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Anthropological Perspectives: On the Management of Knowledge

Simon Harrison

Anthropology Today, Vol. 11, No. 5. (Oct., 1995), pp. 10-14.

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further experience, however, more recent contracts take

this into account, and so our unfortunate disjuncture

need not be repeated, but it is a cautionary tale for any

one contemplating the idea. We estimate this entire pro-

ject to have cost somewhere in the region of $15,000,

for example. This sum covered only the costs of re-

search assistance, software and mastering, not computer

hardware or basic video and sound studio equipment,

scanners and the like.

Looking back upon the process now, I realize just

how radically it has altered my conception of doingethnography, in a way I find both liberating and chal-

lenging. I do not, however, subscribe to the view pro-

moted by proselytizers of the 'virtual campus' who

maintain that the arrival of electronic publishing fore-

casts the end of the book as we know it. Joan Huntley

and I agree that it is not necessary to think in eitherlor

terms, but rather to divide the labour so that books do

the work they do best, while multi-media interactive

formats enrich the possibilities. If the results of scho-

larly production can be almost as multi-media as cultu-

ral events themselves, then conducting fieldwork with a

CD R OM in mind means collecting data in as many

forms as possible video, sound tape, photographs,

pictures, maps, drawings, songs, interviews and im-

agining creative ways to re-present them, bearing in

mind that the ethnography so produced will be struc-

tured somewhat differently each time, depending upon

the inquisitive choic e of the user. I find that exciting

To assist ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY readers reflect

upon some of the advantages and disadvantages of the

new technology from the perspective of teaching as

well as research, Joan Huntley has prepared the table

on page 7, in which a number of traditional and con-

temporary forms of representation and transmission are

compared: a human lecturer; hardcopy print; film; vide-

otape; audiotape; local digital (e.g. CD ROM ), and dis-

tributed digital (e.g. Internet). Each possesses differentstrengths and weaknesses, advantages and disadvant-

ages, but no one form is universally superior in all con-

texts. The major problem we were addressing in desig-

ning the W ~ Y U T ACD ROM, for example, was one of

supporting motion analysis (in this case, Plains Indian

Sign Talk) along with linguistic analysis in both aural

and textual modes. Such material was particularly well

suited to a CD ROM format. An additional consider-

ation that relates as much to design and purpose as it

does to physicalltechnical constraints is whether to pro-

vide a linear narrative or allow for interactivity. Nar-

ratives that tell a story from beginning to end (be it via

live human, or movies on CD ROM) certainly have

their place, but one can a lso support natural inquisitive-

ness and move from point to point.

nthropological perspectiveson the m n gement of knowledge

SIMONH RRISON

The author rs Reader rn

Anthropology at the

Universrty of Ulster

Coleraine NorthernIreland and was recently

appornted Hon Edrror of

the Journal of the Royal

Anthropological Institute

incorporating Man)

IntroductionIn 1973, Daniel Bell published The Comin g of the Post-

Industrial Society in which he envisaged society mov-

ing beyond the industrial stage. He argued that an econ-

omy is emerging based less on the production of ma-

terial resources than on the production of knowledge or

information. An anthropologist might perhaps respond

that there are, or have been, many societies including

some of a sort at one time called 'primitive' in which

the production and distribution of information were

vital to the economy (Harrison 1990; Keen 1994; Lind-

strom 1990). 'Information societies' have probably

existed for a very long time.

Information with economic value can become a focusof proprietary claims. The term 'intellectual property'

refers to rights asserted in the products of the mind

(Phillips 1986): in Western economies, these may in-

clude such diverse products as inventions, industrial de-

signs, works of literature or art, trade secrets, commer-

cial brand names, and even fictional personages such as

Superman or Sherlock Holmes. T o describe trademarks

or cartoon characters as 'knowledge' may appear to

stretch the meaning of the term. But the forms of

knowledge I wish to discuss encompass any sorts of

mental products that are, or can be, owned as values,

assets or resources.

The question I should like to pose is this: if

knowledge is an important and valuable resource in

many economies, and perhaps increasingly so in our

own, what is the best way of managing it? In particular,

how ought universities to manage the knowledge they

produce? For of course, any answer to my first, more

general question must depend to some extent on the

particular type of knowledge one is considering. Mostof us would probably agree that the proper management

of certain kinds of information involves restricting their

circulation in some way. Confidential information of a

personal nature, military intelligence, pornography, and

commercial secrets are just a few examples of the sorts

of information which, for one reason or another, are

usually kept out of the public domain. At the opposite

extreme, the management of other kinds of information

seems to call for the greatest possible openness, pub-

licity and freedom of access. At least since the seven-

teenth century philosopher Francis Bacon, scientific

knowledge has been regarded as belonging to this ca-

tegory. The traditional assumption is that the interestsof science, and of society, are best served by encoura-

ging the freest possible circulation of ideas (see, for in-

stance, Dicks 1865). This is, of course, a value system

with which universities have often identified them-

selves.

We might then imagine two extreme choices in the

management of knowledge: on the one hand, the maxi-

mum regulation of the circulation of information and,

on the other, the maximum deregulation of it. The first

we might envisage as a system of rationing or sump-

tuary regulation in the field of ideas, with rigid controls

on the distribution and consumption of information.

The second alternative we could picture as an intellec-

tual free market, a free-for-all struggle for survival be-

tween ideas, in which only those that are in some sense

the 'best' will succeed and spread. I would like to sug-

gest that choices of this sort are, at least in part, a mat-

ter of culture. That is, people may operate with con-

trasting theories of the correct management of

ANTH ROPOL OGY T ODA Y Vol 11 No 5, October 1995



Above male dancer.

clothed in a tunic of

spider s web, with

artificial hands and

arms, as a ghost in a

performance o f a h igh

nalawarl (men s

association) ceremony ,

Malekula, New Hebrides

(photo b y Bernard

Deacon , c . 1920 s , RAI

photo archive no. 3851 .

knowledge, and these theories are culturally con-

structed.

Models of knowledge management

Barth (1990), for instance, draws a contrast of a similar

kind between two fundamentally different ways of

managing specifically r ligious knowledge. One is

exemplified by the Asian guru, or religious teacher. His

role is to educate, e,xplain and instruct, and his status

depends on this ability continually to dispense religious

knowledge. The opposed mode of managing religious

knowledge is exemplified by the Melanesian ritual

adept, whose role is to initiate novices into the mys-

teries of secret cults. His status depends on his abilityto withhold and conceal knowledge; here, the assump-

tion is that the valu e of knowledg e is enhanc ed by

veiling it and sharing it with as few as possible (Barth

1990: 64 I), not by broadcasting it.

In an earlier work, Barth (1975: 217) shows how the

Baktaman of New Guinea regard knowledge as worth

something only if it is restricted to a select few, and

assume that knowledge widely shared must have little

or no significance. For the Baktaman, the value of any

information is inversely proportional to the number of

people who possess it. Moreover, the connection they

posit between the value of knowledge, and its secrecy,

scarcity or difficulty of access, works in both direc-tions. Valuable information must be restricted because

dispensing it freely would be a senseless waste of an

important social resource. And conversely, to restrict

information can in itself make it important and desir-

able. A Patrol Officer of Barth s acquaintan ce had tried

to introduce representative local government to the

area, but with little success. His attempts to persuade

the population of their rights to nominate, and vote for,

representatives met with indifference because he made

the mistake of giving this information to them in pub-

lic. On Barth s advice, he adop ted the tactic of divulg-

ing the workings of local democracy in great secrecy to

a few selected individuals. Unfortunately, they regarded

this knowledge as having so profound a significance,

and kept it so secret, that elections became impossible

anyway (Barth 1975: 217).

Gregory Bateson carried out anthropological f ield-work in New Guinea in the 1930s, and made a similar

observation of the Iatmul (1958: 231 . The Iatmul as-

sume that any knowledge disseminated in public must

either be trivial or untrue. To be considered true, im-

portant or valuable, information must be conveyed in

hushed tones in private. Bateson found that very little

he himself said was taken seriously by any Iatmul indi-

vidual, unless he imparted it confidentially as a weighty

secret intended to create a special bond of trust. This,

then, is a way that people in some cultures manage

knowledge as a resource: namely, they seem to treat it

as an almost concrete f inite good, like an area of land

or a sum of money. In this view, the more people it isdistributed am ong, the lesser the value of each p erson s

share. Knowledge distributed universally would be

worthless; knowledge of any value is scarce and diffi-

cult to acquire. In such societies, information is a

limited resource to be carefully conserved, hoarded, and

dispensed parsimoniously.

Let me try to contrast this with the other, opposed

approach to managing knowledge. This seems to begin

from the premise that something known only to a few

people is inconsequential, an attitude exemplified by

the Balinese guru who told Barth (1990: 641) that there

is no merit from even the deepest religious knowledge

unless you teach it . Knowledge has to be shared in

order to acquire value at all, and it grows in signific-

ance as more people share it. Actually, an unusual

property of information, considered as a good or re-

source, is that one does not lose it when one dispenses

it. After giving it away, the giver still possesses it (see

Gambetta 1994a: 207). This seems to me to make the

management of knowledge potentially rather different

from the management of most other resources. In par-

ticular, knowledge is perhaps one of those few re-

sources whose value to their possessors can actually be

increased by conv eying them to other people.

An example is knowledge of commercial brand-

names and products. A firm s brand-names and trade-

marks are an important part of its assets because theyemb ody its reputation and goodw ill , or attractiveness

to customers. The value of these intangible assets can

be maximized simply by maximizing their ppblic expo-

sure and this is, of course, one important purpose of the

advertising industry. The way that trademarks acquire

value through publicity is illustrated by an intriguing

case described by Gambetta (1991: 72; 1994b: 359-

360). In the late 1980s, a certain Italian television pro-

gramme regularly featured a satirical sketch in which

dancers performing a samba sang an advertising jingle

in pidgin Portuguese, supposedly promoting a brand of

chocolate called Cacao Meravigliao. This name was

quite fictitious, and the aim of the sketch was simply topoke fun at commercial sponsorship. But as a totally

unintended consequence of this publicity, the name

Cacao Meravigliao began to acquire a very real com-

mercial value to Italian chocolate producers. They

started pressing the makers of the programme to sell the

ANTHROPOLOGY TODA Y Vol 11 No 5, October 1995 11



rights to the name, and a fierce competition erupted

within the Italian chocolate industry to acquire the

name of this non-existent but nonetheless highly pres-

tigious chocolate. Although the name signified nothing,

it became a valuable commodity simply by becoming

well-known and highly publicized.

I mention this case because it illustrates one approach

to the problem of assigning value to ideas and informa-

tion. In this approach, knowledge increases in value by

being shared. In the other approach, exemplified by the

tribespeople in New Guinea, it decreases in value by

being shared. There seem to be two contradictory

models here for managing knowledge, and two incom-

patible theories of its value.

Western and tribal systems of knowledge

management

If one were to draw a broad distinction, as anthropolog-

ists once habitually did, between Western societies and

the small-scale societies which they themselves tradi-

tionally studied, one might arguably discern a contrast

of just this sort in the way they characteristically man-

age knowledge. For instance, let us take Morph y s

(1991) discussion of the art of an Australian Aboriginal

people called the Yolngu. The greater part of Yolnguart consists of relatively fixed designs owned by clans.

These clan designs are considered so sacred that they

can never be displayed in public, and they are produced

and seen as paintings only by initiated men in the

highly restricted context of secret ceremonies. In Abo-

riginal society, knowledge of important works of art is

therefore confined to an elite of religious adepts. These

objects and designs are simply too important and too

sacred to be revealed to people at large.

Morphy contrasts this with the underlying principles

of the Western art world, where the fundamental as-

sumption is that art is a public phenomenon. Museums

and galleries seek to give their collections the widestpossible public exposure; their reputations, quite poss-

ibly even their livelihoods, depend on disseminating

knowledge of the objects they possess. In the West, the

value of a painting is likely to depend on its fame, on

how many people know it. In Aboriginal society, it

may depend rather on how f w people know it (Morphy

1991: 21-26).

These differences between Aboriginal and European

conceptions of the value of art often give rise to diffi-

culties nowadays, because Aboriginal paintings are in-

creasingly finding their way into the Western art world

and are treated there as public objects. Aborigines may

see their art as being thereby profaned and damaged.

To them, its value is not enhanced by being exhibited

in galleries, or reproduced in books, but harmed or

even destroyed by this sort of public exposure (Mo iphy

1991: 25). A similar contrast between Western and

tribal societies might be made in the field of ethnicity,

for cultural or ethnic identity can be viewed, from one

perspective, as a particular problem in the management

of ideas. In New Guinea, a group of islands called the

Admiralties were populated in precolonial times by

about twenty ethnic groups. Some of these groups were

tiny, but every one of them assiduously guarded its

own distinctive identity and uniqueness. The groups in-

teracted with each other through trade, warfare and in-

termarriage, and shared many basic features of culturein common. One particular str iking shared feature was

their deep preoccupation with preserving their dif-

ferences in language, ritual, art, architecture, craft

specialisms and so forth. Many of these diacritical fea-

tures might well have appeared unimportant to a de-

tached observer, but they were all intensely significant

to the islanders as markers of identity. Each group

treated its emblematic practices as precious possessions

it jealously had to safeguard from being usurped or ap-

propriated by outsiders (Schwartz 1975). These groups

seem to have had much the same relationship with their

cultures that mediev al craft guilds had with their trade

secrets, or that biotechnology companies have with

their innovations: namely, they treated them as intan-

gible yet vital assets needing protection from piracy.

An ethnic group owned its culture as a kind of

patented possession, its patent consisting fundamentally

in the right to control its culture s diffusion. No gr oup

allowed outsiders to copy its special practices without

securing the right to them through kinship, marriage, or

some form of purchase or licensing (Schwartz 1975:

117). The re were cases in which the infring ement of a

grou p s proprietary rights its right, for instance, to

ornamen t the prows of canoes in a particular way re-

sulted in warfare (Schwartz 1975: 117).

In the Admiralties, the power of a social group seems

to have been imagined as the power to k eep its cultural

practices to itself; the test of a group s strength was that

it could stop its customs from being stolen by outsiders.

There is a radical contrast here with the West where,historically, the power and status of ethnic groups has

often been measured by their success in spreading their

beliefs and practices and forcing them on often unwill-

ing recipients. The Admiralties exemplify the ex act op-

posite of this sort of cultural imperialism: far from

seeking to universalize their cultures or expand their

bound aries, the islanders attitudes to their cultures

were highly proprietorial and exclusionary. In the West,

dominant ethnic groups are those most successful at

disseminating their cultural practices; in the Admiralties

they were those most able to kecp others from adopting

their practices.

The contrast I am seeking to draw is perhaps particu-larly clear when we compare Western and tribal reli-

gions. Characteristically, a tribal religion altogether

lacks the evangelical and proselytizing drive of

religions such as Christianity or Islam. It does not seek

to spread its message and gain new converts. On the

contrary, it belongs to a narrow and exclusive social

group whose members want to confine its perceived

benefits very much to themselves. The preoccupation of

such religions is more with keeping potential converts

out, than with drawing them in.

For instance, in many Melanesian societies, such as

the Baktaman studied by Barth (1975), men have cults

in which they are initiated during the course of their

lives into a series of ritual grades. Women, children and

other outsiders are strictly excluded. In their initiations,

men are introduced to successively more secret, and

more sacred, levels of religious knowledge. ,The mere

public exposure of the mysteries of a religion of this

sort can be enough to destroy it. This was a technique

used by Christian missionaries to subvert and discredit

the men s cults: they would take cult objects and sacra

from their sanctuaries, and publicly expose them to the

view of women and children (see, for instance, Tuzin

1988). These were fragile religions because they could

be demolished just by being forced into the public do-

main.

In some religions, the believers seem to treat theirgods as virtually their property. They may keep the

names of their gods secret (Cassirer 1953: 48; Frazer

1967: 342-345), for fear that outsiders who discovered

the names could invoke or control these beings for their

own ends and so, in effect, purloin them. The Rom ans,

ANTHROPOLOGY TODA Y Vol 1 1 No 5. October 1995



I would like to thankDominic Bryan, Harvey

Whitehouse and two

anonymous referees forA.T. for helpful

comments on earlier

versions of this article.

Barth, F 1975. Ritual andKnowledge among the

Baktaman of NewGuinea. New Haven:

Yale U.P.

-1990. The Guru and

the Conjurer:

Transactions in

Knowledge and the

Shaping of Culture in

Southeast Asia andMelanesia. Man (N.S.)

25(4): 640-653.

Bateson, G. 1958. Naven.

2nd ed. Stanford: U.P.

Bell, D. 1973. The

Coming of the

Post-Industrial Soc~e ty:

a Venture in Social

Forecasting London:Heinemann.

Cassirer, E. 1953.Language and Myth.

New York: Dover.

Dick, T 1865. On the

Improvement of Socrety

by the Drffusion of

Knowledge: or an

Illustration of the

Ad~ anragesWhich

Would Result From a

More General

Dissemination of

for instance, treated the god of their city in this way.

Rome itself, as a matter of course, appropriated the

gods of any cities it conquered, and its generals pre-

pared for battle by calling on the enemy gods to turn

renegade and defect to the Roman side. The Romans

had a very real concern that their own god might in

turn be stolen by their enemies through some similar

perfidious means (Fustel de Coulanges 1963: 215).

I seem at this point to have come full circle from my

discussion of the non-existent Italian chocolate. The fic-

titious chocolate was an entity as imaginary as ancient

Rome s god; both, after all, were nothing more than

names. Yet both of these nominal entities were, in their

own ways, highly sought after by many would-be pro-

prietors. The radical difference between them lies in the

way their value was created and maintained. One was a

name made valuable by being publicly exposed; the

other a name made valuable by being kept secret.

Universities clans and software companies

I have tr ied so far to draw a contrast between two op-

posed ways of managing ideas and information. One

way seeks to generate value by restricting the circula-

tion of ideas, and the other by promoting the circulation

of ideas. Now, I want to suggest that this contrast is, inone sense, actually a false one because the management

of knowle dge always in practice entails even in the

cases I have just discussed using both of these

strategies in som e kind of combination. In other words,

the manag ement of knowledge is the complicated,

precarious and difficult task of trying to operate with

both of these two theories at the same time.

For instance, let me point out som e similarities not,

I hope, too far-fetched between the behavio ur of cer-

tain business corporations and tribal clans. In New Gui-

nea, a people called the Manambu are divided into

some sixteen clans, each of which owns a corpus of

origin-myths, and other religious knowledge, concern-

ing the acts of its ancestors, the creation of animals,

plants and the landscape, and the proper conduct of

ceremonies. These myths are largely secret, and are

known in full only to a small handful of the clan s sen-

ior men. They cannot be openly disclosed to outsiders

because, among other reasons, they are the basis of the

clan s land-rights. If some other clan were to gain pos-

session of these myths, it could use this knowledge to

claim title to its land (H arrison 1990). Nevertheless, a

clan cannot maintain too tight a grip on its sacred lore,

and has to make its myths at least in part known to

outsiders. I t must do so, f irstly, in order to have these

outsiders acknowledge the legitimacy of its territorial

possessions. They cannot give this acknowledgementunless they know something of the mythological justifi-

cation of the clan s lan d-rights. Seco ndly, the clan

needs to disclose its myths to some trusted outsiders as

a way of insuring the myths against loss. Otherwise, it

might only take the deaths of on e or two of the clan s

elderly men for all of its sacred knowledge to be lost

forever. This would amount, in effect, to the catastro-

phic loss of all title to its land. It would therefore be an

oversimplification to say that a clan restricts access to

its religious knowledge. Rather, it tries to maintain a

delicate balance between restricting it and circulating it.

Too much openness, and too little, would both equally

expose the clan to the risk of being dispossessed of itsterritory (Harrison 1990: 127- 132; cf. M orphy 199 1

98-99). Seen in this light, there are instructive parallels

between the behaviour of these clans, and the behaviour

of corporations in the computer software industry. A

problem that software companies face is that their pro-

ducts are vulnerable to reverse engineering; that is, no

matter how technically innovative a product may be,

competitors may be able to reconstruct its desigr? and

so market r ival versions of their own. Like Manambu

clans, most companies pursue a kind of double-edged

strategy. On the one hand, they try to protect their soft-

ware by keeping secret much of their technology and

also by safeguarding it with patents. On the other hand,

many of them, particularly the most successful, have

realized that it is very much to their advantage to re-

lease some knowledge of their technology into the pub-

lic domain. Of course, a company too open and

generous with its ideas risks having them stolen and its

products pirated; but just as surely, a company too

miserly and secretive risks marginalizing itself and let-

ting its competitors take centre stage. Microsoft Corpor-

ation gained intellectual and market leadership of the

software industry, and made many of its products into

industry standards, by this sort of shrewd mixture of

possessiveness and liberality with its inventions (Econ-

omist 1989).

A M anambu clan and a software company are similar

in that both are institutions depending for their exist-

ence on the successful management of knowledge and

ideas, and both can perish if they fail to carry out thisfunction adequately. Another institution in the same

general category is the university. Universities too seem

to show in their behaviour the same contradictory

necessity of combining openness with protectiveness.

The contradiction is perhaps particularly acute in the

case of universities because they, unlike software com-

panies or Manambu clans, are officially committed to

an ideal of knowledge as public resource available for

the common good.

Inevitably, this gives rise to many conflicts between

theory and practice. At one time, the ideals of knowl-

edge as a collective human good were in contradiction

with the actual restriction of university education

largely to an elite. Nowadays, it is perhaps rather that

universities are under conflicting pressures to make

themselves accessible to an ever-wider public on the

one hand and, on the other, to redefine education as a

sort of merchandise they must market to consumers.

That is to say, universities seem under expectations

now to operate as though education were both a public

good and also a commercial product or commodity.

Clearly, these two requirements are in some respects

contradictory.

The growing involvement of the private sector in

funding and controlling research gives rise to similar

conflicts. This involvement may offer mutual benefits,

but it is also raising concerns about its implications foracademic freedom and impartiality, and appears also to

be creating in some fields of research an atmosphere of

comm ercial comp etition in imical to the free, circulation

of knowledge among researchers, and therefore inimical

to the long-term interests of research itself (Nelkin

1984).

But my point is that all institutions producing and

managing knowledge are faced with the same basic di-

lemma in one form or another. The dilemma is that

they depend for their existence both on producing and

communicating knowledge and on keeping this

knowledge in some respects their property. To put it

differently, these institutions seem in their behaviour tobe trying to act simultaneously upon both of the two

conflicting theories I outlined earlier. It is as though

they must operate on the assumption that the value of

knowledge increases with openness and accessibility,

and also on the assumption that it decreases. The cause

ANTHROPOLOGY TODA Y Vol 11 No 5, October 1995 13



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Death in Ilahita.Oceania 59(2): 81-104.

of this apparent inconsistency is the underlying di-

lemma faced by all these institutions: namely, that their

interests can be harmed by too much openness and by

too little.

The manag ement of knowle dge seems therefore to

consist in a sort of balancing act, in an attempt to func-

tion with some combination of two equally credible,

but contradictory, models of the value of knowledge at

the same time. Academic researchers, whose standing

depends on the knowledge they produce and dissem-

inate, may seem the diametrical opposite of Australian

Aboriginal ritual leaders, whose standing in their

society depends on the knowledge they withhold and

conceal. The secretiveness with which a Manam bu clan

manages information may seem the complete reverse of

the openness with which a university research centre

does so. But it is more a matter of degree, a difference

in the relative emphasis of two contrasting strategies,

than a difference in kind. In neither situation is know-

ledge wholly privatized and restricted. And in neither

situation is it wholly free and unowned.

The nature of ownership and the ownership of

nature

Universities and other organizations involved in re-search seem to be facing increasing difficulties with

sustaining, even as an ideology, the Enlightenment con-

ception of scientific knowledge as a universal free

good. Rather, their existence is likely to become in-

creasingly dependent upon their securing proprietary

rights in the knowledge they produce and exploiting

this knowledge commercially. If these organizations

will in the future not just produce and disseminate

knowledge but will inevitably be forced in some sense

seek to exercise ownership of it, let me ask what

models of ownership they should employ .

I pose this question because anthropologists have

found that Western definitions of property rights are byno means universal. Let me give an example of how

concepts of own ership can vary across cultures. Recent

advances in biotechnology have led to the patenting of

genetic material by private companies. A complex de-

bate with moral, economic and other dimensions has

arisen over the creation and ownership of life-forms by

business corporations and, more generally, over the

ownership of both human and non-human genetic infor-

mation (see, for instance, Nuffield Council on Bioethics

1995). Let us try to clarify precisely what it means to

describe as private property an organism whose genetic

material is owned by some biotechnology company. To

describe it as private property means, above all, that the

patent holder has the exclusive right to exploit the or-

ganism commercially. In other words, the rewards of

possessing these property rights are commercial profit.

All parties to this debate, whether they argue that life

cannot be owned in this way or that it can, seem to

share this same assumption about the nature of property

rights: namely, that to own the genom e of some or-

ganism means the entitlement to control its use for fin-

ancial gain.

In other cultures, people may make very different as-

sumptions about the nature of ownership. The Man-

ambu people of New Guinea, whom I referred to ear-

lier, regard virtually every species of plant and animal

known to them as belonging to one or other of theirclans. For them, this means that the ancestors of that

clan brought the animal o r plant into existence in myth-

ical times; that the clan shares kinship or substance

with the species; that it owns the magic and ceremonies

necessary for its growth, fertility and well-being; and

that it performs these rituals at the proper times for the

benefit of all other clans (Harrison 1990).

A clan has more than just ritual responsibilities to-

wards the plant and animal species it owns, and looks

after their welfare in quite pragmatically effective ways

as well. It can interdict an area of land being over-

hunted, or an over-fished lagoon, laying a taboo on the

land or lagoon until the stocks of game or fish are re-

plenished. In Manambu society it is a serious religious

offence to kill an animal without using it for food or for

some other valid purpose, or to waste f ish one has

caught, or crops one has grown, letting them rot un-

eaten. It is treated as an injury against the clan owning

the species concerned, and is called by a term which

means to vandalize someone s property or treat some-

one s belongings in an insulting or threatening way.

The clan owning the species would perform magic to

mak e it scarce or, as the Man ambu say, to send it

away , until the wrongdoers have ma de am ends. Of

course, we know these beliefs are illusory; but they do

shape the way that Manambu people exploit their natu-

ral environment, and therefore have entirely real conse-

quences for their ecology.

My point is that living species can rightly be de-

scribed as property in Manambu society. The Manambuconceive of these property rights essentially as the

guardianship of species, as the responsibility for their

welfare. To own som e life-form is to be its steward or

trustee on behalf of the community. These people have

concepts of property that rest on assumptions of a cus-

todianship of the natural environment quite extraneous

to Western conceptions of private property. Their own

property rights in living organisms, as the Manambu

define them, d o not yield comme rcial profit but other,

more intangible and diffuse rewards such as status, re-

spect and social credit, and their overall effect is to tie

together the various groups in the community in a net-

work of mutual indebtedness and interdependence. Inshort, these property rights have a moral dimension

lacking from the Western law of industrial patents. For

the Manambu, the ethical dilemmas that property rights

in life-forms provoke in Western society do not arise

because the Manambu do not have to choose between

treating life as a commodity and treating it as a collec-

tive resource belonging to som e universal entity such as

society or the human race. Their concepts of property

are framed in terms that do not give rise to these sorts

of antinomies.

onclusion

have argued that all organizations producing and dis-

seminating knowledge inevitably seek in some sense to

own, or protect, or restrict the use of this knowledge as

well. I have also suggested, however, there is at least

one matter in which they do have a degree of choice:

namely, in the concepts of ownership they use. There is

no necessity for them to employ the categories of con-

temporary Western commerce. Universities, for in-

stance, are having to redefine their relationship with the

knowledge they produce. This relationship will prob-

ably be more proprietorial than it was in the past. On

the other hand, it is unlikely to be of the purely com-

mercial sort characteristic of business corporations.

Universities are organizations dedicated to innovation

in ideas, and it would surely be appropriate for them todevelop innovative definitions of the ownership of

ideas. Here, perhaps, anthropologists might make an

important contribution: namely, their own knowledge of

the culturally diverse ways in which knowledge can be

owned .

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 11 No 5, October 1995

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