Western modernity is commodifying IP to be socially and economically profitable—especially through categorizing private and public domains in society.

Anthropological considerations of intellectual property (IP) have a short history; only since the mid-1990s and the incorporation of IP into international trade regimes has it become a major field of concern. What may have been a topic of narrow interest to legal anthropologists has attracted attention across the discipline because of the range of the law’s social and economic impacts. In market economies, IP protects many intangible cultural goods (e.g., aesthetic works, trademarks, designs, modes of manufacture and composition, genetic resources) from unauthorized reproduction through material means of enforcement. Protected informational or cultural goods are manifest in material and digital forms of fixation (books, films, posters, songs, fertilizers, machines, plants, medicine, software, pesticides) that circulate as publicly accessible (if not freely available) goods. Such goods are so pervasive and socially significant that restricting access to them via IP provokes concerns about the scope of powerful economic interests, the state’s capacity to meet vital human needs and provide critical infrastructures, and the protection of citizens’ democratic entitlements and minority cultural traditions. IP protections are understood to be both economically and socially productive: not only do they yield revenue in the form of royalties for their holders, they legitimate certain actors as creators and delegitimize others, including counterfeiters who may be deemed “terrorists” and “pirates.” As the scope and range of IP protection expanded, so did its capacity to restrict access to goods as diverse as music, communications technologies, seeds, pharmaceuticals, and academic scholarship. The new forms of capital accumulation and cultural influence generated by these legal changes attracted the attention of diverse subfields of anthropology, prompting scholarship that added feminist, new materialist, and science and technology studies (STS) methodologies to conventional approaches drawn from political economy, social constructionism, and interpretive legal anthropology. From these different theoretical perspectives, anthropologists addressed the IP vehicles of copyright, patent, trademark, design, plant variety protection, and publicity rights alongside emerging protections for traditional knowledges, traditional cultural expressions, and genetic resources. When ethnographically tracking these legal mechanisms, anthropologists explored questions of property and commodification, representation and translation, research and ethics, personhood and subjectivity, and place and territorialization, which are the major themes of this article. Anthropologists regularly engage with interlocutors in law, cultural studies, communications, and media studies; this article references scholars outside of the discipline whose work has been influential for anthropological engagements with IP.Anthropologists recognize IP as a form of commodification rooted in Western liberal philosophy that creates regimes of scarcity by recognizing some types of material expression as the property of individual, collective, and corporate actors. Using rationales such as the valorization of original individuated expression (copyright), novel innovation (patent), investments in creating fields of commercial meaning (trademark), and the making and merchandising of distinctive personas (celebrity), the law legitimates various entitlements. Such legal recognitions are selective in the kinds of cultural creativity they encompass, routinely finding certain forms of human expressive and innovative work to be legible and legitimate while excluding or taking for granted other similar, socially valuable activities performed by people with less political power. Although anthropologists insisted that there were some similar types of exclusive protection in non-market societies, the global consolidation of such protections was largely understood to be a product of liberal capitalist modernity, ideologically premised upon the naturalization of social categories dividing private and public zones of social life.