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Transactions and Creations
Property Debates and The Stimulus of Melanesia
Edited by Eric Hirsch and Marilyn Strathern
248 pages, bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-57181-615-3 $135.00/£99.00 / Hb / Published (November 2004)
ISBN 978-1-84545-028-1 $34.95/£27.95 / Pb / Published (December 2005)
eISBN 978-1-78920-421-6 eBook
Reviews
“…an intellectual coup certain to reorient thinking about the meaning of property and control of cultural production…Together there essays successfully subvert received categories…In this [they] succeed splendidly.” · PoLAR
Description
In the early 21st century, intellectual and cultural resources emerge on all sides as candidates for ownership claims. Members of an anthropological research team investigating emergent conomic relations in a part of the world renowned for its innovative approach to resources and transactions, wish to open up the vocabulary. In this unique volume, they bring an unexpected comparative perspective to global debates on intellectual and cultural property rights (IPR and CPR). The contributors bring from Melanesia their collective experience of people initiating, limiting and rationalizing claims through transactions in ways that challenge many of the assumptions behind the international language.
In a bold theoretical move, “property” is put alongside two other terms: “transactions” and “creations.” The former have a place in the anthropological tradition that now needs to be brought into the foreground. In turn, increasing interest in protecting intellectual and cultural resources means that questions about creativity have suddenly become pertinent to what is or is not being transacted. Yet is creativity a special preoccupation of modernity? How are we to talk about people’s creative practices, when innovation becomes the basis for ownership claims? This book is full of surprises!
Eric Hirsch is Senior Lecturer of Social Anthropology at Brunel University.
Marilyn Strathern is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge
Subject: Anthropology (General)
Area: Asia-Pacific
An interview on the life and work of the anthropologist Professor Marilyn Strathern. Interviewed on 6th May 2009 by Alan Macfarlane and edited by Sarah Harrison. Generously supported by the Leverhulme Trust.