http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/books/review/14SCHWEDT.html?ex=1224734400
&en=f577e96dc06fe07e&ei=5070

September 14, 2003

'Who Owns Native Culture?': The Gatekeepers

By RICHARD A. SHWEDER

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

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."