Who Owns Native Culture?

Who owns 'culture'?1

No one owns the concept 'culture'. Anthropology's long-standing proprietary claim on the concept rests on three sorts of contentions none of which are convincing. Anthropology's overwhelmingly interpretive approaches to cultural materials have led to a preoccupation with the details of cultural materials at the expense of formulating explanatory theories. This has, among other things, rendered ...

Who Owns Native Nature? Discourses of Rights to Land, Culture, and Knowledge in New Zealand

Michael Brown famously asked ‘Who owns native culture?’ This paper revisits that question by analyzing what happens to culture when the culturally defined boundary between it and nature becomes salient in the context of disputes between indigenous and settler populations. My case study is the dispute between the New Zealand government and Maori tribal groupings concerning ownership of the fores...

Who Owns Intelligence?

Who Owns Child Abuse?

Expectations of contemporary child protection apparatuses are strongly influenced by beliefs inherited from the nineteenth century child rescue movement. In particular, the belief that child abuse determination is obvious. However, this assumption fails to make a distinction between nineteenth century’s emphasis on impoverished environments and the twentieth century introduction of the patholog...

Who Owns Your DNA?

Stanford Genetics Professor Michael Snyder’s book, Genomics & Personalized Medicine: What Everyone Needs to Know, is a work to be enjoyed on multiple levels. Designed for a broad audience, the book delivers a great deal of detail for the scientifically savvy while still providing a generalized overview for the yet-to-be-initiated. Although brief, the book is timely, having followed closely on t...