ANTHRCUL 625 001 WN 2017

Anthropological approaches to property and property rights have acquired new significance in the context of the global economy, in which we can see the concept of property expanding both in scope through the creation of novel forms of property, including claims to cultural property, and in scale, ranging from the molecular in the patenting of genetic material to the planetary in the establishment of new markets for the trading of carbon and other pollutants. Property is central to the transformation of formerly socialist societies, indigenous rights and heritage claims, environmental politics, and developments in the life sciences. The application of digital technologies challenges the conventions of authorship, fair use, and copyright. Assumptions about the person, nature, the body, and culture often circulate unexamined with these new property claims. This seminar considers some earlier works on property from anthropology and political theory before turning to contemporary debates about privatization and the public domain, cultural property rights, scientific authorship, the ownership of biological and genomic information, the status of customary property in contemporary Africa, capitalism and landownership on the Indonesian frontier, and property in engaged anthropology.