Culture, Control, Information, the Intangible

I have been reading Who Owns Native Culture? by Michael F. Brown. The book describes the efforts of native or indigenous cultures to control that which UNESCO calls intangible cultural heritage.

The book illustrates in many ways that American concerns for the free flow of information, and our belief that sharing information brings economic and technological progress are not shared in many cultures. There are even differences among OECD countries in this respect, but many indigenous groups are concerned that their heritage is being appropriated without proper recompense, or that inappropriate use of their cultural heritage by outsiders is a form of pollution. Indeed he tells a story of an early anthropologist who would physically shove his way into secret rituals in the U.S. Southwest, where the tribal peoples were afraid to physically eject him for fear of reprisals, and record the ceremonies; the tribe is seeking the return of all those records.

As I think about it, it seems to me that our culture often institutionalizes control over the intangible via rights, especially property rights. Ours is also a culture that embodies those rights in laws, and specifically intellectual property rights laws. Thus we have trade secrets law, copyright law, trademark law, and patent law, plant breeders law, etc. together forming a complex web of intellectual property rights (IPR) law. As science and technology bring new intangibles under human control, in order to stimulate investment in those technologies, we change the IPR law. Thus we patent software and genes now, when we did not do so in the past. We pass laws to control the use of symbols, such as governmental flags. We even have international treaties in this area, including the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage and the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions.

However, American culture does not invariably resort to laws to protect information and the intangible. We do not criminalize plagiarism in the schools. Churches ordain ministers, thereby controlling the rights to perform specified rituals. Social sanctions are applied to women who show up a posh parties in the gowns that other's had planned to wear.

Indigenous cultures are, I think not nearly so legalistic as ours. In any case, the indigenous culture finds its institutions for the control of what we term to be intellectual property are sometimes in conflict with the institutions of the dominant societies in which they live. As indigenous groups have been more fully empowered, they have sought (and have found allies in seeking) to institutionalize protections i the larger society for some forms of information/expression. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States all have laws and/or policies that resulted from such efforts.

However, an increasingly globalized economy creates international threats to the cultural intangibles of indigenous peoples, threats that can not be met by laws within single nations. Thus we have the growth of the UNESCO conventions mentioned above.

This blog focuses on knowledge and understanding, and necessarily on the information used to communicate that knowledge and understanding, on analysis to deepen understanding of the meaning of information, and on the ways that information is embodied in things and institutions. This posting seems relevant to those purposes because Brown's book raises fundamental questions about how we should embody intangibles in institutions, and more precisely, how we should handle the clash of cultures occasioned by the differences in the ways they institutionalize control of intangibles.