Who Owns Native Culture?

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Summary: Description of "Who Owns Native Culture?"
Review: From the author:

For reasons known only to Amazon.com, the entry for "Who Owns Native Culture?" doesn't contain the usual publisher's description or selections from trade reviews. Here's a link to the New York Times review of the book, published in September 2003:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/books/review/14SCHWEDT.html

Harvard University Press summarizes the book this way: The practical and artistic creations of native peoples permeate everyday life in settler nations, from the design elements on our clothing to the plot-lines of books we read to our children. Rarely, however, do native communities benefit materially from this use of their heritage, a situation that drives growing resistance to what some denounce as "cultural theft."

"Who Owns Native Culture?" documents the efforts of indigenous peoples to redefine heritage as a proprietary resource. Michael Brown takes readers into settings where native peoples defend what they consider their cultural property: a courtroom in Darwin, Australia, where an Aboriginal artist and a clan leader bring suit against a textile firm that infringes sacred art; archives and museums in the United States, where Indian tribes seek control over early photographs and sound recordings collected in their communities; and the Mexican state of Chiapas, site of a bioprospecting venture whose legitimacy is questioned by native-rights activists.

By focusing on the complexity of actual cases, Brown casts light on indigenous claims in diverse fields--religion, art, sacred places, and botanical knowledge. He finds both genuine injustice and, among advocates for native peoples, a troubling tendency to mimic the privatizing logic of major corporations.

The author proposes alternative strategies for defending the heritage of vulnerable native communities without blocking the open communication essential to the life of pluralist democracies. "Who Owns Native Culture?" is a lively, accessible introduction to questions of cultural ownership, group privacy, intellectual property, and the recovery of indigenous identities.

Amazon's software obliges me to include a rating for this note to be uploaded to the site. Why should I pretend that I can be objective about my own book?

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Summary: long overdue, but something awry
Review: How much we need a book that looks with unjaundiced eyes on the issue of cultural ownership and cultural appropriation. This is that book, but with a caveat: there is something slightly out of balance here, with the overbalance being in the form of a bias toward an intellectual definition of ownership. Brown is a scholar, and a worthy one. As such, his virtue is a healthy skepticism toward all points of view, rather than an unreflective sympathy toward each. In a sense, he is a debunker, not a sequential believer, and this places him in a distinct relationship to his material that seems to this reader to militate against a sympathy toward that which cannot be explicated or analyzed by rational means. I know I am getting murky here. But the simple fact is that you cannot do justice to non-analytical traditions and points of view by the application of analysis. This is perhaps better explained by demonstration in a wonderfully subtle treatise by Kent Nerburn called Neither Wolf nor Dog. Here, in the guise of a novel or some sort of fictionalized non-fiction, a man who has lived with native people takes on the subject from a different angle. He, too, comes up a bit short by using a device that is perhaps too clever by half. But he gets me closer to an understanding by embodying conflicting points of view and expressing them with the conviction of different systems of belief. I suggest that the reader consider both these books as distinct halfs to a very difficult whole. Though the distance between them is great, it is in the space in the center that some true understanding of the problem of cultural appropriation and ownership will be found.