Customer Reviews

Who Owns Native Culture?

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In this book, Michael Brown discusses a wide range of cases in which indigenous cultures and cultural artifacts are used or appropriated by majority (or foreign) cultures. The kinds of issues that he discusses include folk tales, folk music, native art, traditional ecological knowledge (including medicinals), crop varieties used primarily by Native peoples, and religious beliefs and objects that have been borrowed by others.

His strategy is to avoid establishing hard-and-fast rules but to explore, sympathetically, middle-ground solutions that respect Native beliefs and rights. He argues that general rules often cause more harm, introducing elements of policing and control that cause Native peoples to lose control over their own culture. According to Brown, negotiated solutions among well-meaning people can lead to better resolutions in individual cases, while also developing new principles that may prove to be useful in future disputes.

Brown explores these issues through a series of cases and anecdotes, which he seems to have chosen in a completely haphazard way. He tells the stories journalistically, providing his own commentary and the opinions of both sides of each issues. This approach makes the book very readable but not fully satisfactory to people looking for systematic treatment of these issues.

Hardliners will be offended because Brown does not give Natives exclusive control over their own heritage. He would argue that all culture includes shared (social) elements as well as individual elements (artistry for example), and that both features are routinely shared. Cultures borrow from one another all the time - - New Age beliefs borrow from Native religious, Native cultures have borrowed from Christianity and Islam. Exclusive rights ignore these elements of sharing, exchange, and new syntheses.

Brown is likely to satisfy most well-meaning people from majority cultures, such as liberal whites in the United States, Canada or Australia. Those people who regularly end up on the short end of the stick will be suspicious of consensus solutions, which reflect power imbalances in more subtle ways. This book awaits a response from them, but nonetheless represents a respectful attempt at reasonable solutions to these various problems.

How much we need a book that looks with unjaundiced eyes on the issue of cultural ownership and cultural appropriation. This is that book, but with a caveat: there is something slightly out of balance here, with the overbalance being in the form of a bias toward an intellectual definition of ownership. Brown is a scholar, and a worthy one. As such, his virtue is a healthy skepticism toward all points of view, rather than an unreflective sympathy toward each. In a sense, he is a debunker, not a sequential believer, and this places him in a distinct relationship to his material that seems to this reader to militate against a sympathy toward that which cannot be explicated or analyzed by rational means. I know I am getting murky here. But the simple fact is that you cannot do justice to non-analytical traditions and points of view by the application of analysis. This is perhaps better explained by demonstration in a wonderfully subtle treatise by Kent Nerburn called Neither Wolf nor Dog. Here, in the guise of a novel or some sort of fictionalized non-fiction, a man who has lived with native people takes on the subject from a different angle. He, too, comes up a bit short by using a device that is perhaps too clever by half. But he gets me closer to an understanding by embodying conflicting points of view and expressing them with the conviction of different systems of belief. I suggest that the reader consider both these books as distinct halfs to a very difficult whole. Though the distance between them is great, it is in the space in the center that some true understanding of the problem of cultural appropriation and ownership will be found.

In reading this review, keep in mind that I am a lay person in the truest sense of the word, and so I brought no prior understanding to the subject of "cultural ownership" in reading this book. With that caveat, my review:

In Who Owns Native Culture? Brown successfully combines two philosophical perspectives to the subject: the legal view, and the social/anthropological view. In the legal view, he covers applicable law, and emerging international conventions in several different countries. In the social view, he turns away from the formal rationalism of the law, to the formal irrationality of numerous social views, such as "emotivism". Throughout numerous case studies, he relates the opinion that entirely legal constructs will not work in preserving Native Culture. He thoroughly rejects the idea that a single legal framework can cover all situations, as a result, he promotes the case by case approach of negotiations.

One small problem I had was that in the chapter on Ethnobotany, some sections read like a press release directly from Shaman Pharmaceuticals, touting the superiority of the drug Provir, whose efficacy was in fact minimal. Beyond this, my lack of knowledge of the subject precludes a more comprehensive review.

This is not a review of the content of the book, but rather the format of the Kindle edition. It apparently does not have the option to show the page numbers of the hard copy. This is completely unacceptable for an academic text, as it renders citing a page impossible.