An introduction to the class (text as property/property as text)

Text as property/property as text: intellectual property across the ages (anth 321/clas 311)

This class is an experiment in comparison. It stretches over millennia and includes a pretty outrageousdiversity of material, but it is collected together under the assumption that it can be compared and contrasted by thinkingabout the concepts of authorship, ownership, circulation, property, control, imitation, re-use, appropriation, forgery,plagiarism etc.

Such comparison needs a baseline, of course, and that is what the first seven weeks of the class is meant to provide. Byhalfway through the class, you should have a pretty extensive grasp of the following things: modern intellectual property,ancient Roman and Greek manuscript traditions, modern definitions of "information", andboth ancient and modern conceptions of "author", "genius", and "owner". From this baseline, we will proceed to compare a widevariety of artistic, scientific, literary and real-life things.

The second half of the class, however, is meant to introduce you to a number of different alternative conceptions of authorship and ownership, both in the modern world and in the ancient world.So you can think of this class as not only a comparison between ancient and modern, but a comparison of modern with modern andancient with ancient. Every era has its own dominant and lesser known traditions. In the end, we hope to leave you with amuch richer sense of just how narrowly most dominant versions of authorship and ownership are, and how many other traditions,experiments, movements, communities, and practices there have been in the past and continue to be in the present.

Anthropology and cultural comparison

One way of understanding how this class is structured is to think about how anthropology views its object.When anthropologists study the Bororo, for example, they treat them as a separate culture -- even if this is just a fiction since these days the Bororo are wearing Nikes and wanttheir MTV. Nonetheless, the Bororo culture is assumed to include a set of practices, institutions, laws, politicalorganizations, economic systems and religion that are presumed to be relatively stable--and more importantly different from anequally stable "us" (which usually means the Euro-American traditions of democracy and capitalism and Judeo-Christianity).Occasionally, this kind of comparison is enlightening and leads to a better understanding not just of another culture, but ofboth cultures being compared. Such comparison could be conducted between any two "cultures" so long as one is willingto get to know each of them in sufficient detail, and to keep an open mind about them.