The alt replicates biopolitical colonialism—it leaves systems of manufactured consent unquestioned—means the alt gets co-opted

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

Critically exploring modern liberal political understandings of Western societies as structured by divisions between public and private spheres of activity, concern, and deliberation (e.g., Habermas 1989), anthropologists undermined the narrow conception of IP as merely an economic domain. Rather, they insisted that IP fundamentally shaped the social life of human communications by commodifying cultural forms. Conceiving of the public as a communicative space along Habermasian lines enabled counter-publics to come into view and revealed IP’s role in restricting counter-hegemonic cultural expression (Coombe 1998). Challenging the modern, liberal concept of a singular public domain, anthropologists explored multiple publics as politically significant zones of cultural production and communicative exchange (e.g., Goodman 2005; Hayden 2003). Ethnographic studies of digital workers and software developers showed how non-proprietary digital goods served as a means of communicative deliberation that created patterns of sociality and innovation challenging IP’s distributions of power (e.g., Coleman 2013; Kelty 2008). In the creation of legal frameworks supporting the creation of open source software, for example, anthropologists revealed how IP was strategically used in new social movements that challenged Western understandings of politics (e.g., Chan 2014). Poststructuralist understandings of the public domain explored it as a spatial metaphor, dependent upon law while seeming to function independently as somehow outside it (e.g., “before the law” [Flessas 2008]); the concept of the commons established and policed thresholds that shifted historically according to new capacities for proprietary acquisition and thereby served to justify appropriations. For example, as research in Indonesia and India showed, a state could deem local, collectively created knowledge or artistic creations to be part of the public domain—a declaration that transformed goods previously subject to traditional authorities and norms of transmission into national cultural patrimony (Aragon 2012; Aragon and Leach 2008; Halliburton 2017). Public domains could be “scaled” to create new arenas of jurisdiction. As social movements promoting open and unfettered access to creative productions gained momentum, scholarship showed how valorizations of the public domain mirrored and validated colonial histories of appropriation and dispossession (Bowrey and Anderson 2009; Christen 2015). Transnational ethnographic research suggested that open access advocates working against the extension of IP may be more interested in Western individual expressive freedoms than the cultural rights of communities when trumpeting the public domain (Fish 2014). The Western legal tradition of IP legitimates certain goods as private properties based on individuated authorship and innovation, but often ignores collective genres of novel productivity. Under this framework, the works of many kinds of creative industry—from traditional cultural expression to crop varieties developed by farmers—are considered free for general use. Such elisions are especially consequential because states routinely misrecognize the forms of creativity, territorial inscription, and cultural work of minorities, particularly Indigenous peoples in settler colonies who have been deliberately marginalized by policies of cultural assimilation (Anderson 2009). Anthropologists explored the political consequences of decontextualized distinctions between the public and the private within postcolonial contexts and in decolonizing agendas. They considered the historical conditions under which “the public domain” was forged, the illusions of equality and inclusion it projected, and the means by which modern nation-states thereby assume sovereignty over the products of certain human energies (Aragon 2012; Brush 1999; Christen 2012). In an era of biodiversity loss in which biotechnological innovation was prioritized for agricultural futures, IP regimes clearly privileged the work of laboratory and field science as innovation, denying the contributions made by farmers and peasants to the world’s plant genetic resources (Brush and Stabinsky 1996; Cleveland and Murray 1997). The historical categorization of crop germ plasm as the common heritage of humankind, despite its distinctive development in culturally and ecologically discrete fields of human endeavor, obscured practices of farmer innovation (Brush 2004). Like the public domain, the common heritage concept denied non-individuated, situated agencies (other than corporate ones), and licensed accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2003; Kloppenburg 2010). Just as the “tragedy of the commons” (Hardin 1968) was recognized as a central myth justifying private property (Rose 1986), exposing a fictitious “commons” as IP’s other helped shift attention to possessive relations beyond the exclusive market-based rights characteristic of Western models of protection. Anthropological consideration turned to other concepts of attachment (e.g., stewardship [Brosius 1999; Fish 2006; Ogden et al. 2013]) to understand human management of culturally and ecologically significant knowledges, practices, and goods. As anthropologists began to explore a diversity of publics with distinct moral economies of cultural circulation, they became more concerned with issues of governance and types of publicity. Other structuring dichotomies of the law such as discovery and innovation, imitations and originals, tradition and modernity, and other variants of what Lévi-Strauss (1964) described as “the raw and the cooked” came into view. Showing how IP discourse figured in local social imaginaries, ethnographic research from Latin America, Africa, and the Pacific illustrated that the places perceived of as “outside” IP’s governance were not simply places of license, but sites of cultural memory (Goodman 2002, 2005), moral economies of care (Hartigan 2017; Nazarea et al. 2013), significant spaces of responsibility (e.g., Solomon 2004; Wright 2008), and aspirations for global belonging (Larkin 2008). Whether they were considering the meaning of open source software in animating understandings of democracy and speech in the United States (e.g., Coleman 2013), the protection of plant varieties in Costa Rica (Aistara 2012), the political work of making and marking traditional medicine in Tanzania (Langwick 2015), or the social life of generic drugs in Mexico (Hayden 2007), anthropologists challenged proponents of liberal public goods to attend to significant social relations co-produced through IP regulation.3