Bootlegacy: Liz Nevis on intellectual and cultural property

Stories handed down orally are a form of cultural property that international organizations like WIPO and even the WTO are working on protecting. I’ll go into that some more in later posts. Today, it’s the slab of concrete on which I’ll set up a small soapbox (which I promise not to do very often).

Professions have subcultures of their own.  My former profession, engineering, didn’t have much folklore (aside from the occasional hero or trickster legend) back when I started. Since the advent of Dilbert, it has developed a fairly large body of humor that is often self-deprecating. See also User Friendly. When I changed careers to law later, I was fascinated to learn that the American legal culture is very rich in folklore. . . but my fascination took on morbid overtones when I realized that most of the folklore was of a very specialized kind.

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Appropriation of minority religious or other cultural images by outsiders - often, though not always, as a status symbol or fashion statement - is a sharpening point of controversy in some parts of the world. People from the originating cultures are upset for any or all of a number of reasons:

1. Some images are traditionally classified “eyes only” for certain individuals or subgroups under certain circumstances.
2. The right to display some images traditionally had to be earned rather than bought.
3. Outsiders displaying the images often do not know or care about their meanings or the traditional rules for how they are to be displayed.
4. Some images are traditionally not intended for fixation in some types of media, or for any type of permanent fixation at all.
5. Even if none of the above objections apply and the image may be embodied in a commodity and sold, people who believe they should be entitled to a share of the proceeds aren’t getting any.

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Well, OK, I’ve already broken my rule about spending more than 4 hours on a post. I set out to write about something told to me orally by a usually reliable source, but despite Googling my fingers to the bone I can’t seem to verify it anywhere - at least not online, for free, in a language I can read. However, in my science life I found that we often learn more from a failed experiment than a successful one, and maybe that will happen here too. Readers, please help me if you can!

Established: In some countries - reputedly “free” countries at that - you can’t name your baby just anything you want. You have to choose from an approved list or get an authority, such as a court or a church, to grant an exception. (Some in the U.S., where celebrities have counted on giving their babies weird names as a source of free publicity since the late, celebrated musician Frank Zappa named his first two children “Dweezil” and “Moon Unit,” are appalled by the existence of these laws, possibly because it creates a trade deficit in weird-baby-name jokes).

In question: Whether Norway has recently dropped some extremely traditional names, such as “Bjorn” (which means “bear”) from the approved list. Can anyone tell me whether this is or isn’t true (and preferably supply a reference)?
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Road verges. Windbreaks. The vicinities of abandoned fields, market grounds, and storage sheds. When most people think of biodiversity conservation, these are not the places that come to mind. Much more familiar are wild-land conservation areas - rainforests, wetlands, tundra, even tidepools and undersea canyons - places virtually untouched by human occupation. However, the smaller, humbler areas around traditional farming communities are sources of agricultural biodiversity (”agro-biodiversity”). Agro-biodiversity hasn’t had as much global press as wild-land biodiversity - it’s less photogenic, for one thing - but it affects the security of the food supply in agricultural societies. As climates, soil compositions, and local dominant wild species (both crop-eating pests and competing weeds) change, a crop is only as resilient as its gene pool is deep.
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Everywhere they go in Indian country, the Wanabi are despised and ridiculed.  They seem to get everything wrong.  They never take advantage of a good opportunity to shut up.  They ask stupid questions and then hear what they want to hear, no matter what the answer is.  They have no dress sense.  They call the regalia “costumes.”  Many of them can’t dance, and the ones who can insist on doing the wrong steps, which might really screw up the weather one of these days. 

On what is plausibly “their” day, let me play the white/black/yellow/brown devil’s advocate for a moment.

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No matter what you call these globe-trotting researchers (often pharmaceutical companies or entities hoping to attract the favorable attention of pharmaceutical companies), this is what their detractors say they do: 

1. Go someplace that has flora or fauna with unusual or unknown characteristics.  In a lot of these places, the people who live there are poor.  Possibly, given more money, the locals would have already paved over the flora, killed off the fauna, and built modern roads, houses, and stores.  At least, when I visited the Peruvian Amazon a few years ago, that’s what a couple of the local folks I met said they’d prefer to do.
2.  Ask local healers which plants or animal parts are medicinal, and for what, and exactly how to prepare them and how they work. 
3. Go home with the collected knowledge and materials and lab-tweak them into a mass-producible, marketable, globally shippable product.
4. Patent it and make a lot of money.
5. Never pay the so-helpful locals one thin dime.

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A non-denominational, or inter-denominational, or maybe lowest-common-denominational Blogger’s Prayer.
I don’t presently get paid out of anyone’s taxes, so I can get away with this.

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Visitors, I apologize:  I really thought I’d be putting up more content by now, but I’m still banging my head against the process of setting up my structure and visuals.  Thud, thud, thud.  This is my first Website and I am not an HTML or PHP virtuosa (though maybe I will be before I’m done).  Thanks for your patience, and please do come back.