WIPO’s IGC on GRTKF – An Anthropological Perspective

Anthropology has long since been concerned with economic and political processes of the valorization of culture. Be it the “discovery” of specific cultural practices as ideological and monetary assets, UNESCO’s conventions on the safeguarding of cultural heritage or WIPO’s Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Traditional Knowledge and Folklore (IGC on GRTKF), there has been an ongoing and extended discussion on the intricacies of bringing culture to the market, preventing the misappropriation of cultural expressions and knowledges and protecting world heritage. Yet, only little has been written on the concrete negotiation and decision-making processes on the international level. 
The sub-project “Communication Patterns and Decision-Making about Cultural Property in the International Forum of the World Intellectual Property Organization” focuses on the communicative processes on the establishment of an international framework concerning cultural property rights at this international level. Building on the methodological frameworks of the ethnography of communication and organizations, fieldwork has been carried out during the biannual meetings of WIPO’s IGC in Geneva, and an initial analysis of the vast number of documents that the committee has produced since its installment in 2001 has taken place.
The committee brings together delegations from 184 member states and a large number of NGOs and “indigenous and local communities” (ILCs) from various socio-cultural and linguistic backgrounds. While NGOs and ILCs are admitted only as observers and have no voting power in the negotiations, they nonetheless frequently partake in the discussions and introduce their viewpoints. Thus, the IGC is not only faced with different strategic agendas, but also with a multitude of perceptions of culture and property, and diverging levels of competence of how to act (and speak) on this international level. With regard to the terminology of the ethnography of communcation, one might term the IGC a “speech community in emergence”, i.e. there is only little shared linguistic understanding among its actors – a prime example for this is the fact that so far there is no definition of “traditional knowledge” or “traditional cultural expressions”. Yet, the committee can certainly revert to procedural and communicative conventions that apply to the various bodies of the UN system.
The performance of actors is thus contingent upon their competence to act accordingly to already solidified rules of speech and conduct and at the same time use the leeway that results from the relative nascency of the speech community and its attendent speech events to their advantage. For example, first findings show how in preparing decisions on future work of the committee, actors carefully “micro-edit” documents in order to steer negotiations into a specific direction – a process that requires knowledge and competence on how to act within the given structures of the speech community so as to achieve one’s desired results. Given the prominent role that matters of language and speaking play in the IGC, the ethnography of communication is an ideal means for grasping the complexities of this decision-making process on cultural property on the international level.