[wta-politics]NYTBR: 'Who Owns Native Culture?': The Gatekeepers

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'Who Owns Native Culture?': The Gatekeepers
New York Times Book Review, 3.9.14
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/books/review/14SCHWEDT.html?pagewanted=all
&position=

WHO OWNS NATIVE CULTURE?
By Michael F. Brown.
Illustrated. 315 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. $29.95.

   By RICHARD A. SHWEDER
   
   Some years ago an American anthropologist I know, who was trained at
   the University of Chicago, sought permission to conduct research among
   the Maori people of New Zealand. During one part of an elaborate
   bureaucratic process he found himself being interviewed by a
   ''native,'' a rather well-traveled Maori with an Oxford University
   degree in anthropology. This cosmopolitan graduate of aboriginal
   descent was a gatekeeper for his ''indigenous people'' and a legally
   empowered guardian of their group privacy. He believed that Maori
   rituals, art, legends and history belonged to and were, in some sense
   or other, owned by the Maori. He believed that the Maori people had a
   collective interest in regulating the scholarly interests of outsiders
   and in controlling how Maori traditions got talked about in the rest
   of the world.
   
   The man took his job seriously. He interrogated the American
   petitioner and expressed doubts and reservations about the ''Chicago
   School of Anthropology'' as a way of representing the Maori way of
   life. And he was in a position to say ''no'' -- to limit research and
   restrict the flow of information and to constrain the freedom of
   academic outsiders to associate with Maori insiders, including those
   insiders who might be willing or even eager to speak to any American
   anthropologist who came along. One does not know whether to laugh or
   cry.
   
   Every once in a while critical reason triumphs over political
   correctness and identity politics, and the result can be exhilarating.
   Michael F. Brown, who is the Lambert professor of anthropology and
   Latin American studies at Williams College and knows more about
   intellectual property law than most legal scholars, has written a
   brave, logical and even witty book about some of the hazards and
   challenges of cultural heritage protection. His book is titled ''Who
   Owns Native Culture?,'' yet his message is one of skepticism and
   caution about extending the logic of ownership and group rights to the
   music, art, religious rituals, origin stories and botanical knowledge
   of any cultural tradition.
   
   Do we want to turn culture into a legally protected resource? Is
   cultural heritage something that ought to be owned, patented,
   copyrighted, trademarked, licensed, exclusively controlled or treated
   as the private property of particular ethnic groups? What are the
   risks to a liberal pluralistic democratic society when ethnic groups
   are empowered with group rights? Does the assertion of cultural
   ownership by indigenous peoples threaten the public domain? Does it
   hazardously restrict that region of our open society -- the
   intellectual and social commons -- where members of different
   traditions can meet, mix, creatively invent hybrid cultural forms and
   do so freely and without bureaucratic surveillance?
   
   ''Who Owns Native Culture?'' describes a series of fraught and
   provocative incidents in contemporary democracies, especially the
   United States and Australia, where there is a history of domination
   and even genocide of native, aboriginal or indigenous groups. In these
   multicultural countries, historically devastated minority groups are
   understandably and often legitimately sensitive about the
   appropriation, commercial exploitation and disrespectful use of their
   culture.
   
   So what happens in a liberal democracy when Australian Aborigines
   demand that museum curators forbid all female staff members from
   handling the indigenous sacred objects that are on display in Sydney,
   out of respect for the sexual division of the world in Aborigine
   society? Or when Native American Lakotas object to the desecration of
   a sacred site by mountain climbers and by New Age religious
   worshipers, and the sacred site just happens to be Devils Tower
   National Monument (made famous by the movie ''Close Encounters of the
   Third Kind''), which is located in a public park in Wyoming?
   
   What code of cultural privacy makes sense when representatives of the
   Pueblo community complain that the sun symbol on the New Mexico state
   flag was stolen without permission from a design on a 19th-century
   ceramic pot made by an anonymous and unidentifiable American Indian
   potter? What about the disempowered forest-dwelling pygmies of Central
   Africa? Is there a meaningful modern sense in which they can be said
   to own their traditional flute music and distinctive form of yodeling,
   traces of which have diffused throughout the globe and can be detected
   in Herbie Hancock's album ''Headhunters'' and Madonna's ''Bedtime
   Stories''? Should the pygmies be compensated? Why and how? What are
   our legal responsibilities under such circumstances? What are our
   moral responsibilities?
   
   Brown's writing is gorgeous, often funny, and he has a near perfect
   sense of the absurd. Recoiling at the idea that all knowledge is
   parochial and owned by those who are insiders (as though only
   African-Americans are entitled to rap or sing the blues), he points
   out that reggae is currently the music of choice among young American
   Indians on the Hopi reservation. In the context of a discussion of
   ''bioprospecting'' he acquaints us with the famous ethnobotanist
   Richard Evans Schultes, who pioneered the study of the roots and
   shoots of the forest and the medicinal plants of indigenous people:
   ''He may have been the only Republican in America who freely admitted
   to having sampled just about every mind-altering plant yet discovered
   in the New World.'' With regard to the moral majority of rugged
   individualists in the state of Wyoming who are indignant about the
   rights claims of American Indians, he writes: ''An ethic of
   self-reliance contrasts with the reality of ranching and mining
   enterprises heavily subsidized by the federal government -- hence the
   criticism that Wyoming, like other Western states, practices a form of
   socialism for the rich that benefits a few corporations and cattlemen
   (welfare cowboys').''
   
   Commenting on the use of the name Redskins (as in Washington Redskins)
   he writes: ''Native American cultures have survived five centuries of
   pestilence, military conflict and dispossession. Compared to these
   catastrophes, in what meaningful sense does the name of a professional
   football team put their survival at risk? One could argue just as
   convincingly that petty insults actually promote cultural survival by
   bringing Indians together in solidarity against the dominant
   culture.'' This writer is a sardonic liberal pluralist who is prepared
   to defend both liberalism and pluralism without resorting to group
   rights and ideas of exclusive possession.
   
   The courage in Brown's book is his insistence that we live in a
   morally complex world. Part of the complexity stems from the fact
   that, despite some of the illusory claims associated with the Western
   Enlightenment, modern, postmodern and premodern values continue to
   coexist even in the developed world; and they make powerful and
   contradictory claims on our sympathy and judgment. No one really owns
   culture is Brown's message: cultural elements are too hard to define,
   too easily copied or too long detached from their points of original
   creation. Contact between cultures and processes such as borrowing,
   appropriation, migration and diffusion have been ubiquitous for so
   long that little remains of the authentically indigenous (southern
   Italian cuisine got its tomatoes from the New World, the Navaho got
   some of their current practices from the Hopi); which is just as well,
   and a very good thing for the creative and innovative side of the
   human search for meaning.
   
   The bottom line in Brown's book is his challenge to both
   multiculturalists and liberal individualists. For he believes we can
   develop informal social norms of decency and respect that are
   responsive to the concerns of indigenous peoples without turning our
   society into a patchwork of legally empowered illiberal cultural
   enclaves. He seeks the middle road. Not the postmodern path, at the
   end of which there is a free flow of everything, all boundaries are
   down, everything is up for sale and nothing is sacred. And not the
   premodern path either, at the end of which everything is private,
   secreted and shielded from the interest and interests of outsiders,
   and the intellectual and social commons have been destroyed. It
   remains to be seen whether in a commercial and legalistic society such
   as ours there really is a middle road.
   
   Richard A. Shweder, the William Claude Reavis distinguished service
   professor at the University of Chicago, is the author of ''Why Do Men
   Barbecue?: Recipes for Cultural Psychology.''