Anthropological approaches to property and property rights have acquired new significance in the context of the global economy. Property is central to the transformation of formerly socialist societies, the relationship between public and private, indigenous rights and heritage claims, creativity and invention, and recent developments in the life sciences. New digital technologies challenge the conventions of authorship, fair use, and copyright. Unexamined assumptions about the person, nature, the body, and culture often travel with these property claims. This seminar will consider some earlier works on property from anthropology and other disciplines before turning to contemporary debates about privatization and the public domain, cultural property rights, scientific authorship, the ownership of information, land rights, and intellectual property.
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