Anthropology good—the discipline has a colonial history, but we can recon with this and re-appropriate it for anti-biopolitical ends—only a bottom-up approach solves

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

Amid growing concerns about the reproduction and decontextualization of cultural and biological materials through commodification and the spread of digital technologies, anthropological debates about property and propriety proliferated. Anthropological interest in indigenous heritage rights and property rights, first voiced in terms of the politics of cultural appropriation, evolved into a larger set of questions around the ethics of anthropological and archaeological research more generally in an era in which community relationships to knowledge were the subject of human rights deliberations. In many instances, this reshaped the nature of relationships between anthropologists and their communities of research. Appropriation and the Ethics of Research Just as postmodern celebrations of cultural hybridity, borrowing, and remix gained particular traction in anthropological theory, considerations of cultural appropriation drew new attention to collective cultural rights (Berson 2010; Coombe 2009). Self-identified Indigenous peoples, diasporic communities, and their advocates pointed to the various types of injury enabled by presuppositions of a free, open, and undifferentiated commons (Howes 1996; Ziff and Rao 1997). Such critiques raised acute questions about the ramifications of anthropological research. To what extent may the publication of indigenous knowledge and cultural heritage facilitate misappropriation by placing such material in the public domain (Christen 2005, 2011; Holcombe 2010)? Recognizing that cultural rights—understood as the human rights of communities—could be violated by the unauthorized reproduction and circulation of heritage goods posed new challenges to anthropological research methods, sparking reflection on how the terms and aims of research are established and how knowledge is produced and by whom. For whose or what ends is research justified? Who should decide how research materials should (or should not) be made available (Nagy 2011; Pels et al. 2018)? These issues were considered central in efforts to decolonize research methodologies (Smith 2012). Questions about the management and ownership of anthropological data, the production and circulation of tangible and intangible materials via research and publication, and new expectations about the repatriation of research outputs characterized a new era of scholarly ethics. Within archeology, the capacity of publication to enable information, images, and artifacts to circulate in ways that may negatively impact Indigenous community recognition and rights prompted the creation of new legal tools and ethical protocols with respect to the use of cultural knowledge and property (Nicholas and Bannister 2004; Nicholas and Wylie 2009; Smith 2010). In environmental and ecological anthropology, increased awareness of how publication of ethnobotanical information could facilitate misappropriation of traditional knowledge led ethnobiologists working with indigenous organizations to craft a code of research ethics. The code emphasized the necessity of community participation, informed consent, reciprocity in benefits, and recognition of the customary rights and cultural responsibilities of Indigenous peoples (Bannister et al. 2009). Largely driven by the early Brazilian fieldwork and international advocacy of Darrell A. Posey (1990, 1999), this undertaking was influential in bringing principles of benefit-sharing and compensation for indigenous work into international biodiversity policy and linking such practices to internationally recognized Indigenous peoples’ rights of self-determination (Garcés and de Robert 2012). In other anthropological subfields, the acknowledged inability of IP regimes to accommodate indigenous values and customary practices led scholars to consider alternative strategies for documenting, repatriating, and protecting data, recordings, and other cultural materials. For example, concerns that the circulation of ethnographic music recordings beyond source communities may misrepresent traditions, deny compensation to creators, and offend community norms led ethnomusicologists to explore different means of vesting rights in recorded music to collective holders of intangible cultural heritage (e.g., Aubert 2010; Fox 2017). In the archeology of the Americas, collaborative and community-based research practices developed, using local norms for managing cultural heritage and knowledge as guides for scholarly research practice (Atalay 2012). Applied Methodologies: Alternative Knowledge Management Strategies Digital technologies posed further ethical issues; while they provided new opportunities for source community curation of research, museum, and archival materials, they also created problems for social groups seeking to control the conditions under which cultural resources circulated (Bell et al. 2013). This recognition sparked efforts to create mechanisms for the protection of intangible cultural heritage that would reflect community values, support sustainable development, and foster self-determination (Brown and Nicholas 2012). Anthropologists began to work with local heritage centers, museums, and community leaders to help repatriate materials historically collected under colonial conditions of dispossession (e.g., Nagy 2011). Some created interactive online databases with Australian aboriginal and North American tribal communities which embedded culturally specific terms for accessing and interpreting data (e.g., Christen 2011). Others developed protocols to guide practice and set the terms of knowledge collection and management (Anderson and Younging 2015) and tools such as traditional knowledge labels and licenses to help communities better manage their cultural heritage in digital environments (Anderson and Christen 2013; Anderson and Montenegro 2017; Christen 2015). Many communities learned to define and assert their customary knowledge practices within the context of research relationships, archival repatriations, and digital rights management. Such articulations made communities and their interests more legible to dominant research and curatorial institutions (Coombe and Kisin 2020) and encouraged both parties to critically (re)interpret IP rights for new ends (Colwell-Chanthaphonh 2011). Increasingly organized and internationally networked Indigenous peoples began to exchange knowledge and experience of their practices of digital database management and heritage protection. In the face of widespread state reluctance to revise national IP legislation to address the needs of Indigenous communities, these collaborations helped to establish what became known as international “best practices” for the management and return of archival materials and other culturally significant heritage goods. New cultural policies were thereby recursively produced through collaborations in which anthropological knowledge became enmeshed in broader struggles for community political, legal, and social recognition.