DRAFT: NO RESTRICTIONS ON CIRULATION BUT LIABLE TO ALTERATION

Contemporary moments: Land as intellectual property

Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge

This is written as a response to a request that overlies another request. My response to being
asked (by the Centre for Melanesian Studies in Goroka, Papua New Guinea) to talk about
‘contemporary Melanesia’ became the substance of my response to being asked to talk about the
[anthropologist’s] ‘modern field’ (to a postgraduate research seminar in Denmark). The paper is
a slightly modified version of the second response.

Where is a Modern Field to be found, and how is it to be conceptualised? It is not surprising if

anthropologists search among their own practices and presuppositions for clarification. But in
this they are not so far from some of their colleagues elsewhere. Asked recently by Papua New
Guinean academics to ponder on whether ‘indigenous-centered’ knowledge was destined to be
swallowed up by ‘euro-centered’ knowledge, I wondered about whatever it is that renders
practices and procedures contemporary anyway. Taking up the case of the impact of globally
conceived intellectual property rights on local conceptions of culture (as one might expect) and
land tenure (which one might not), helped formulate the notion of a contemporary moment.

The ‘modern field’ … includes not only other places, but also other kinds of places.
From the Mega Seminar rubric, Danish Research School of Anthropology, 2009.

If the modern field includes not only other places but also other kinds of places, then it

must also include ‘other kinds’ of people. I begin with some people who share the

anthropologist’s dilemma of where to locate a modern field. These are people who,

like the anthropologist want to be up to date and be seen to have an outlook that is

thoroughly contemporary, yet in finding themselves reluctant to ignore former times

and former anthropologies also find a contrast or antinomy between new and old
knowledge. The antinomy presents itself simultaneously as though there were a choice

to be made and as though the construction of old and new in knowledge making were

simply an outcome of the passing of time. This forking I take as diagnostic of a

modernist ethos. The people I am talking about can be forgiven for eliding tradition

and modernity with the old and the new, because the antinomy is for them

overdetermined by another axis created by their colonisation and liberation from it.

The people I have in mind live in Papua New Guinea, where there is a general concern,

laid down in fact in the colonial era, with what it means to be modern, to follow ‘new

ways’, and by the same token what alternatives there might be. But it is one articulated

especially closely to the anthropologist’s dilemma by the scholars who have set up a

Centre for Melanesian Studies at the University of Goroka. Their backgrounds are in

anthropology, sociology, history, literature, general studies. They are not alone, but I

mention the Goroka Centre since I was there earlier this year.

I was invited to speak on contemporary Melanesia. As I said to them, it might seem

odd for someone on the verge of retirement to talk about the contemporary, but that

was in fact almost a paradigm for what I wanted to say about the future of Melanesian

Studies. For by this stage I have lived through many of what I called ‘contemporary

moments’! All I meant by that phrase was being aware of the time frame one is in. That

time frame is always of course the present; awareness is of the different pasts – long or

short -- of which it is composed.

Now the invitation came with a specific suggestion: that I address the relationship

between indigenous centered and euro-centric knowledge, and how inevitable the move is from

one to the other. The concern of these Papua New Guinean scholars lay in the implicit

prognosis that what they called indigenous centred knowledge had no chance against
knowledge practices with a euro-centric origin. And you have to realise what a

commitment these people are making to devote themselves to academic and museum-

related work on Melanesian societies and cultures when their brothers and cousins go

for medicine or law or business and administration studies.

This paper comes with an invitation to the listener or reader, probably in the plural and

probably best imagined as a group of academics, wherever you are. I invite you to

think of yourself momentarily alongside academics from this emergent university– it

was formerly a teacher training college -- in the Eastern Highlands of PNG. What

follows isn’t quite the lecture I gave there, but I give you the gist of it. Retelling it now

with the Goroka academics in mind is perhaps one way of inhabiting the contemporary.

As it happens its subject matter was also germane to our debate here.

The question I was asked gave me my terms of reference – indigenous-centred and

euro-centric knowledge — though I would never have phrased things quite like that

myself, nor indeed drawn up the contrast. Categorical contrasts are not fashionable

these days in anthropology, yet here I was being requested to deploy one. Indeed I felt

bound to deal with the two categories as salient in these people’s imagination of their scholarly

enterprise. My evocation of time frames was a way of handling it. I asked in turn that

they suspend any axiomatic association between modernity and euro-centrism and the

contemporary. Instead, speaking from the present, I took euro-centric and indigenous

knowledge as existing within the same (time) frame. Examples came from a real-life

sequence of events in Papua New Guinea, and beyond. They captured an alternation

between now privileging euro-centric knowledge, now privileging indigenous centered

knowledge; either could be foreground or background in relation to the other.

The exercise then encouraged me to a piece of exploration of my own. I would like to

think that what I present to you (alongside the assembled University of Goroka) is an

example of being in ‘a modern field’, at least in so far as it involves choice; from my

perspective any choice of roads has to be a question of analytical framing.

Foreground and background

Where do we encounter euro / indigenous –centric knowledge? Not just in what

people say or profess to ‘know’, but as values and assumptions embedded in their

practices and institutions. And by institution I do not just mean organisations such as

companies or clans, but any organised or conventional way of doing things. My

example comes from law, and by no means confined to lawyers, from a debate over

intellectual property rights (IPR). -- In fact in relation to this topic some of those from

the Danish seminar [see acknowledgements] were already alongside the PNG

academics, and I referred to Dalsgaard’s article on ownership of cultural practices in

Manus, PNG; Liep’s book on cultural creativity. -- So what is it that now gets

foregrounded, now gets backgrounded?

(1) Let’s start with embedded Euro-centric knowledge. IPR is embedded in Euro-

centric ways of thinking about the person and relations and things-as-possessions. In

the late 1990s Papua New Guinea, like other Pacific Island states, and several countries

elsewhere, was put under pressure from international interests (GATT / TRIPS, WIPO)

to develop its own copyright and patent laws. As far as the latter was concerned it was

in the interests of technology-exporting countries to be able to exercise their rights of

ownership in technology-importing countries. People couldn’t just copy what they

liked, although they could under license from those who owned the patent. Ideas are

intangible, but what could be protected would be forms of expressing them or their

embodiment in inventions. Here Euro-centric practices were foregrounded, and the

PNG legislation has followed more or less an international format.

Now while commerce was at the heart of the motive here, along with the legal forms

came euro-centric views of the person. Prime examples were the idea that inventions

could be attributed to specific inventors or to the companies that funded them; that

works of art were the outcome of individual authorship. These intangible products of

the mind had a value. The corollary was that authorship implied ownership, that those

with whom an idea originated had rights over any profit to come from that idea, a

corollary that makes sense in a world where people live, that is, subsist, earn income, by

their inventions or products. Of course the legislation does not just serve outside

interests; thus copyright holds a potential within PNG for the protection of (for

example) writers or musicians or other people in the creative arts.

(2) What was arresting about the international pressure to legislate was a counterpart

international ‘movement’ across several developing countries in the 1990s-early 2000s,

including the Pacific Islands. Intellectual property was conceived to be an instrument

that could be turned to the benefit of those who for years had not been able to articulate

the value they put on their own intangibles, in the form of knowledge or skills: now

suddenly it seemed that there was an international language that recognised,

potentially put a price on, what people reckoned to be of cultural value. This was

already apparent at a seminar I attended in Port Moresby in 1997 and was followed

through by Drs Lawrence Kalinoe and Jacob Simet, who conducted a cross-country

survey on people’s attitudes towards the protection of cultural property. Culture is an

intangible, but what could be protected would be forms of cultural expression. Here we

may say that it is indigenous centered knowledge that is foregrounded: how could IPR

be turned to the service of cultural property?

IPR in fact stimulated a wider notion of cultural property than its former museum-
based connotations implied – it embraced ideas, artifacts, medicinal knowledge, plant

varieties and genetic endowment even. Yet what informed this move to thinking about

cultural property were indigenous concepts of persons and the relations in which

persons (we could say) were embedded. While the language of ‘property’ was used, it

was clear that in a Melanesian context there was a widely articulated desire to recognise

the relational, rather than individual, origins of cultural artefacts. Moreover, against

ownership an emphasis was put on the circulation of items of value through exchange.

This was all heightened in a context where people were also learning to articulate their

‘identity’ in terms of ‘culture’. However, it became clear that euro-centrically informed

IPR would not do the work that now needed to be done. The Pacific Islands jointly

turned to develop an instrument of their own for the protection of expressions of

culture that would take relational (people generally elided the term with ‘collective’ in

this field) interests into account.

Now this story proceeds in a fairly well known way, one that could be repeated for

many innovations and developments, and has some interest if it is seen as a thoroughly

contemporary inter-weaving between euro-centric and indigenous centered knowledge.

However, it is to be hoped that such ‘contemporary moments’ could lead to ‘another

kind of’ scholarship, one rather more exploratory and experimental. Let me continue

my story of foregrounding and backgrounding with this in mind.

(3) Suppose we turn again to foregrounding euro-centric practices. IPR might turn out

to be largely irrelevant when it comes to protecting what people in PNG regard of

value, but nevertheless it may throw up concepts or approaches that have a longer

shelf-life. I am thinking of the way social anthropology is always on the look-out for

new tools of description and analysis. In recent years, when IPR ceased to be the

exclusive domain of lawyers and was talked about all over the place, a huge surge of
interest fuelled by developments in digital music, human genetics, biotechnological

developments, and so on, anthropology has seized on it for the potential analytical

questions it raises. In a euro-centric way it draws attention to how we might think

about the origins of creativity, and applied to a Melanesian context has refreshed

interest in the transmission of song, dance, magical formula and performative and non-

performative creations of all kinds as reported in the ethnographic literature.

So what is happening here? The intention is not to make new legal objects out of these

practices, but to look again at what we thought we knew with new eyes, to turn back to

those old accounts with fresh respect because one can ask yet more questions of them.

And if the result, so to speak, is to keep the ethnographic record young, perhaps it has

the same effect on the way past practices are enacted or re-enacted in the present. So

while in Europe IPR has been around for 200 years, it is only at a certain ‘contemporary

moment’ that it has pressed in on social science and the humanities: people are made

aware of dimensions of their activities they weren’t aware of before. It is only at a

certain ‘contemporary moment’ that it seems to offer resources for understanding

materials derived from long before, and that applies as much to Melanesia as anywhere.

In fact in following an interest in these things, the anthropologist would be doing what

Ton Otto argues PNG kastom does already: keeping ways of being thoroughly in the

present.

(4) However, if there might be some mileage to the ideas that come with certain euro-

centric institutions, even if the institutions themselves will not work as originally

conceived, can we reverse the positions again and talk about the influence of

indigenous centered knowledge, and thus foreground it? What would it mean to put

IPR into a Melanesian context? Could Melanesian thinking change how we think about

IPR? It has already shown up some of its limits, but is it possible to go further?
Well, I am sure that many of you are already familiar with the way diverse international

approaches to the protection of the commons, though open source software and so

forth, find resonance, if not with specifically Melanesian practices then with practices

elsewhere beyond the global internationalist purview. This is not just the

anthropologist’s parallel. Some of those who have worked on the protection for and

distribution of computer programmes, for example, in opposition to mainstream IPR,

have drawn inspiration from their understanding of giving and sharing in other

cultures. Indeed the idea of ‘the gift’, with pointed reference to the anthropology of

Melanesia, has long circulated among scientists to describe the circulation of knowledge

outside an ownership / IPR context. They are not always terribly well informed, but

the inspiration is there. A contemporary moment! One wonders what contribution

present-day Melanesian thinking might or might not make to the rather generalised

notions that these open source computer activists work with.

This brief excursus gives me a reason for something else. I said that I would present an

exploration of my own as an example of being in ‘a modern field’. It is not the

substance of what we deal with, or the places from which we draw materials that

interests me: from my perspective, the choice of roads really does have to be a question of

analytical framing. My choice is to pursue the contemporary.

Land as intellectual property

The subject matter is land. If I say I want to introduce another way of looking at land

claims, it is not to claim authorship of the notion. Rather, it is important to

acknowledge its origins in others, on the one hand in the work of the anthropologist

James Leach and on the other hand in the people of Reite village in the Madang area
who made him see that land can be thought of as creative. And behind them many

others I cannot do justice to here. Nothing could be more important than land – as

important to present-day Melanesians as to anyone at any time. How to describe and

analyse the issues is less simply put! The following offers some reflections that go back

and forth between euro-centric ideas about IPR and what else we know of Melanesian

ideas.

To think about land rights at once enlarges and diminishes our vision. It enlarges, for at
its greatest extent the idea of land evokes the earth, the commonality of our existence,
what we share whether we like it or not. It diminishes, insofar as land seems a
particular materiality, a specific kind of resource, just one among many aspects of
people's lives, a source of income. I want to see if we can deal with both these
dimensions at the same time. This might in turn serve as a partial analogy for some of
the exercises in multi-dimensionality by which we think we know ourselves to be in a
modern field.

Something of that first dimension is found in the notion that the language of land
ownership is too restrictive. An Australian judge tried to convey how very ‘other’
Aboriginal concepts were from those found in the euro-centric law of property, in just
this vein. He concluded a famous land claims case with the remark that rather than
thinking of land belonging to people one should think of people belonging to the land.
The people here were members of a particular Aboriginal clan, and this was the most
succinct way in which he could summarise the totalising effect that land had on their
lives. Almost exactly the same formulation is reported for the 'Are'are people of Malaita,
Solomon Islands, though interestingly it contrasts with another formulation as well. A
paramount chief explaining the different rules of Melanesian land tenure included the
nature of personal links to the land -- because that is what people's accomplishments
have sprung from and where like their ancestors they will be buried. In this sense
people own the land. The observation is accompanied by an extensive explanation of
how, in another sense altogether, people not do not own land at all -- rather the land
owns them. 'The land owns 'Are'are people', he declared. 'The land owns men and
women; they are there to take care of the land'.
An enlarged sense of what is at stake can these days also be set against other kinds of
personal interests, such as those of investors who acquire land as real estate, land that
for development, land to plant cash crops, and so forth. But let us look more closely at
this second and apparently diminished sense of land. Planners have their own
aspirations, including improvement and wealth creation. Their aspirations are for land
as an exploitable resource, appropriated for tea plantations or copper mining perhaps,
or for market gardening or arabica coffee, in any event bringing in revenue. We know
that in many places residents are keen for improvement, may seek profit for themselves.
Indeed, they may actively embrace development, as happens across Papua New Guinea
where forms of public entitlement enable clan groups to control land as a legal asset.

The current concept of 'landowner' in Papua New Guinea simultaneously evokes the
past, appealing to the depths of people's ancestral association with specific territories,
while also drawing on an international language that gives them negotiating purchase
with overseas companies. A ‘contemporary moment’! Equally notable within Papua
New Guinea has been the long history of local efforts to seek some kind of recompense
for environmental damage and loss of livelihood. The Ok Tedi copper and gold mine is
a case in point. But demanding recompense merges with people's own aspirations for
wealth. In the expectation of the mine closing down, the Ok Tedi mine continuation
agreements inaugurated in 2001 incorporate all kinds of local development packages in
return for consent to allow operations continue in the short term.

So it is not just a question of enlarged and diminished apprehensions of land -- there are
different aspirations for it. Most stark would seem to be the contrast between rights
that come from land owning the people and those that come from people owning the land.
On the one hand, land is perceived as an embracing source not just of livelihood but of
life, and not just the life of individuals but the life of society, or at its greatest extent
humanity. On the other hand, land is a resource that its owners can exploit, that
becomes a source of wealth as well as sustenance, that can be made productive. How
do we reconcile these? I suspect the antithesis is more a euro-centric than indigenous
centered one.

It is safe to generalise about the way people in PNG are very interested in land as a

resource that produces resources. This is what mobilises their sense of entitlement and
the claims pursued in litigation, and it dominates thinking about land rights. We might

look in detail then to the kind of produce that land yields, to its wealth-creating

potential, to the way this wealth enters into people's transactions with one another, in

short, to the land’s productivity. And what we shall find is that instead of an interest in

the products of the land being set against a cosmological concern with land as a source

of life, implying ancestral regeneration and custodial responsibilities, just as the

Solomon Islands chief indicated the two go together. How can this be?

In the same way as the Australian judge had to make play with the notion of
ownership, we need to alter our understanding of 'productivity'. Suppose we took
another analytical route and talked instead of creativity. And thought of the land as
creative and its products as creations.

Now I intend nothing mystical here. I draw not on the language of religion, nor
alongside the Reite of Madang, of reproduction, but on the language of law. There is a
whole class of law in the euro-centric tradition, as I have already noted, devoted to the
issue of creativity and people's creations. Intellectual property rights. In the technical
manner of lawyers, the legal definition of creativity becomes one that can be applied
almost automatically, as in the supposition that the author of a work is one who literally
creates it. However, that is exactly the kind of automatic connotation I seek. The
entitlements I am talking about arise in a very straightforward way from people's
demonstration of their connections to land. Indeed they may think they need do no
more than demonstrate a connection and entitlement is evident.

Here we can mobilise a contrast between two types of euro-centric property law in order to
find a vocabulary with which to make credible an indigenous / Melanesian contrast
between rights to land regarded as a source of creativity (land owns people) and rights
to its creations (people own land). This is the European distinction between intangible
and tangible property. For it may help us appreciate Melanesian people's interest in the
intangible dimension of land, just as much as the tangible, to think of their intangible
connections as a kind of resource, bringing its own entitlements, by analogy with the
euro-centric notion of intellectual property. Of course, a big leap of imagination is
required on the euro-centric side since in European jurisprudence land is often held up
in (modernist) contrast to intellectual property as the type example of something that is
manifestly tangible.

My purpose, then, is to ponder on how the intangible may be imagined as a resource,

which is what intellectual property law is all about. The notion of an intangible
resource points to what might be at stake in claims that are incomprehensible when
land is understood simply as a material or tangible asset. Land can of course, as I have
tried to make evident, be both at the same time.

Let me speak from the perspective of the Western Highlands of PNG as the area I know
best. Here land flourishes not just by how it is cultivated, but because of its association
with specific ancestors who have worked the area and who are thought to exert a
(mostly) benign influence. Land has on it the 'name' of a particular group, a clan or
lineage. The rights people have to enjoy the fruits of the land depend on entitlement
through their links to the clan and its former members.

We could think of that name as a bit like a trademark, a term borrowed from IPR, at
least insofar as it is a name to which exploits are attributed and reputation accrues. The
clan name is simultaneously attached to the land and to those living there who walk
around with its name on them. Entitlement to use a particular name is of course
restricted, but everyone has such a name. Now trademarks are primarily, as the lawyers
would say, 'things in action': rights that can only be enforced by legal action, as opposed
to rights of possession. As indicated, they belong to that class of property, intellectual
property, generally described as intangible. Of course such property takes material
form, but what is protected by the rights is the creative effort that brings the thing into
existence. Thus copyright law to prevent others from taking advantage of one's creative
activity must apply to a material expression, say as a particular text, but it is the
composition that is protected not the printed page. Similarly patent law can only be
applied to artefacts, to things made, what is protected being the right of the inventor to
prevent others from exploiting without permission the original combination of ideas
and effort that led to the invention. We can also think of people protecting the
reputation and ancestry manifested in land.

In the Western Highlands, land that yields the staple food, sweet potato, is also divided
up into territories; these are the notional spaces of clan groups. Their boundaries are
marked and defended. Of course it is not the hedges and ditches that people are
protecting, it is their notion of the integrity – reputation and ancestry -- of the clan that
resides there. So one might call a boundary a piece of intellectual property. While it is
not protected by a legal system as such, it is certainly a thing-in-action insofar as the
rights to establish a boundary can only be perpetuated through people defending or
activating it, that is, by the clan acting in its full territorial extent. This echoes the need
to keep up claims to possession -- a clan member has to activate particular claims to
particular gardens by gardening there, or loses them -- for what is at stake in both is the
intangible concept of the clan.

Land as territory is also a horticultural resource that nurtures people and everything
that grows on it, but in either case we could call the land productive. For territory
produces too, that is, it produces people with a specific name and identity. In this sense
the most tangible landscape, one that the clan can possess, can also become a notional
and intangible counterpart to the living body of people. However, this is the moment
at which to return to analytical choice and question the concept of productivity.

What lies behind the euro-centric notion of productivity? One could illustrate the
productive model from countless sources; here is just one. It uses an analogy similar to
that I have deployed in suggesting we compare certain land claims to intellectual
property rights. Here is intellectual property being compared to land!

It belongs to early formulations in England, at the time in the eighteenth century when
a new notion was growing that authorial copyright could refer not just to the material
but to the immaterial, not just to the book as a physical body but to a more abstract
entity, the composition as a text. Now supporting the authors' cause was an old
equation between literary property and landed estates from which a living might be
made. This was an idiom that authors borrowed from printers and booksellers. The
latter had long argued that their copies (property that was at once the manuscript and
the right to multiply copies of a particular title) were the equivalent of other people's
landed estates, their farms. We see here elements, too, of those ideas of individual
ownership to which I referred. While in the early modern period the most common
metaphor employed to represent the author's relation to his writing is paternity (the
author as begetter and the book as child), others included the author as singing
shepherd, vessel of divine inspiration – and farmer, in the language of time, a tiller of
the soil.
In this metaphor, the image of land is being used to make the effort of intellectual work
manifest in material and tangible products. So what it introduces is the notion of the
produce to be gained from the land. With a sense of tilling and harvesting comes also of
course the idea of labour, and the idea that the justification for property rights lies in the
person's investment of labour. In other words people get produce from the land by dint
of exertion applied to it, and the early proponents of intellectual property were claiming
that mental work should bring entitlements quite as much as physical work. That early
modern logic still lingers. It departs radically from the Melanesian ideas I am dealing
with.

In the indigenous centered world of the Western Highands no such value is put on
labour. Entitlement to produce comes from the entitlement to the land rather than from
entitlement to the work. In fact when people speak of 'work' they usually mean the
work of social relationships, the work of making connections, of tending to one another,
such that the work of the hands is evidence of the way people keep their relationships
in order. A person toils in the garden for their parents or for their husband or child.
Feeding the family from the fruits of one's own labour is thus an obligation that comes
from relationships -- a husband has a right to fruits of his wife's labour because they are
married. But he also has a right because of his relationship to his clan and the
generations before him who worked the land. So in this context one intangible right
demarcates another. Knowledge of relationships, quite as much as memory of who
occupied what places, is at the basis of claims. Only thus can someone show that it is his
-- and in the Western Highlands I mean his not her -- land on which the food is grown.
And that goes for everything that the land grows.

These are, I suggest, not elements of a productive model of people's relation to land but
of a creative model. The land that creates the people does so in parallel to everything else
it yields: trees, crops, pigs, and so forth. These are analogous creations. Moreover,
if the entitlement to produce comes from an initial entitlement to the land, then we
should see these creations not as an extension of people's labour but as an extension of the
land itself. What the land grows belongs to it; at the same time these creations may be
detached and traded or consumed or given away.

In dealing with both dimensions simultaneously, then, we could think of land as both
an intangible resource (land owns the people) and a tangible one (people own the land).
The land that stays is the enduring clan entity, the territory, the intangible and indefinite
reference point for people's activities, and the continuity of persons who replace one
another (as in a clan group). The land that moves are the people who travel back and
forth, incoming spouses, the food that it grows, the pigs fed off it, and all the tangible
items it is possible to possess in some way. These creations are, we might say, tangible
forms or expressions of its intangible creativity. In sum: there is at once a distinction and a
connection [a relation] between the land and its extensions, otherwise put, between land
as creative and its extensions as creations.

Here for the moment I leave the Highlands – for all this can be most neatly summed up
in the story that coastal people tell. In the Western Highlands the enduring connection
to the land is through ties through men; hence the emphasis in my account. In this
coastal area, it is women through whom relationships to the land are stressed. The story
is from Gawa island. It is about the origin of canoes.

A group of men went to build a canoe. They hacked out a long hollow from the soil and
tried to make a prowboard from rocks. They worked for months, years. One of their
sisters got tired of cooking for the unending work and went to see how far they had got.
When the men showed her the hollow in the ground, she says 'What canoe is this? You
are hollowing the soil!’ She indicates a tree growing from the land: that is what they
should be building with. So canoes are made from the fruits of the soil, trees that can be
cut down and carried away, and indeed canoes are vehicles for travel, trade and
exchange, and essential to the prestige men gain from their exploits overseas. A canoe,
in other words, can be seen as an extension of the land.

The moral of the story is that some things are properly harvested and consumed, that is,
appropriated, and some not. People should not appropriate the basis of life, of
reproduction. The woman was saying, ‘Don't try to extract what is creative -- enhance
your reputation through taking its creations’.

The land's creations are consumable or transferable extensions of land that itself, the
source of creativity, is non-consumable and non-transferable. The guarantee of both
possibilities -- conserving it and exploiting its fruits -- lie in the social relationships that
are evidence of the way land owns people and people own land. To say that sweet
potatoes or pigs can be regarded as an extension of the land, rather than of the
cultivator who sweats to plant or tend them, is to say that they belong to the
relationships in which that person is enmeshed. These are all particular relations, and it
is the through particular relations that people gain their personal reputations.
Incidentally, this gives us the rules of exclusion. No one else should take the planter's
crop because the cultivation enacts the planter's, and not someone else's, relationships
to others.

Creations are at once specific extensions of named areas of land, and detachable from
them So they flow across social contexts. People mobilise both values at the same time.
And may make this visible. Thus they may use the vehicle of creations to point to the
creativity of their land, and use the creativity of the land to point to the personal regard
that comes to them from creations, their own accomplishments.

Conclusion

I dare say there is more detail here than anyone needs. However, tacking between euro-

centric and indigenous centered knowledges is not to mix everything up; it is not a

matter of picking on different elements to put or merge together. Rather it is the case of

allowing one mode of thought to take the privileged place, so that we appreciates the

knowledge it yields, the perspective it brings, and then allowing another mode of

thinking a privileged place. By privileged place, I don’t mean one mode being

dominant over the other, I mean bringing a particular mode fully into view, so one is

able to actually appreciate the detail. Without the detail, in fact, without the

interconnections and interrelations in all their complexity, without specificity, there

would be nothing that is particularly euro-centric or indigenous centered in what we

learn, only vague and vacuous generalities.

Where the outcome is a set of analytical tools, their different components visible, there

is the possibility of new insights to be gained out of combinations of old knowledges.

The platitude is made more interesting if we remind ourselves that this is none other

than what is entailed in IPR understandings of (scientific) invention! And where we

discern the effect of different pasts co-existing in the present, we shall have created a

contemporary moment. That was implied in the very question I was asked to address

in Goroka – the contemporary didn’t lie in hiding somewhere else!

If that seems rather obvious, what can be taken from all this detail for the idea of The

Modern Field? Perhaps one point is that the kinds of skills that we may think we need

for approaching a modern field – making analytical choices, holding alternatives in

play– may already be embedded within what people act out. And such people may

include both those interlocutors already familiar to the anthropologist and ‘new’ kinds

of people with new questions about the world. In turn, the anthropologist’s description

and analysis may be enhanced by the conjunctions of a ‘contemporary moment’--

dealing with more than one dimension at a time, say, or being simultaneous and

sequential together. It was worth keeping with those two categories (indigenous

centred and euro-centric), clumsy as they might have seemed. Perhaps we have turned

them from modernist alternatives to contemporary analytics.

It is not being interested in IPR that signals a new field, but in being made aware of

sources of vocabulary and concepts that draw one to look again at existing realities.

After all, if IPR introduces a global dimension it is because it enables a description of a

phenomenon one now realises was already global in its import -- the intangible value of

land.

Acknowledgements
This paper was earlier given under the same title to the annual Mega Seminar (Danish
Research School of Anthropology) on ‘The Modern Field’, 2009, Sandjberg, Denmark; it
is based on a presentation to The Centre for Melanesian Studies, University of Goroka,
Papua New Guinea ( Melanesian Seminar Series, ‘Contemporary Melanesian Issues’),
2009, called ‘Perspectives on a contemporary Melanesia: Privileging one kind of
knowledge over another?’ I thank both seminars for the stimulus they provided, before
and after the events in question. [References are incomplete.]