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| illustrating the globalisation of indigenous and traditional culture, by Ilpo's Sojourn, via Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ikkoskinen/312461073/ |
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Lawrence Lessig’s understanding of the regulation of speech and expressions (see Code and Code 2.0) can help frame some issues around indigenous culture and online communication. Lessig highlights the importance of technological controls that work beyond IP law in shaping how culture and information flows within society. Information architectures are similarly significant areas of concern for indigenous knowledge. Highly systematised and rigidly structured systems are the norm for databases produced by narrow, expert communities. Such communities, including researchers, museum and archival professionals, and even legal advocates on behalf of indigenous communities have all developed databases containing highly codified expressions of traditional knowledge (TK). Representations of traditional knowledge are stored in museum, archive, and library databases, as well as databases that attempt to explicitly document items of traditional knowledge in order to allocate them to the public domain. These “prior art” databases are used as a strategy to thwart unwanted patents derived from traditional medical or environmental knowledge.
However, these databases have come under increasing fire for divorcing TK from their communities and cultural contexts. The systematic documentation and categorisation of indigenous knowledge in such archives continues the practices that emerged during the height of European colonialism (see Bowker and Star 2000). Most of the effort going into cultural heritage archiving works in a well meaning but very “top down” manner. The method typically involves committees of technical and subject-matter experts developing ontologies, which serve as “universal” standards for organising cultural heritage collections. Unfortunately, this “top down” approach leaves very little room for community input or divergent worldviews. This is very important from an indigenous knowledge perspective. Building online digital archives of indigenous cultural heritage can often become an exercise in de-contextualised listing of coded elements of cultural knowledge. Much indigenous knowledge is difficult to “archive” and communicate through such systems, because it is often implicit and highly context dependent (Brown 2003: 206). The imposition of a culturally alien database schema dissociates indigenous culture from its context, making it lose much, if not all, of its meaning. Such attempts at cultural heritage documentation may have little relevance to a local community; worse, it may be seen as an act of appropriation, even if motivated by a desire to help.
The conceptual difficulties of surrounding the “informatics” of cultural heritage parallels the difficulties in reconciling local norms of privacy, propriety, and spirituality that may regulate access and use of knowledge. This makes “top down” approaches to protect traditional knowledge hard to devise. It is difficult to set global rules and parameters for culturally bound systems that are inherently fluid and contextually dependent. Such attempts run the risk of missing the mark by either under-protecting traditional knowledge or over-regulating it with arbitrary legal and bureaucratic systems. Local cultural norms regulating traditional knowledge make global, international governance very difficult. If traditional knowledge protection schemes become overly rigid in defining how people can and cannot express elements of traditional culture, this dynamism and fluidity will be lost. Rigid barriers may cause cultural production and expression to loose much of its vitality (for an anthropological critique of overly formalised regulation, see Brown 2003:212-214). Members of indigenous societies already face tremendous pressures because of globalisation. Wrongly structured “protections” may lock cultural legal museum cases and further diminish and distort threatened indigenous knowledge.
International and national legal frameworks that better recognise indigenous conceptions of property, propriety, spirituality and privacy probably should be developed. But such efforts at cultural protection are insufficient. For interest, protectionism, even in its most drastic forms (DRM, copyright extensions) have done little to promote the recording industry. Other ways to strengthen indigenous culture need to be found. Fostering indigenous creativity, connectivity, and innovation are probably far more effective at preserving and enhancing the dynamism and vitality of traditional knowledge. Capacity building, education, and information technology investments must be part of the equation Such investments will help people in traditional societies can maintain social networks, systems of knowledge, and modes of expression in the face of the many pressures of globalisation. Vital, vibrant communities with the capacity to maintain, use, and further develop traditional culture will be better able to assert themselves in international legal arenas and more successfully navigate through other challenges.
If they are open and accessible, digital technologies and communications will help empower members of indigenous communities. Obviously, language, economy, infrastructure, bandwidth, security and literacy are all factors that greatly determine how to structure effective capacity building strategies. One of the chief barriers, now, is limited bandwidth and connectivity, especially for rural peoples, even in comparatively developed nations, such as the United States. Nevertheless, there are some encouraging trends and developments, both in terms of connectivity (increasing penetration and power of cellular networks), and in terms of hardware (cheap cellular handsets and the Open-Laptop-Per-Child programme).
Ramesh Srinivasan’s work with Tribal Peace (a database driven web resource for Native American communities in Southern California) and Village Voice (a Somali refugee web resource in the Boston area) help illustrate how online tools can be adapted to meet the needs of indigenous communities and displaced peoples. Similar “localised” approaches include systems built by Aboriginal communities of Warumungu, Northern Territory, Australia. They developed the Anyinginyi Manuku Apparr DVD collection of songs and stories, organised according to principles that made sense to this community.
One very sophisticated online resource is the Cherokee Nation’s official website (www.cherokee.org). This website supports a range of news, employment opportunities, arts and culture, schooling and Cherokee language education (including roll-over translations of site content from English to Cherokee and computer aided Cherokee lexicons)(see also Haas 2005).
“One size fits all” solutions are unlikely to be found, and highly particular frameworks need to be developed for virtually every community wanting to express traditional heritage in digital environments. Fortunately, such niche-customisation is not as infeasible as it sounds. Demand for flexibly structured, community-building and collaborative tools extends well beyond indigenous communities and has motivated the rapid development of many open source social software community content management systems (CMSs). Many of the social software frameworks enable a much greater degree of community customisation and adaptation than more traditional, rigidly structured systems that are typical of museums and other institutional data repositories. These systems should be explored as a means to empower indigenous communities both for solving everyday needs of coordination, information sharing and activism, and for shaping how they represent and express themselves globally.
Access and open, participatory systems can help indigenous peoples have much greater say in how they are portrayed and represented. With access to a commons-based resource such as Wikipedia, indigenous stakeholders can monitor, edit and contribute in ways to make their voices heard. Indeed, there are fascinating examples within Wikipedia where members of indigenous communities have edited and commented on entries that describe their communities. The discussion page linked to the Wikipedia entry about the Cherokee Nation illustrates how Native American participants are working to correct perceived misrepresentations of their communities.
While openness is empowering we need to remember that participation in open, collaborative systems should be a matter of choice and not compulsion. Few advocates of the commons would argue that it is ethical to broadcast confidential medical records or other personal secrets without the consent of people who are well informed of the risks of such exposure. Putting an “Attribution” licence on such content won’t make it any more ethical. In the same way, members of the global Commons need to recognise that ideas of privacy and secrecy vary widely, and indigenous ideas of what’s sacred, private, shareable, or secret vary tremendously. While Creative Commons licences can be a powerful tool for indigenous cultural expression, there are some cases where Creative Commons licence choices map poorly to local needs (Kansa et al 2005). To fill these gaps, other, non-standard, and incompatible licences may emerge as a result. Many elements of indigenous cultural heritage will probably never be neatly and cleanly compatible with global conceptualisations of “free culture” operating on a bedrock of compatible open licences. Much cross-cultural communication will likely take place in a necessarily “messy public sphere of contest, debate, and protest” (quoting Hayden 2003:46).
We can’t gloss over the complexities of communicating across different value systems. The interests and goals of traditional knowledge protection will sometimes clash with the commons. Nevertheless, there is very fertile common ground to be found, especially if we remain focused on the critical issue of empowerment. Strategies that afford indigenous communities the tools, both legal and technical, to help maintain social ties, innovate, create and have a global voice can help bring such empowerment. Powerful open source software and innovative legal tools such as those pioneered by Creative Commons are available now. While differences in worldview and opinion will continue, it is time for advocates of the digital commons to reach out to indigenous peoples and recognize some common interests. Both movements will be challenged by each other, but both movements may find common goals and invaluable alliances.
Bowker, Geoffrey C., Susan Leigh Star
2000 Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences.2nd Edition. MIT Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Brown, Michael.
2003 Who Owns Native Culture? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Haas, Angela M.
2005 Making Online Spaces More Native to American Indians: A Digital Diversity Recommendation. In Computers and Composition Online (Kris Blair, editor).
http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/Haas/index.htm
Hayden, Cori
2003 When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico. Princeton University Press
Kansa, Eric C, Jason Schultz, and Ahrash N. Bissell
2005 Protecting Traditional Knowledge and Expanding Access to Scientific Data. International Journal of Cultural Property 12(3):285-314 (download http://www.alexandriaarchive.org/IJCP%20Article%20FINAL_share.pdf)
Lessig, Lawrence
1999 Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Basic Books. New York.
2006 Code version 2.0. Basic Books. New York.
tags: berkeley-california united states culture heritage traditional-knowledge creative-commons protection indigenous open-source empowerment
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I think you've skimmed over the fact that an indigenous community might have a reason to reject open collaboration. I speak as a devil's advocate, only to point out that empowerment, as you seem to mean it, is not valueless. I don't know how this point has been dealt with, although I can see that it has been discussed by others. Is there a reason we should want empowerment? It seems that open systems can give examples of why some forms of empowerment might be opposed.
Wikipedia, for instance, with its rules about notability and reliable sources can be an authoritative database. How an issue is presented in wikipedia can be quite different from how it might be presented at cherokee.org, even when the wikipedia article is written and edited largely by people of cherokee decent. The internet itself, even before things like the cc, has been a forum of empowerment for indigenous individuals to present their ideas; consider cornsilks.com as a counter to cherokee.org. But here we see that cherokee.org becomes authoritative, and while it empowers the Cherokee Nation as a political voice of Cherokee, it disempowers those Cherokee who disagree.
I just don't see how you can talk about how members of the open source and cc community can empower another group. Your tools can empower some and give voice to their opinions, as the example of wikipedia articles gives. But in doing so, it can be against what others see as the correct way to discuss the issue.
The very idea of empowerment is slanted to your perspective. The internet has allowed Falun Gong to grow and develop much more than it might have without it. But the Chinese government has seen fit to ban and suppress it. Allowing seditious elements a greater voice may feel like empowerment, but if unity is a central cultural goal, open systems is a value that you are forcing onto the culture, and it might be a value that will harm the culture (at least from the viewpoint of some in that culture).
smmurphy (United States) · Sep 01st, 2007 1:27 pm
1 out of 1 person believes this is useful
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