Copyright, heritage protection and cultural contamination: How the non-West was won

This chapter takes as its starting point the tendency to think in terms of binary distinctions, derived from the Western Enlightenment, that underlies schemes of protection for cultural production and creativity. It will examine the way Western binary thinking has shaped and mediated the relationship between two, now globalized, Western regimes for the protection of cultural production, copyright and cultural heritage protection. Focusing on the distinctions between tangibility and intangibility, the chapter will contend that, while they have the appearance of empirical validity, when examined more closely they reveal themselves to be conceptually problematic post-colonial constructs. It will show how, in the context of the protection of cultural production, these distinctions shift and manipulate meaning in ways that favour the imposition of Western ordering on global cultural production. The overall argument that will be sustained in this chapter is that by seeking to understand cultural production everywhere according to systems of categorization produced by the Western Enlightenment we have produced a mishmash of meaning that defies attempts at regulation or protection. However, the problems this produces cannot be understood on the basis of a distinction between the West and the rest. This is because the distinction between the West and the rest does not, itself, hold. For reasons that reflect no merit on Western expansionism, historical and contemporary, there are few places and cultures that do not bear its marks. This means that much of the world that we might tend to categorize as non-Western lives, and forms its culture, in some sort of engagement with Western dominance. The negative side of all this, as far as cultural heritage/property is concerned, is that we are all in variations of the same unseaworthy boat. The positive side is that there are things to learn from practices of cultural cohabitation and resistance.