Logos, trademarks, national insignia, brand names, celebrity images, design patents, and advertising texts are vibrant signs in a consumer culture governed by a regime of intellectual property laws. In The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties, professor of law and cultural anthropologist Rosemary J. Coombe brings an illuminating ethnographic approach to an analysis of authorship and the role law plays in shaping the various meanings that animate these protected properties in the public sphere.
Although such artifacts are ubiquitous in contemporary culture, little attention has been paid to the impact of intellectual property law in everyday life or to how ownership of specific intellectual properties is determined and exercised. Drawing on a wide range of cases, disputes, and local struggles, Coombe examines these issues and dismantles the legal assumption that the meaning and value of a text or image is produced exclusively by an individual author or that authorship has a single point of origin. In the process, she examines controversies that include the service of turbanned Sikhs in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the use of the term Olympic in reference to the proposed gay Olympic Games. Other chapters discuss the appropriation of such celebrity images as the Marx brothers, Judy Garland, Dolly Parton, James Dean, and Luke Skywalker; the conflict over team names such as the Washington Redskins; and the opposition of indigenous peoples to stereotypical Native American insignia proffered by the entertainment industry. Ultimately, she makes a case for redefining the political in commodified cultural environments.
Significant for its insights into the political significance of current intellectual property law, this book also provides new perspectives on debates in cultural anthropology, cultural studies, and political theory. It will therefore interest both a wide scholarly and a general audience.
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Authoring Culture
- A Critical Cultural Legal Studies
- Against Culture(s)
- Anthropology’s Trademark and Its Academic Others
- Authoring Alterity
- Contested Cultures
- Legalities, Identities, and Mass Media
- Authorship and Alterity
- 1. Objects of Property and Subjects of Politics
- Objects and Subjects
- Historicizing the Subject
- Postmodern Culture
- It’s a Small, Small World™
- Postmodern Goods
- Author(iz)ing the Corporate Persona
- Manufacturing Distinction
- Fixing the Signifier/Owning the Sign
- Activist Appropriations
- Policing Postmodern Precincts
- Xerox® Cultures
- Dialogics of Postmodern Politics
- 2. Author(iz)ing the Celebrity: Engendering Alternative Identities
- The Value of the Celebrity Persona
- Celebrity Authorship
- The Celebrity Form and the Politics of Postmodernism
- Doing Gender
- Respecting Judy
- Fictionalized Sexualities
- Enterprising Women
- Engendering and Endangering Alternative Identities
- 3 Tactics of Appropriation and the Politics of Recognition
- Political Articulations
- Official Signifiers
- Postmodernity and the Rumor
- Racial Inscriptions and Iterations
- Corporeal Vulnerability
- Signifyin(g) Powers
- 4. Embodied Trademarks: Mimesis and Alterity on American Commercial Frontiers
- Mimicry, Alterity, and Embodiment
- Marked and Unmarked Bodies
- Contemporary Contestations
- Fighting Redskins®
- Consuming Crazy Horse
- Mimicking Authors at the Alters of Property
- 5. The Properties of Culture and the Politics of Possessing Identity
- Whose Voice Is It Anyway?
- The European Art/Culture System
- Contemporary Properties of Culture and Identity
- Listening to Native Claims “in Context”
- Representation without Representation: Visibility without Voice
- Possessive Individualism Revisited: Authorship and Cultural Identity
- Aboriginal Title
- 6. Dialogic Democracy I: Authorship and Alterity in Public Spheres
- The Author in the Modern Public Sphere
- Free Speech in the Condition of Postmodernity
- Objects and Subjects Redux
- 7. Dialogic Democracy II: Alterity and Articulation in the Space of the Political
- Locating the Politics of the Public Sphere
- Mass Mediation and the Publics of Civil Society
- The Space of the Signature
- The Unworked Community
- An Ethics of Contingency
- Notes
- References
- Index
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