Indigenous Intellectual Property : A Conceptual Analysis

Indigenous Intellectual Property. A Conceptual Analysis shares the (today) common idea that a conceptualization of Indigenous knowledge and culture as "intellectual property" is essentially an inaccurate one. With specific reference to Yolngu people of North-East Arnhem Land (Australia), this study aims precisely to explain why Western "property-ownership" constructs and categories do not fit Indigenous cultural objects and performances. This research refers more generally to the theoretical framework of anthropological metalanguage borrowings from legal theory, possibly conveying false representations of non-Western societies. Its crucial premise is that, in order to address the contemporary debate on the protection of socalled "traditional knowledge" held by native communities, a full understanding of the "connection" between Indigenous land and cultural expressions seems an inescapable task to be accomplished. The first part of the book explains Yolngu view of land as a "territorial cosmos": namely, a "physical-cosmological continuum" where ancestral subjectivity inhabits the landscape and shapes a web of "cosmological connections". The second part enlightens the inability of Western "property" (or "land property") archetype to conceptualize Yolngu "territorial cosmos", mainly due to a (non-Indigenous) narrative of land as an abstract and "dephysicalized" space. The third part of this study argues that the culturally different conceptualization of land determines a fundamental clash also in the conception of cultural objects and performances, whose "propertization" provokes their detachment from territorial cosmos along with the severance of their "cosmological" bonds to humans and land. Lastly, the book provides an analysis of how this fundamental shift has been transposed in Yolngu judicial dialectics before the Australian Courts.