The interdisciplinary and multisited approach of the Göttingen Research Group on Cultural Property (GRGCP) allows for the interdependence of local, regional, national and international discourses, contexts, and actors concerned with the constituting of cultural property regimes. The most important premises for the collaboration of scholars from the fields in the humanities and social sciences, jurisprudence and economics, however, were to overcome “language” barriers. A lecture series in summer 2008 aimed at an understanding of disciplinary cognitive interest, and methodology. At every session another sub-project presented its specific approaches and interests. In preparation for the meetings, basal literature relevant to the subject of cultural property was studied. The lecture series was completed by an interdisciplinary methodological workshop focusing on the collaborations of the sub-projects. Prof. Dr. Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, Max Planck Institute for Socialanthropology/ Halle and a scholar trained in law and ethnology, supervised the workshop as external commentator.
The most obvious connections concern the sub-projects with the same research field: Scholars of Cultural Anthropology, Economy/Commercial Law and International Law observe and analyse the negotiation processes at the Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore (IGC) at WIPO. Investigations are carried out either by means of organizational and communicative ethnography with a focus on communication patterns (Cultural Anthropology) or from an economic point of view with a positive-analytic institutional Economics approach. The latter aims at an optimally structured regime on cultural property in accordance with welfare Economics. Framed by economic theory and the question of efficiency and adequacy of a legal norm, the Commercial Law sub-project takes part on the normative endeavour of modelling a cultural property regime -with regard to the legal traditions of the representatives at the IGC (common law, case law, local, and traditional law). The scholars of International Law are predominantly concerned with linkages to and interactions with other policy making arenas and institutions. But this sub-project is not the only one which research interest exceeds the WIPO conference building: Particularly the economic/legal sub-project depends on empirical data generated by the ethnological micro studies. In local field researches carried out in Indonesia and Cambodia and by using qualitative research methods such as participant observation and interviews, the ethnological sub-projects investigate local efforts of creating exclusive usage rights on cultural expressions as well as impacts of UNESCO heritage-nominations on the local population. The relations among different legal norms, motivations and incentives for the exclusion of others from usage, and the underlying power structure are a shared interest. The second cultural anthropological sub-project fathoms the limits of propertization-practices by asking: Sounds as Property? Are sounds and tones debated in the IGC as part of intellectual property or protected as intangible elements of rituals or artefacts? These questions are closely linked to all other sub-projects.
The interdisciplinary collaboration goes beyond the reciprocal delivery of data: The occupation with different methods and approaches certainly broadens one’s disciplinary perspective on the research subject. But questions such as “How does an economist deal with the (reflected) subjectivity of ethnological data?”, or “Is it possible to transfer cultural meaning in monetary systems as a means to define value?” demonstrate, however, that there are still some challenges our research group will have to face in its course of an altogether promising collaboration.