STRATHERN, Marilyn. What is Intellectual Property After all

5/28/2018 STRATHERN, Marilyn. What is Intellectual Property After all

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What is inteUectual property after?

rilyn trathernAbstract

This chapter U ke s as its starting po int A N T s success in overcomdescnptive resistance to dealing even-handedly with persons, thiartefacts and so forth together. It pointe to a situation which attemeven-handedness, resource transfer in the wake in the BiodiveConvention, *ile at the same time re-inventing the very divide betwTechnology and Society which ANT has sought to demoUsh. The smay be said of procedures of recompense, and the chapter consiissues in intellectual property rights as they have been extended tocom pensation-sensitive m ilieu of Papua New Gu inea: what is intendebalance out interests creates new social divisions. It thus raises questabout processes of social differentiation. It is also intended to showapplicability of ANT models to the practical understanding of wotherwise would just seem to o h eterogeneous a collection of m aterial

In seeking momentary anchorage in actor network theory, I caught by its formative tmsle with the division between technoland society.* Surely there is an after-life to its success in overcomdescriptive resistance to dealing with persons, things, artefacts events all in the same breath? Perhaps we have learnt to treat th


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W hat is intellectual property after

The parliament of brothersAN T s anchorage in a division between Technology and Society hasbeen its own netting within science/technology studies.^ Its insis-tence on treating hiunan and nonhuman entities alike has endorsedthe democratic potential of that programme. Humanity shouldnever have been constructed in op position to extensions o fitself anaxiom which Bruno Latour has extended to all kinds of societiesand circumstances: a parliament of brothers follows the parliamentof things (Latour, 1993:142-3). Yet something akin to a human/Qonhtunan divide lingers in certain social formulations, evocative ofthe pains that officers of the British or Australian colonial serviceonce too k no t to regard peop les under their jurisdiction as differentkinds of human beings from themselves. Indeed having to banishany hint of that divide (having to banish because it was still there)was a kind of minimal threshold for entry into the internationalcommunity after the second world war, endorsed in the UnitedN ation s declaration of rights for the himian family.This gives me half of the present argument. The other half lies ina corollary o f sorts: how to apply the insights of A N T to social het-erogeneities in the particular absence of a signifying divisionbetween persons and things. One would not want the neutralisinglanguage and evenhanded analysis of actor network theory to lessenthe observer s capacity to perceive loaded rhetoric and persons farfrom evenhan ded dealings with on e another.From the perspective of peoples of the Papua New GmneaHighlands, continuities of identity between persons and things maybe taken for granted. People imagine one another in terms of thefood which sustains them or the wealth by which they can be mea-sured. Now to Euro-American ears that niay soimd a familiarenough situation; however, as we shall see, it is what these imagin-ings com pel people to d o with their things which m arks them out.


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arilyn Strathernare symmetrical processes. Above all, it is to the actions and intions of persons that all kinds of effects are assigned. One wondfor example, which ancestor is blocking a business enterpriswhose persuasion it was that got the election campaign to comthis particular place rather than that. As a result, people are divno t so m uch by what they possess as by what they d o w ith their sessions and atteibutes with respect to others.^ They capitalizthe fact that you cannot tell by looking at a motor vehicle whois, or the power it mobilizes. That not being able to tell is a suon which Papua N ew Gu inea H ighlanders elaborate endlessly.

Imagine that radical distinctions hold between persons, trather than between persons and things; if on e includes the sworld persons may be both human and nonhuman. So how are tinctions betw een p ersons established? Very simply, peop le achdivision through relations. They are divided by the positions occupy in relation to one another: male and female, donor redient, a clan of this ancestry and a clan of that. Relationsseparate out capabilities for action. A speaker holds an audiencvirtue of their acquiescence; between them they create moment(social) asymm etry.

Where interests are the phenomenal form of relations, interdivide people from on e another. Different interests are addresseANT through Michel Callon's (1986:208)' interressements, devices by which actors detach others from elsewhere in ordeattach them to themselves, not to speak of counting allies andpoints of passage through which they squeeze debate. Indeed Aanalysis implies that people are always negotiating their relatships with others. If I dwell on persons as actants, it is to pleaspecial case not for human agency (see Singleton and Mich1993:230-1) but for the diversity of social heterogeneities wpeople create out of extensions of themselves. Consider Call(1992:80) definition of a n actor as an intermediary regarded as


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W hat is intellectual property afterThe situation I have in mind, or rather one half of it, is of peopleforced to swallow a set of conceptual divisions long familiar toANT. Papua New Guineans are being inducted into the mysteries ofthe divide between Technology and Society. How did this come

about? It has come about through a democratizing impulse to renderhuman beings symmetrical to one another. For global interests insustaining the d ivision are being drawn in with the best of intentions,specifically to ensure an equitable distribution of resources and thusto make sure that people are not (too much) divided by what theypossess. Just as national sovereignty is promulgated on an inter-national stage, or appeals to traditional social forms are made in acontext of mass education, instruments which actually promote thedistinction between technology and society are being introduced intoa situation where the distinction did not exist so as to protect theindigenous order from some of its effects (the effects of that distinc-tion). One intermediary here is the very category Callon used for hisexample, intellectual property rights [IPR].Already the focus of con-siderable controversy in the Third World figured through the peasantfarmer (eg. Brush, 1993; Greaves, 1994), there are some interestingpassages ahead to be shaped by the particular way in which manyPapua New Guinean societies deal with persons, their attributes andtheir effects, and the way as a consequence they also deal w ith things.

Perhaps part of ANT s after-life will be its effectiveness in havingus recognize now familiar confrontations such as these. Being ableto see how its very own demon (the separation of technology fromsociety) gathers allies to colonize new terrain may tell us why itsanalysis remains necessary. And how does this separation combinewith the concomitant separations of nonhuman from human orthings from persons? John Law (1994) h as asked about the diffi-culty, or ease for that matter, with which phenomena persist andhave any durability at all, and that goes for the characteristic dis-tinctiveness of these entities. The seminar on intellectual propertyrights in Port Moresby promises to mobilize all of these. Along thisaxis I predict two contrasting passage points for its deliberations.


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arilyn Strathern

First pusage point: tiw Biodiversity conventionPapua New Guinea is a signatory to the 1992 ConventionBiological Diversity [CBD].^ The convention s objectives inc developing national stratepes or programmes for the conservaand sustainable use of biodiversity (article 6), in relation to wthe principle of in-situ conservation frames a whole series of recmendations (article 8). A m on g them is the contracting paragreement:

Subject to its national legislation, [to] respect, preserve andm aintain knowledge and practices of indigenous and localcommunities embodying traditional lifestyles relevant for theconservation and sustainable use of biological diversity and [toprom ote their wider application with the approval and involvem ent of th e holders of such know ledge, innovations and practand [to] encourage the equitable sharing o f the benefits arisingfrom [their] utilisation [8j]

The category inclusion of indigenous communities is an outcoamong other things, of a decade of NGO campaigning on behalindigenous rights. Alongside this has been vigorous debate oindigenous know ledge and its protection serious attention begiven world-wide to this double issue at the very point when EuAm ericans speak of their societies as information societies andknowled ge as industrial capital (see C oom be, 1996a: see Brn.d.), and when genetic and biological materials come to be treaas informational resources (Parry, 1997).

Intellectual property rigjits have entered the picture in diveways. They comprise an existing instrument for securing the innational reco^ition of copyrights and patents. Papua Gui(PNG) is also in the process of becoming a signatory to the Wo


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W hat is intellectual property aftervides new sco pe for indigen ous claims to resources. Here Papua N ewGuinea is being introduced to legislative efforts already attemptedon behalf o f indigenous peoples elsewhere; representatives from Peruand the Philippines are invited to the Port Moresby seminar [here-after 'seminar']. After decades of unsatisfactory debate over landclaims, come a new set of formulations: the possibility of being aUeto attribute 'authorship' to products of the intellect, and thus turndebate about property rights from rights of possession to rights ofcreation. Property in cultural knowledge ('cultural property'' ) sud-l^enly seems a construct realizable on a new scale. IPR could allowindigenous communities, then, to give voice to new kinds of claims,for example to ethnobotanical know ledge (Greaves, 1994 ), therebyenabling a beleaguered Third World to assert itself on the inter-national stage. The seminar programme, under the title Intellectual,Biological and Cultural Property Rights, includes 'knowledge,information, inventions and techniques', 'genetic information andproducts', and 'ciiltural practices and production'.

On the surface, it wou ld appear that AN T 's lessons about sym m e-try between the human and nonhuman have already been learnt.Intellectual property rights protection promotes human knowledgeon a par with other resources. More than that, the BiodiversityConvention explicitly recognizes that knowledge may be embeddedin people's practices ('communities embodying traditional lifestylesrelevant for . . . conservation'), and seems prepared to deal w ith arange of entities of both a social and natural kind. There appears anew readiness to accept all manner of phenomena as relevant toagreements. Yet this l^rbrid embrace entails, as we might expect,new practices of purification (after Latour, 1993). IPR pursues itsown differentiations between technology and society.

Differentiation starts with the simple question of profit arisingfrom the utilization of knowledge. Using knowledge to gain know-ledge would not qualify for IPR protection; using knowledge toproduce a commodity would. For the problem is how to makeknowledge socially effective, how to make it transactableknow-


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arilyn Strathernusefulness of knowledge: possessing the machinery to cut dowforest helps to create the interest in doing so. At the point of intion, then, an after-life is given to the application of knowle(patent). Intents are regarded as crucial to technology devementfor technology is both a product and produces produAnd it captures people s imagination. One impetus for the proposeminar is alleged international interest in local resources; outcommercial entenmse is regarded as being able to mobilize technological base to exploit them . Th us the seminar rubric reto the plans of an Australian b iotech comp any to research market products derived from snake and spider venom from speunique to PN G .

So where do es Society com e in? Copyright and patents premised on the specific need to give a secondary social effecworks and techn ologies wh ich are already in themselves soeffects. People first author or invent a device and then lay claimits anticipated utility. Th ey have to m obilize society in order tosuch claims. In Euro-American convention, society here lies only in commerce but in the procedures, such as legislation and ctract, w iiich a lso govern access.

This is the point at which Society finds more representatives tit thought it had. On its behalf have come trenchant criticismIPR as a quasi-legislative device; and criticism has been given imtus by the very cha llenge o ft h e Convention o n Biological DiverThe movement for IVaditional Resource Rights is a case in p(POsey, 1995; 1996; and see n. 8), on e of its programmes bdissemination of information between different non-governmbodies concerned with these issues. The question they askwhether IPR could really offer appropriate procedures for alignsocial interests with new resources. Far from it liberating the riof indigenous peoples, many see in IPR only the spread of EuAmerican forms of property that will legitimate the extractor


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is intellectual property after1996:13). Bringing in the state, from this point of view, does nothelp. For the Biodiversity Convention only adds to potential injus-tice in affirming state sovereignty at the expense of local resourceholders. Against both market and state, alternative appeals aremade to indigenous 'communities' and to the collective basis ofknowledge.

Here are old differences rendered anew. This fresh polarization ofSociety is itself an artefact of international interests: persons aredivided by the very debate which provides the key points at issue. Forthe debate is constituted around apparently axiom atic polarities (fre-quent candidates are com m odity transactions versus sharing, individ-ual interests versus collective ones, companies versus communities,nation states versus first nations). This in turn generates further divi-sions. If it is agreed that indigenous collective claims are the startingterms of the debate, then the question becom es how to allocate prop-erty rights to specific social identities (seniors versus juniors, w om enversus m en, c lans versus villages)? W ho will be delegated t o representwhom? Social difference could proliferate infinitely.

Thus does the hybrid lead to new practices of 'purification'.Entailed in the potential for IPR to extend protection to diverseforms of resources, human and nonhuman, is the way in whichknowledge is made effective through technology. Bringing socialprocedures from technology-rich states and companies to bear onwhat are perceived to be technology-poor ones perpetuates divisionsbetween world powers/multinationals and indigenous peoples/thirdworld enterprise. Both sides may well attribute to the former analready socialized technological competence (they know how toprofit from their knowledge) whereas the latter have to be made tosee first that have technology (as in the way they implement know-ledge about tree products, for example), and then to realize thatthey have to develop social institutions to protect it. The chancesare that Papua New Guineans will feel that they must temper theirinternationalism with a specifically indigenous responsearespon se to end orse a specific sense of national identity. Certainly


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arilyn Strathernrelations which are being sununoned. The social and the ancient acombined in appeals to tradition, and 'indigenous peoples' acrothe world have responded to IPR for its attack on traditional valuIn short, IPR has become the subject of international debathrough enrolling two concepts on which both sidesthose whave hopes for it and those who despair of itagree. One world hknowledge made effective through 'technology'; another world hsociety made effective through 'community' (see Latour, 1991)The former is driven by the material necessity to produce new geerations of products, for the technologically advanced somehoowe It to the intrinsic nature of things to exploit their potentiwhile latter is, whether as a matter of self-dignity or self-interepushing claims of social identity.

And who and what will represent the indigenous order whichthe basis of the claims that Papua New Guinea exercise on tworld stage?We might look for representatives in their own descrtions ofthemselves.That brings me to the second half of the argment.Second passage point: compensationPapua New Guinea already has a representative of its own indignous order (so to speak) in the concept of 'custom ary law', formalpart of the underlying law of the country (Law ReforCommission, 1977).'^ It is there (as the seminar intends) to enrolled in the translation from international agreements to locrealization. One particular area generally attributed to 'customwhich has much exercised the implementation of recent claims resources, is to do with the way claims are negotiated with procdure.I have been pointing to divisions of interest over the suitabiliof IPR. There are fundamental problems with how one translat


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What is intellectual property after?is the way procedure itself exaggerates heterogeneity of a socialkind. *

So what is this universal translator? It is known by the PidginEnglish word kx>mpensesen/coiapetisa.tion.^ Compensation tranlates persons and things into power-holders with a special competence: they both acquire the capacity to effect further translations.

'Compensation' as it is generally understood in Papiia NewGuinea does everything which an English-speaker might imagineand much more. It refers both to the payment owed to persons andto the procedures by which they com e to nego tiate settlenient. It canthus cover recompense due to kin for nurture they have bestowedas in bridewealth, as well as damages, as in reparations to equalizethefts or injuries. It can substitute for a life, in homicide compensa-tion, or for loss of resources. Car fatalities, war reparations, miningroyalties: all potentially fall under its rubric, although since it isgenerally agrMd that people frequently make exorbitant demandscompensation is seen as the enemy as well as the friend of peacem aking cerem onies and o f comm ercial exploitation alike. (On m ighask, after Latour, how 'exorbitant' is exorbitant). Its outcome isfrom a Euro-American viewpointhybrid, insofar as it consists inan equally easy translation of persons into things and things intopersons. And its procedural capability is of the utmost simplicityLiabilities and claims are defined by the positions parties take inrelation to one another over the issues of compensation itself Ireturn to this.

The concept of compensation has only recently spread acrossPapua N ew Gu inea from what is taken as its central Highland s origin (Filer, 1997). Not only was it never ubiquitous, different prac-tices characterized different regional areas; comparative analysis osome of the cultural and social differences in the substitutability oitems for one another, for example, may be found in Lemonnier(1991). So wherein lies the ability of Highlands-style 'compensationto travel? What follows is a synthesis from a Highlands and, inits detail, specifically a Hagen perspective. It suggests two crucia


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arilyn Strathemowner s inner resources. Witnessing foreign ventures in mining anlogging, the thought of company profit prompts nationals to costrue the counter-idea of recompense. There is thus a logic to curent interest in land as an object of investment that commandsprice, insofar as wealth (company profits) extracted from it can talon as evidence of wealth (ancestral fertility) that has gone init. By this logic, local politicians and businessmen may persuacompanies to enter into reciprocal transactions on the grounds thsocial welfare is at stake. What an economist might call the oppotunity cost of lost subsistence production, nationals voice as compensation , reimbursements which they can invest for futudevelopment. Paying for loss of future benefit can be likened compensation for bodily injury in warfare or personal paymenfor nurture. N o wonder there is some apprehension am on g sompolicy-advisers at what the idea of intellectual property might do a regime like this: it would add to an already heady mix the concethat know ledge is a lso an inner resource with a potential price.

Second, and this is the point on which I dwell here, compensatiotravels by its own means of evaluation. A transaction which tranforms hu man energies into other values, it offers the prom ise of hanessing any order of material worth to realize theman insult cosa fortnight s wage, assistance in war is measured by twenty fgrown p igs, mother s milk lead s to claims over a p iece o f lanIndeed I would aigue that the potential of compensation as a readmechanism for summoning a modernized indigenous oixier lies the very way in which equivalences are set up between persons anthings. There are Highlands regimes where one can these days pafor almost anything, because the fact of transaction in and of itseneed not drive a wedge between different phenomena. * The mointimate acts between persons may materialize in transactions andwid e range o f material effects may be laid to people s doorMoreover the applicability of these procedures is much facilitate


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is intellectual property afterbetween persons and the products of their efforts (see Gudeman1996). One corollary is that almost anything can be attributed topeople s work, someone s, somewhere. If not in known human persons, the source may lie in ancestors or spirits or heroes, with amythology of inventions and interventions to prove the point. Inany case, since so many things are the ultimate result of such interventions, there is little that cannot be made to show the imprint oexertion, including the exertion of thought and intent.

Remark again on the simplicity of the procedure. The compensation process itself defines what is transactabk (compensatable). T hiis no tautology. For compensation entails making relations betweenpersons visible through the flow of payments, and making themafresh. The vehicles for compensation (usually conceived as wealthof a kind) are thus pressed into the service of creating, limiting andexpanding social relationships. Relations are infinitely op en t o redefinition and reiteration; their definitive capacity is that of absorbinnew transactional moments. IPR would expand by huge volume thnumber of items that may fall into the category of objects withwhich Papua New Guineans can transact, insofar as it would benlisting persons seen in the light of new resources, and thus newcategories of social actors and new grounds on which to create relationships.

Unlike claims people make on one another with reference to territorial areas or group membership as some pre-determining set oattributes, com pen sation itself works as a species of social organization. It can create new social units. For it may be given or receivedby any order of social entityan individual or a clan or a districtBut that is really the wrong way round. Rather, collectivities differentiate, identify and, in short, describe themselves by their role incompensation a kind of functional heterogeneity. Compensation ipart of the wider field of transactions by which social units ardefined through exchange. ^ So, for instance, clan or subclan identity m ay be claimed on the grounds o f people s joint action agivers/receivers of bridewealth. If social entities justify themselve


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rilyn trathemAll tha t remains to be added is tha t, in its present guise, compesation has become a new passage point, in Papua New Guineanrelations with one another and with outsiders alike. Kirsc

(1997:142) has argued that econom ic explanations of conflibetween landowners and resource developers allow developers continue business as usual in the face of landowner complainabout environmental impact, which are redefined as [exorbitandemands for increased compensation . They equally allow develoers to limit liability to material claims and to avoid other questionabout responsibility. Compensation is also new from another poiof view. While it works as an intermediary to which ac tors attributhe value of tradition, its tradit ion al status is questionable. Quiapart from the issue of its ubiquity. Filer (also see A. Strathem1993) refuses to agree with people s vviiolesale equation of compensation and tradition. He argues that despite its reference to olpractices of body compensation, the new phenomenon of resourccompensation speaks to a very recent history of relations witdevelopers and with the state. In any case, traditional attributes dno t bind people to tradit ion al behaviour. Hence Filer (1997:17observers that expatriate developers may package their relationshipwith local landowners through traditional compensation agreenients intended as signposts to their mutual obligations, whiindigenous landow ners seek their own private means to remove elements of balance from the relationship-demanding favours on thone hand, resorting to coercion on the other.

Combiiiations and diviskmsThe interesting conclusion to derive from this Papua New Guineasketch is not that people run together technology and society, othings and persons, but that without ideological need for either o


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is intellectual property afterNew Guinean Highlanders (among others) should spend so muchenergy on exchanging like for like, shells for shells or pork forporkor for that matter money for money. The difference betweenthe items which go back and forth betw een persons, the significanceof their materiality, is precisely a matter of social origin and socialdestination. Th ey have com e from or are intended for specific sets o fpeople. Similarly, the reason why some are lucky and some havepower, or have goo d or bad soil, or advanced tech nology or not, canbe attributed to p revious relationships. An d, in converse, anything istransactable that can be pressed into the service of the differentia-tion of persons (after Sahlins, 1976). Perhaps this m akes personsdifferent kinds of actants from those persons of Euro-Americanproperty thinking who struggle, Thurber-like, with the intractabilityand peculiarity of things.

Perhaps, too, something like this arises when IPR is criticised forintroducing alien forms of possession into indigenous communities.Relations with people become the basis for laying claims; one has aright because o ne is a cousin or neighbour, and in claiming the rightgives substance to being, even sometimes becoming, a cousin orneighbour. Now while we can extend the Papua New Guineanmetaphor and speak of Euro-Americans using persons to dividepersons, through inheritance for instance, ANT knows that thelatter have what is, for them, a far more articulate set of indigenousm ediators at their disposal: precisely the properties o f things .Kodak cameras, hotel keys: perceived as things with properties oftheir own these entities require people do something about them.

Take the notorious product derived from the Pacific yew tree,Taxol, as described by Goodman and Walsh (see Walsh andGoodman, n.d.). After years of largely American development withpublic funds, this e m e r ^ as a drug eventually used in human trialsfor cancer treatment, sometime after which its name became regis-tered as a trademark of the company, Bristol Myers Squibb. Overtime, from the first assays of the 1960s to a period betw een 1982 and


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arilyn Strathernformula. These diverse attributes are summoned by diverse (expeinterests, although the attributes or properties to which these inteests correspond, notably chemical and biological ones, are regardas inherent or natural to anything which can be classified as organic substance.

This is a prime Euro-American example of what Law (1994:10means by relational materiality. If people were not divided into dferent kinds of experts then we would not have an expert descrition of the substance divided up like that. Moreover because expeget themselves into permanent positions of competence, as tauthority on this or that aspect, they presuppose that there is substance which could not be divided up thus. Any organic sustance can have a biochemical analysis done on it. Whether anyowishes to w ill depend on other interests, but properties attributed the thing will summon forth their own experts, and thus justify tdivisions between people. Things come to seem intrinsically hetergen eou s this way. So , like the genetic description w hich byp asses ttedious coUecting of medical histories (Wexler, 1992:227), the thiItself will identify what people have to be mobilized. This is whANT has been telling us all along about (Euro-American) hetergeneity. You do not necessarily want to reopen all the negotiationYou do not reinvent the conventions of commerce with strangeeach time you handle money: it is there in the banknote. Of theown accord, things fetishize people s past decisions. It then becoma matter of surprise or discovery how people rearrange themselvanew around thingsthe fracas over the private company takinover Taxol is like the difficulty of trying to find the right social costellation, the appropriate protection procedures, for indigenoresources.

In IPR, as it is internationally pursued, a separation betweethings and persons turns out to be a necessary precondition implementationat least to the extent that attributes are taken


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hat is intellectualproperty afterThis can be imagined in several ways.^* If IPR rests in the evi-dence given by the artefact itself then it disregards other Euro-American possibilities of establishing ownership. People takepossession of all manner of things, through purchase, donation,inheritance, and so forth; such property rights (drawing onMacfarlane s formula [1998]) use people to divide things. In otherwords, each entity is split among the persons who have a claim onit, and has as many pa rts as there are persons who have rights, like a8um of money divided between several claimants. By contrast, thereis a sense in which IPR uses things to divide people, since the claimis specifically to the embedded nature of (intellectual) activity in the

product. For IPR can only apply to things (human artefacts)already notionally divided into components, with that part indicat-ing the commercial potential of knowledge or creativity being seenas among several components of the whole. It is as though themoney itself indicated which bit was to buy subsistence items andwhich bit was for luxury expenditure.It was suggested that if, in the view of the international comm u-nity , IPR were to be extended to indigenous resource claims, itwould recreate at one stroke the division between Technology andSociety (recognize your technical potential and take social action),and between First and Third Worlds (show new nations the socialprocedures to cope with commercial potential; biological rights andcultural rights may need different instruments). To this set of viewswe can now add a division between Things and Persons (the inher-

ent nature of resources as things indicates the appropriateness ofth esocial claim: this is a biological specimen, that a cultural monu-ment). It is likely that the internal relations of indigenous peoples toone another will matter only insofar as they bear on the passagepoint of their relation to international players; that will no doub t betranslated into the thing in which both are held to have an interest.


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arilyn Stratherntraditional anthropological activity of comparison? How, for exple, would on e com pare networks? Com parison wo uld forceobserver to find parallels and eq uivalences, to treat one's cases smetrically, within a presum ption o f difference. N o w loo kin g for allels in the manipulation of Persons and Things will simreinforce a sense of difference. But that is to start, so to speak, wahady purified terms. Suppose we took a cue from a concepIryrbrid, compensation, and looked for other parallels in EAmerican practice. One candidate with an equally limitless capafor translation suggestsitself It translates knowledge into a powholder of a now familiar kind, a competence which acquirescapacity to rfTect further translations. I refer to the Euro-Am erpench ant for self-description.

Self-description is an instrument which, like compensation prdure, encourages social entities to proliferate. And like compention, which defines the unit that can claim it, such descripcreates units radically distinct from one another. However simthey all look to an outsider, self-description establishes the uniqness of each through enrolling the radical divide between self other. We see this, for instance, in the cascading effect of claimethnic identities. Observers who attempt descriptions from the side are sometimes confused by the Itybrid composition of ethgroups, as though their mixed constitution were a bar to collecidentity. But all you need are the instruments for 5e(f-descr iptionThe Papua New Guinea seminar on intellectual, biological cultural property rights is a hybrid of a kind, at least as far associal orientations are concerned (being convened by a new Norganization in con,junction with a statutory government body). its own mandate joins these together in its very description of aand intentions. On the one hand, the Executive Summary states

concern with 'promoting conservation and sustainable managemof natural resources at the grassroots level in Papua New Guin


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is intellectual property after?the various churches, to help implement its policies. This particularalliance of enablement is also part of a late twentieth century globalphenomenon. It is a microcosm of the traffic that Willke identifiesbetween interest organizations and the state. In contrast, he writes(1990:235), to the liberal format o f infiuence and pressure po litics . [many] countries are moving towards an officially organizedcollaboration between the state and large interest organizations inpublic policy m aking . T hese organizations are resourceful andselfdetermining, to the extent that the state becomes dependent onthem for detailed and specialized information, while having torecognize their decentralizing effect. They act as ( corporated ) soci-etal sub systems. Willke argues that the state trades in its compe-tence at policy making for access to the knowledge and skills atthese organ izations disposal; they in turn com ply with state poli-cies, while gaining the chance to reproduce themselves in numerousfields of expertise.

Their capacity for reproduction is immense. When Posey assem-bled the documents for his volume on Traditional Resource Rightshe drew on a range of organizations, from the U.N., to variousbodies in the burgeoning field o f soft law ,^^ to local interestgroups. But this is no t any random collection o f social entities: thesegroups are mutually recognizable, produce similar docu m ents, speaka common language, and thus communicate with one another.^They are all experts. What enables them to miiltiply is, am ong otherthings, the generative language of self-description in a field consti-tuted by entities communicating their descriptions to one another.Self-description is a form of self-reference. The self-descriptionwhich Papua N ew G uinea produces of itself (the P N G way ren-dered concrete in customary law) is a description m ade for a field o fsimilar descriptions circulating in the international community.Each evokes particular competences or sources of enablement. Thisis the parallel to be drawn w ith the self-constituting nature of c om -pensation procedures.


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Marilyn Strathemcalls this functional difTerentiation (after Luhmann).^* We cancall it social proliferation.

As service bodies informing the state, these quasi-governmorganizations thus contain their own drive to reproduce; they pel social division. What is written, for example, into the UNC B D , is endorsed in the interest organizations which spring uinform states how to take care of social heterogeneity. As Psays, in his Executive Summary on behalf of the IUCN International Union for the Conservation of Nature) (1996:xiii)intention is to guide the development ofsui generis systems, thlocally appropriate mechanisms for protection and conservasubject only to the requirement that they are seen to be effecThis calls forth, as we have seen in the case of Papua New Guthe efforts at self-reference I have been noting: systems have to municate their uniqueness to others. Customary law is an apt eple because custom s are axiom atically unique by virtue osocial identities to which they are attached. Arguing thatreferentiality is necessary for a system to deal with its own comity, WiUke observes that systems thereby control their bordeciding which among myriad contingent operations fit into own procedure, thus producing some kind of operational cloThat very closure is a cond ition of heterogeneity.

I have been borrowing from som e o f the con cepts associatedmodels of complex systems, in order to underline the self-propenature of social heterogeneity in international regimes. For won e might say that these proliferating organ izations are all the sthey do promote functional differentiation. That is, they have mels of themselves as offering distinct and unique, competences, cble of combining with one another, but different from one anoby virtue of attributing organizational (operational) closurthemselves. N o w W illke seems to take it for granted, that systare bound to conserve difference. ANT would query that axio


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W hat is intellectual property after?through which they communicate with others, becomes a precondi-tion for further division. Describing itself is the first move a neworganization takes (this is what makes heterogeneity functional).Heterogeneity may thus be commimicated though common mediaAnd identical looking docum ents, exactly as H ighlands com pensa-tion payments mobilize similar items of wealth in an endless roundof reciprocities: in bo th cases the substantive focus of these transac-tions is the social uniqueness of every participating actant.

The success of ANT is to have overcome descriptive resistance todivisions between technology and society, and everything that followsin relation to things and persons. In actor network theory, anythingmobilized in the course of action is an actor/actant: they are allpotential agents. One could say that a decade of effort am ong N G O sand others has overcome descriptive resistance to talking in the samebreath about governments, multinationals and indigenous peoples. Inthis language, these bodies all have rights; indeed potentially they allhave expertise, their own competences and above all organizationalcapacity. Yet people may be as d ivided by what they share as by whatthey do not. It may be agreed that everyone has knowledge embodiedin their practices: the question becomes how (commercially) useful itis. If claiming access to knowledge leads to functional social differen-tiation, its utility turns out, like any other resource, to be distributedamong people in uneven quantities. The moment one suggests thattechnologyor procedures for technology-protectioncould liberatethe usefulness of knowledge for particular social units, one reintro-duces the distinction between society and technology which sustainsthe new international progranune. ANT s location within science andtechnology studies is there as a constan t reminder.

AcknowledgementsI owe my introduction to ANT to John Law, whose inspiration is


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arilyn Strathern

Notes1 Like scallops, one w ants to be caug ht in the right nets. I am no t sure that Ca

(1986) Breton scaUops would behove like Inuit ones (if there were any). Inuitlop i would yield themselves to flghermen directly (r fB od en ho m . 1995:187).

2 I am struck by the axiomatic location of Actor Network Theory (ANT) wstudies of science and technology. (Callon [1986:197] begins with the hopethe socio logy of translation offers an analytical framework for the study orole played by science and technology in structuring power relationships ) Ithank Vivien Walsh for furnishing m e with several relevant papers.

3 NeedkM to say I hswe specifics in mind: specifically Highlanders from cePapu a Ne w G uinea, and transactions predicated on gift caichange . In my digmatic case (from Hagen in the Highlands of PNG), men deliberatelythemselves into asymmetrical relationships as donors and recipients withexchange relationship.

4 On kindedness of hum an beings see Astu ti, 1995.5 T o interest other actors is to build devices wh ich can be placed between

and aU other entities who w ant to define their identities otherwise (1986This cutting disassociate* actors from their previous associations.

6 A N T s appeal to symmetry requires the enrohnent of the social observer hherself as another neutral party. However here, not neutral at all, I am defiaggeraung various analytical positions, and especially in relation to the PNew Gumean material give s


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Whatisintellectual property afterheritageo fthe coun try , including objects connected with the traditional culturallife of people (Preliminary). Its target was p rindpally items ofart and artrfacUw h k h h ad value in international markets. M y thanks to Mark Busse of theN ational Museum for h is help with information here.

11 Se e Nabhan et at(1996: 1 90-1 ) w ho observe that it would b e posable for tribalHghu t o a folk variety o f plant to be asserted through the U .S. Plant VarietyProtection Act already in place, although n o tribe has to date deployed thismechanism. It should b e noted that Papua N e w O uineans are able to equatenational with indigenous rights vis-a-vis th e international comm unity) in waysunheard of in either N orth or South Am erica; the concept o ftribe i s only used invery specific location s, eg , tribal warfare .12 There are attem pts to put these on an equalizing basis. Thus Article 40 o f theCharter o f the Indigenous-tribal Peoples of the Ttopical Fbrests ( Programmes

related to biodiversity m ust respect the collective rightso four peofdesto culturaland intellectual property ) is followed by Article 44: Since w e highly value ou rtraditional techn ologies a nd believe that our b iotechn ologies can m ake im portantcontributions tohum anity, including developed countries,w e demand guaran-teed right to our intellectual property an d control cover th e develoiHnentandm anipulation of this know ledge. However,a s Fr an foise Barbira-Freedman (pers.com m .) adds, one reason why a ctors cann ot be on th e same level of agency liesinthe history o f commoditization which long preceded the IPR debate an d h a salready created a particular kind o f added value to products n ot matched innon-com m odity concep tions of products and work.

13 Procedural rather than substantive uniformity h a s been noted a s a feature ofPapua New Gu inean custom ary law.14 For a trenchant critique, wh ich should be comp ulsory read ing for anthrop ologistsinterested in these issues, see Coom be , 1 996.15 B y universal I mean that under certain circumstances i t can translate any -thing into wealth, n ot that it is a universal feature o fP^>ua N e w G uinea soci-eties. I am simphfying a case which be argued in its specifics from the Mt.Hagen area, although i t is not unrecognizable elsewhere in the country.However, i t is not necessarily accepted everywhere eithei; and in any case tra-ditional barriers to the substitutability o f certain classes of items for oneanother have long been th e subject o f anthropological interest (eg Godelier,1986). Iwould add that while from th e viewpoint o f th e n ew generic standingof compensation practices, th e synthesis whkh follows i s not out of place, it(the synthesis) does not of course pretend to be a historical accounting of theway in which these ideas have developed (see eg, the contributicms to Toft,1997; Banksan d BaUard, 1998).16 Filer (1997) disputes the connection here [seebelow].H e is at pains to d istinguish


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arilyn Strathernattributed (the outcome o f past interactions an dperforman ces) and what iated during new interactions or performan ces.20 With fiuid 'collectivities' goes fluid rhetoric. '[For] when w e try toinv estigaconceptualise the substance o f their mutual condiict, w emay find that w ealonger dealing with any actual pattem o frelationships between real ind ividuconcrete soc ial settings, but on ly with snatcheso frhetoric w hich , like the abopposi t ion o f landowners t o developers , areapplied t o developmencou rse in a certain type of public forum .' (Filer, 199 7:174).

21 I borrow from a nanalytical conun drum observed elsewhere ( eg , M .Strat1991a). Aremindero f Macfarlane's formula: Roman la w emphasized th ebility o f material things among persons [people divide things (into diffshares)], while feudal and English common law emphasized the divisibil ity osons in the multiple 'bundled o f righto' held in entities themselves indiv[things divide people (into different right-holders)]. W e might say that sciclassification (asaproject that divid es by insp ection , that is, by virtual orinttual partition as incom pon ential analysis, w ithou t having t o divide th eetransposes 'bundles of attributes' on to the things.

22 The reproductive powero f combination and recombination which producestural Iqrbridity' (Werbner, 1997) does not g oaway with fundamentalisms intity when identity summons a division between self and other(c f. Yuval-D1997).23 Posey an d Du tfield (1996:120) draw attention to thedevelopm ent o f soft'strictly speaking it is n otlaw atall. Inpractice, soft la wrefersto a great vof instrumento: declarations o f principles, codes o f practice, recommendaguidelines, standards, charters, resolutions, etc. Although a llthese kind o fmento lack legal status (are not legally binding), there is astrong expectationtheir provisions will b erespectedan dfollowe d by t heintem ationai comm uThey add that th eevolution o f 'customary intemationai law' c a n b eacceleby th einclusion o f customary principles in soft law agreemento and nongomental declarations. These become hardened through use and world wide actance.

24 Both interm so ftheir participation in the culturally recognizable activity oument production, and (a sR iles (inpress a )describes inde tail) interm s ot ions between specifK seto of organizations am ong wh om the documento proby on e m ay be crafted soa stoencom pass the docum ents o f others (Rilesinb). Fran^oise Barbira-Freedman (pers. comm.) notes the virtual nature o fcand cou nter-claim s (as between landow ners and developers) wh ich may be iently incapable of lock ing in to the social con stellation s called for by IPR pra


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Latour, Bruno (1991), Society is technology made durable. In J, Law (ed.) , ASociology o f Monsters: Essays o n Power . Technology an d Domination L o n d o n :


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Marilyn StrathemPosey, Darrell 199 5), Indigen ous Peo ples a n d TVaditional R esou rce R ighConference Proceedings, Oxford: Green College Centre fo r Environmental Poland Understanding.Posey, Darrell 19 96), Traditional Resou rce rights: International Instruments f

Protection and Condensation fo r Indigenous Peoples and Lo cal Commu nitGland, Switzeriand, a n d Cam bridge: IU C N [International U nio n for Conservation ofNature] .POsey. DarreU an dG raham Dutfield 1996 ), Beyond Intellectual Property; TowaTradUional Resource Rights fo r Indigenous Peoples and Lo cal C ommu nitOttawa: International Development Research Centre.Riles , Ann el ise inpress).The Actions ofF act: T he Aesthetics o f G lobal InstitutioKnowledge.A nn Arbour, M I: M ichigan U niversity Press.Sah lins, M arshall 197 6), C ulture and Practical R eason. Chicago: Chicago UniverPress.Singleton, Vicky an dM ike M ichael 1993 ) , Actor-networks a n dam bivalence:geral practitioners in th e U K cervical screening programme, Social Studies ien e 23:217-64.

Strathem , M arilyn n.d.) , Environm enU within: an ethnographic commentaryscale. Linacre Lecture O xford, 1996).W agner, Roy 196 7), Tlie C urse ofSouw Ch icago: Chicago University Press.Walsh, Vivien an dJordan G oo dm an n.d .) . Cancer chemotheriq>y confronU bdiversity and public property: the case o f the anti-cancer drug taxol. Manches1997.W erbner, Pnina 19 97), introduction t oP .W erbner a n d T . M od ood eds ), DebatCultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics o f Anti-RaciLond on: Zed Books ,1 -26 .W exkr, N an cy 199 2), Clairvoyance an d cau tion: repercussions from th e h u mgenome project . In D.J. Kevles a n d L .H o o d e d s) . The Code o f Codes: Scientand Social issues in the Human Genome Project Cam bridge, M A : HarvUn iversity P ress.W iUke, H ehn ut 199 0), Political intervention: operational preco nd itions fo r genalised political exchange. InB. M arin ed.) . Governanceand G eneralized Ex chaFrankfurt: Boulder C o, 23S-2S 4.Yu val-Davis, N ira 19 77), Ethnicity, gender relations a n d multi-culturalism.F Werbner a n d T . M o d o o d e d s) . Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-CultuIdentities and the Politics of Anti-Racism. London: Zed Books , 193-208.


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Documents

STRATHERN, Marilyn. What is Intellectual Property After all