-
1. The Tongue Does Not Rot: Authorship, Ancestors, and Cloth
- University of Minnesota Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
KO F I , A N A D I N K R A M A K E R , raised the subject of property rights in cultural production before I could even explain my mission in wanting to talk to him. Several researchers had come to the community asking him and others about their craft, he declared angrily. He and his fellow cloth producers had shared their knowledge but had gained nothing from it. Clearly, as he saw it, knowledge about adinkra making belonged to those who made the cloth in his community, Asokwa, and they deserved to benefit from it. This was only one of the ways in which I encountered adinkra and kente makers as producers of knowledge, and it suggested a relationship to their cultural production that was analogous to the relations protected under intellectual property law but with some important differences. The underlying premises of intellectual property law typically exclude cultural producers like adinkra makers or kente weavers as holders of the kinds of legal rights routinely granted those who write books and produce music and films.Thelaw conceives of rights-holding cultural producers as individuals and deems “traditional knowledge” to be communal in its production . As such, traditionalknowledgebelongs outside the sphere of intellectual property law. While Kofi’s views do not entirely contradict this concept, they do not completely confirm it either. In the weeks and months following 35 Chapter 1 The Tongue Does Not Rot Authorship, Ancestors, and Cloth We Asantes, we believe that we should pray. It is not idol worship. . . . We pray to remember our ancestors who have died who brought this work. —Kwabena, kente weaver, Bonwire Earrings are not cloth. —Nana Baffour Gyimah, adinkra producer, Tewobaabi this encounter, he and other adinkra and kente cloth makers revealed creative practices that supported the view, advocated by indigenous peoples and several nations, that traditional knowledge combines both individual and communal creativity. In this chapter, I examine the ways that Ghanaian adinkra and kente makers conceive of themselves as creative persons with rights over their work, focusing on two key aspects. The first is the nature of the creative process in cloth production and the ways that communal and individual creativity combine in such production. An important aspect of that creativity is its temporal dimension, as living cloth makers link their creative work with that of deceased cloth makers. While this is partly a reflection of the wider society, the way that time factors into both adinkra and kente production restores to creative work features that are eliminated in the framework of intellectual property law. The second aspect of cloth making has to do with knowledge transmission norms that challenge intellectual property law’s relegation of cultural products like adinkra and kente to the public domain, or “commons.” Instead, cloth makers’ norms of knowledge transmission delineate the boundaries of a restricted commons that cannot be equated with an open one. Based on this examination, I consider what cloth makers’views and practices reveal about the differences between ways of organizing creative activity in the realms of traditional knowledge on the one hand and intellectual property law on the other. I argue that attention to actual practices of cultural production in the two areas reveals considerable similarities in underlying ideas about creative work and the rights of those who do such work. At the same time, there are variations that complicate any easy equation of cultural production in different spheres. Some of the strongest variations occur in the points of emphasis in the organization of creative work. Thus, while proprietary benefits are a concern in both of the systems I discuss here, they receive differing degrees of emphasis. Following from this, I also argue that adinkra and kente makers’ views and practices around their work provide resources for rethinking key elements in the debates on intellectual property law, such as the idea and social functions of the author, and the nature of the commons. Individuals in Spatial and Temporal Communities The view that traditional knowledge is communally created holds, to some extent, in the case of adinkra and kente. This aspect of creativity in cloth 36 The Tongue Does Not Rot [3.237.232.196] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:16 GMT) production came up in a number of ways in cloth makers’ life history narrations . At the most general level, it emerged in connection with the rivalry between four centers of cloth production: Bonwire and Adanwomase,which produce kente cloth, and...