‘Possessing Culture’ : Political Economies of Community Subjects and their Properties

The proliferation of collective claims made in cultural and proprietary terms demands a critical understanding of the political economies of community construction in order to understand ownership as a process through which property-holders are constituted as social actors and as political agents. The legal and political conditions under which culturally self-defined communities emerge to make possessive legal claims include neoliberal governmentalities, environmental regimes, intellectual property and cultural policy initiatives, as well as indigenous rights discourses which converge in many parts of the world to encourage collective needs and aspirations to be expressed in terms of community property rights. Exploring ethnographic examples from Latin America, it becomes clear that the global conditions under which collective holders of culturalised property claims have assumed greater agency and voice are diverse and their objectives contradictory. The communities empowered via recognition of their traditional knowledge, their intangible cultural heritage, or their traditional cultural expressions are situated at the intersections of old regimes of power and attachment, emerging forms of governmentality, and new imaginaries of social justice.