Abstract

BENDIX, Regina. TK, TCE, and Co.: the Path from Culture as a Commons to a Resource for International Negotiation. Cuad. antropol. soc. [online]. 2022, n.56, pp.25-39.  Epub Nov 10, 2022. ISSN 1850-275X.  http://dx.doi.org/10.34096/cas.i56.12059.

The acronyms in the title stand for ‘traditional knowledge” and “traditional culture expressions.” They are linguistic evidence of how vast components of cultural practices have been bundled in order to facilitate speaking about them in international negotiations at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The paper traces the path of immaterial cultural knowledge from a dynamically changing repository available to all within a community to its potential selective passage to ownership and exclusive economic use. There are numerous reasons that have fostered interests in legal protection of selections of culture; one of them resides in the heritage-making process which singles out intangibles within culture as worthy of protection and celebration, another is the illicit use of traditional knowledges by non-native actors in various industries. Drawing on examples from WIPO sessions, the paper traces the difficult efforts to generate definitions that lend themselves to draw up legal frameworks customary in intellectual property law, and calls for more vigorous participation of cultural scholars in critically accompanying such normative developments.

Keywords : WIPO; Resource nature of culture; Legal framework; Immaterial knowledge; Negotiation.

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