02 geismar 2005 material culture & copyright in vanuatu

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Reproduction, creativity, restrictionMaterial culture and copyright in Vanuatu

HAIDY GEISMAR

Program in Museum Studies, New York University, USA

ABSTRACTCopyright legislation is often described in relation to a series ofabstract legal and economic constructs, without due attention to theways in which it may be constituted by the persons and artifacts thatit legislates over. In this article, I focus in detail on some ways in whichconcepts of copyright are negotiated in the South Pacific archipelagoof Vanuatu. I analyze copyright in relation to the technical, social andconceptual processes of copying, restriction and creativity, respec-tively, in order to draw out some of the diverse social and materialprocesses that are built into the legal category. I draw specifically onmy research with Ni-Vanuatu men and women using local resourcesto earn money through the production of artifacts for the market an exemplary context for the emergence of discussions aboutindigenous copyright legislation. In describing copyright in one verylocal context, I emphasize that focusing on the materiality of differentproperty forms can enable us to more sensitively understand thedifferential constitution of intellectual property rights in an increas-ingly global arena.

Journal of Social Archaeology A R T I C L E

Copyright 2005 SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com)ISSN 1469-6053 Vol 5(1): 2551 DOI: 10.1177/1469605305050142

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26 Journal of Social Archaeology 5(1)

KEYWORDSindigenous copyright legislation intellectual property rights materiality Vanuatu

INTRODUCTION

The indigenous people of the Pacific, particularly those in the region ofMelanesia, are renowned within ethnographic literature for the immaterial(or conceptual) ways in which much of their formal imagery is preservedover time, even in the face of radical social and political change. Notableexamples of this are the Malanggan funerary effigies of New Ireland(Kchler, 2002), sand drawings of Northern Vanuatu (Huffman, 1996), andAboriginal Australian renditions of the dreamtime (Myers, 2002). In all ofthese examples, remembered and inherited images, often signifying andembodying vital acquired knowledge and social position, are momentarilymanifested in a variety of materials, varying from natural pigment on woodto acrylic paint on canvas. Such diverse materializations of images connectsocial processes of creativity and innovation to an ancestral and spiritualdomain of replication; a connection that may facilitate control over theproduction and circulation of visual material in ever-increasing circles.

In this article, I discuss the amalgamation of diverse ideas about copy-right a practical and material construct that legitimates formal reproduc-tion in the Melanesian nation of Vanuatu (Figure 1).1 I describe thedifferent ways in which indigenous rules about permissible reproductionare entwined with international notions of property rights and restrictionson the sites of three types of artifact: baskets made by women from theisland of Pentecost, carvings made by men connected to rituals of statusacquisition from Ambrym island, and the work of contemporary artistsbased in the capital of Vanuatu, Port Vila. In following the status of thesethree genres of material culture as intellectual and material property, Ihighlight the contextual complexity of copyright legislation. By emphasiz-ing the capability of material culture to synthesize a broad range of ideasand practices, I expose the ways in which dichotomies such as indigenousand international are both reified and overwhelmed within the inter-meshed processes of social and material reproduction.

The material emphasis of copyright legislation is a good place to beginto unravel the tensions between conceptions of property as thing andproperty as a series of rights directed towards things or a way of knowing(Kirsch, 2001b) that permeates much of the literature about property andproperty relations (Kirsch, 2001a; Leach, 2003; Marx, 1976; Spyer, 1998).Recent theoretical discussions have highlighted both the importance of

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27Geismar Reproduction, creativity, restriction

Figure 1 Map of Vanuatu

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material culture to the constitution of social relationships (Meskell, 2004;Miller, 1987, 1998), and the benefits of utilizing an ethnographic perspec-tive that takes into account the material as well as social world (Geismarand Horst, 2004; Miller and Tilley, 1996). I aim to develop this perspectivein order to emphasize the importance of materiality in the forging of intel-lectual property rights and attendant political economies based upon repro-ductive restriction.

Throughout this article, I define copyright broadly as official injunctionsand restrictions that establish legitimate entitlement for individual or incor-porated entities to circulate and profit at any particular moment from thematerial reproduction of specified forms. Copyright may be seen to con-solidate rather than divide indigenous, national and international politicaleconomies, to incorporate diversity. Yet this process of consolidation is byno means uncontested or unproblematic. The material productions thatemanate from such a compressed cross-cultural context still cause troubleas they move across economic and cultural borders. This is most evident ifwe glance at the myriad controversies raised over fakes, forgeries, andissues of authenticity that emerge in these contextual cracks, for examplein the domain of Australian Aboriginal art production. There, non-Aboriginal dealers and local artists alike have a hard time reconciling theinterface between complex social responsibilities and commodity marketmechanisms with the objects that they produce (Bowden, 2001; Merlan,2001; Myers, 2004).

The work of anthropologists such as Marilyn Strathern may be used tohighlight the analytic potentials and pitfalls of treating Pacific practices,productions, and reproductions as analogous, yet conceptually alternative,to Euro-American ones. Intellectual Property Rights (a catch-all phrasethat, not unproblematically, unites a series of diverse ideas about propertyand entitlement into a global category) have often been used as a primeencompassment of such comparative alterity within these discussions(Harrison, 1991; Pottage, 2001; Strathern, 1999).

In The Patent and the Malanggan, Strathern draws a parallel betweencarved New Ireland funerary monuments and international patent legis-lation, emphasizing the power of each form to regenerate human creativityand channel technological power (2001: 9). She criticizes the tendency ofanthropologists to read the reproductive restrictions around Malangganartifacts as a form of copyright. In light of the immaterial focus on know-ledge in the minds of Malanggan producers, rather than on the artifactsproduced by that knowledge, she suggests that patents might be a moreappropriate form of comparison than copyright, the most material form ofintellectual property.

However, in the context of the intensification of cross-cultural debatearound the nature of property, international concern for the definition andprotection of cultural and intellectual property rights (abbreviated here as

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CIPR) has, in the present day, discursively situated the rights andentitlements to the materialization of many ancestral images within thedomain of indigenous copyright. Following the encouragement of inter-national bodies such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific andCultural Organization (UNESCO)2 and World Intellectual PropertyOrganization (WIPO), international views of copyright have returned fullcircle to localities in the guise of national copyright legislations, whichincorporate a plethora of material and reproductive entitlements under therubric copyright (Brown, 1998, 2003). While Strathern is at pains to pointout that New Irelanders do not think of Malanggan as inventions (appli-cation of technology) nor as describing the original inventive step (patents)(2001: 15), copyright (and its neo-Melanesian transliteration Kopiraet) isa term that has passed into common parlance throughout the Pacific islands,even for some Malanggan producers (Gunn, 1987). Copyright is no longerjust a Euro-American concept, but one with a more global meaning bothan internationalist discourse and an important trope by which to distinguishlocal specificity within an increasingly connected, global environment. Thegulf of ideological proportions Strathern describes (2001: 15) has, in thiscase, been bridged both by ideas and by objects.

COPYRIGHT LEGISLATION IN VANUATU

During my main period of fieldwork in Vanuatu (200001), the term copy-right had heightened resonance due to the passing of the Copyright andRelated Rights Act (hereafter Copyright Act) and its accompanying public-ity. The Copyright Act was based upon international guidelines establishedby WIPO using Australian copyright legislation of 1968 as a template,3 withthe addition of clauses dealing with custom. Working copyright legislationis a prerequisite for entrance into the World Trade Organization and, assuch, national copyright acts are being adopted by many nations seekingacceptance into this global economic regulator. While the Vanuatu legis-lation has been passed by Parliament, the Act still awaits gazetting.4

Despite internal legal organization around the enforcement of copyright, Ithink it is fair to say that, at the time of writing, copyright injunctions aremore effectively enforced within Vanuatu than between Vanuatu and othernations.

As well as having the potential to constrain the illegal reproduction ofvideo, music and software, the Vanuatu Copyright Act aims to incorporatekastom5 entitlements into the national domain, delineating the conditionsof legitimacy for the broad circulation of expressions of indigenousculture. Prior to this, there were no specific legal mechanisms for theprotection of Ni-Vanuatu CIPR, although there was some supporting

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internal legislation in place within the Vanuatu National Cultural CouncilAct, the Preservation of Sites and Artifacts Act, the Island Courts Act, andelements of the criminal code (i.e. on the desecration of graves). TheNational Council of Chiefs and the Vanuatu Cultural Research Policy havealso initiated discussion about IPR, particularly in relation to kastom(Bongmatur, 1994). In the past, kastom entitlement has been enforced inlocal contexts by traditional structures of hierarchy (such as various ritualceremonial complexes, see below) and through the medium of villagemeetings and local councils of chiefs local judiciaries that function withvariable levels of state sanction (Lipset, 2004: 6566; Rousseau, 2004: Chs6 and 8). The Copyright Act thus marks one of the first times the state hasformalized traditional entitlement into an internationally recognizedlanguage.

Within the Copyright Act, an expression of indigenous culture isdefined as: any way in which indigenous knowledge may appear or be mani-fested including all material objects; names, stories, histories and songs inoral narratives; dances, ceremonies and ritual performances or practices,designs and visual compositions; and any local specialized and technicalknowledge (Republic of Vanuatu, 2000: 5, authors emphasis). The aim ofsuch an extremely open definition is to create framework legislation thatcan empower local constructions of indigenous entitlement in increasinglygeneric circumstances (Wright, 2001: 5). This move follows the drive ofmany advocates for indigenous IPR to incorporate sui generis (unique)concepts into global systems of restriction, fighting a political battle byoffsetting one hegemonic legal structure against another, indigenous, one(Commission for Intellectual Property Rights, 2002). The result of such anintentionally loose framework is a series of potential cracks in the cement-ing of legal categories, especially in the definition of what an object, overwhich legislation could be wielded, might be.

A major difficulty for any copyright act is enforcement across nationalborders, especially by poorer constituencies that cannot afford extensivelegal support.6 It remains the case that for many people around the world,international copyright prohibitions remain irrelevant (for example, thosewho, with computers and high-speed internet access, download music willbe aware of the recent attempts of record companies to prosecute users,but may feel fairly confident that they will not be targeted), or resonateprimarily in relation to more local systems of reproductive restriction (anexample more familiar to the reader than the prohibitions of Pacificislanders might be plagiarism regulations enforced by universities).

Despite these potential pitfalls, economic interest in establishing aworking notion of copyright in Vanuatu is growing for many individuals.With a population of only around 200,000 people, many of whom struggleon a daily basis to participate in the cash economy, copyright is seen as animportant mechanism with which to regulate competitive economic activity

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between and within communities, and as a narrative trope that can affectthe material configuration of many kinds of social, political and economicrelationships. The passing of the Copyright Act, despite its current lack ofgovernmental enforcement, means that kastom entitlement and stategovernance are increasingly intermeshed. The Copyright Act determinesthat Ni-Vanuatu as well as foreigners who infringe national copyright legis-lation are potentially punishable with a fine of 1,000,000 vatu (approximatelyUS$8000, an unobtainable amount of money for most locals) and/or a yearin prison. By extension, the focus on indigenous injunctions may also beseen as a legal validation of alternative mechanisms for enforcing copyright,which range from the strictures of traditional ritual hierarchies to the appli-cation of sorcery. Not surprisingly, the threat of government prosecutionmixed with attendant grass-roots forms of enforcement has caused a greatdeal of introspection and self-consciousness among almost all Ni-Vanuatuwho work making objects for their livelihood, most of them reliant on thecorpus of imagery and styles intrinsically connected to their locality. Whatis at stake here is not only the articulation of economic imaginations, butthe very real right to materialize (and thereby control) vital connectionsbetween persons and places, and to capitalize on the attendant profits thatcirculating these materialized productions can afford.

The case studies I will now present highlight some ways in which copy-right was talked about, and made, in Vanuatu in the wake of the CopyrightAct. It soon became apparent that engagements with copyright variedgreatly depending on who was making what and selling it where. In thethree examples below, I describe how different material forms engenderedvery different types of politico-economic engagements with copyrightconcepts. I discuss copyright in relation to three activities that cruciallyintersect with the object world: technical processes of copying, politicalpractices of restriction, and liberating ideologies of creativity. By focusingparticularly on the relations between copyright and material culture, Iargue that copyright is not just an internationally oriented legal category,but a context-sensitive narrative and a very material construct.

COPYRIGHT AND WRONG WEAVING BASKETS,COPYING PAT TERNS

The reality in Vanuatu is that we live on copies. (Musician commenting about copyright in the Vanuatu Trading Post,

25 November 2000)

Intrinsic to the formulation of copyright legislation is the basic assumptionthat the exact material reproduction of a formal entity (from a song to a

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piece of software) could potentially be an economic threat to the primaryor entitled producer during their productive lifetime. In Vanuatu, as wesaw briefly above, national copyright legislation has been partially builtupon international legislative guidelines and partially on sui generismechanisms and ideas about reproductive restriction. In this light, thecomment above seems somewhat problematic. The commentator was refer-ring both to kastom processes of the continued reproduction of ancestralimages and objects, crucial to the inventive production of indigenousmaterial, and the ways in which non-indigenous material has been drawnupon by Ni-Vanuatu artists and musicians (see below). He intimates thatfrom the start, the continual, object-oriented dialectic between copyrightand copying is by no means easy to navigate.

It is easy to forget in concentrating on its official injunctions that copy-right legislation focuses on the perpetuation rather than cessation of formalreproduction. Copyright legislation is established in order to continue sanc-tioned processes of copying. For example, Microsoft prohibits users copyingsoftware from one computer to another without each user having paid theirdue, not to restrict the numbers of people owning the software, but tomonopolize potential profits to be made out of its circulation. Indeed, therecent cases in the US law courts around the issue of monopolizingcomputer operating systems with Windows software makes clear that aprimary aim of Microsoft is for their products to circulate as broadly aspossible. In opposition, the Free Software Movement sees itself as a funda-mentally social movement, resisting the economic domination of multi-national corporations in favor of an ethic of grass-roots sharing andcooperation.7 In the following example, I describe a similar rejection ofsocio-economic stratification by women weavers from the region of CentralPentecost, working in the urban marketplaces of Port Vila. One of the mainarguments of the Free Software Movement is that focusing on IntellectualProperty primarily as an object forces political, economic and socialrelations to be understood in consumer terms, with an emphasis oncommodity circulation rather than on social contract. Here, I want toemphasize the importance of recognizing the inextricability of social andmaterial reproduction. The ways in which software is conceptualized asimmaterial (despite its dependence on access to a host of material formsfrom computer hardware to telephone cables and modems) is akin to theways in which woven material in Vanuatu is conceptualized as a funda-mentally regenerative, quasi-transcendent, social material.

Baskets from Central Pentecost

The women of the island of Central Pentecost are famed throughoutVanuatu for their brightly colored, patterned baskets, woven from theleaves of pandanus trees and colored using a combination of natural and

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synthetic dyes. While their vibrant patterns are seen very much as localisland resources, they circulate widely throughout Vanuatu and beyond.Women in the island make baskets as presents to sell throughout the archi-pelago, often weaving the owners name into the basket rim. They also sendthem to Port Vila, where their friends and relatives are dominant in theoutdoor and indoor marketplaces and where baskets are a commercialmainstay. Many women from Central Pentecost living in town, often theprimary breadwinners of their household, make their living entirely fromselling baskets. This economic success, coupled with such validation as arecent basketry research project mounted by the Womens Culture Projectof the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, has ensured that baskets are no longerconsidered by Ni-Vanuatu to be a generic craft but are also understood asimportant reifications of female identity, as cultural markers and makers.

The most popular kind of Central Pentecost basket is the handbag-style, known generically as patterned basket (in the Apma language ofCentral Pentecost, Matnangwatang). Women create a variety of designs,using many different colors. Older patterns are gleaned from the outsideworld incorporating natural imagery such as butterflies and breadfruitleaves. These are increasingly combined with more modern icons such aschicken wire, truck wheels, and razor blades (Figure 2). When I askedweavers from Central Pentecost, both on the island and in Port Vila, aboutthe origin of the various basket patterns they were weaving, they eitherpointed to a woman sitting nearby, or mentioned another woman from theregion by name. All newer basket patterns are explicitly associated withindividual women who in turn are inextricably connected to a precise placewithin the region. For example, a woman from one village described to mehow she had discovered the particular breadfruit leaf pattern she wasworking on, and how patterns on baskets move around Vanuatu:

[This design was] created by Chantal from the Catholic area [the east coastregion of Central Pentecost]. It is only a year or so that we have beenmaking this pattern here. The woman that started it married and moved tothe north of the island. I am making this for a man who requested it. In acouple of days when I finish it, I will send it to him on Ambae, although Iusually send them to be sold in Vila. (Mary Mabon, Wutsunmel Village,Central Pentecost, May, 2001)8

Despite the explicit linkage of innovative designs to individual women,there has been no move to restrict their movements (and thus control thepotential capital to be raised by them) by galvanizing ideas about copyright.Patterns transmit themselves freely from woman to woman by themovement of baskets and therefore may be woven by any woman who seesthem. Women see and admire a pattern on a basket that someone iscarrying around and copy it, just as they might see something around them,such as a truck wheel or some chicken wire, and create a pattern in the first

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instance. In this way, patterns are reified as natural resources and used associal mechanisms, facilitating connectivity between women and betweenwomen and the world around them.

The fact that copying is viewed extremely positively by weavers fromCentral Pentecost reflects the longstanding local practice of basketry:weaving baskets together is one way that women can openly transfer knowl-edge and create social bonds. Teaching the younger girls stories, songs, andimplicitly, how to be a woman, is intrinsic to the process of learning how toweave; accentuating a familiar metaphor that associates woven textiles withthe binding together of social relations (Bolton, 2003; Guss, 1989;Mckenzie, 1991; Weiner and Schneider, 1989). Baskets are primarily usedin villages as containers for food, and are explicitly connected to ideas aboutnourishment. Equally, learning how to weave baskets prepares a womanfor the weaving of mats, artifacts that are exchanged publicly at everyimportant life-rite on Pentecost and by people from Pentecost living intown (Walter, 1996).

The close social relationships that are encapsulated by both the idea andthe practice of weaving (and exchanging) textiles are extended into theovertly commercial domain of the Port Vila marketplaces, where womenfrom Pentecost gather daily to weave and plait baskets, raffia grass-skirts,and plastic leis (Figure 3). Here, the act of copying (the exact reproductionof material made by others) is actively not restricted with recourse to copy-right, despite significant economic pressure and hardship for many markettraders. It is immediately striking how women in the Port Vila marketplacesresist creating the economic and political hierarchies that copyright injunc-tions can facilitate, emphasizing instead an ethic of fairness and equality.Every stall in the Port Vila marketplace run by women sells the same

Figure 2 Patterning in Central Pentecost baskets. Left to right: chicken wire,football field, butterfly patterns

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objects for the same prices. The open transmission of patterns on baskets,and also on shell jewelry and other market goods, seems to be used as away of asserting a moral economic community, minimizing competition asmuch as is possible. As Jean Mana, then head of the inter-island WomensOutdoor Market Association, commented:

The market is for everyone all women and young girls can work at themarket. The market is good, if you dont have work, you can become astallholder. You can weave baskets anything you can make, you can comeand sell at the market, and earn some money. In my case, my husbandworked hard, but now he doesnt work, and I am the only one working. Withmy small market I can feed me and my children, pay for our house, and buyall the small things that we need for the house, I can look after my wholefamily. Every day you have a little money for bread or what ever else youwant, kerosene. It is better than other kinds of work. (Jean Mana, Port Vila,April, 2001)

The passing of the Copyright Act stimulated many traders to start thinkingabout copyright, and it was immediately apparent that many womenconsidered copyright to be a potentially collective, rather than divisive,mechanism. Jean Mana described to me how the concept of copyright was

Figure 3 Women weaving together in the Port Vila marketplace. Left toright: Marie Sisi, Alison Siveni and Esther. My sister here, she started hermarket with only one basket, and then she started to sew dresses and sellcalico, and then she made enough money to buy a piece of land, and now shehas a big business from the market only, from one basket. (Jean Mana, PortVila, May 2001)

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applied by women in the market to reify national borders as channels ofrestriction. She commented:

Before, we didnt have a law in Vanuatu to protect our copyright. I think weshouldnt show our custom and culture (how to weave mats or make thingsthat are special to each island) too much to outsiders. We dont havefactories to make things, and the kastom ways in which we make things areimportant, we mustnt let all outsiders know about them because that is ourway of making money. For us, traditionally mats are types of money, theways of weaving baskets and weaving mats are almost the same, and if wesold them to people from other countries, who know how to weave, theycould make them just like us and then we wouldnt be able to sell all of ourthings like baskets, weaving and handicrafts, the things that belong to us.(Jean Mana, May, 2001)

Jean Manas understanding of copyright is that it exists to protect Ni-Vanuatu economic and cultural resources from being exploited, but not tolegislate between Ni-Vanuatu. With this attitude, open forms of copying arepermitted between local women: basket weaving is a collective practice,to be protected only from other nations, rather than other Ni-Vanuatu. Thisattitude is reiterated in the melting-pot that is the Port Vila central market-place, where women from all over the archipelago share tables, mind eachothers children, and watch over each others wares (and where womenfrom Pentecost comprise over 50 percent of the handicraft stallholders).

As I intimated above, in reference to the Free Software Movement, thechoice to actively reject the potentially discriminatory application of copy-right legislation amongst one another is by no means confined to womenweavers in Vanuatu. For women from Central Pentecost, baskets areconceived as a very particular type of substance regenerative, laden withmetaphors of sociality which in turn effects the ways in which they canbe conceptualized as property. As Marilyn Strathern points out, the defi-nition of technology is in itself a delineation of the domain of nature, eachdiscursively dependent upon the other (2001: 4). In this way, we might drawa comparison not only with computer software as it is conceptualized bythose in the Free Software Movement, where an innate immateriality isemphasized in order to promote the model of shared ownership over thatof individualistic private property, but with natural objects (genes,children) whose transactions cause discomfort to many when couched in aneconomic as opposed to social discourse. All of these objects refuse insome way to be wholly alienated from society, to become commodities inthe baldest sense of the term. Or perhaps they show us the flaws in modelsof commodity exchange that deny the co-dependency of material and socialreproduction.

The keen awareness of women basket weavers that their resources mustbe protected from external exploitation highlights the salience of conceptsof copying to the notion of restriction. As the Free Software Movementadvocates the open circulation of software with the proviso that its original

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creators must be perpetually acknowledged in social rather than economicterms, women in Central Pentecost realize the importance of asserting amore communal form of ownership of their local basket forms, in order toexploit them more effectively in an increasingly international marketplace.As well as selling to dealers and tourists locally, women attend trade fairsin Australia, New Zealand and New Caledonia and are increasinglyinvolved in national economic development. Their viewpoints about therestrictions of copyright thus have the potential to effect a more globalmarketplace.

COPYRIGHT: A POLITICAL ECONOMY OFREPRODUCTIVE RESTRICTION

For women weavers and traders, baskets, as socialized commodities, areconceptualized as artifacts able to entwine ideas about individual posses-sion and the right to circulate property for profit with a social concern advo-cating the communal benefits of collective ownership. This view, embodiedin the material form of baskets themselves, incorporates an attitude to theopen sociality of reproduction very different to the emphasis on reproduc-tive restrictions in more conventional understandings of copyright, as foundin most academic and legal readings (Brown, 2003; Coombe, 1998). In mynext example, I will discuss some material that has come to be viewed asarchetypal in relation to copyright legislation in Vanuatu and which is usedexplicitly to maintain a more restrictive economy centered on processes ofreproduction. Throughout Vanuatu, the classic understanding of copyrightis connected in both form and practice to the restricted circulation ofcarved, wooden images between authoritative men from the northernregion of the island of Ambrym, North-Central Vanuatu (Figure 1).

Carvings from North Ambrym

In Vanuatu, the fusing of ideas about copyright with kastom entitlementsbehind the drafting of the Copyright Act has been, to a large extent, precip-itated by the success of men from North Ambrym in developing an inter-national market for their carvings. Briefly stated, villagers from NorthAmbrym have been exporting their carvings directly to dealers over the past60 years, sometimes bypassing the middle grounds of the urban centers ofPort Vila or Santo with direct links to New Caledonia, France, and America.Particularly lucrative are their large vertical slit drums, a prerequisite forany ceremony, crowned with faces and wearing circular pig tusks as wellas figurative models associated with kastom rank (Figure 4). Smalldrums and models of kastom figures, made primarily in response to themarket, are also sold (Figure 5). A growing consolidation of kastom

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entitlement has emerged within theselong-term market negotiations,sparked by intense local competitionover such lucrative enterprise. Theformal delineation of traditionalritual hierarchies in relation to narra-tives about copyright has been themain method by which kastom enti-tlements are legitimated in thiscontext.

As well as being highly successfulcommodities, the original models forthese figurative carvings are crucialembodiments of male rank, andshould ideally be produced only bythose who participate in the hier-archical processes of initiation knownin Vanuatu by the generic name,nimangki, and more commonlydescribed by anthropologists asgraded societies (Allen, 1981). Allenhighlights some general character-istics of male-graded societies inVanuatu: each ritual series consists ofa number of ranked grades achievedby men by the ritual sacrifice or

exchange of tusked boars, the purchase of insignia and services, and thepublic performance of elaborate ceremonies. Members of grades aremarked by sets of rights publicly materialized by emblems, figures, andapparel as well as by constraints on eating, sleeping and other activities(Allen, 1981: 24). These markings of entitlement are increasingly conceptu-alized using the rubric of copyright. As Huffman comments,

the copyright system recognises certain individuals, groups or areas as theproper owners of cultural items, the rights to which can be purchased, soldand resold over large areas in the perpetual spiritual and material driveupwards and outwards towards increased social height, prestige, power andinfluence in the world of the living and the world of ancestral spirits.(Huffman, 1996: 1823)9

The substance of these ceremonial systems circulates widely across theregion: titles, songs, and images are passed between men, villages, andislands, creating a coherent yet dynamic network. The anthropomorphiccarvings and drums, revealed ceremonially at the moment of grade-takingand then left to stand in the sacred spaces of hamlets, are explicit manifes-tations of male status, conduits of power connecting ancestors to initiate.

Figure 4 Chief Gilbert Bongtur,from Melbera Village, NorthAmbrym, June 2001, alongside hisMage rank of Maghenehewul,carved out of black palm

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Each figure is named, its title corre-sponding to the name that a man willtake after passing through each requi-site ceremony. The form of the figuresthemselves reflects the structure of thegraded society: each rank has its ownfigure, a personification of the manwho is taking the grade, and all of theancestors who came before him whoshare his name. Figures may be differ-entiated by the arm and leg decora-tions that they wear, by being carvedfrom hard wood or from tree-fern,even by being male or female.10

Despite the seeming fixity of ritualhierarchy, the innovation of form inthe model figures made for the marketreflects a fundamental dynamism ofthe system of status acquisition, whichhas, in recent years, expanded toinclude more secular activities, such asthe pursuit of wealth in the dealerstores of Port Vila. It is increasinglythe case that the model figures haveno actual life-sized ritual counter-parts. While retaining the reproduc-tive restrictions, names, titles, andmotifs of the graded society in theirproduction, it can be said that themarketplace has become one of theprimary inspirations for innovativeproduction (Patterson, 1996).

Looking at how kastom and national copyrights are entwined in the waysNorth Ambrym men talk about who has the right to carve and sell what,highlights a contemporary contingency of kastom and the commercial, whichhas been now reified within the Copyright Act. The regulation of the cere-monial acquisition of entitlement (commonly described in Vanuatu as acopyright system11) also regulates a more general, island oriented, politicaleconomy: the control by high-ranking men over transactions of pigs, yams,and increasingly money, both in their island community and in Port Vila,where significant numbers of men from North Ambrym reside (Rio, 2002).

Carvers from all over Vanuatu use the example of carvings made byNorth Ambrym men as archetypal manifestations of the kastom copyrightthat was translated into the white mans law in the forging of national copy-right legislation. Indeed, reproducing an indigenous carving in material

Figure 5 Commercial carvingsmade by Bule Tainmal, of FanlaVillage, North Ambrym, drawingon kastom styles and designs.Left: model drum crowned with ahead from the Rom secretsociety. Right: model Mage figurein the form of a woman

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form is the sole tangible example used in the section on customary copy-right within the Copyright Act (Republic of Vanuatu, 2000: 32). Thiscomparison emerges from the contrivance of a parallelism between theexchange mechanisms controlled by the application of copyright legislationand the rules of restricted ceremonial exchange within the graded societies in both an individual must pay (either with pigs or money) for the right toproduce (carve or commission), manifest and circulate an image.

However, the link between kastom rights and copyright is more than justan analogous one: North Ambrym men draw explicitly on the term copy-right both in their dealings with the international marketplaces where theytrade their carvings, and within their participation in the graded society.Men assert their high rank (defined in the form of access to control overreproduction, increasingly coined by them as copyrights) in order to gaincontrol over the market and maximize their profits in a number ofspheres of exchange.

The passing of the Copyright Act and the increased awareness of theeconomic potential of the legitimate production of kastom artifacts hasreinforced an underlying tension in North Ambrym around money-making from kastom material (Rio, 2002). In 2000, the North AmbrymCouncil of Chiefs (the kastom arm of local governance) responded to thegrowing competition from carvers who had not attained the requisitekastom entitlements within the graded society, but were still trying tocarve the images associated with these rights, by calling a meeting at whichall high ranking men of the area convened. At the meeting, they tran-scribed the genealogies of their families participation in the local gradedsociety, known as Mage. The rights that had been ceremonially paid forin the past by specific ancestors could thus be profitable to those whocould trace descent from them. It was intended that this local documentwould ensure that each individuals family rights to carve particularimages would be made public knowledge, and by extension, become anenforceable form of indigenous copyright legislation that could be used toregulate the growing market for carvings. It was assumed that this suigeneris system would in turn be supported by the Copyright Act. Themeeting of chiefs was much discussed on Radio Vanuatu, and themanagers of the Vanuatu National Museum store and the only Ni-Vanuatuowned dealership in Port Vila, Handicraft Blong Vanuatu, were waitingfor a copy of the document to be sent to them so that they could adjusttheir buying policies accordingly. As Marie-Ange Osea, then manager ofHandicraft Blong Vanuatu, commented:

Copyright will give people back their sense of kastom. I really want everyisland to write down what belongs to them, and give me a copy so that I canknow what is right to buy and what is wrong, what their kastom rights are,what children have the rights to make, what family line has this right or that.It is no good if I buy something and afterwards someone says, they donthave the right to make this. I am waiting for this to arrive a black and white

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letter to tell me who has the right to carve what designs . . . Each decorationbelongs to someone . . . Copyright will stop people from making thingshaphazardly, by only letting people with the right to carve, carve. (MarieAnge Osea, Port Vila, 19 April 2000)

Foreign dealers were much less enthusiastic at this incursion of kastommores into the marketplace both expatriate dealers and carvers fromother islands are often fined, sued for compensation, and threatened oreven punished with sorcery by North Ambrym men for failing to compre-hend the restrictive regulations governing the production and circulationof material designated as kastom. Just after the meeting of the NorthAmbrym Council of Chiefs, a prominent Chinese artifact dealer was threat-ened with both violence and sorcery after refusing to acknowledge kastomproscriptions and payments around several North Ambrym drums erectedoutside her private museum, and even the Mayor of Port Vila was obligedto remove ceremonial figures he had commissioned to decorate the side ofPort Vilas main highway after North Ambrym elders asserted that theirmakers did not have the right to produce them for this purpose.

In this way, carvings from North Ambrym embody an enforceablesystem of restriction that enables multivalent understandings of copyrightto be crafted into an effective form of economic and political control. Whilemany commentators are fearful that international copyright legislationenforces problematic, ethnocentric notions of property into other, lesspowerful, cultural contexts (Brown, 1998), the case of both North Ambrymmen and Central Pentecost women shows how international copyrightmores can also be appropriated and successfully turned to local advantage.Within these appropriations, the formal substance of the artifacts whoseeconomic potentials are both commandeered and contained plays animportant part in the constitution of property rights and can increasinglyconjoin divided spheres of interest.

COPYRIGHT AND CREATIVIT Y

I have shown above how different kinds of material are able to mediatebetween divergent ideas about copyright and expectations about the poten-tial freedoms and restrictions inherent in material processes of reproduc-tion. By reproducing and transacting their kastom material, women basketweavers in Central Pentecost try to organize the concept of copyrightamongst themselves in as egalitarian a manner as possible. In contrast,carvers in North Ambrym have constructed a category of copyright aroundthe sale of wooden carvings that is starkly hierarchical, based aroundcomplex stratifications of traditional rank and political authority. While theconcept of copyright in relation to both kinds of material focuses on a formof perpetual replication, both object forms have also become grounds for

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a continual series of formal innovations. As we have seen, women weaversintegrate their new patterns into the socialized world around them, makingrazor blades and butterflies analogous in the form of woven leaves. In thesame way, Bule Tainmal, a carver living and working in Fanla village, NorthAmbrym, described how he has to establish legitimate (kastom) entitlementfor the new designs he carves, conforming to the expectations of gradedsociety leaders outlined briefly above:

Often, I have a new idea for a drum and I carve a small one first and show itto my father before I carve a big one. When I carve a new face for a drum,one that I cant buy from another man, I still have to make a kastompayment to my [maternal] uncle out of respect. In the absence of anotherman who owns the rights, you pay your uncles [mothers brothers], in respectof where you come from [your mother]. Then it becomes official. I also paytwo chiefs from Fanla to claim the rights to the new drum. I had to kill twopigs whose tusks had gone through their jaws and three more that hadalmost gone round again, plus four small pigs and 40,000 vatu. (BuleTainmal, Fanla village, North Ambrym, June, 2001)

In response to the complex insider/outsider boundaries created by suchdelineations of indigenous copyright, many of the established dealers inPort Vila have abandoned dealing with kastom artifacts, focusing purely onnew traditions objects made explicitly for the market still considered tobe indigenous, but without overly strong connections to traditional prac-tices. Such material is exemplified by the work of a growing number ofcontemporary artists in Port Vila, the final body of material I will examinehere. Contemporary art in Vanuatu is produced almost entirely in a metro-politan, commercial context, yet contemporary artists rely heavily on kastomimagery and iconography to carve out their unique identities. It is vital thatthey successfully navigate the social obligations and reproductive restric-tions that are so closely associated with indigenous material, while repro-ducing local imagery in a recognizable way. In order to do so, contemporaryartists explicitly utilize concepts of creativity in much the same way as otherartists around the world: as a liberating, individualistic discourse that enablesthe free appropriation of style and image to be presented in radically newenvironments and media (Geismar, 2004; Krauss, 1986). In this way,creativity is constituted as a conceptual antithesis to the various social,political and economic responsibilities engendered by copyright, andcontemporary art objects are freed of their reproductive shackles. In a sense,this last case study is a way of understanding copyright from the other side:a material zone within which copyright legislation is itself restricted.

Contemporary art in Vanuatu

The primary criteria of membership outlined by the Nawita association ofcontemporary artists, the oldest and most established group of contemporaryartists in Port Vila, defines the contemporary explicitly against the concept

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of kastom and excludes those working with traditional media and traditionalprinciples (Regenvanu, 1996: 312). The division between contemporary andkastom made by artists working in this context is fundamentally material,kastom being tentatively (and somewhat ambiguously) understood in termsof technological process and media. Ideas about copyright in relation tocontemporary art thus prohibit the exact physical reproduction of artifactsdesignated as kastom. Contemporary artists can neither copy directly fromlocal resources (as in the case of Pentecost basket weavers) or call their inno-vative work kastom (as in the case of North Ambrym carvers); instead theymake recourse to a third discursive and technical strategy: creativity. Thecreative use of kastom imagery or motifs using non-traditional media isconsidered to be vital to the constitution of the identity of contemporaryartists. Making art thus becomes a careful accomplishment: to be indigen-ous, but not too traditional; to be contemporary, but not to lose touch witha local corpus of objects and images. Artists in Vanuatu are able to delicatelybalance between these categorical distinctions by virtue of an authenticposition of entitlement to creatively absorb and rework kastom material.Without being indigenous, the entitlement to eschew restriction is lesslegitimate. We have seen this in the case of the recent controversy overAustralian painter Elizabeth Durack, who on occasion, paints under theguise of an Aboriginal man, Eddie Burrup (Myers, 2002: 32341, 2004), andsimilar contestations have occurred in Vanuatu (see below).

The relationship between contemporary art and kastom material focuseson complex criteria of the indigenous, which oscillate between the perpet-uation of a paradoxically ahistorical vision of the past represented increative, dynamic, highly politicized and novel form, produced by personswith incontrovertible connections to indigenous place (or blood-ties). Thismay be exemplified by an incident that occurred in Port Vila, which wasdescribed several times to me in 2000. Before any exhibition of contem-porary arts, kastom representatives are invited to check that nothing ondisplay infringes kastom strictures. The only reported case of censorshiphas been that of an Antipodean accountant, who painstakingly crafted aminiature replica of the Pentecost land dive from matchsticks and won firstprize at a national art competition in 1995. Once his nationality was fullyrealized by the chiefs acting as judges he was stripped of his award (LindaBayer, personal communication, October, 2000).

A contrast to this restriction of creativity (commonly glossed in Port Vilacontemporary arts circles as copyright) can be found in the work ofJuliette Pita. Pita is the only female Ni-Vanuatu member of the Nawitaassociation (although there are several female expatriate members). Sheearns her living mainly by hand-painting designs on T-shirts and shirts tobe sold to tourists, and at the same time is building an international repu-tation through her work in tapestry. As part of a collection I made for theCambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, shecreated a stylized sewn depiction of the Pentecost land diving ceremony

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entitled Land Divers (Figure 6). In the tapestry, four men leap to theground, watched by the staring eyes of an Ambrym slit drum.

Pita is aware that she treads on sensitive ground here. When asked aboutthe motifs in her tapestry she commented: I havent made this exactly like[people from] Pentecost or Ambrym, it is straight from my own ideas . . .I have created everything that you can find in Vanuatu, if you just look withyour own eyes (Juliette Pita, Port Vila, May, 2001). As we have seen above,making things already claimed by others using criteria of the indigenousis considered in Vanuatu to be an infringement of copyright. At the sametime, contemporary artists are aware that this is at odds with the creativepossibilities of painting the world as you see it. During a conversationabout the copyright act, one Port Vila artist asked me what would happenif someone painted something that they had witnessed, and it later provedto be the same as an image circumscribed by kastom conventions. Hisanswer to his own question echoed the musician I quoted above: the realityin Vanuatu is that we live on copies. This tension between creativity andreplication in depicting the experience of viewing both the social and

Figure 6 Juliette Pita with Land Divers, Port Vila, May 2001.Wool tapestrydepicting the Pentecost land dive (Nangol), a precursor of the bungee jump

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natural world (which could involve the replication of viewed images) is byno means unique to Vanuatu: to give but one example, look at the overtchallenge raised by American artist Sherrie Levine who has faithfully re-photographed a series of images by iconic photographer Walker Evans.12

Pitas appropriation of two kastom icons (Pentecost land diving andAmbrym drums) shows that Ni-Vanuatu artists are in some instances able toevade the increasingly sensitive issue of copyright through recourse to theirown (newly nationalized) indigenousness. Despite the predicament of theexpatriate accountant above, it is fine for Pita to create a stylized depictionof the land divers, even though her natal affiliation is with the southern islandof Erromango, rather than Pentecost. However, such distinctions are alsobecoming increasingly tenuous (Jolly, 1994). For example, it remains to beseen how long women from Central Pentecost can hold on to Central Pente-cost-style baskets in the context of the outdoor marketplace, where theyweave alongside women from throughout Vanuatu. When will their patternspass into the national domain as have the depictions of the Pentecost landdive or Ambrym slit-drums? It seems to be no coincidence that the twoislands most adept at working the market for kastom should also be provid-ing the symbolic imagery subject to national generification (Errington andGewertz, 2001; Myers, 2001). At present, such forms of material culture arecrucial grounds of political definition of what it means to be an indigenousplayer in widening spheres of exchange. As this balance shifts between thesecontexts, so do the attendant entitlements and property relations.

At this time, contemporary art objects still overwhelm the reproductiverestrictions of kastom copyrights through a sort of material sleight of hand.Images are transformed into different types of object: from wood to paint,clay to tapestry. This untouchable form of pure innovation is very muchin keeping with the rationale behind international CIPR legislation: thatownership rights to objects are clearly defined by the very tangible (ormaterial) relations between persons (and increasingly by corporate entities,whether they be companies or native collectives), and that their produc-tions are constituted out of the originality and creativity of these indi-viduals. While seeming to transcend the reproductive restrictions ofcopyright, contemporary art objects may also be understood as a formalbasis for the philosophical perpetuation of claims to original entitlement.

CONCLUSIONS

Close analysis of the way in which copyright is both constituted andenforced on the ground in Vanuatu as a legal category demonstrates acontingency of processes of copying, a political economy of restriction, anda rhetoric of creativity. The material world itself is vital to the formation of

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all three of these ideas in relation to over-arching copyright narratives.Handlers assertion that culture does not reside in material things, it residesin or better, is ceaselessly emergent from meaningful human interaction(2003: 354), denies the crucial importance of materiality in the constitutionof concepts such as culture itself. As new objects are produced in Vanuatu,out of the interaction of local mores with changing domains of social andpolitical experience, so too are new conceptions of entitlement emerging that increasingly (re)define boundaries between nation-states as well asislands, regions, or even villages. What is clear in all of the cases I havedescribed, is that despite the diverse ways in which ideas about copyrightare interpreted and implemented, legislating around copyright has becomean arena within which localized political and economic entitlements areincreasingly extended and contested in wider and wider spheres of inter-action, as much as global, generic conceptions of IPR regulation areextended into the locality. As Lipset comments, the law may not only beused politically, but may also have rhetorical value, particularly in colonialand post-colonial settings, where it may be deployed to represent andconvey ambivalent attitudes, not only about justice, but no less about localconstructions of personhood (2004: 634). In this way, Stratherns gulf ofideological proportions may even be dissolved, rather than only bridgedby legislative acts and actions.

As well as being a mediator of contextual complexity, copyright may alsobe understood as a narrative trope that articulates various kinds of politicaland economic tensions and imaginaries: a discourse and a practice consti-tuted in relation to particular kinds of object in particular contexts. Forwomen from Central Pentecost, handling copying and copyright in relationto baskets is a way of creating idealized egalitarian economic and socialrelations, and a way of organizing collectives both in island villages and PortVila marketplaces. For North Ambrym men, promoting national copyrightlegislation is a way of extending idealized kastom hierarchies and politicalauthority from the island into the burgeoning international marketplace.For contemporary artists, working with the ideology of creativity can aid innavigating between creativity and kastom, transcending problematicrestrictions, as well as enforcing, through oppositional distinction, import-ant definitions of indigenous entitlement.

I have tried here to describe the complex material world that facilitatesthe forging of the descriptive categories that legislation relies upon. Inparticular, I have emphasized the ways in which copyright legislation canhelp people to think about the production and circulation of objects withinnew domains of experience. Copyright, as a generic protective mechanism,need not only lead to the promotion of only one set of idealized propertyrelations and attendant entitlements. In Vanuatu, the Copyright andRelated Rights Act has been interpreted, and implemented in grass-rootspractice, if not national law courts, differently in accordance with the typesof material that are being produced and reproduced. This has implications

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for how we understand the copyrighted material that surrounds us all on adaily basis from computer software, to music, art, and digital reproduc-tion. What I have underscored here is the capability of copyright legislationto incorporate economic and social imaginaries, and its material andmalleable role within a political economy that balances processes of restric-tion and reproduction between persons and things.

Acknowledgements

This article has been drawn from doctoral and post-doctoral research conducted inVanuatu (20002001, 2003), supported by the Economic and Social ResearchCouncil, University College London, the Cambridge University Museum ofArchaeology and Anthropology, and the Vanuatu Cultural Centre. I am extremelygrateful to all of these organizations. I am grateful also to Barbara Bodenhorn, LynnMeskell, Ralph Regenvanu, Benedicta Rousseau and four anonymous reviewers ofthis Journal, for editorial advice and insightful commentary and criticism. All photo-graphs are my own.

Notes

1 Vanuatu is a country of 85 inhabited islands set in the Melanesian region of thesouth-west Pacific. Between 1906 and 1980, it was governed as the JointAnglo-French Condominium. Upon independence, citizens of Vanuatu tookthe description Ni-Vanuatu. Most inhabitants speak Bislama, the nationalpidgin English (Crowley, 1990), alongside either French or English and theirlocal language, of which there are over 110.

2 http://www.unesco.org/culture/copyright/; http://www.unesco.org/culture/heritage/intangible/html_eng/index_en.shtml and UNESCO (1970, 1999).

3 This has since been revised by law, number 34 of 2003.4 As well as Copyright and Related Rights, Trademarks, Designs and Patents

Acts have also been passed by Vanuatu Parliament. As none of these acts haveyet been gazetted, they are not currently enforceable. While the VanuatuGovernment has long-term plans to join WIPO, and eventually the WTO, thisis unlikely to take place in the near future (Ralph Regenvanu, the Director ofthe Vanuatu Cultural Centre, personal communication, 1 April 2004).

5 The term kastom, and its variants, has been galvanised throughout Melanesiaas an indigenous possession, conceived in direct opposition to the practicesand artifacts of the west or of white people. The concept reflects a complexself-consciousness about history and development, for both indigenouspersons and foreigners. Throughout this article, I use the term to broadly referto the body of artifacts, practices, knowledge and representations that are usedto determine indigenous culture in Vanuatu, generally by building on a viewof a collective past in the present, seemingly bypassing the colonial period, andworking to establish the legitimacy of an indigenous political economy andnation-state. For deeper discussion, both in relation to Vanuatu, and the regionof Melanesia, see Jolly and Thomas (1992), Keesing (1982), Lindstrom andWhite (1994), Norton (1993), Otto and Thomas (1997, especially Jollys paper)and Rio (2002: Ch. 4). For some examples of discussions about the more

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material aspects of kastom in Vanuatu, see Bolton (1994, 2003) andBonnemaison et al. (1996). Throughout this article, I use the term kastom inlieu of traditional or customary, both in recognition of the terminology usedmost commonly by ni-Vanuatu and to emphasize that the longstanding notionof custom in law is not necessarily interchangeable with that of kastom. Ithank Benedicta Rousseau for drawing my attention to this distinction.

6 http://www.mq.edu.au/house_of_aboriginality/network.htm for an unusualsuccess story of copyright enforcement on behalf of Aboriginal Australianartists.

7 http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html andhttp://www.copyleftmedia.org.uk/

8 All interviews were conducted between 20002001, and translated by myselffrom Bislama. I have used the real names of all interviewees, with theirpermission.

9 The local, often ritualized, exchange of intellectual property has been welldocumented in Vanuatu (Allen, 1981; Layard, 1942; Lindstrom, 1990), as wellas in other parts of Melanesia, predominantly Papua New Guinea (Harrison,1991, 1993, 2002; Kalinoe and Leach, 2001; Strathern, 1988, 1999; Sykes, 2001;Wagner, 1986). These exchanges have often been analyzed as indigenousreckonings of cultural and intellectual property, including copyright. Whilemuch of this literature discusses potential tensions around the cross-culturalapplicability of such terms as property and copyright, as a body, itdemonstrates that exchanges of knowledge and artifacts are unequivocallyintertwined and that the rhetoric of CIPR (of borrowing, purchasing, lending,and other exchanges) has a longstanding history in the region.

10 Although the graded societies that Allen (1981) discusses are restricted tomen, they occasionally have analogous female institutions, and women oftenfollow their husbands into higher rank. However, on Ambrym, a man maypossess the right to carve a female figure, which could be representative of amale grade, in a mythic acknowledgement that much of male ritual practicewas stolen from women. The current public controversies around copyright inVanuatu, such as those raised by the North Ambrym Council of Chiefs, allfocus, as far as I know, on the material culture made by men.

11 The Bislama translation of copyright into kopiraet (or kastom kopiraet inreference to indigenous restrictive mechanisms) is widespread, but ideastranslatable into this term have a long local history. In North Ambrym, forexample, I was told that the local word namyelku (which was translatedliterally for me as I buy possession) is also exactly translatable as copyright.

12 See www.aftersherrielevine.com for a virtual presentation of this issue, whichexplicitly uses the open model of distribution encouraged by open-sourcesoftware.

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Wright, M. (2001) Legislative Initiatives in Vanuatu to Protect Expressions ofIndigenous Culture, paper prepared for SPC/PIFS/UNESCO Workshop forLegal Experts on the Protection of Traditional Knowledge and Expressions ofCulture (Noumea, New Caledonia, 2628 February).

HAIDY GEISMAR completed her doctoral and post-doctoral researchin the Department of Anthropology, University College London and theCambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. She iscurrently Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in the Program in MuseumStudies, New York University.[email: [email protected]]

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