In a decolonial determination to resist the modern ontological separation of nature from culture, political ontologies and posthuman legalities in Andean Community countries increasingly recognize natural and cultural forces as inextricably interrelated under the principle of the pluriverse. After years of Indigenous struggles, new social movement mobilizations and citizen activism, twenty first-century constitutional changes in the region have affirmed the plurinational and intercultural natures of the region's polities. Drawing upon extensive interdisciplinary ethnographic research in Ecuador and Colombia, the article illustrates how Indigenous, Afro-descendant and campesino communities express multispecies relations of care and conviviality in opposition to modern extractivist development through the concept of buen vivir. These grassroots collective life projects and life plans articulate rights 'from below' to support new practices of territorialization that further materialize natures' rights and community ideals. Although human rights have modern origins, the implementation of third generation collective biocultural rights to ful-fill natures' rights may help to materially realize community norms, autonomies and responsibilities that exceed modern ontologies. The ecocentric territorial rights struggles and posthuman legalities we explore are examples of a larger emergent project of decolonizing human rights in a politics appropriate to the Anthropocene.

Drawing upon literature in cultural studies, the author argues that the concept of the postmodern challenges the discipline of cultural anthropology in a number of ways. Interpretive anthropology is a modernist enterprise — one with untenable premises and limitations that are increasingly evident in the condition of postmodernity. Exploring the intersections between culture and power in local contexts, cultural anthropologists engage the postmodern by investigating the cultural politics of everyday life.

The bizarre rumors that consumers spread about the origins and meanings of corporate trademarks are phenomena of consumer culture that indirectly articulate social anxieties about the intersections of culture, power, and place in the condition of postmodernity. Demonic rumors, I will suggest, provide a means by which people culturally express commercial power's lack of place - the simultaneously pervasive but incorporeal presence of corporate power. Moreover, such rumors serve to remark upon the consumer's own place - making audible her lack of voice - and her sense of powerlessness in the ubiquitous but evanescent world of commercial media culture.

Ethnographic research into intellectual property (IP) gained traction in the mid-1990s. During this period international trade agreements mandated that all states introduce minimum IP protections, property rights in intangible goods were expanded to encompass new subject areas, international Indigenous Peoples’ human rights were being negotiated, and protecting biodiversity became a global policy concern. Anthropologists considered IP extension in terms of the processes of commodification the law enabled, the cultural incommensurability of the law’s presuppositions in various societies, the implications of these rights for disciplinary research and publication ethics, and the modes of subjectification and territorialization that the enforcement of such laws engendered. Recognizing that IP clearly constrains and shapes the circulation of goods through the privatization of significant resources, critical anthropological examinations of Western liberal legal binary distinctions between public and private goods also revealed the forms of dispossession enabled by presuming a singular cultural commons. Anthropologists showed the diversity of publics constituted through authorized and unauthorized reproduction and circulation of cultural goods, exploring the management of intangible cultural goods in a variety of moral economies as well as the construction and translation of tradition in new policy arenas. The intersection of IP and human rights also prompted greater disciplinary reflexivity with respect to research ethics and publication practices. Analyzing how IP protections are legitimated and the activities that their enforcement delegitimizes, ethnography illustrated how the law creates privileged and abject subjectivities, reconfigures affective relationships between people and places, and produces zones of policing and discipline in processes of territorialization.

Critical scholarship on geographical indications (GIs) has increasingly focused upon their role in fostering development in the Global South. Recent work has drawn welcome attention to issues of governance and sparked new debates about the role of the state in GI regulation. We argue that this new emphasis needs to be coupled with a greater focus upon local social relations of power and interlinked issues of social justice. Rather than see GI regimes as apolitical technical administrative frameworks, we argue that they govern emerging public goods that should be forged to redress extant forms of social inequality and foster the inclusion of marginalized actors in commodity value chains. In many areas of the world, this will entail close attention to the historical specificities of colonial labor relations and their neocolonial legacies, which have entrenched conditions of racialized and gendered dispossession, particularly in plantation economies. Using examples from South Africa and South Asia, we illustrate how GIs conventionally reify territories in a fashion that obscures and/or naturalizes exploitative conditions of labor and unequal access to land based resources, which are legacies of historical disenfranchisement. Like other forms of neoliberal governmentality that support private governance for public ends, however, GIs might be shaped to support new forms of social justice. We show how issues of labor and place-based livelihoods increasingly influence new policy directions within Fair Trade agendas while concerns with “decolonizing” agricultural governance now animate certification initiatives emerging from new social movements. Both initiatives provide models for shaping the governance and regulation of GIs in projects of rural territorial development that encompass principles of rights-based development to further social movements for rural social justice.

Geographical Indications (GIs) were established as a distinctive category of intellectual property (IP) in the 1994 Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) Agreement. Reflecting this broad field of legal vehicles, marks indicating conditions of origin (MICOs) denote indications of source, appellations of origin, denominations of origin, and collective trademarks and certification marks. This chapter recognizes the limitations of GIs, examining a need for greater empirical study of the regulations governing their use. Most academic scholarship fails to investigate the social relations between labourers, landowners, producers, and GI institutions, or political movements for decolonization. This chapter, therefore, suggests that local GI governance must be analyzed within a broader scope that encompasses class, ethnicity, and gender. We begin by exploring Darjeeling Tea as a famous form of national GI in India that reflects some of the ideological tendencies of MICO systems. We then demonstrate the global significance of MICO governance by providing insight into contemporary political ecology in Southeast Asia. By examining palm oil expansion, the decline in swidden agriculture, and subsequent environmental and cultural effects, we outline a crisis of biocultural diversity in the region. Lastly, this chapter inquires into the future of MICOs, looking specifically at emerging practices that might encourage alternative value systems to address both environmental and social justice concerns, including greater gender equity. Ultimately, this chapter illustrates how current uses of MICOs uphold entrenched social hierarchies and therefore must be reoriented towards rights-based development and social justice objectives.

This chapter delineates the features of a distinctive terrain – emerging political economies and political ecologies in which cultural property’s futures in the Global South are likely to unfold and aspirations for alternative futures politically articulated in a culturally possessive fashion.

Anthropologists address historical developments such as the global restructuring of capital, post-Fordism, and the flexible accumulation of capital from perspectives that diverge substantially from those employed by lawyers, political scientists, or economists. The global restructuring of capital and the intensified flows of capital, goods, imagery, people, and ideas has shaken the authority of nation states, cast cultural differences into sharp relief, and undermined the capacity of governments to deal with social welfare concerns. The woman who purchases day care service without filling out social security forms, the gypsy cab driver who serves poor neighborhoods without benefit of a license, the moonlighting software consultant, the craftsman building furniture in an area not zoned for manufacturing activity, the immigrant woman reading pap smears or sewing teddy bears in a poorly lit suburban garage, and the unlicensed African street vendor are all participating in the burgeoning informal economy that characterizes a global city like New York.

"Critical heritage studies" (Baird 2009, 2012) positions heritage within a wider field of global institutions, discourses, and power relations. For example, the new emphasis upon cultural heritage as a development resource by international institutions, states, NGOs, and local governing bodies is criticized by scholars who call attention to the new governmentalities that neoliberal heritage regimes engender (Coombe 2012), and their impacts on local "communities" reduced to mere "stakeholders" in reconfigured fields of power. In this vein, we draw upon ethnographic studies in Australia, Romania, and Madagascar to show how heritage claims emerge in new terrains of contestation involving local residents, resources, and extractive industries. International heritage institutions face new challenges as heritage becomes imbricated in industry strategies on "resource frontiers" (Tsing 2003, 2005 ), limiting social expectations for its governance. Rights oriented institutions and movements, however, also afford communities and indigenous peoples the means to insist upon new forms of participation and accountability, and assert territorialities that expose the limits of universalizing heritage discourses.

Despite the differences in perspective that define the field, ethnographers of Mediterranean societies consider the cultural values of honour and shame in a remarkably consistent and theoretically im poverished manner. The article attempts to demonstrate that the rhe torical strategies of structural functionalism continue to characterize discussions of honour and shame in Mediterranean societies, even when anthropologists appear to have rejected this theoretical para digm. Arguing that to conceptualize the values of honour and shame as a type of juridical code does representational violence to the lives and experiences of Mediterranean peoples, the author advocates a practice-oriented theoretical approach to these cultural values that is more sensitive to social relations of inequality and difference. Resume: En depit des differences de perspective qui definissent le champ, les ethnographes de societes mediterraneennes considerent les valeurs culturelles d'honneur et de honte de fagon remarquablement consistante et theoriquement appauvrie. L'article essaye de demontrer que les strategies rhetoriques du fonctionnalisme structurel continuent a caracteriser les discussions traitant de l'honneur et de la honte dans les societes mediterraneennes, meme si les anthropologues semblent avoir rejete ce paradigme theorique. En raisonnant que cette concep tualisation du complexe honneur/honte en tant que code juridique n'est que representation injuste de la vie et de l'experience des peu ples mediterraneans, 1'auteure recommande une approche theorique et pratique vis-a-vis ces valeurs culturelles, plus sensible aux relations sociales d'inegalite et de difference.

Cultural goods are increasingly significant under neoliberal conditions of regulatory restructuring that favor investments in informational capital in so-called "knowledge economies." Linguistic difference, linguistic practice, and increasingly standardized genres of representation have been constitutive of new technologies of government and reterritorialization in Latin America in the last quarter-century as global policy regimes that valorize diversity have been interpreted and implemented. The argument is presented through a critical multiscalar survey of recent ethnographic research in Latin American contexts in which we can trace the ways and means through which international trade, intellectual property, and biodiversity regimes have influenced representations and management of knowledge to effect new forms of spatialization. Indigenous social collectives constituted as self-managing communities have embraced possessive, if not necessarily proprietary, attitudes toward traditional knowledge, plant genetic resources, and food sources, learning to mark goods and services to indicate culturally specific conditions of origin. As culturalized communities become subjects of neoliberal government, however, they are called upon to project their distinctive assets so as to make them politically and economically legible to new interlocutors. This has provoked new forms of reflexivity around assets, goods, values, and norms, and provided new resources for rights-based struggles in an emerging field of cultural politics in which neoliberal multiculturalism is vernacularized in more embedded markets and more pluralist polities.

We will explore the historical, political and ecological context in which rooibos figures as a topical case study of the potential promise and perils of GIs that we introduced in our previous chapter. There, we argued that the dominant rhetoric promoting the use of GIs has the tendency to project a particular ‘social imaginary’ that represents communities holistically, possessing singular traditions and rooted in a particular place characterized by a naturally bounded and distinctive ecosystem. In this chapter, we suggest that although this ‘social imaginary’ may easily characterize the socionatural contexts of some place-based goods, in the South African context its use may avert political attention from the historical relationship between the rooibos plant, those who control the lands on which it is grown, those who harvest it, the traditional knowledge of its cultivation, and the ecology in which it grows.

The critical study of cultural heritage faces crucial challenges if it is to fully attend to fundamental shifts in the global political economy and global approaches to heritage protection. Under conditions of neoliberalism, people are witnessing shifts from liberal state-based regimes of protection of patrimony (understood as state property) to multiscalar and multisectoral assemblages of governmental regulation. Many heritage scholars characterize neoliberalism as an ideology privileging economic rationality that has contributed to a profit-driven conception of heritage; others describe it as “an ideological approach to the state's role in economy and society”. A new form of governmental rationality is emerging under neoliberal conditions as a constitutive form of cultural policy focused on “the organization of self-regulating and self-managing communities”. Rights constitute dynamic and emergent constituents in heritage assemblages. To explore this, however, heritage scholars need to approach human rights in a more anthropological fashion.

In light of the increased spread and availability of digital technology, issues of cultural appropriation have received new scrutiny. The tendency to treat all cultural forms in digital media ecology as mere “information” enables everyone to access and make use of cultural goods – assuming we overlook the “digital divide.” Nonetheless, it is important to recognize that when creativity involves a practice described as appropriation, an assertion is being made that a text has been moved or removed from its authorizing context, or that it has, in some other significant sense, been taken (Meurer and Coombe 2009). In some cases, this decontextualization may be deliberately and critically intended – to challenge the fields of meanings in which the object properly figures, to assert an alternative ownership over it, and/or to consider the importance of other realms of connotation in which it might signify. Other allegations of appropriation may occur when a cultural text is understood to have been improperly recontextualized to the harm of those who have serious attachments to its positioning in specific worlds of social meaning. In this chapter, we deal primarily with those forms of appropriation that effect injury to groups, primarily because of the power relations at work in digital environments that enable old inequities to be perpetuated in new ways.

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.