"Culture" and Culture

the long version

"Increasingly today, intellectual rights over traditional knowledge are fiercely contested and have revived debates about culture in major ways. But how should we make sense of the politics and meaning of culture, knowledge and authorship? What are the unexamined assumptions over the regimes of knowledge that ground the increasingly pervasive legal constructs on intellectual property? What are we to make of inconsistencies that surface in cultural claims? As the Brazilian anthropologist Manuela Carneiro da Cunha highlights in this pamphlet, it is no easy task. By distinguishing "culture" from culture, the former being a reflexive notion that purportedly speaks about the latter, da Cunha shows how such inconsistencies are inherent to any reflexive system. She asks: What are the cognitive as well as pragmatic consequences of the coexistence of "culture" and culture? In answer, da Cunha explains how the loan word "culture," as imported from anthropological jargon, is mobilized by indigenous people to effectively separate interpretive regimes and avoid contradictions." --Book Jacket.