualized and rendered. Since IP creates relations of legitimated power by privileging particular forms of inscription, the simple denial of inscription is one of the means by which IP is resisted or refused. Anthropologists have explored the ways in which the legal recognition of some “natural” substances as authored or “cooked,” and others as discovered, or “raw” has social consequences for both persons and things (Hirsch 2010; Pottage and Mundy 2004). For example, positioning simple DNA as part of the public domain enables rather than discounts its political consequence in terms of the identities people may claim, as debates about DNA testing to confirm tribal identity suggest; conflating ancestry with racial, ethnic, or tribal kinship discounts the cultural and social means by which tribal belonging was historically rendered (Tallbear 2013). Contests over the ownership of plants reconstruct them as discoveries or inventions at different moments. The valuable properties of the South African hoodia plant, for example, could be represented as a patented molecule, a solid drug, a liquid food, or a wild or cultivated plant. While the state patent on hoodia hinged upon molecular isolation of the plant’s appetite suppression chemicals, San peoples’ claims to benefit sharing relied upon demonstrating their traditional knowledge of the whole plant’s medicinal properties (Foster 2017). Subjectification: Authors and Stewards A long tradition of critical theory showed that historical legitimations for IP imagine authorship or innovation as originary individual inscription, relying upon gendered tropes and the naturalization of paternal authority (Rose 1996, 2002; Woodmansee and Jaszi, 1994).6 Such gendered structuration is replicated in global IP discourses where creative work that is rendered natural rather than cultural, reproductive rather than productive, or social rather than individuated is relegated to an inferior status. In the sphere of digital cultural production, even “hacker culture,” which otherwise flouts IP protections, nonetheless partakes of a similar legitimating logic in which individual male activity is celebrated as transformative expressive work rather than “mere” reproductive labor (Liang 2010, 2011). This discursive logic may be traced across diverse fields of activity, stubbornly re-emerging under conditions of technological change. Practices of creolization and hybridization often identify new subject positions and express subjectivity. The global circulation of cultural goods, the ease of their reproduction in new contexts under conditions of digital communications, and the inclination to recombine them may be considered constitutive of conditions of postmodernity (Harvey 1989) as well as indicia of cosmopolitan subjectivities (Novak 2010). Where “remix culture” is naturalized as a form of global cultural identity, however, critics complain that it universalizes the conditions of subjects with particular privileges, discounting the ways that conditions of remediation may allow others to maintain the alternative value systems in which cultural goods figure (Christen 2005). IP, subjects, and moral economies tend to coevolve in complex dialogues and dialectics. A great deal of contemporary scholarship has addressed remix practices as creative acts of “piracy” that express new subject positions. For example, the literary “hack” in India rewrites classical works to engage in contemporary social and political criticism (Poduval 2014). Expressing knowledge of IP legalities and practices of illegality may be means of mimicking modes of modernity and drawing attention to global entitlements and their relationship to local social exclusions (Dawdy and Bonni 2012). If the contemporary politics of pirate practice tends to criticize global corporate hegemony, in Bolivia artists have also found new means of distribution and publicity to support local, independent, small-scale cultural producers (Stobart 2014). Creators of “peripheral” musics in Brazil, for example, not only rely upon remix practices, but work outside of dominant channels of distribution, giving away music on social media in order to build careers and reputations (e.g., Lemos 2014). Traditions of cultural expression, medicine, and artisanship require the social maintenance of a production commons that is often overlooked and may well be undermined by efforts to extend IP. People are becoming more conscious of their practices of stewardship over both natural and cultural resources. Many Indigenous communities, in particular, have adopted this subject position with respect to biodiversity congruent with international recognition of the value of their traditional environmental knowledge. They reject IP encroachments and instead emphasize their cultural histories of cultivating plant genetic resources (e.g., Coombe and Kisin 2020; Rhoades 2006; Shepherd 2010). Claims of stewardship and rights to exercise ancestral responsibilities over biocultural resources are now routinely asserted by local communities and environmental NGOs (Bavikatte 2014). Certain specialists, like shamans, have been elevated to a new social prominence in this new role, with Brazil, for example, portraying them as bulwarks against corporate biopiracy (Alberts 2015). In India, however, the state itself has usurped the position of steward over traditional medicines and therapeutic practices (Fish 2014). Pirates and Their Practices A number of ethnographic studies illustrate the various means by which IP and the policing of its violation have constituted new figurations of pirate subjects while simultaneously encouraging reflexivity among subject populations about community identity and the norms that reinforce peoples’ senses of communal belonging in these circumstances (e.g., Reinberg 2015; Thomas 2013). The figure of the pirate has re-emerged in the West as a rogue “other” properly subject to industrial demonization, surveillance, and punishment or, alternatively, celebrated as a subaltern challenge to corporate cultural industries. These moral positionings are often gendered and racialized. Acts of piracy that “merely” make copies or reproduce goods are often defamed with tropes of passive imitation and effeminacy contrasted to more muscular “transformative” acts of appropriation (Liang 2011, discussing Larry Lessig; Vats 2020). The omnipresence of informal markets, however, also reveals that different kinds of copies carry distinct values in local moral economies and that a variety of pirate subjectivities may be locally recognized (Dawdy and Bonni 2012). Antipiracy campaigns attempt to impress upon socially disadvantaged peoples a normalized, universal, and transhistorical human subject that puts targeted communities outside the pale of proper ways of life and legitimate economic activity (Thomas 2016). IP piracy is often essential to accessing cultural goods and engaging in cultural reproduction more generally in the Global South (Liang 2011). Local assessments of necessary, permissible, desirable, and blameworthy acts of IP violation tend instead to reflect a wide range of community norms. Accusations of piracy made by local artists in Mali were shown to have more to do with assertions of citizenship and perceptions of state failure than concerns about lost revenues (Skinner 2012). The pirate may also locally represent a position of protest against the disintegration of state–subject relations in polities that appear to value cultural resources over human ones (Dawdy 2011), and foreign economic interests over citizens’ social needs. Anthropologists studying the phenomena of piracy have refused to privilege the private property–public domain binary, showing how, why, and to what ends this modern conceptual division is rejected by subjects whose economic circumstances exclude them from IP’s circuits of recognition and exchange (Grassmuck 2014; Poduval 2014). For example, in urban Bamako, piracy has been both the cause of artistic precarity and the rationale for new kinds of cultural governmentality, creating a crisis in political subjectivity where musicians struggle to maintain professional livelihoods amid weak state oversight and a flourishing informal economy in copied music (Skinner 2015). Challenging the purported dangers of piracy to mainstream industries, while exploring the politicized nature of creative counterfeiting practices, anthropologists attend to the abject subjects and public anxieties generated by the policing of illegalized cultural goods (Dent 2016, 2020; Eckstein and Schwartz 2014; Thomas 2016). Assessments of piracy exceed considerations of subjectivity when they explore political economies, moral economies, and the policing of cultural circulation in the Global South. Anthropologists increasingly ask, not who is a pirate and why, but rather, what does piracy do, shifting inquiry to issues of labor, technology, monopoly, cultural consumption, and political representation. Attending to the productive dynamic between “appropriate” circulation and digital piracy in Brazil, for example, revealed how social groups enact, challenge, and, ultimately may modify IP law by exposing its contradictions and fault lines (Dent 2016). Although considered illicit by state and international powers, pirate practices in Guatemala were shown to have local legitimacy in communities that rejected police powers exercised on behalf of foreign corporate actors who are clearly unaccountable to the people so governed (Thomas 2016). Antipiracy campaigns, draconian enforcement regimes, and punitive measures amplify antagonisms between emerging classes in informational capitalism, the structuring principles of whose interrelationship are still obscure (Dawdy 2011). Personas, Brands, and Communities Legal anthropologists have long recognized that law does not merely reflect social worlds but constitutes, authorizes, and legitimates social identities and relationships (Dent 2013). To the extent that IP promotes forms of recognition, enables streams of royalties, and encourages investments, it fosters practices of individual and collective public subject formation. Cultural anthropologists have been particularly interested in public personas and the branding of collective identities (e.g., Bunten 2008; Foster 2007; Mazzarella 2003). Public personas are created through expressive investments and particular forms of circulation, both of which are shaped by IP protection of the symbolic attributes of the persona that may artificially freeze fields of connotation and stifle subaltern challenges to dominant meanings. Studies of pen names, for example, show how an authorial persona is constructed as a brand to mediate between producers and consumers in mass-market publishing in North America (Taylor 2018). The intersection of different regimes of value for restricting the circulation of iconic imagery also engenders new politics of publicity. Where the commercialization of ritually important Hindu images provoked criticism from diasporic communities, for example, these conversations spurred new aesthetic practices in expressions of shared identity (Ramachandran 2014). The relationships between signs (e.g., trademarks), the virtual commonalities their circulation enables (and their owners capitalize upon), and the social imaginaries they actualize is a rich area of ethnographic inquiry, particularly in post-socialist contexts (e.g., Vann 2006). Anthropological approaches to trademark and branding involve semiotic explorations of their fields of meaning as well as explications of the material infrastructures of their production and consumption. Ethnographers explore the folk ontologies and ideologies that are latent in the legal and economic discourses that legitimate brands and their circulation (Manning 2010). Subaltern groups in India, for example, were shown to use the repertoire of cultural forms provided by trademarks to express their understanding of and protests against corporate powers, while creating new forms of surplus affective value (e.g., Nakassis 2012, 2013). Anthropologists have been interested in brand behavior—the creative social engagements that trouble a singular social intelligibility for the IP-protected commodity. Branding takes place on multiple scales and embraces a range of actors beyond corporate producers and individual consumers, and now encompasses issues of statecraft (e.g., Thomas 2013). The phenomenon of nation-branding, for example, is a new means of communicating national identities and interests that engages corporate publicists and constitutes the state as an entrepreneurial subject (Aroncyzk 2013; Cao et al. 2019). Advertising and marketing professionals emphasize the need to maintain the singularity (and restrict the diversity) of national collective connotation, which may limit public discourse, channel political conversation, and become a means to discipline everyday social conduct (e.g., Scher 2014). Anthropologists have explored the further extension of branding to European cities (e.g., Graan 2013) and the convergence of marketing and militarism in Colombian peace-building strategies (e.g., Fattal 2018).