Graduate student Martin Skrydstrup, under the supervision of Dr. Brinkley M. Messick, will conduct comparative, cross-cultural research on a new form of property claims. Few questions concerning social organization have been asked with such persistence as "How do things come to be owned." The purpose of this research project is to compare the ways in which this question has been answered in two different contexts: United States and Denmark. Is generally is observed, that the former gravitates towards legal formalism and generalized exchange, whereas the later exercises rule skepticism and particularized exchange. The central hypothesis is that these differences in what we might call "moral economies of the State" are inseparable from postcoloniality, specifically that American settler-colonialism has produced different forms of cultural property than Danish imperial-colonialism.
The research is jointly supported by NSF's Cultural Anthropology Program and the Law and Social Science Program. Analytically, the research intersects the anthropology of law with exchange theory to investigate the relations between cases and codes and between disputes and doctrines within each cultural property regime. The ethnographic field research will explore the 1996-claim of Hui Malama I Na Kupuna O Hawai`i Nei, a Native Hawaiian organization, for a carved wooden anthropomorphic figure (ki'i 'aumakua) held in the collection of the Museum of Natural History in Providence, Rhode Island. In this case, the holding institution challenged the property doctrine of indigenous inalienability codified in the NAGPRA laws, with recourse to the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment. The second case under scrutiny involves the Akuapem Kingdom in Akropong, Ghana, which also in 1996 requested a pair of royal talking drums (fontomfrom) from the National Museum of Denmark. This claim challenged the doctrine of cultural property as a legitimate possession of the nation-state (UNESCO 1970), in so far the claim originated from a non-State actor. Using historical and ethnographic methods, the objective is to explore how codified and non-codified property regimes enable or disenable the articulation of claims on the ground and how such claims are mediated by and recognized within cultural property regimes.
The intellectual merit of this project lies in its approach to the ascendance of new forms of property; a largely unexplored terrain in anthropology at the intersection of law, history and culture. Anthropology has largely handled the concept of property as relational and socially embedded producing ethnographies which have tended to focus on the social context of property disputes. What remains relatively unexplored is the examination of the links between disputes and doctrines and more generally between state recognition of indigeneity and normative orders of property. With regard to the broader impacts of the project, it is hoped that a comprehensive understanding of the coming into being of cultural property and a rigorous analysis of its different forms will have a broad relevance for contemporary normative debates within cultural resource management.
