Book Review:

Who Owns Native Culture?
Michael F. Brown
Harvard University Press
Cambridge 2003
ISBN 0-674-01171-6

This wide-ranging and readable book is by a distinguished anthropologist who did his field work in the 1970's among the Aguaruna of the Peruvian Amazon - his credentials are relevant. It seeks to draw together the many facets of the intense international debate about whether and how moral and economic claims to ownership made by or on behalf of aboriginal, native or indigenous communities can be accommodated within a broadly liberal democratic framework of rule of law and respect for individual rights.

By drawing out the connections between diverse cases in Central Africa, Australia, the United States, Canada, Central and South America, Brown presents a powerful argument that the currently ascendant, legally-based, adversarial approaches to conflict resolution adopted by both those asserting rights and those seeking to resist them tend to generate emotionally charged processes and lousy results for all parties. It is a powerful argument and also an important one given the inexorable growth in such claims, fuelled both by historic injustices of epic proportions and the growing political will to protect wasting cultural assets from further erosion under the onslaught from the global market and the commercial cultures that thrive in them.

He also illustrates neatly how superficially loopy claims and assertions can have profound rationales, albeit sometimes difficult to articulate in legalese, and how superficially robust claims can, on closer investigation, be rooted in pure political expediency and cultural ambulance chasing.

The foci of his attention range widely: artifacts and human remains found in museums; photographs of ceremonial dances that are regarded as abuses of privileged information by the Hopi; folkloric knock-offs of Australian aboriginal motifs used in the rag trade; the state flag of New Mexico, appropriated from a Zuni symbol; access by climbers and loggers to sacred sites; the commercial exploitation of indigenous knowledge of the healing properties of plants and of traditional ecological knowledge (i.e. predictive folk-lore concerning particular geographies); and the appropriation of Pygmy flute music by Madonna (by way of Herbie Hancock and Brian Eno).  

Through detailed case studies and shorter vignettes, Brown illustrates the pitfalls of generalisation and the damage done by polarized sloganeering based on the assertion of absolute rights, particularly those employing the notion of sovereignty as a basis from which communities should negotiate. The 1997 UN Report "Protection of the Heritage of Indigenous People" (The Daes Report), comes in for particular flack. The general approach, which he calls Total Heritage Protection, is, he argues, inoperable, Canute-like in its naivety ("Does any society, no matter how wealthy and privileged, control its culture?") and bristling with unintended and counterproductive consequences. He also shows that the shifting and often contradictory arguments employed in defending native culture would be widely regarded as epistemologically facile or morally unacceptable if voiced in support of non-indigenous claims. 

More generally "stepping outside the indigenous rights debate, one finds progressive legal thinkers arguing passionately for more freedom to borrow, blend and ultimately create new artistic and technological forms," something the Total Heritage Protection approach effectively seeks to veto.  He argues for the inappropriateness of knee-jerk recourse to copyright and patent systems and their adverse impact on the cultural commons that in other contexts those asserting cultural claims generally wish to protect and expand. In its place, he proposes an approach of incremental pragmatism, drawing on political philosopher John Gray's "value pluralism", and the acceptance that beyond a relatively small set of core values, everything has to be negotiated. This approach may not redress historic grievances, but neither will its alternatives, and it will, he argues, provide operable accommodations of conflicting 'rights'. The weakness of the argument, he concedes, is what to do when one party or the other basically refuses to negotiate.

Brown's basic perspective is summed up as follows:

If I am critical of those who seem eager to defend a world of discrete, perfectly bounded cultures that never existed, it is because I am so impressed by the hope and pragmatism of indigenous elders, museum curators, archivists, and cultural resource managers who are negotiating their way to more balanced relationships. They, far more than the activists and academic theorists who set the terms of debate about cultural ownership, understand that progress will be built on small victories, innovative local solutions, and frequent compromise. They recognise too that a world ruled solely by proprietary passions is not a world in which most of us want to live.

Apart from its intrinsic merits as a bracing read, the book and its approach are important in suggesting ways in which the broader restitution debate in the museum sector - of which contested ethnographic items are of course only a small part - could be taken forward by the sector itself, without having to be goaded into action by the prospect of legal claims or political embarrassment.

Adrian Ellis
aellis@aeaconsulting.com

AEA Consulting LLC

© AEA Consulting 2000 - 2004

| PLATFORM | SERVICES | ABOUT AEA | CONTACT AEA |