The Göttingen Research Group on Cultural Property

How can culture be property? Is not culture a birthright of every human being? That might be an initial response when one hears about struggles to delineate, for instance, copy rights for a particular traditional melody or access rights to a sacred site. Yet such initial consternation quickly fades in the face of considerable global as well as national and local activity to delineate ownership and use rights of cultural artifacts, expressions and knowledge. Such activity is by no means homogeneous. To name just a few examples, individuals or groups of actors in diverse corners of the world seek copy right for their traditional expressions, such as for instance a weaving pattern or a folksong; others act for exclusive indigenous use and hence against the patenting of traditional knowledge on the healing properties of particular plants; yet others hope to secure exclusive rights to market a traditional recipe. Such interests arise in varied contexts where divergent power relations exist between individuals, groups, and states. Cultural property is thus a concept with far-reaching consequences, and grasping what all is or can be cultural property is frought with difficulty. It is thus evident that in an era where “culture” has moved into the limelight as an attractive resource, research on this process and its social, political and economic ramifications is timely.
The Göttingen Research Group on Cultural Property (GRGCP) participates in this growing, internationally situated research effort, choosing as its focus the constitution of cultural property. By focusing on the actors, discourses, contexts and rules that have led to different ways of constituting cultural property, the research group intends to highlight the problematic nature inherent to the concept of cultural property itself, with an eye to both understanding and explaining it as a phenomenon. In acknowledging the emergent, dynamic nature of the concept, the participating teams of scholars from fields in the humanities and social sciences, jurisprudence and economics hope to shed light on different trajectories from within which an interest in cultural property rights take shape. Simultaneously, the group seeks to generate expertise on the complex legal and economic ramifications that arise with different, equally emergent regimes of using culture as both an economic and an identity resource.
Research began in the course of 2008 with ethnographically based studies in South East Asia, German speaking Europe as well as within the international organization WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) and its committee concerend with cultural property rights. The ethnographically based empirical projects examine, for instance, the interplay between ownership and use rights of cultural sites and expressions in the context of global regimes of heritage designation and guardianship. Locally situated craft traditions and their role both in terms of cultural identification and economy are examined in their handling of imitations and global competition. The boundaries of cultural, individual and institutional ownership are to be explored in realms intersecting with technical fixation, such as audio archives and ethnographic film production. Projects in international law focus, for instance, on how the constitution of cultural property is manifest in emergent international law, as well as on the role of international human rights agreements in such processes. Project members in institutional law and economics, finally, investigate the interests and incentives of participant and affected actors to examine how cultural property rights can be optimally structured.
Funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG) with support also from the Georg-August-University, Göttingen, allows for an initial three years of work. The design of the project places great emphasis on creating a challenging training framework for junior researchers. Their tasks lie foremost within the disciplinary subprojects they are assigned to. Secondarily, they work alongside the project leaders on establishing the interdisciplinary bridges necessary to answer the questions at the heart of the overall research endeavor. Joint methods seminars, workshops with visiting experts and longterm exchange with associated fellows further contribute to both the training and the collective research endeavor.

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