Arts and owners: Intellectual property law and the politics of scale in Indonesian arts

Abstract

ABSTRACTInternational and national agendas are redesigning the terms of intellectual‐property (IP) laws to create cultural property for developing nations. Debates over IP and cultural‐property “rights” or legal needs for “protection” are critical to anthropology's effort to reflect on how the production of knowledge, even culture itself, is variously construed to originate with, or “belong to,” particular individuals, ethnic communities, or nation‐states. We explore the implications of two Indonesian legal documents to show the disjunction between discourses of regional artists who describe the ritual exchanges, relationships, and transgenerational messages their arts shape and (inter)nationalist legal initiatives that bypass artists' concepts of process, access, and authority in an effort to disembed and control ritual‐based expressions as products with exclusive owners. [intellectual property, cultural property, law, art, tradition, globalization, Indonesia]