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Negotiating Tradition Insights Into Positions, Strategies, and Perspectives Pertaining to Cultural Property

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Negotiating Tradition Insights Into Positions, Strategies, and Perspectives Pertaining to Cultural Property ommunicative interactions in international negotiations on cultural proper- 4 ty not only provide information about the emergence and proliferation of arguments,C rhetorics, and registers, but also permit valuable insights into actors’ positions, strategies and alliances. They signifi cantly infl uence local and national practices and views related to cultural property debates. What can be gained from a deep analysis of the communicative patterns and strategies that actors engage in – the entailing text and talk of negotiations – is a better understanding of the process itself: how do different actors argue, what kind of strategies and rhetorics do they use, to which instruments and institutions do they refer, and in what way do actors react to each other? An analysis of communicative interactions contributes to the question of how international negotiations work. The analytic inclusion of sociolinguistic practices allows Negotiating Tradition insights into positions, strategies, and perspectives pertaining to cultural property. By looking at not only what actors say, but also at how and in what contexts they do so, it is possible to make more accurate statements about their positions and perceptions in cultural property debates. As these communi- cative interactions infl uence outcomes considerably, an approach from linguistic The Pragmatics of anthropology is not only benefi cial for an understanding of specifi c negotiations, International Deliberations but also for the analysis of broader cultural property issues. on Cultural Property Stefan Groth Göttingen Studies in Cultural Property, Volume 4 Tradition Negotiating Stefan Groth Stefan ISBN: 978-3-86395-100-9 ISSN: 2190-8672 Universitätsverlag Göttingen Universitätsverlag Göttingen Stefan Groth Negotiating Tradition This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License 3.0 “by-nd”, allowing you to download, distribute and print the document in a few copies for private or educational use, given that the document stays unchanged and the creator is mentioned. You are not allowed to sell copies of the free version. Published in 2012 by Universitätsverlag Göttingen as volume 4 in the series “Göttingen Studies in Cultural Property” Stefan Groth Negotiating Tradition The Pragmatics of International Deliberations on Cultural Property Göttingen Studies in Cultural Property, Volume 4 Universitätsverlag Göttingen 2012 Bibliographische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliographie; detaillierte bibliographische Daten sind im Internet über <http://dnb.ddb.de> abrufbar. Printed with funding from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG). Address of the Author Stefan Groth e-mail: [email protected] An earlier version of Chapter 5, “Multiperspectivity & Differentiation”, has been published as: Groth, S. (2010a) Perspectives of Differentiation: Negotiating Traditional Knowledge on the International Level. Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics 4(1): 7–24. This work is protected by German Intellectual Property Right Law. It is also available as an Open Access version through the publisher’s homepage and the Online Catalogue of the State and University Library of Goettingen (http://www.sub.uni-goettingen.de). Users of the free online version are invited to read, download and distribute it. Users may also print a small number for educational or private use. However they may not sell print versions of the online book. Set and Layout: Stefan Groth Cover: Stefan Groth Cover Image: Ville Oksanen (http://www.flickr.com/photos/villoks/243843209/) © 2012 Universitätsverlag Göttingen http://univerlag.uni-goettingen.de ISBN: 978-3-86395-100-9 ISSN: 2190-8672 „Göttinger Studien zu Cultural Property“ / “Göttingen Studies in Cultural Property” Reihenherausgeber Regina Bendix Kilian Bizer Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin Gerald Spindler Peter-Tobias Stoll Editorial Board Andreas Busch, Göttingen Rosemary Coombe, Toronto Ejan Mackaay, Montreal Dorothy Noyes, Columbus Achim Spiller, Göttingen Bernhard Tschofen, Tübingen Homepage http://gscp.cultural-property.org When a diplomat says yes, he means ‘perhaps’; When he says perhaps, he means ‘no’; When he says no, he is not a diplomat. Voltaire, cited in Korta and Perry 2011 Table of Contents Preface: Up for Negotiation i Donald L. Brenneis Acknowledgements v List of Abbreviations vii Note on Documents ix 1 Introduction 1 International Negotiations on Cultural Property and Language 1 The Debate on Cultural Property 8 Approach and Aims of this Study 10 2 On Terminology: Why Language Matters 13 Linguistic Anthropology 16 The Ethnography of Communication 18 Pragmatics & Metapragmatics 21 3 Negotiating Tradition on the Global Stage 25 February 2008 25 WIPO’s Committee on Traditional Knowledge 31 Actors and Alliances 41 The Multiplicity of Communicative Events 49 4 The Pragmatics of Negotiating Cultural Property 53 The IGC as a Speech Community 56 Opening Statements 59 Language Politics in International Negotiations 68 Opening Statements as Framing Devices 75 Referential Frames of the IGC 107 Micro-Editing 136 5 Multiperspectivity & Differentiation 145 Stigma 150 Potential 157 Right 160 Unity 161 Justice 164 6 Conclusion 167 Bibliography 175 Preface: Up for Negotiation Donald L. Brenneis We often read of topics ranging from the details of local environmental planning to such potentially catastrophic issues as nuclear arms control being “under nego- tiation.” We may have some sense of who the actors are, from local officials to diplomats, and we may have a sense that talk, document drafting, and the ongoing navigation of technical issues play major roles in such processes. At the same time, for most of us, and for many scholars, negotiation itself provides something of a terra incognita. A great deal has been written linking antecedent conditions, political and otherwise, to outcomes. Rarely, however, do we get a sense of the specific top- ics, styles, and strategies that figure in such crucial interstitial conversations, or of the complex intersections of talk, text, and decision-making they encompass. Stefan Groth’s book introduces us, with remarkable insight and ethnographic texture, to the often invoked but rarely deeply explored processes of diplomatic negotiation and into the routine communicative practices central to such activity. More specifically, he brings a breadth of methodological perspectives together to focus on the “negotiation of tradition” at the World Intellectual Property Organi- zation (WIPO): How are decisions made, avoided, or transformed regarding the intellectual property status of “traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions/folklore” in this major transnational agency? And how do the specifics i ii Donald L. Brenneis of quotidian talk in such cases speak to the larger political, commercial, and com- munity interests that often figure more centrally in academic models of such decision-making? In part his work reflects his strong core training in cultural anthropology, and especially his intense engagement with his colleagues in the Göttingen cultural property research group. It also draws very effectively upon recent social anthropo- logical research on complex organizations. In particular, his research resonates with an emergent scholarly commitment to the ethnography of transnational regulatory regimes, whether in official institutions such as the United Nations and its deriva- tive offices or in less formal nongovernmental organizations, parastatal agencies, and ad hoc entities. There is a great deal of significant and pathbreaking work be- ing done in such sites, research that certainly challenges more orthodox organiza- tional studies of these institutions. At the same time, Groth’s work is utterly origi- nal, in part because of a third scholarly strain he brings to the work, that is, a thor- oughgoing commitment to the detailed analysis of communicative practice at WIPO, a perspective grounded in linguistic anthropology. The underlying argument of Groth’s book begins with his emphasis on the signal importance of the sociolinguistic practices through which negotiation is constituted. He argues compellingly for the revelatory role of an “analytical triad” that brings together institutional ethnography, micro-linguistic analysis, and a thor- ough examination of those macro-processes, incentives, and constraints central to the broader context within which negotiation takes place. While institutional eth- nographers often invoke the importance of negotiation, their analyses usually re- main more or less metaphorical; they rarely grapple with the language through which such key work is accomplished. Groth not only focuses on such language, but he does so with a rich and subtle sense of the complex interworkings of mean- ing, style, social positioning, and indirection characteristic of such talk. This is lin- guistic anthropology of a very high order indeed. He has read widely, and with insight and imagination. His engagements with and uses of the work of key schol- ars are among the most lucid and generative I have read in recent years. Further, his innovative refigurings and applications of such concepts as shifters, “fractal recursivity” and social differentiation, intentionality, and speech community are sophisticated and fresh at the same time. In the United States, where there has been a much longer tradition of linguistic anthropology than in Europe, language specialists have only recently turned
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