Skip to content

Posts from the ‘Interlocutors’ Category

Oct 20

New Book: Die Konstituierung von Cultural Property: Forschungsperspektiven

The Göttingen Interdisciplinary Research Group on Cultural Property is happy to announce the publication of an edited volume on the constitution of cultural property:

Regina Bendix, Kilian Bizer, Stefan Groth (Hg.)
Die Konstituierung von Cultural Property: Forschungsperspektiven.
Göttinger Studien zu Cultural Property, Band 1. Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen 2010, 320 Seiten, Softcover, 30,00 EUR
ISBN 978-3-941875-61-6

Kann Eigentum an Kultur sinnvoll sein? Das Interesse, Cultural Property dem Markt zuzuführen oder dies zu verhindern und hierdurch kollektiven oder individuellen, ideologischen oder ökonomischen Gewinn zu schaffen, gestaltet sich unter den stark divergierenden Bedingungen, die Akteure in einer postkolonialen, spätmodernen Welt vorfinden.

Die interdisziplinäre DFG-Forschergruppe zur Konstituierung von Cultural Property beleuchtet diese seit einigen Jahren in der Öffentlichkeit mit wachsender Brisanz verhandelte Frage. Die Forschergruppe fragt nach der Konstituierung von Cultural Property im Spannungsfeld von kulturellen, wirtschaftlichen, juristischen und hiermit auch gesellschaftspolitischen Diskursen. Dies bedingt auch die in dieser fokussierten Form neue Zusammenarbeit von Fachwissenschaftler/innen aus Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften sowie Rechts- und Wirtschaftswissenschaften. Die Unterschiedlichkeit des disziplinären Zugriffs auf einen Forschungsbereich zeigt sich in den in diesem Band vermittelten ersten Ergebnissen aus der laufenden Forschung genauso deutlich wie die Notwendigkeit, disziplinäre Standpunkte in gemeinsamer Arbeit zusammenzuführen, um den Konstituierungsprozess von Cultural Property zu verstehen.

Der erste Teil versammelt Beiträge, die den Zusammenhang zwischen Heritage Praxen und der Formierung von Interessen an Cultural Property anhand von Fallstudien aus Indonesien, Kambodscha und Deutschland  beleuchten. Im zweiten Teil werden existierende Parameter des Schutzes von Cultural Property aus der Sicht von Völkerrecht, Verfüungsrecht und visueller Anthropologie untersucht. Der dritte Teil widmet sich Erkenntnissen aus internationalen Verhandlungsprozessen und ein vierter Abschnitt zeigt unterschiedliche Forschungsperspektiven auf Cultural Property.

Der Band kann auf den Seiten des Göttinger Universitätsverlages bestellt werden und ist zudem unter einer Creative-Commons-Lizenz als PDF verfügbar:
http://bit.ly/gscp01
Read more

Aug 28

Noyes on the Oversimplications of Cultural Property and Heritage Policy

An important working paper by my friend Dorry Noyes presenting alternatives to the conceptual oversimplifications common in cultural property and cultural heritage policy has just been circulated by the Interdisciplinary Research Group on Cultural Property at the University of Göttingen. Help make the argument even stronger with your comments and feedback here: http://www.cultural-property.org/2010/cp-101-how-traditional-culture-works

Lots to think with and work on.

Jul 15

1 Comment

Congratulations Dr. Jessica W. Blanchard

Another successful dissertation defense to report and celebrate. Jessica Walker Blanchard (a.k.a. Dr. Blanchard) is a wonderful person and scholar whom I have known and respected for many years. She has just completed her Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Oklahoma (where I was proud to be one of her teachers). I am little behind in reading her dissertation (about a chapter short of finished) but I can say that it is a important contribution to anthropology and Native American studies.  Jessica’s focus in her study are the activities of Southern Baptist missionaries (church “planters”) of diverse Native American backgrounds who establish mission congregations in (i.e. “targeting”) particular and specific local Native American communities. Her work was undertaken in congregations in Central Oklahoma, near the communities of Little Axe, Shawnee, and Earlboro. When she is not dissertating, Dr. Blanchard is a researcher at the Center for Applied Social Research at OU. She has been involved in a wide range of complex and important research projects, mainly focusing on the sociocultural aspects of health and wellness in Oklahoma and in general. Congratulations Jessica!

Jun 8

Berlinger’s Chapter in the Collection-Jews at Home

Congratulations to Gabrielle A. Berlinger on the publication of her article “770 Eastern Parkway: The Rebbe’s Home as Icon” in Jews at Home: The Domestication of Identity, volume two in the Jewish Cultural Studies series edited by Simon J. Bronner and published by Littman. The book is beautifully made and carefully edited. Gabi’s article is a fine study of Jewish architecture in a complex context. Find the book on the publisher’s website here.

May 25

Dr. Arle Lommel

Congratulations to Arle Lommel on the successful defense today of his Ph.D. dissertation in folklore. His dissertation is titled Semiotic Organology: A Peircean Examination of the Bagpipe and Hurdy-Gurdy in Hungary. His innovative project unfolds at the intersections of Hungarian ethnography and general ethnomusicology, organology, folklore studies (especially of “folk revivals”), material culture studies, and semiotic theory. It was a pleasure to be member of Arle’s dissertation committee.

May 6

Janice Frisch on T-shirt Quilts

A note of congratulations for Janice Frisch on the completion of her M.A. in Folklore. Her M.A. Thesis, recently accepted by the faculty, is titled Scrapbooks in Fabric: Memory, Identity, and the T-shirt Quilt. It is a wonderful study utilizing ethnographic methods in the study of contemporary U.S.  material culture. It is particularly valuable in the ways that it situates t-shirt quilts relative to the areas of (1) dress and adornment, (2) quilts and quilt history, and (3) scrapbooking and other practices associated with hand-made memory objects. In her abstract, she writes:

Historically, in the United States, clothing that was worn beyond repair was used in quilts in order to salvage the still usable parts while creating another useful item. Modern quilters, however, generally purchase new cloth to use in their quilts rather than cutting up old clothing. Fairly recently there has been a trend towards constructing quilts out of still wearable clothing items, such as t-shirts. This form of quilting is both a continuation of past practices and an innovation. In today’s society these quilts are a medium for the expression of personal identity and memories. This thesis draws upon existing literature on body art, material culture, memory, and identity as well as original fieldwork to examine the rapidly growing phenomenon of t-shirt quilts and connect them to the larger history of quilting, dress, and collecting in the United States. [Frisch 2010:vi]

Looking ahead to her Ph.D. work, Ms. Frisch will be continuing her studies of quilting this summer at the Smithsonian and several European museums. Congratulations to her on the completion of an important M.A. study.

May 4

International Trade Law and Cultural Diversity Workshop

Another exciting (for me) component of my March visit to the Cultural Property Research Group in Göttingen was my participation in a the first day of a two day workshop led by the members of the project’s sub-project titled “Constituting Cultural Property as Part of the International Law Regime, and its Development.” This research foci is directed by Professor Dr. Peter-Tobias Stoll (an international law scholar at Göttingen) and includes several talented doctoral students as researchers. Their sub-project description notes:

The discussions and negotiations of cultural property in the Intergovernmental Committee of WIPO are closely linked to other policy areas, institutions and regulatory realms. Among others, these include the long-standing efforts to arrive at a form of human rights protection for indigenous peoples, the international cultural policy pursued by UNESCO – the Conventions for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003), developments in international law concerning the environment, and controversies in the World Trade Organization over protecting intellectual heritage. The interactions, and intersections, between these various efforts in international law are the subject of this sub-project. In doing so, what is at issue is a forward-looking analysis of internal compatibility and the linkage in terms of process with other regulatory realms, as well as the development of corresponding methods. The knowledge obtained from individual cases here can be used to create a more general means of regarding the international law regime, one which is characterized by increasing differentiation and a need to coordinate the individual sub-realms that have developed. (source)

In the March 19-20, 2010 workshop led by the sub-project group and participated in by the larger Cultural Property Research Group as a whole, the aim was to describe research findings to date, to articulate them with the models and findings developing in other sub-projects, and to bounce these ideas off of a group of guest scholars visiting for the occasion.  The topics considered on these days included: (1) International Trade Law and Cultural Diversity, (2) Fragmentation, and (3) International Negotiations in Different Fora, Regimes, and Organizations.  The two main guests invited were Michael Hahn of the University of Lausanne and Nele Matz-Lück of the MPI Heidelberg. I was able to participate in the opening session in which Stoll described very effectively the state of play in these related domains of international law vis-a-vis the work of the sub-group and the total project as a whole.  This was followed by a rich set of commentaries by the two special guests and a very fruitful discussion by all of the participants.

I was struck by two aspects of this experience. One was the very effective degree to which the various sub-projects of the overall project were contributing very fruitfully to one another, despite considerable difference in disciplinary backgrounds and norms (in economics, social anthropology, folklore/ethnology, and law). The other was the remarkable effectiveness of the institutions that the group has developed for communicating internally and externally and for moving the research process forward fruitfully despite the size and complexity of the undertaking.  As was true throughout my visit, my participation in the International Law Workshop was instructive in both substantive ways and in terms of what it taught me about organizing large and ambitious collaborative research projects.

May 3

All But Dissertation

It is not quite over, but this academic year was one in which a large number of students with whom I work have undergone the rite of passage known as the Ph.D. qualifying exams.  All of the following folks have experienced great success in this process and are now moving onward into their dissertation research.

Nicky Belle (Anthropology)
Gabrielle Berlinger (Folklore)
Zilia Estrada (Folklore)
Jill Hemming-Austin (Folklore)
Hsin-wen Hsu (Ethnomusicology)
Suzanne Ingalsbe (Folklore)
Selina Morales (Folklore)
Jodine (Jody) Perkins (Folklore)
Jim Seaver (History)

In just over a week, Sarah Gordon (Folklore) will complete her own exams and join this platoon of distinguished colleagues traveling into dissertation land. Congratulations to each and all.

Mar 15

Cultural Property Research Group, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Very happily, I have begun a week-long visit to Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, Germany. I am very fortunate to be the guest of the Cultural Property Research Group. This is a major interdisciplinary project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). I very much recommend their research weblog (here) and the project website (here).

Today I spent time talking to some of the doctoral students in law and in cultural anthropology/European ethnology/folklore studies who are pursuing dissertation projects within the larger research group. They’re all wonderfully smart and very generous in their patience with an American who has never spoken a word of German in his life. In addition to beginning discussions of their interesting projects, they taught me a bit about the changing nature of academic life in Germany and showed me around their beautiful campus and city.

While I will hopefully have something from my own work to offer my hosts, I am enjoying learning about their studies and connecting them with the work of favorite (and very relevant) colleagues back home who are working on similar issues. I was reassured by the familiarity of the topics that we discussed today.  In the usual one-thing-leads-to-another fashion we jumped from geographic indicators to WIPO policy, open source software, cultural appropriation, human rights, heritage lists, and open access.

Thanks to everyone involved in my visit possible.

Dec 22

Delaware Tribe in a Cherokee Nation

With this note, I want to congratulate Brice Obermeyer on the publication of his new book Delaware Tribe in a Cherokee Nation (University of Nebraska Press, 2009). Brice is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Emporia State University. His book began as his dissertation research at the University of Oklahoma, where I had the privilege of serving on his doctoral committee. Of the Ph.D. students with whom I have worked, Brice has the distinction of being the first to accomplish the difficult additional task of seeing his doctoral dissertation transformed into a published book. This major effort entails not only additional research, writing and revision, but the practical matters of securing a publisher, further revision on the basis of peer-review, and going through the multitude of steps the follow in the production process. Congratulations to Brice on his negotiating these many steps successfully.

An important study of a complex and contentious topic, Brice’s book has been published by the University of Nebraska Press, an important publisher of books in anthropology and Indigenous studies. His study is a crucial examination of the political and historical complexities that have led to the entanglement of the Delaware people with the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma and of the Delaware struggle for self-determination in a context in which they are doubly encompassed by both the United States and the Cherokee Nation, two powerful governments whose interests have often been hostile to Delaware ones. To explore the complicated ways in which the exercise of Cherokee national sovereignty has resulted in the disenfranchisement and subjugation of another American Indian people is a difficult and painful undertaking, one that Brice pursues with care. Brice succeeds in accounting for the complexities of the Delaware situation, respecting the diversity of views found among Delaware people, and contextualizing the historical events and social and culture processes that make sense of the political paradoxes that Delaware and Cherokee people must negotiate. A excerpt is available on the University of Nebraska Press website.

Congratulations to Brice and to his Delaware collaborators.

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »