Communication Patterns and Decision-Making about cultural property in the International Forum of the World Intellectual Property Organization

Project Director: Prof. Dr. Regina Bendix (Cultural Anthropology/ European Ethnology)
Research Associate: Stefan Groth M.A.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) established the Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore (IGC) in October of 2000 “as an international forum for debate and dialogue concerning the interplay between intellectual property (IP), and traditional knowledge (TK), genetic resources, and traditional cultural expressions (TCEs)/(folklore).” Its mandate consists in contributing to the establishment of internationally acceptable guidelines in these areas, and within the context of the law on intellectual property. This Committee only exists by virtue of the communication among members who do not share the same origins, language, material culture, or worldviews. This communication utilizes face-to-face meetings as well as virtual and print communication to create a communicative community that means to include if not necessarily represent “the world” and hence to create ‘global’ guidelines for cultural property. The research project focuses on the ICG at WIPO and documents and analyzes the communicative process of constituting cultural property at the international level. At the core stands an analysis based on organizational and communicative ethnography, of the committee meetings that take place twice a year in Geneva. The focus is on the communication regimes that actors develop and employ, be these actors from the WIPO Secretariat, the national delegations, NGOs, indigenous groups or interest groups with observer status. Each of these actors has different motivations and very different levels of knowledge or information. What will also be investigated are the changing dynamics in the different forms of communication during the intervals when the Committee is not meeting, and the extent to which the habitus of WIPO shapes the interaction on the one hand, and the actors and interests, at local to national level, shape it on the other.