With funding from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Colloredo-Mansfeld will host twenty-one scholars in a two-day workshop that examines how communities use cultural assets in order to develop local economies. In particular, the workshop will assess how theories of the commons that explain natural resource systems can be adapted to investigate cultural resources. Indeed, unique, heritage-based resources have found prominence in the global economy. Many communities have sought legal protection for place-based crops, handcrafted commodities or ethnically identified wares. Other communities turn to cultural claims to restore economic value to traditional manufacture and commercial trades. The workshop aims to build an analytical framework that will allow comparison across such regional economies. The two day gathering will bring together an international group of scholars from the United States, England, Belgium and Australia who are currently researching artisan communities, indigenous cultural heritage, local food economies, and natural resource commons. Participants will divide their effort into four primary sessions: (1) the identification and valuation of cultural assets; (2) the description of interactions that generate cultural assets; (3) the place-based strategies that link culture and economy and shape the defense of regional trades; and (4) moderated round table discussions to narrow a research agenda and enable collaborative research projects.
The central intellectual task is to connect research on local trades to the commons literature. Writers on law, popular culture, indigenous heritage, and technology, have embraced the idea of the commons to explain the importance and vulnerability of shared resources in a globally connected economy. However, work needs to address the crucial differences between assets that form within market systems themselves and forests, fisheries and pastures that stand apart from markets and become exploited as their products gain economic value. Participants in the workshop will develop the analytical terms to describe cultural resources, identify patterns of competition and cooperation that build these shared assets, and document rules, settings, and strategies used to defend resources against appropriation by powerful outsiders or over-exploitation by local producers. The objective is to articulate practical research questions that will allow researchers to return to their field sites and data sets to assess the use of cultural assets and compare their results.
This workshop will set up an international collaboration that contributes to training, engaged scholarship, and policy work. In practical terms, UNC-Chapel Hill's Center for Integrating Research and Action (CIRA) will both provide support for the dissemination of project-related research and serve to promote graduate training rooted in the workshop's models. More broadly, the planned follow-up for the workshop in terms of research, a symposium, and publication will enable pathways of participation for other scholars, policy makers and potential graduate students seeking to engage and evaluate the workshop's model.
Research and Education Activities: The grant supported a two day workshop held at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, September 10-11, 2010. The 2010 event had three objectives (1) to present cases of regional trades and community economies in which producers and vendors promote the cultural heritage of commodities; (2) to document how tradespeople use formal and informal means to defend cultural assets, (3) to evaluate the utility of theories about the commons and common pool resources for investigating the regeneration of cultural assets. The workshop was supplemented by a second meeting, in Quito, Ecuador, May 29-31, 2012 during which five investigators met to extend the planning work and develop a comparative project on Andean heritage economies. The future investigation will focus on six sites, three in Ecuador and three in Peru and examine how communities defend the boundaries of heritage economies through formal political jurisdictions or through intellectual property claims. Researchers will document the relationships between strong territorial defense and the expansion of local investments in community economies. Intellectual Merit: The activities of the workshop resulted in a special issue of the journal Anthropology of Work Review that offered a conceptual framework for comparative study of economies connected to local heritage or cultural claims. Specifically, researchers focused on defining cultural assets in relation to the following three characteristics: (1) Embeddedness in social relations and institutions, (2) Encloseability and the ability to erect barriers to competitors, and (3) Vulnerability to underuse and overuse. Broader Impacts: The workshop offered professional and training opportunities to one post-doc and five graduate students. All served as full participants in the presentations and discussions. Two were included among the five authors publishing the results of their work in the special issue of the Anthropology of Work Review.
