Perm do both—lines of flight are compatible with the aff, but our theory of power is a pre-requisite for their success

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

Just as the extension of the IP into new markets and jurisdictions has enabled the production of new subjectivities, it also has provoked processes of territorialization.7 Such processes may include the inscription, delineation, and valuation of place and regional heritage through legal mechanisms such as geographical indications as well as deliberations over territory, sovereignty, and authority that arise in the extension of regulatory frameworks to new jurisdictions. Most ethnographic work in this vein has engaged with two related processes that accompany such legal change: the (re)signification of product origins and attachments to place, and the authorization of space, territory, and markets that stirs struggles over sovereignty and citizenship. Place, Terroir, Authenticity, and Heritage As markers of natural distinction and cultural difference gained value within global informational markets, IP protections that signified the origins of products were elaborated and extended to new regions. These include older vehicles such as appellations of origin and collective and certification marks as well as new geographical indications (GIs) such as European marks for “typical products.” As marks indicating conditions of origin, these protected designations signify that specific product attributes are a result of the qualities of a particular place and its environment (or terroir). They may also signify social or economic aspects of production, including cultivation techniques, methods of labor, or culturally unique production practices—often asserted to be based on a region’s heritage (which may be quite newly minted). Hailed for their potential to protect biodiversity, foster sustainable economic development, support traditional knowledge practices, and add value to biocultural goods, marks indicating conditions of origin are both a means to secure monopoly rents and vehicles to express identity (Coombe and Aylwin 2011). Ethnographic studies of GIs consider how place-based product protections affect local understandings of identity, heritage, and history. GIs may provide a vehicle for artisan communities, such as producers of clay whistles in Matera, Italy, to assert long-standing, affective attachments to the goods they produce and to guarantee their authenticity (Bortolotto 2010). GIs may also redefine geographical boundaries, notions of authenticity, and conceptions of belonging and indigeneity (Bérard and Marchenay 1996; Grasseni 2016; Ives 2017). In France, for example, where the formalization of GIs under the appellation d’origine contrôlée system dates to the early 20th century, the law is meant to reflect the confluence of terroir and local standards of production. Although the law often registers local consensus on geographic and cultural boundaries, it has also been an important tool for socially reworking them, as excluded producers struggle to obtain membership in the exclusive clubs who control these designations (Farmer 2014). GI protections may provoke assertions of belonging that are at odds with policies valorizing placed- based heritage. For example, bemoaning the fact that in France, GIs are so hegemonic that without a cheese you are deemed to lack a culture, people have nonetheless crafted a sense of place and shared local identity by emphasizing their very lack of the types of products that GI designations protect (Filippucci 2004). Even where attempts to attain GI protection fail, campaigns to demonstrate the heritage status or the regional typicality of a product may transform its cultural and regional significance (Terrio 2014). Thus, unsuccessful efforts in Italy to obtain a GI designation for the Zolfino bean nonetheless transformed the crop from a sharecropper’s staple into a heritage food whose new market value attracted the attention of large, wealthy farmers (Badii 2013). Such efforts often activate deliberations over the meaning and history of place at the same time that they heighten economic reliance upon increasingly distant markets for the continued production of locally authentic products (Grasseni 2014). Marks indicating conditions of origin are often embraced as a means to foster rural development by providing small-scale producers a distinctive edge in increasingly competitive and homogeneous global food markets. The use of GIs may, however, have deleterious social effects on the communities they are meant to serve (Coombe et al. 2014). GIs function ideologically to convey harmonious social imaginaries of territories that integrate production activities, communities, and natural environments, but in practice they enable forms of fetishization that may obscure and support unfair and exploitative labor conditions (Coombe and Malik 2018; West 2012). In India, for example, the GI for Darjeeling tea harnessed discourses of terroir and place-based distinction to fashion a luxury commodity for global markets, but in the process, the exploitative, racialized labor relations of colonial-era tea plantations were further entrenched (Besky 2014a, 2014b). Likewise, attempts to define and enforce GIs may commodify traditions of practice in ways that foment competition and exploitation, thereby eroding feelings of shared social interest and collective identification. In Peru, state efforts to use GIs to bolster artisanal ceramic production led, ironically, to the codification of traditional practices and ultimately their industrialization as rural towns and producers were linked to international markets only to the extent that “native” goods were produced using standardized practices that enabled them to be mass-marketed (Chan 2014). State projects to promote GIs for rural development may favor larger, wealthier actors who are already positioned to take advantage of emerging markets. In crafting GIs for tequila in Mexico, only elite landed farmers possessed the infrastructure and networks to profit from these new origin-based protections, and in the process, both traditional knowledge and traditional terroir were lost (Bowen 2010). Nonetheless, under specific conditions of governance, such marks may enable alternative assertions of value and attachments to place while linking producers and consumers in relations of recognition and identification (Coombe and Aylwin 2011). To these ends, a third generation of certification for place-based goods is evolving to communicate new forms of production and distribution grounded in environmental norms and an ethic of agroecology and socio-natural or cultural reproduction (Coombe and Malik 2018). Local actors may push for place-based marks that go beyond indices of terroir, heritage, or authenticity to capture other aspects of production, such as labor conditions and environmental standards. Farmers and their intermediaries may us n e GIs to build place-based economies that are more varied than any single, legally structured, place-based marketing initiative (Ofstehage 2011). In Bolivia, for example, farmers in the region of Los Lipez worked with NGOs and industry actors to create GI protection for their quinoa in an effort to distinguish the unique qualities of the region’s crop and its ritual origins. This unique mark of origin did not omit other economic avenues for farmers in the region, but became one among many pathways for bringing quinoa to market (Ofstehage 2012). Territorialization: Sovereignty, Jurisdiction, Securitization, and Markets If ethnographic work on GIs has tracked the social and political negotiations over authenticity, heritage, and belonging that are activated by place-based IP protections, anthropologists have also explored how other vehicles of IP protection, such as copyright, patent, and benefit-sharing contracts for the use of traditional knowledge and cultural expression, may prompt political conflicts over sovereignty and jurisdiction. The roots of this anthropological inquiry may be traced to early critiques of state sovereignty over biological resources and its implications for Indigenous peoples and small farmers (e.g., Brush 1993). More recently, anthropologists have explored “the politics of scale” in the creation of national patrimony, which depends upon the usurpation of local traditional arts (e.g., Aragon and Leach 2008 exploring this in Indonesia). Anthropological consideration of such processes as new modes of territorialization gained traction in the 2010s. Bioprospecting, for example, spurs territorialization through the extraction and regulation of plant life. As a long-standing companion to both colonialism and capitalism, it continues to be central to state expansion (Besky and Padwe 2016). Where bioprospecting involves plants and resources territorialized through their globally recognized association with local and native knowledge, as it did in South Africa, struggles over the ownership of patents and the benefits arising from projects to commercialize those resources may provide fertile ground for peoples historically marginalized by the state to assert alternative forms of national belonging (Foster 2017). Industries built upon copying and counterfeit products create marked zones that contain both new goods and new values. In cases where technologies of reproduction and distribution are more powerful than the state economic structures that may constrain them, as they were in Nigeria, piracy transforms the infrastructures through which globalization—as the flow of informational goods and media imagery—takes place (Larkin 2008). The extension of IP into new jurisdictions effects territorialization by demarcating zones of licit and illicit production and distribution. In some cases, this may give rise to counterfeit economies that enable marginalized peoples to generate livelihoods and enclaves of production and distribution, but it may also provoke new forms of state intervention and surveillance. Ethnographic work in Brazil showed how acts of piracy enabled often marginalized actors to gain some control over strategic spaces, even where formal state powers work to control, surveil, and set the boundaries of licit market activity (Dent 2016, 2020). In South Africa, the threat to public health posed by the counterfeiting of medication was used by the state as a rationale to transform drug safety regimes into more territorialized drug security regimes, linking pharmaceutical corporations and state authorities in ways that exacerbated predatory police interventions and encouraged the territorializations of security industries (Hornberger 2018). Piracy also tends to produce new networks that traverse state boundaries, facilitating traffic in cultural goods, and, where technologies of reproduction and distribution are more powerful than state economic structures, affective connections to new territorial infrastructures of global belonging (Larkin 2008; Reinberg 2015).