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(This essay is a draft version of a chapter to appear in Trademarks and Brands, an Interdisciplinary Critique, (eds.) Lionel Bently, Jennifer Davis and Jane Ginsburg, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.)

James Leach is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at The University of Aberdeen. He held a Research Fellowship at King's College Cambridge while this chapter was being written. James trained in Manchester between 1989 and 1997, and has undertaken long term field research on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea, as well as additional research on comparative material to do with knowledge production and creativity in the UK. His publications include work on the topics of art, aesthetics, kinship, ownership, intellectual and cultural property, interdisciplinary collaborations, free/open source software communities, and knowledge production. www.jamesleach.net.

Social Anthropology is the comparative study of social forms. Social anthropologists seek to understand the ongoing constitution of persons, institutions, values, and cultures through a combination of in-depth analytic engagement with particular societies, and through a comparative methodology. Juxtaposing principles and assumptions discernable in one social and cultural situation with those in another yields understandings of the development and constitution of the social reality under scrutiny. It also exposes assumptions relevant to the constitution of the society of the analyst that otherwise might remain hidden. The ideal is to learn something about both other peoples' social and conceptual worlds, and simultaneously about one's own through this comparative method.
This chapter, written by a social anthropologist, seeks to throw light on the subject of trademarks. In it, I focus upon the generation of the value which trade marks have been designed to protect. I then look at how that protection (of the value generated) through the system of trade marks influences the form that transactions take, and how it inflects the outcomes (objects, persons) of these relations for the parties involved. My interest then is upon the ongoing generation of value in social processes, and how the law comes to shape that value. To achieve this end, comparative material on the ownership and transaction of names and marks relating to identity is introduced. This comparative material is drawn from Papua New Guinea. Close attention is paid to the transactions between persons, and between groups, in which identities emerge and which result in proprietary control over names and marks.
Persons differ in their constitution depending on the objects they create and associate through. My task here is to show something of the constitution of persons which is specific to the working of trade marks in their wider socio-economic context. I do that by contrasting trade marks and the relations they make possible with a description of other kinds of person and their objects; that is, other possibilities for the emergence of persons, and marks associated with them, in a different socio-economic context. Examining trade marks through comparison tells us interesting things about the operation of these 'marks' in both instances. In analyzing the specific ways names and marks are used in different transactional contexts, I show that we can learn about the emergence of particular kinds of social form, and how the law might be party to the construction of one form of personhood rather than another. I point to contrasts between the kinds of relationships, and therefore the form persons take in trade mark regimes, and the kinds of relationships and persons apparent in the Papua New Guinean material.
The chapter draws upon an analytic vocabulary developed within social anthropology, and particularly in relation to the ethnography of Melanesia. That vocabulary speaks of transactions, and the constitution of kinds of persons in those transactions. As mentioned, I also draw upon comparative material about names, value creation, and its retention, from that region of the world. My strategy is thus not primarily historical, but comparative and analytic. The Papua New Guinean materials upon which I draw are snapshots for purposes of comparison. More could be said about these examples and their transformation over time, but that is not the endeavour for me here.

We are familiar with differences between personal names and those signs that name organizations and companies. Neither of these are necessarily quite the same as the distinguishing name or mark given to a commercial product. Yet as symbols denoting kinds of identity, they do have overlaps, or perhaps I should say 'underlaps' significant to how they achieve their effects. The marks draw their associations from a common series of elements. How each comes to have distinctive value, while drawing upon common elements, is good anthropological subject matter.
In the first section of the paper, I focus on names as signs which have particular value for dwellers on the North coast of Papua New Guinea with whom I am familiar, or for whom there is an extensive ethnographic literature. These signs are both items of transaction, and establish relations in which other transactions are appropriate. In other words, they participate in the formation of particular relations, and the persons who result. In both of the Papua New Guinean language groups to which I refer, names carry value, point to things and persons that are also perceived as having value, and in doing so, participate in the establishment of particular forms of social relation and institutions. It is how that particularity (difference from aspects of trade mark regimes) comes into being that I seek to establish through detailed discussion of the cases.
What emerges is that people's appearance as persons of particular kinds (a brother, a clansman, an initiated man, a marriageable woman) is dependent upon the relationships in which they are enmeshed. Transactions which establish, perpetuate and modify those relationships are foundational to the emergence of all persons there. Each party to a relationships has ongoing interests in the future possibilities that relationship affords for identity (definition of the person), and for productivity. These reciprocal interests are dramatised by periodic exchanges of nurture, of food and wealth, and of people. My point will be that the 'future potential' of the relationship is 'owned' by all parties to it. Their interests in acting upon those relationships is an interest in their very being, and its transformations, one might say. Identity then is wholly bound into the relations one has to others, and these relations, while not always equal, or indeed, peaceable, are clearly seen as core to the constitution of each party as an agentive social actor of one kind or another.
Moving on to a discussion of trade marks, I establish that from their basic definition it is clear that registered trade marks do not directly reference relations to specific persons (unlike similar signs in the Papua New Guinean material). However, my suggestion is that even though there is a clear separation (in the definition) between goods and sign, and although the person does not figure in the definition at all, these signs carry value in relation to persons in interesting ways, highlighted by the contrast with transactions in Papua New Guinea.
My starting point in the quoted passage from the Trade Mark Directive (footnote 10) is the designation of the sign in relation to a valued entity. There is a clear logical sequence apparent in the statement. Primary value lies in the good itself, in the service or substance that can be used or consumed by another party. This is interesting in its own right, as despite the clear and arresting value of marks and indicators in themselves, their value in this construction is dependent upon, and derivative of, a transaction which involves the consumption of a tangible (and in a broad sense) consumable item. I am aware of other aspects of how the trade mark comes to hold value, how it is part of intangible and highly significant processes of identity creation in consumers, and so forth. In fact, these are aspects to which I shall pay considerable attention later in the chapter. But my starting point is the distinction between the consumable element in a transaction involving trade marks, and the enduring or non-consumable element. I argue that consumers of trade marked goods draw upon tropes of both interpersonal, and of autonomous, value creation. They are in pseudo-personal relationships to the kinds of person that a trade mark appears to delineate, but are able to consider themselves autonomous from those other persons for the purpose of making their own identity through the consumption of trade marked goods.
Much of the value generated in transactions which involve trade marked goods is shown to arise from the possibilities these goods allow for the formation of identity in relation to another person (the trader and the image he protects through the trade mark). Yet having approached these transactions through the Melanesian cases, transactions involving trade marks come to look peculiar in that there is no ongoing relationship established with this other person. Here differences between notions of the person and notions of agency are significant. Autonomy and self determination are ideologically significant for consumers in mass societies. Trade marks are shown to participate in the ongoing development of particular kinds of persons: those appropriate to a political economy of mass production and consumption where persons must forge relations with others while maintaining a particular image of self determination and agency.
Implicit in establishing the difference between the Melanesian examples and those involving trade marked goods are difficulties that the Melanesian people I discuss would have in adopting the principles of trade marks without disrupting existing creative social practices. However, the chapter seeks to do more than point to a well known incompatibility between western and indigenous regimes of ownership. Instead, the focus is what we might learn about our own social form through looking at trade marks from the perspective of Papua New Guinea, and through a specific anthropological methodology.
I conclude by arguing that in the Papua New Guinea material, what I describe as the 'future' of the relationship , which can be embodied by a name or a mark, is owned by both parties. They have a different, but oscillating and reciprocal interest in its potential. The relationship and its future is an aspect of the emergence of the person, or groups of persons, as identifiable social entities, entities for whom the ideals of autonomy and self determination are subsumed by the need to appear as a particular person through their position in relation to other persons. It is this 'future' which both giver and receiver 'own' and which the mark embodies.
In the case of transactions involving trade marked goods it appears that although there is a 'future' to the relationship, instantiated by and made concrete by the trade mark itself, power over crucial aspects of that future is owned by one party to the transaction. The emergence of the person in the transaction is thus constituted differently. Responsibility for making the self appear, for forming an identity, lies with the purchaser/consumer. It is made possible in the transaction by the form of the transaction itself. As I outline, transactions governed by trade marks thus have a dual aspect for the consumer. A pseudo interpersonal relationship is established with the trader as if they were a person with whom the consumer could have an ongoing and identity-defining relation. Yet at the same time, a sense of autonomy from relationships and thus a sense of self-determination and individual character emerges through a relation to an object, defined by the transaction as alienated from other people and thus available, as it were, to be wholly incorporated into the consuming subject. This fosters the constitution of their identity apparently without reference to other persons. It is in this complex interplay of subject to subject and subject to object relations that I locate the interesting aspect of the social operation of trade marks.

Persons in Melanesia can be seen to be made up of the relations they have to others. In what follows I seek to demonstrate that this ongoing constitution of personhood is made explicit through religious and exchange practices. There is no emergence of an identity, or power, or value, without the input of others, and moreover, without their presence as registers of the effect of a person's action. Marks and names can stand for these relationships, and thus embody a future which all parties to their constitution have ongoing interests in and ownership of.
In the villages of Nekgini speaking people, which lie on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea, names and marks are highly valued aspects of places. 'Place' is a crucial term in my analysis. Places are complex entities comprising persons, spirits, knowledge, landforms etc. Places are identified, that is, called by, the name of the land on which they lie, after the people there have successfully attracted others to come and receive presentations of wealth grown upon this land, and given away in that location. Being known as a place is dependent then upon transactions with other places in whose emergent identity the donor's name has a significant role.
These presentations are always part of wider life-cycle processes. They are made at the time, or as a consequence, of birth and marriage. They rely upon all the residents of a hamlet contributing, but more than this, they require the co-operation of spirits and ancestors that reside in the lands owned by these residents. Spirits and ancestors reside in the landforms, in the springs that water each area, and in bones placed strategically in the bush lands of their descendents. The presence and significance of spirits and ancestors is made apparent by their presence at exchange ceremonies, taking the form of musical voices, decorations and of inscribed marks. It is these voices and the beauty of the marks that elicits the presence of the receivers, Rai Coast people say.
Successfully completing a payment has the radical consequence not only of putting the place and its inhabitants on the map, as it were, as a named entity, but also, as members of that newly emergent named entity, the residents of the hamlet become close kin with one another. Hamlet members share knowledge of how to make an area productive, they share spirits, forms of planting crops, myths, and magic. But these are 'internal' specifications. They do not amount to an identity until someone from beyond the group recognises and names the emergent place. The term for an emergent hamlet/kin group is palem in the Nekgini language, referring to the physical structure from which wealth is distributed, a named place in the landscape, and all those people who have given a presentation of wealth to others from there.
A peculiarity of kinship in the area is that all the children who grow up together in a hamlet are considered siblings whatever their previous relationship, and as a consequence may not inter-marry. To do so is likened to self-consumption, an unproductive self-closure. And this, I would argue, is because marriage is the archetypal form of making productive relations with outsiders. Marriage results in the payments in the form of palem which at one and the same time name the hamlet and make its inhabitants 'one' (kinsmen). Identity is in essence a relational product. As Megan Richards points out in her comments, trade marks were seen as a means by which identities might be developed in the absence of the kinds of ongoing relationships apparent in Papua New Guinea by "ordering commerce in a society where relationships, power, trust and intimacy could no longer be the sole basis of exchange". But the consequences of the introduction of trade marks has, as I will come onto, been to obscure the possibility for this kind of identity formation by making concrete new a-symmetric relations.

Among Nekgini speakers, each generation has the responsibility of making their presence and power known through generating named places. One sees a constant emergence of new named places, new spirits discovered in these places, new songs and designs associated with them, and new kinds of people (newly defined as from this place rather than that) as a constant efflorescence in the landscape. Nekgini people make a large claim in this context, and that is the ownership of the 'story' (patuki: myth, ancestor, inscribed marks, and name) of the origin of differentiation (generative productivity) itself. As this is closely related to identifying marks, I recount their understanding briefly.
There was a time when there were only two brothers and one woman. She was mother, sister and wife to the men. There were no children, no in-laws, no gardens etc. at this time. One day, the younger brother tattooed his design onto the inner thighs of the woman. She became ashamed and hid herself, but the elder brother tricked her, and saw the design there. He was furious, but controlled his anger to discover who was responsible. He called for all the people to come to his hamlet, and carve their designs onto posts there. The very last to do so was his younger brother, and when the elder saw this mark, he knew who had tattooed the women. He fought with his sibling in a drawn out and terrible battle. Eventually, the younger brother left, established himself with the woman at a distance from the original hamlet, and exchanged wealth items with his elder brother to make up for his initial actions and to establish his independence. In this move, plants and animal species came into being, and gardening and animal husbandry, as well as wealth items, were found (as ancestors of various kinds) in the landscape. The mark that he made on the woman is the 'public' mark of all Nekgini people. All have the right to carve and draw it onto their houses, decorative and ceremonial carvings, and dance ornaments. It is called Yandi'emung in the hamlets of Reite.

The man who first made the mark has a name that is known to many in Reite. They use the name, in conjunction with breath and tune, to achieve certain transformative effects on other people. Their mark is something that has direct effect on the bodies of others. Each palem group has its own store of ancestral names and marks. These are explicitly things generated by people in the past, or that emerge in one's own productive engagement in places with other people, and are elicited by the demands of kin from other places. Each generation is responsible for re-generating its position and name through effecting others, causing them to recognise their presence as the emergent generation through exchanging wealth items with them. New places, and new marks emerge all the time, but they are explicitly seen as emergent from the inter-relations of affines. Affines are the 'cause' , the 'base' or 'origin' of generative and productive activity. Their presence elicits this activity, and thus marks and identities are not only relational, but jointly owned by groups connected by marriage. In the case of Yandi'emung, both places (established in the myth) have the right to use the mark. Its value is one generated by their relationship and it retains its value as an element in that and analogous relationships.
Among the Nekgini speakers I know, these marks are closely guarded, their use exclusive to those who are connected to the generate relations in which they emerged. But the idea that one party to the constitution of a valued mark might be excluded from its use undermines the logic of its value. These marks are valued and powerful because they reference a generative set of relations. In fact, they come to embody and carry that generative power. Others may appropriate them, but such acts are explicitly viewed as theft.
Ideally there should be an oscillation of power in the relationships between affines in which persons, places and inscribed marks emerge. However, one side is always in the ascendancy at any one time, as equality and balance would mean stasis. Power to effect others then is the power to give shape to the future of social and material forms, but doing this means acknowledging others' role in that process as co-creators, even if they are passive at the moment of creation.

Among Nekgini speakers, names have a very puzzling element to them. A person there can live their whole life with a personal name, while remaining unaware that this name is also a powerful spell used by other people. Such spells are highly valued and closely guarded as spells. Yet the people who know of the power of the spell may well not own the name as one they could use to name their own children. Some people have a right to use a name for people, others have knowledge about how to make use of it for magic and ritual. Marks and names thus have value in particular relationships in which they are effective. Their power/value is not necessarily available outside those relations.
Nekgini spells are a combination of the use of a name, a particular purpose, a tune or rhythm, and additional elements which may be best described as 'ingredients'. For example, when a gardener plants the central areas of his garden, the 'growing shoot' (wating) of the garden as it is called in Nekgini and which they describe as ensuring the growth of the whole garden, he uses certain secret names. This central ritual planting is said to encourage plants in the periphery by its vigour and example. These names must be sung, or hummed, in the tune of the animating spirit of the garden to which they ultimately refer. Plant matter, paints, other substances, and the gardeners own ritual preparations, are all essential here. The name on its own has no effect. It would not work for any other task either.
Merely having a name, even one attached to one as a personal name, is not to be in control of its power then. A named person might be a place marker, an unconscious keeper for others perhaps, of the possibilities of power. Such power resides in the combination of correct elements and procedures that surround a name and its purpose. And that combination in turn relies upon the correct relation to affinal kinsmen. The knowledge of these combinations are given to adolescents, during initiation rites, by their mother's brothers (affines of their father).
On this part of the Rai Coast, it is categorical that affines, that is, people directly related by a current marriage, live in separate named hamlets. So one's maternal kin live somewhere else. Mother's brothers, who take the lead in initiation sequences, are categorically not part of your family in Rai Coast terms (being affines, living elsewhere, not sharing bodily substances that make one close kin). It is from an external position that they perform the work of initiation, and in doing so effect the transformation of a child into an adult. Knowledge of how to achieve vital ends – successful gardening being a vital end in this economy – thus comes from an external other to oneself. Indeed, this is made explicit in that fathers also have stores of knowledge and names, magic and so forth. Yet they are not the ones who initiate their children. In fact, their spells are given to their sister's children. One's own name may not be available to one as power without this input from other people, without making the relationship to them the basis of both one's productivity, and the receptive space in which that productivity will have its effect. By that, I mean that each party takes responsibility for the future of the relationship. In fact each 'owns' the relationship in that they have claims on its outcomes.
Productivity is demonstrated by the first obligation that an initiated man has on his emergence: that of giving garden food, meat and wealth items to his maternal kinsmen in return for his initiation. Achieving this amounts to the visible (by this I mean socially acknowledged) emergent presence of that person in the world. The mother's brothers see their own power working elsewhere. They in turn acknowledge the emergence of the giver (situated in another place, with other kinsmen helping them) through receiving what has been grown and collected by the initiand. It is in these transactions themselves that the emergence of the person as a socially recognized entity occurs.
The complex relational nature of names and identities is further demonstrated by Nekgini technologies of communication. All Nekgini hamlets/places have spirits, and these manifest as musical voices. The voices are accompanied by a rhythm, a series of drum beats. In this area large drums (actually idiophones -- hollowed logs without membranes) are used to communicate between hamlets. Complex messages can be sent as a combination of various series of beats. Naming people is an integral part of such a communication system. In a dramatic extension of the principle that one's identity (and its reality as other's recognition) is externally generated, all initiated men in these villages have a name which is a 'call sign', consisting of a series of drum beats, which is taken from one of the spirit songs which the mother's brother's family own. It is one of these unique beats which is given to the initiate by his mother's brother, and with which he can be identified for the rest of his life. A man's audible presence in the landscape is in the call sign his mothers' brothers allocate to him on initiation. It comes from the very heart of their power to effect others, to grow crops, and so forth, which their spirits embody.
A Nekgini speaking man's identity then is in a very real sense borrowed from others. In fact, the call sign reverts to the maternal kin on a man's death. They have it available then to use again in the future. Persons here appear as social entities through reference to the relations they have to others. There is no emergence of an identity, or power, or value, without the input of other persons, and moreover, without these other's presence as a registers for the effect of a person's action. Initiates have a right to give wealth to their maternal kin just as much as those kin have a right to receive it. Establishing a valued social identity then is a process of mutual constitution -- an often contested and even agonistic process -- but one in which neither party has the option of denying the other side's 'ownership' of the potential (future) of the relationship. Each parties identity and power is dependent upon that relation, and thus their future is wrapped up in it.
I suggest that thinking through this kind of material, and abstracting from it, if you like, the method used; that is, to consider transactions and the ways in which persons emerge from their specificity, can be usefully applied to the transactions and kinds of persons which emerge around and in trade mark law. I begin though by delving deeper into the issue of names and by returning to the issue noted in the definition of a trade mark: that the sign itself is empty of value, and signifies value lying elsewhere.

I mention the sign's 'emptiness' or representational status (it stands first and foremost in its trade mark definition as a token for value-in-substance elsewhere) in order to make a contrast. Simon Harrison's marvelous ethnography of Manambu speaking people from Avatip village on the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea describes signs that are anything but empty. These signs are the personal names of people. In this instance, one might even say that it is the person who is empty, and the name or sign that carries substance, power and value. People are attached to names rather than the other way around. Let me elaborate briefly.
Avatip people live through fishing and sago production, which needs to be supplemented through trade. This trade is with neighbouring groups, who have different languages, with whom they routinely exchange fish for starch foods (sago and tubers). Manambu rituals and their cosmology have been viewed by outsiders as a kind of patchwork of parts of the cosmologies of their neighbours. In common with other groups in the area, it seems that these rituals and symbols have been acquired piecemeal through trade. The trading of ceremonial goods and cultural or symbolic forms is well documented. For Manambu and their neighbours such a trade is possible because each entertains reciprocal assumptions of a common totemic structure to the cosmos, and to human societies as an aspect of that cosmos. Each Manambu village such as Avatip, and within Avatip, each sub-clan, had monopoly rights over the ritual goods obtained from trading partners because such goods were only transmitted between local descent group who belonged to the same totemic category in different villages and language groups.
Harrison tells us that the major resource in Avatip life was esoteric and ritual knowledge. Politics focussed on the struggle for control of this knowledge, not access to or control over material wealth.
To Avatip people all ritual powers and attributes are held only contingently by particular descent groups, villages or tribal groups, and are ultimately the immemorial property of totemic categories conceived as transcending all social and cultural boundaries.
One can usefully think of this as like a template. The whole world, social and physical, is divided into categories. These categories are repeated over and again. Thus Avatip people found trade partners in the same section of another society as they belonged to in their own. Material wealth had little political significance (unlike in other areas of Melanesia). Harrison instead describes an obsession with the ownership of names. Major political events revolved around public debates over the ownership of names, and who had the right to use them.
Manambu are 'relentless totemic classifiers' according to Harrison. They insist on placing everything in the world into their totemic categories, and the community is divided into three intermarrying patrilineal descent groups which follow from this principle. Each descent group owns hereditary functions in magic and ritual, and it is these that give them control over their part of the environment through weather magic, fertility magic, and so forth. So the polity as a whole is held together by the interlocking of each descent group's cosmological powers. All three groups represent themselves as using their powers for each other's welfare and sustenance. Avatip is further divided into 16 sub-clans and it is these that are important political units. Each has its own ward (area of the village), origin myths, land, totems, magic and sorcery, and hereditary functions in the male cult (exclusive responsibility for certain ritual procedures in the religious life of Avatip, which until the 1990's, was a male theocracy) . The fundamental concept here is an Avatip one -- ndja'am -- which encapsulates the idea of total reciprocity between groups. This amounts to a closed system of archetypal categories forming an organic totality because of the transactions of power and effect between them that sustain the polity as a whole.
Sub-clans have a timeless existence. Rather than being defined by their current members, their exploits or achievements, they exist more significantly as funds of ritual power that are independent of the existence of their members. Each sub-clan has a store of names that are associated with particular ritual powers. These are both personal names carried by living people, and also the names of ancestors used as magical spells. This is a closed and finite universe: and thus men compete for names on the assumption these are a limited resource.
Empty descent groups exist as conceptual classes. Harrison has recently argued that this is a common theme in the ethnography of lowland Melanesia.
In these societies, everyone was vulnerable to the violent theft of their name and kinship position, along with their soul-substance, life force, or vital principle. The new possessor of these personal attributes does not seem to have been viewed as some sort of 'impersonator' or counterfeit of an 'original'. Personal identity appears to have been conceived as transferable in a sense in which it is not in Western societies – where it can perhaps be imitated or counterfeited but not actually alienated or reassigned. But in some Melanesian societies it was as though the person were imagined as a kind of miniature corporation sole… capable of being bodily occupied by a series of position-holders…

In Avatip names are considered the source of all magical powers of the sub-clan. These are personal names borne through generations by members. People occupy, they 'are in' names, which are supposedly fixed forever. A set of names then is the past, present and future of the sub-clan, and clan categories are not dependent on personnel. They are timeless, basic properties of the world. Magical and ritual powers are made permanently available to people by the categories -- filling one or another is a source of competition between people, hence the public debates over who has the right to use certain names.
The future is there in the past, we could reasonably say for Avatip. The power any person or group evinces is the same power as was there previously, and as peoples' identities and relations with one another are determined by the name (ritual position and powerful function) they hold, one might say that life and time are recursive, repetitive, or regenerative. Harrison's ethnography is all about how Avatip people compete, in these circumstances, for the ownership of names and thus cosmological power in a stable and limited cosmos.
The names which they are known by are both separate from them, yet hold the power of their future relations to others. Avatip notions of the self take on a particular character in relation to the series of names and marks that put each person in a specific relation to others. And it is these positions that are transactable (or indeed, appropriable) by the transfer of personal names. Here then we see names as actual structural positions in which persons come to have value to one another. This value is not a value apart from this social positioning. The social position and abilities of persons is an aspect of their names.

The ethnographic material from Nekgini and Manambu speakers presents us with a complex series of suggestive analogies to, and differences from, what we know of transactions involving trade marks. I began by pointing out that under trade marks, the name derives from value generated by transactions of other, 'real' or 'substantial' goods themselves. Both Avatip names and trade marks have value because of their relation to other sources of value. Yet Harrison points out that there is a contrast between them. Avatip signs and names are valuable in themselves, they embody or exist as positions of substance or power in their own right. Their 'relational' element is in their contrast with other such positions or powers. That is, their particular definition is against other similar but distinct positions. And the distinction lies in the particular effects of each sign. Trade marks also have value because of their position, but the value of the trade mark lies in its referential quality. Trade marks primarily have value in relation to the objects which they denote or identify. Thus there can be a fear of the counterfeit of trade marked goods (inferior goods assigned with a trade mark for superior goods) which cannot exist for Avatip or Reite names. In Avatip, as we have seen, names can be appropriated, but in appropriating them, the appropriator takes on the substance and value of the name. In Reite, the appropriator is forced to demonstrate their connection to the powers which generated the mark or name retrospectively. They are not in the position of counterfeiter, but of a replacement of another's position as rightful holder of that name. The sign carries with it the substance of its value in a direct, not a referential, manner.
Following from this contrast, we might say that it is the cultural construction of the sign itself as empty, and of value primarily lying in the substance to which it refers, that has the possible result of a fear of counterfeit, as such, in trade mark regimes. This in turn has the effect of separating reputation from the person or object to which it refers. Reputation itself becomes object-like. That is, it becomes a value or good in its own right, which can then be appropriated and used as if it were an object independent of the relationships in which it has come to have value. Legal regimes sanctioning trade marks are put in place to prevent this kind of appropriation of value.
From the point of view of anthropological analysis then, the law of trade marks has a peculiar cultural logic. That logic begins with the premise that signs are empty and denote or reference real things. Once a sign comes to have value in its own right (the subject of trade mark protection, generated through the work of trading particular qualities of goods), that value is transmuted into the value of an object which in turn makes it available for appropriation by others as (an inappropriate) name for another object. Reputation itself comes to have an object like status: a thing, a value, embodied in an object (the mark) which can then be appropriated by a counterfeiter. There is a circularity here whereby the referential sign comes to refer to its own value rather than the value of what it references.
In both the Papua New Guinean cases here, other people are the register of effect. Thus, in Avatip, one's reciprocal responsibilities as part of a wider whole are essential for the maintenance of the cosmos. In Reite, by contrast, seeing one's effects on others shows the emergent capacities and powers of the complex whole that 'places' amount to. Marks, such as Yandi'emung condense that effect into images; 'icons of power'. And these icons contain within them reference to their sources. They have the effects they do because of where they come from, and how they come into being. They are the markers of generative capacity itself, and that is not something any group can have without others.
Harrison begins his monograph on Avatip with the traffic in cultural forms, pointing to the Manambu tendency to import aspects of symbolism and ritual. We have also seen the significance of transactions of symbols, wealth items, foods and persons in Reite. Through looking at the content and effect of transactions in their specific forms, it has been possible to begin to describe how persons come to have the capacities and identities they do, as aspects of a wider system of relations and transactions in which action in others is elicited as a way of coming to know the self.
The fundamental point I wish to draw from this into another social, economic, and political context is that the person, as a particular situated entity, comes into being in relation to others. This is complex process, involving multiple and continuous transactions. I have attempted to show how marks, images and identities are central elements of this process in Melanesia, and in doing so, follow many others. The future of relationships, of productivity, and indeed, reproduction, is shaped and made available through the forms people appear in, and the effects those forms have on other people. I have emphasized responsibility for action in each case: owning names in Avatip carries obligations to others in reciprocal (not necessarily equal) relations. In Reite putting a mark on a person, or giving them wealth items, has ongoing consequences in oscillations of power between the parties, and the generation of certain kinds of personal identity, group identity, and understandings of the self.
Armed with these principles, I return to the simplest aspect of a trade mark as a definition of a value sign. In what specific kinds of transactions between persons do they come to have their status and value, and how is that status and value related to emergent forms of those persons? How does a trade mark work to position persons in respect of one another and to things, and thus participate in the emergence of a particular social form?

A trade mark consists of any sign capable of being represented graphically, particularly words, including personal names, designs, letters, numerals, the shape of goods or their packaging, provided that such signs are capable of distinguishing the goods or services of one undertaking from those of other undertakings.
As I pointed out in the introduction, in this definition, what is pointed to by the sign is something other than it (of course, that is what 'sign' means – although that perhaps means Avatip and Reite marks are not 'signs' in that sense) . That 'something other' is specifically goods/items/services that are 'consumable'. We might pause to consider here whether all values are based on consumable value. The response is obviously not, as even in the above formulation there is a secondary value there in the sign itself which becomes the object of protection. But notice the primary value of the sign (as a trade mark) is not in itself, but in reference to a tangible thing in the world, a service (labour) of others, or an item that is used/consumed by its receiver.
This is a very particular kind of value; a value based on the incorporation of a 'good' into someone else's body (consumption) persona (also consumption as it is used for this purpose), project, etc. The transaction requires that the good itself is taken away, alienated from its trader or owner and incorporated into another person. To describe it thus makes it clear that there is another value here, and that is one in part created by or protected by, the legislation; the value of the sign, derivative of another kind of value, made apparent by the transaction of a consumable item. All well and good so far: being a sign, it cannot have value without pointing to something tangible and material.
What does the sign do in the context of registered trade marks? Well, it identifies a particular object's origin, gives it an identity above and beyond its actual value to the consumer as an item merely of use or consumption, through connecting it to that origin. The value of the sign itself then is a value placed on a mechanism (I think of the mechanism as a technology of a kind), a mechanism to persuade consumers to consume a particular iteration of something that might be more generally available. So we might say that while one owns what one produces as a consumable item, clearly once it is consumed by another, 'logic tells us' as Locke put it, that the item then is part of that other person. It is this connecting mechanism that is owned. If the material goods are the alienable aspect in the transaction, there is an inalienable aspect that travels alongside the item itself. I suggest that this might be understood as one aspect of the future of the relationship. The future of the transaction is made into a 'right', a control or hold over certain actions of others. These rights do not circumscribe all of their actions. Thus, what I describe appears as the application in commerce of simple principles contained in the Enlightenment liberal political philosophy of John Locke and his followers.
Let us look a little closer at the alienation aspect. What the consumer gives the trader by purchasing the trade marked product establishes no ongoing relationship. The consumer's engagement in the relationship is a commodity relation. The transaction establishes no further formal obligation between the trader and himself due to the trade marks, whereas the trader clearly has an additional element at his disposal generated specifically by the form of relationship the trade marks create. The trader has drawn the consumer into establishing a relationship with an image or form, separate from himself. A consumer cannot make a relationship to the trader of that form other than the one binding him (the consumer) into a contract giving the trader the value of that consumer agreeing to recognise the form of their mark in the future. This may sound a little extreme. The consumer is clearly able to purchase from other traders in the future. Yet in buying a consumable, that consumer agrees to an identity, and an identity that has certain value for the trader, which he does not have a formal share in the future of. This then is very unlike a mother's brother giving a name, an inscribed mark, or a call sign to their sister's son. In this latter case, the transaction of a sign ensures each party's future is bound to the actions of the other.
The value of the trade mark sign is something that both buyer and seller are making appear. It is a 'social value' that you as receiver/consumer are party to creating. But the trader's claim this as theirs solely. Hence there is a distortion of the transaction given by the very form of the name or mark that is attached to the commodity. How this distortion comes to appear, and indeed, seem wholly reasonable, is something we should consider.
Annette Weiner has discussed how, in many exchange systems (even those seen as entailing balanced, reciprocal, transactions) one can discern strategies aimed at withholding assets of an important type. These, which she dubs 'inalienable possessions' are elements which represent the identities of the transactors themselves. In Simon Harrison's most recent book, he makes an extension of Weiner's thesis by focusing on how, 'the maintenance of identity often depends on maintaining an exclusive association with a distinctive set of symbolic objects', and this involves 'the power to prevent those defined as outsiders from reproducing these markers of identity'. Weiner's thesis was that as an object moves and circulates in transactions it leaves a more fundamental possession intact, that is, something integral to the identity of the transactor.
This is a useful position, but I want to make use of the idea to underline a different aspect from that which Harrison highlights. That is, the transactions, rather than leaving something intact, have a dynamic or generative element. In the Nekgini material, it is the very act of transaction that precipitates and constitutes the identity of the transactors. This mechanism is equally clear when one thinks about the transactions around trade marked goods. I propose that it is the movement of the consumable item that makes an identity which has value for the trader. It also makes apparent a static position, allows the perception of a stable identity (the seller as another entity) against which the movement of the object can be seen. This in turn has the effect of making that which has not been included in the transaction (what I described as the future of the relationship between the two parties) appear as the essence or internal specification of one of them. It seems then to follow naturally that this aspect should be the trader's alone. (I come on below to the 'future' of the relationship as it is experienced by the consumer.)
Rosemary Coombe has described in detail how trade marks have a 'cultural life' as circulating images and symbols in which their value is constituted by the circulation and re-use of these marks by the public. This co-creation of value leads to conflicts between those who consume and transform goods and services while at the same time cleave to the symbols and identities that the traders appear to offer alongside a consumable item. As Harrison puts it, 'what is at issue… is the propriety of creating private property rights over public symbols and commoditizing valued public icons'. These authors point to something we might conceive of as the common production of such value. And here the comparison with Melanesia becomes pertinent again.
Reite people's actions acknowledge that the power of their marks over other people exists in, is only perceivable in, their effects on those others. While one comes to know oneself through the responses of others, one retains a responsibility for those responses. The form the future of the relationship takes is not always in one's own hands. It is a connection never denied by either party. It is in taking responsibility for the effects of action that a palem, or a person's, reputation is generated. Thus the social origin of value is kept in view. There are inequalities and distortions in the relations these people have with one another, but these do not take the form of denying the common production of value. That is something specific to our own form of political economy. To deny the relations of value generation in Reite would be to nullify the future effects of one's actions, as those effects only register in the further actions of others in respect to one's own. One's personhood is thus bound to this process of mutual effect. Autonomy is differently constituted, thus so is the self.
Now what trade mark law does is to protect something created as an aspect of a transaction between parties which amounts to the commercially valuable identity of one party to the transaction. (These are trade marks). It assumes that persons are in some way coterminous with their images and representations. Yet, in trade mark transactions, goods and sign pass to a consumer with the value of both (good and sign) apparently available, but in fact, the mark or sign of the trader never is actually available for consumption and transformation. Thus the realization of this value is not something that can happen in the relationship with the trader for the consumer (unlike the other way around). The transaction adds value to the sign for the trader.
To explore this aspect further, I turn to look at a common justification for the value of the trade mark system that potentially undermines the analysis I am here developing, certainly if that analysis is read as a critique of the system. That justification is that trade marks do give the consumer future value as well. They give the consumer that value in two ways. Firstly, trade marks help identify trusted sources of goods, and thus assist purchasing decisions. Secondly, they 'help to provide consumers with an identity'. That is, the trader provides the consumer with an opportunity for 'brand loyalty'. I wish to elaborate on this in the following terms. 'Brand loyalty' operates as loyalty to an idea of the self (identity by differentiation) and its desire for alienated objects (to be self-determining) .
By this I mean that there is a reciprocation, but a reciprocation which transforms the general future value of a sign for the seller into an opportunity for the consumer to add their own labour and imagination in developing an idea of themselves as a particular (differentiated) kind of person. It is crucial to this dynamic that the object is just that, a commodity which can be wholly consumed, taken into the person, and which does not have any ongoing link to another person. That the object takes this social form is what makes the consumer able to imagine that they are acting autonomously of others, and thus engaging in an act of self determination by their choice. To choose to consume one kind of object over another is to make one's agency apparent. But that only makes any sense when the objects that are available have a particularly constituted aspect of identity built into them which is not specifically the identity of any other person. The trade mark, or 'qualisign' is then a floating signifier of identity which is available for transaction, but which is actually owned in its significant value generating elements by another 'person' – the trader.
Objects in this transaction appear as though they can become part of the self because they are shorn of obligation to others. Yet we have seen that because of the mechanism of mediation that the sign allows, there is a connection to another 'person', that is, a corporation or trader who retains elements of the image of the person. The relationship is modeled on the interpersonal, when the obligations that each party have to each other are very different.
The trader's obligation is also in some way 'to themselves'. They must continue to trade in recognizable goods. In a mirror of the self-realization of the consumer through the choice of goods, the trader too realizes his identity apparently through their own actions and agency, but in fact, through their reception and recognition by others. This complex separation dynamic allows aspects of the person in a commodity economy to become part of the ongoing value generation placed on the sign or image itself.
In essence then, to own a trade mark is to own an aspect of the future of a relationship with a consumer. The puzzle comes when one realizes that the mechanism works not to connect transactors in the same way as other marks or names do. With trade marks, we see a situation in which people are reciprocally constituting kinds of value for themselves, one side as economic actor, the other a self determining consumer, but in which the future of the relationship established is particular because the logic of the sign-mechanism actually works to ensure that there is no person for the consumer to have a relationship with in the future. All they can do is continue to consume, and thus develop their own sense of self through the fantasy of self determination. The obligations of the trader (reliable quality, easy identification) are a promise of the system of trade marks, when in effect, it seems that the obligations are all on the side of the consumer. That obligation of the consumer is to imagine the development of a self through consuming goods which draw on tropes of value from relations to other persons, but which in reality are empty and require filling by their very need for self-realisation. Unsurprisingly, the generation of a particular kind of self-determining individual is the outcome of a political economy in which trade marks make sense.

A trade mark consists of any sign capable of being represented graphically, particularly words, including personal names, designs, letters, numerals, the shape of goods or their packaging, provided that such signs are capable of distinguishing the goods or services of one undertaking from those of other undertakings.
As I pointed out in the introduction, in this definition, what is pointed to by the sign is something other than it (of course, that is what 'sign' means – although that perhaps means Avatip and Reite marks are not 'signs' in that sense) . That 'something other' is specifically goods/items/services that are 'consumable'. We might pause to consider here whether all values are based on consumable value. The response is obviously not, as even in the above formulation there is a secondary value there in the sign itself which becomes the object of protection. But notice the primary value of the sign (as a trade mark) is not in itself, but in reference to a tangible thing in the world, a service (labour) of others, or an item that is used/consumed by its receiver.
This is a very particular kind of value; a value based on the incorporation of a 'good' into someone else's body (consumption) persona (also consumption as it is used for this purpose), project, etc. The transaction requires that the good itself is taken away, alienated from its trader or owner and incorporated into another person. To describe it thus makes it clear that there is another value here, and that is one in part created by or protected by, the legislation; the value of the sign, derivative of another kind of value, made apparent by the transaction of a consumable item. All well and good so far: being a sign, it cannot have value without pointing to something tangible and material.
What does the sign do in the context of registered trade marks? Well, it identifies a particular object's origin, gives it an identity above and beyond its actual value to the consumer as an item merely of use or consumption, through connecting it to that origin. The value of the sign itself then is a value placed on a mechanism (I think of the mechanism as a technology of a kind), a mechanism to persuade consumers to consume a particular iteration of something that might be more generally available. So we might say that while one owns what one produces as a consumable item, clearly once it is consumed by another, 'logic tells us' as Locke put it, that the item then is part of that other person. It is this connecting mechanism that is owned. If the material goods are the alienable aspect in the transaction, there is an inalienable aspect that travels alongside the item itself. I suggest that this might be understood as one aspect of the future of the relationship. The future of the transaction is made into a 'right', a control or hold over certain actions of others. These rights do not circumscribe all of their actions. Thus, what I describe appears as the application in commerce of simple principles contained in the Enlightenment liberal political philosophy of John Locke and his followers.
Let us look a little closer at the alienation aspect. What the consumer gives the trader by purchasing the trade marked product establishes no ongoing relationship. The consumer's engagement in the relationship is a commodity relation. The transaction establishes no further formal obligation between the trader and himself due to the trade marks, whereas the trader clearly has an additional element at his disposal generated specifically by the form of relationship the trade marks create. The trader has drawn the consumer into establishing a relationship with an image or form, separate from himself. A consumer cannot make a relationship to the trader of that form other than the one binding him (the consumer) into a contract giving the trader the value of that consumer agreeing to recognise the form of their mark in the future. This may sound a little extreme. The consumer is clearly able to purchase from other traders in the future. Yet in buying a consumable, that consumer agrees to an identity, and an identity that has certain value for the trader, which he does not have a formal share in the future of. This then is very unlike a mother's brother giving a name, an inscribed mark, or a call sign to their sister's son. In this latter case, the transaction of a sign ensures each party's future is bound to the actions of the other.
The value of the trade mark sign is something that both buyer and seller are making appear. It is a 'social value' that you as receiver/consumer are party to creating. But the trader's claim this as theirs solely. Hence there is a distortion of the transaction given by the very form of the name or mark that is attached to the commodity. How this distortion comes to appear, and indeed, seem wholly reasonable, is something we should consider.
Annette Weiner has discussed how, in many exchange systems (even those seen as entailing balanced, reciprocal, transactions) one can discern strategies aimed at withholding assets of an important type. These, which she dubs 'inalienable possessions' are elements which represent the identities of the transactors themselves. In Simon Harrison's most recent book, he makes an extension of Weiner's thesis by focusing on how, 'the maintenance of identity often depends on maintaining an exclusive association with a distinctive set of symbolic objects', and this involves 'the power to prevent those defined as outsiders from reproducing these markers of identity'. Weiner's thesis was that as an object moves and circulates in transactions it leaves a more fundamental possession intact, that is, something integral to the identity of the transactor.
This is a useful position, but I want to make use of the idea to underline a different aspect from that which Harrison highlights. That is, the transactions, rather than leaving something intact, have a dynamic or generative element. In the Nekgini material, it is the very act of transaction that precipitates and constitutes the identity of the transactors. This mechanism is equally clear when one thinks about the transactions around trade marked goods. I propose that it is the movement of the consumable item that makes an identity which has value for the trader. It also makes apparent a static position, allows the perception of a stable identity (the seller as another entity) against which the movement of the object can be seen. This in turn has the effect of making that which has not been included in the transaction (what I described as the future of the relationship between the two parties) appear as the essence or internal specification of one of them. It seems then to follow naturally that this aspect should be the trader's alone. (I come on below to the 'future' of the relationship as it is experienced by the consumer.)
Rosemary Coombe has described in detail how trade marks have a 'cultural life' as circulating images and symbols in which their value is constituted by the circulation and re-use of these marks by the public. This co-creation of value leads to conflicts between those who consume and transform goods and services while at the same time cleave to the symbols and identities that the traders appear to offer alongside a consumable item. As Harrison puts it, 'what is at issue… is the propriety of creating private property rights over public symbols and commoditizing valued public icons'. These authors point to something we might conceive of as the common production of such value. And here the comparison with Melanesia becomes pertinent again.
Reite people's actions acknowledge that the power of their marks over other people exists in, is only perceivable in, their effects on those others. While one comes to know oneself through the responses of others, one retains a responsibility for those responses. The form the future of the relationship takes is not always in one's own hands. It is a connection never denied by either party. It is in taking responsibility for the effects of action that a palem, or a person's, reputation is generated. Thus the social origin of value is kept in view. There are inequalities and distortions in the relations these people have with one another, but these do not take the form of denying the common production of value. That is something specific to our own form of political economy. To deny the relations of value generation in Reite would be to nullify the future effects of one's actions, as those effects only register in the further actions of others in respect to one's own. One's personhood is thus bound to this process of mutual effect. Autonomy is differently constituted, thus so is the self.
Now what trade mark law does is to protect something created as an aspect of a transaction between parties which amounts to the commercially valuable identity of one party to the transaction. (These are trade marks). It assumes that persons are in some way coterminous with their images and representations. Yet, in trade mark transactions, goods and sign pass to a consumer with the value of both (good and sign) apparently available, but in fact, the mark or sign of the trader never is actually available for consumption and transformation. Thus the realization of this value is not something that can happen in the relationship with the trader for the consumer (unlike the other way around). The transaction adds value to the sign for the trader.
To explore this aspect further, I turn to look at a common justification for the value of the trade mark system that potentially undermines the analysis I am here developing, certainly if that analysis is read as a critique of the system. That justification is that trade marks do give the consumer future value as well. They give the consumer that value in two ways. Firstly, trade marks help identify trusted sources of goods, and thus assist purchasing decisions. Secondly, they 'help to provide consumers with an identity'. That is, the trader provides the consumer with an opportunity for 'brand loyalty'. I wish to elaborate on this in the following terms. 'Brand loyalty' operates as loyalty to an idea of the self (identity by differentiation) and its desire for alienated objects (to be self-determining) .
By this I mean that there is a reciprocation, but a reciprocation which transforms the general future value of a sign for the seller into an opportunity for the consumer to add their own labour and imagination in developing an idea of themselves as a particular (differentiated) kind of person. It is crucial to this dynamic that the object is just that, a commodity which can be wholly consumed, taken into the person, and which does not have any ongoing link to another person. That the object takes this social form is what makes the consumer able to imagine that they are acting autonomously of others, and thus engaging in an act of self determination by their choice. To choose to consume one kind of object over another is to make one's agency apparent. But that only makes any sense when the objects that are available have a particularly constituted aspect of identity built into them which is not specifically the identity of any other person. The trade mark, or 'qualisign' is then a floating signifier of identity which is available for transaction, but which is actually owned in its significant value generating elements by another 'person' – the trader.
Objects in this transaction appear as though they can become part of the self because they are shorn of obligation to others. Yet we have seen that because of the mechanism of mediation that the sign allows, there is a connection to another 'person', that is, a corporation or trader who retains elements of the image of the person. The relationship is modeled on the interpersonal, when the obligations that each party have to each other are very different.
The trader's obligation is also in some way 'to themselves'. They must continue to trade in recognizable goods. In a mirror of the self-realization of the consumer through the choice of goods, the trader too realizes his identity apparently through their own actions and agency, but in fact, through their reception and recognition by others. This complex separation dynamic allows aspects of the person in a commodity economy to become part of the ongoing value generation placed on the sign or image itself.
In essence then, to own a trade mark is to own an aspect of the future of a relationship with a consumer. The puzzle comes when one realizes that the mechanism works not to connect transactors in the same way as other marks or names do. With trade marks, we see a situation in which people are reciprocally constituting kinds of value for themselves, one side as economic actor, the other a self determining consumer, but in which the future of the relationship established is particular because the logic of the sign-mechanism actually works to ensure that there is no person for the consumer to have a relationship with in the future. All they can do is continue to consume, and thus develop their own sense of self through the fantasy of self determination. The obligations of the trader (reliable quality, easy identification) are a promise of the system of trade marks, when in effect, it seems that the obligations are all on the side of the consumer. That obligation of the consumer is to imagine the development of a self through consuming goods which draw on tropes of value from relations to other persons, but which in reality are empty and require filling by their very need for self-realisation. Unsurprisingly, the generation of a particular kind of self-determining individual is the outcome of a political economy in which trade marks make sense.

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Thanks to Jennifer Davis for her persistence while encouraging me to participate, and for her editorial and intellectual input, to Megan Richardson for her commentary, and to Fleur Rodgers, who talked through the initial analysis of trade marks and transaction with me. Katharina Schneider shared ideas to my benefit and Rebecca Empson kindly commented on a late draft. The inspiration I have taken from Simon Harrison's work should be obvious, as will be the influence of Marilyn Strathern.
'Person' and 'personhood' are technical terms in social anthropology. To study 'the person' is to investigate how an entity must appear and how they must behave in a given social network in order that they are recognised as a person. The emergence of the person in these terms is thus a social issue, and the study of 'personhood' naturally draws in a study of social relations and their formative qualities on both social actors, and upon wider societal forms often approached under the rubric of political economy.
See Gell, A. 1999. Strathernograms. In The Art of Anthropology. (ed.) E. Hirsch. London: The Athalone Press, Strathern, M. 1988. The Gender of the Gift. Problems with Women and problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press, —. 1999. Property Substance and Effect. London: Athalone Press.
See Strathern, M. 2004. Transactions: an Analytical Foray. In Transactions and Creations. Property Debates and the Stimulus of Melanesia (eds) E. Hirsch & M. Strathern. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
See Harrison, S. 2001. The Past Altered by the Present: A Melanesian Village after twenty years. Anthropology Today 17, 3-9, Leach, J. 2003. Creative Land. Place and procreation on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books.
'Underlaps' is to signify shared conceptual underpinnings.
See also M. Strathern Kinship Law and the Unexpected. Relatives are Always a Surprise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) pp 157-160.; and Leach, J. 'Drum and Voice. Aesthetics and Social Process on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea' (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 8, 2002) pp. 713-734.
As Strathern points out, persons are always particular, always one person, not another (see footnote 7).
Or just 'future'.
Art. 2, Trade Mark Directive: 'A trade mark consists of any sign capable of being represented graphically, particularly words, including personal names, designs, letters, numerals, the shape of goods or their packaging, provided that such signs are capable of distinguishing the goods or services of one undertaking from those of other undertakings'
See Coombe, R. 1998. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties. Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law. Durham, NC.: Duke University Press.
As will become clear, these practices are based on different assumptions about the role of marks and names, in turn based upon different operational understandings of the relation of the signs, marks, and performances. As shorthand, I have elsewhere argued that they do not operate with a representational theory of meaning (see for example, Creative Land. Place and procreation on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea (2003 New York and Oxford, Berghahn Books) chapter 7, and 'Out of Proportion? Anthropological Description of Power, Regeneration and Scale on the Rai Coast of PNG', in Locating the Field. Space, Place and Context in Anthropology (eds) Simon Coleman and Peter Collins (ASA Monograph 42, Oxford: Berg 2006), pp 149-162.
And for this reason, these are fascinatingly different from standard commodity purchases.
The Rai Coast is the land that runs east from just south of Madang town on the North Coast of Papua New Guinea and extends to the border with Morobe Province. It is a narrow land, hemmed in to the south by the massive and dramatic Finisterre mountain range and is isolated by its extreme terrain. The area is densely populated in terms of coastal Melanesia with multiple language groups living subsistence lifestyles based around swidden horticulture ('gardening'), small scale animal husbandry, and hunting. All Rai Coast people have some access to the cash economy, and many have small cash cropping schemes, trade stores or cocoa buying and drying operations which produce minimal returns in the vast majority of cases. Their access to print media, and certainly to electronic media, is very limited although local radio stations are popular when people have money for and access to batteries. Common manufactured items present in these hamlets around the turn of the century were kerosene lanterns, second hand clothes, steel knives, and rice/tinned fish. The hamlets that make up Reite village lie between 300 and 700 metres above sea level, and between 7 and 11 km inland from the coast. Each hamlet group is between 20 and 100 people.
See Levi-Strauss, C. 1969. The Elementary Structures of Kinship (trans.) J.H. Bell, J.R.v. Sturmer & R. Needham. Boston: Beacon Press.
'Affines' denotes those related through marriage rather than descent in the technical language of social anthropology.
The punishment for this theft are 'fines' or death through sorcery. However, such fines can be interpreted not as a punishment as much as a demand for substantive proof, after the fact, of the user's claim to inclusion in the generative relations of the mark's production. Thieves of such marks, should they survive, are thus rehabilitated, they are retrospectively redefined though transactions of wealth items and thus included in the generative relations the producers enjoy (see M. Demian 'Custom in the Courtroom, law in the village: legal transformations in Papua New Guinea' (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 9 (1), 2003) pp32-57; J Leach 'Modes of Creativity' in E. Hirsch and M. Strathern (eds) Transactions and Creations. Property Debates and the Stimulus of Melanesia, (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2004), p 168.
See R. Foster, R. (ed.) 1995. Nation Making. Emergent Identities in postcolonial Melanesia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Mauss, M. 1925. Essay sur le don: forme et raison de l'echange dans le societies archaiques. Annee Sociologique (n.s.) 1, 30-186.
See also P. Lawrence 'The Ngaing of the Rai Coast' in Gods, Ghosts and Men in Melanesia (eds) P. Lawrence and M. Meggitt. (Melbourne: Oxford University Press).
See Leach, J. Creative Land (2003) Chapter 5.
ibid.
Gourlay, K.A. 1975. Sound Producing Instruments in Traditional Society: A study of esoteric instruments and their role in male-female relations (New Guinea Research Bulletin 60. Canberra: Australian National University, Leach, J. 2002. Drum and Voice: aesthetics and social process on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8, 713-734.
Harrison, S. 2001. The Past Altered by the Present: A Melanesian Village after twenty years. Anthropology Today 17, 3-9, Leach, J. 2003. Creative Land. Place and procreation on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books.) pp 151-157.
Harrison, S. 1990. Stealing People's Names. History and Politics in a Sepik River Cosmology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bashkow, I. & L. Dobrin. n.d. "Pigs for Sance Songs": Reo Fortune's Empathetic Ethnography of the Arapesh Roads. Histories of Annthropology Annual 2, Harrison, S. 1992. Ritual as Intellectual Property. Man (ns.) 27, 225-44, —. 1993a. The Commerce of Cultures in Melanesia. Man (ns.) 28, 139-58, Mead, M. 1938. The Mountain Arapesh: an Importing Culure. American Museum of Natural History, Anthropological Papers no. 36.
See Footnote 25.
'Totemic categories' refer to divisions between people which mirror divisions between animal species, and other elements within the natural world which are grouped together as belonging to, or dependent upon, each other. To belong to the same totemic category as people in a different language group is thus to share with them an identification with and responsibility for certain behaviour in relation to those aspects of the world.
Harrison, S. 1990. Stealing People's Names. History and Politics in a Sepik River Cosmology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.23.
See also Moutu, A. 2004. Names Are Thicker Than Blood: Cambridge University.
Ibid. footnote 28, page 18.
Harrison, S. 1993b. The Mask of War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, —. 2001. The Past Altered by the Present: A Melanesian Village after twenty years. Anthropology Today 17, 3-9.
Harrison, S. 2006. Fracturing Resemblances. Identity and Conflict in Melanesia and the West. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books.
During the 1980's many Avatip people abandoned their totemic rituals and enthusiastically adopted evangelical Christianity. It is clear however, that in doing so, much of the logic of a theocratic polity was maintained, and transferred onto the new form of religious authority and power (Harrison, S. 2001. The Past Altered by the Present: A Melanesian Village after twenty years. Anthropology Today 17, 3-9.)
Avatip names have an alternate function to and thus different value from other names and signs of the same type.
See also M. Jamieson 'The Place of Counterfeits in Regimes of Value: An Anthropological Approach' (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 5, 1999).
See Munn, N. 1986. The Fame of Gawa. A Symboloc Study of Value Transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) Society. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
See Footnote 30.
Strathern, M. 1988. The Gender of the Gift. Problems with Women and problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press.
See footnote 36. Munn provides a classic Melanesian example which explicitly deals with 'qualisigns', marks of value which condense social understandings and logics and allow transformations in persons through their transaction. Other references abound.
Art. 2, TM Directive.
See footnote 12.
A real difference to Melanesia. Consumable items are one aspect of what is generated by the mark Yandi'emung (gender relations, sexual productivity, the population of the lands with species). The mark activates a particular mode of productive relation itself.
Locke, J. 1946. The second treatise of civil government : and A letter concerning toleration. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Specifically under the terms of the trade mark, that is. There may well be other mechanisms to ensure the product is fit for purpose and so forth, but these are not specific to the individual marked item as an aspect of that marking.
Gregory, C. 1982. Gifts and Commodities. London: Academic Press.
Weiner, A. 1992. Inalienable Possessions: the Paradox of Keeping-while-giving. Berkeley: University of California Press.
See Harrison, S. 2006. Fracturing Resemblances. Identity and Conflict in Melanesia and the West. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books.) p. 7.
ibid: 7.
ibid: 32.
ibid.
L. Bently, L. & B. Sherman. 2001. Intellectual Property Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2001) pp. 656-7.
Purchasing one good rather than another is to differentiate oneself from other purchasers who make different choices.
That is, objects which are alienable through purchase from their owners. These objects appear to have value apart from those owners. This value is wholly transferred to the purchaser on purchase. As the objects in question have an 'identity' or are associated with a particular 'identity', this is apparently also transferable to the purchaser. The act of purchase then appears as an autonomous act which defines the purchaser in relation to an object. Association with objects, and choice over that association, allows a purchaser to imagine that they determine their identity.
It is another aspect of this 'labour' input that Rosemary Coombe points to as the justified basis for consumers to resist the total control over these signs by traders or corporations.
See Footnote 36.
Their identity is generated, just as it is protected, by appearing to offer a relationship, and thus a form of mutual constitution of identity.
J. Davis, J. 2002. European Trade Mark Law and the Enclosure of the Commons. Intellectual Property Quarterly 4, 342-367.