Transactions and Creations Property Debates and The Stimulus of Melanesia [Paperback]

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!

Preface
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations

Introduction
Marilyn StrathernandEric Hirsch

PART I: PROPERTY

Chapter 1.Property Limits: Debates on the Body, Nature and Culture
Stuart Kirsch

Chapter 2.Legal Options for the Regulation of Intellectual and Cultural Property in Papua New Guinea
Lawrence Kalinoe

Chapter 3.Seeing, Knowing, Owning: Property Claims as Revelatory Acts
Melissa Demian

PART II: TRANSACTIONS

Chapter 4.Transactions: an Analytical Foray
Marilyn Strathern

Chapter 5.Transactions in PelS°