The place of 'culture' in the Access to Knowledge movement: Comparing Creative Commons and yogic theories of knowledge transfer (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

• Published in: Anthropology today Vol. 30; no. 5; pp. 7 - 10
• Main Author: Fish, Allison
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.10.2014; John Wiley & Sons Ltd
• Subjects: Access to information; Activism; Anthropology; Comparative analysis; Conceptualization; Copyrights; Cultural anthropology; Cultural rights; Economic development; Ethnology; Fieldwork; Gurus; Human rights; Identity politics; Intellectual property law; Knowledge transfer; Political ideologies; Property law; Public domain; Spirituality; Traditional knowledge; Yoga
• ISSN: 0268-540X; 1467-8322
• DOI: 10.1111/1467-8322.12130

A fundamental tenet of the Access to Knowledge (A2K) movement is that access to intangibles, especially educational and cultural works, should be open to all. Grounded in a human rights framework, this perspective links open and unfettered access to principles of social justice, freedom, and economic development. This article explores how mainstream A2K debates play out with respect to intangible cultural heritage. In doing so, the discussion contributes to an emerging literature highlighting the tension between individual and cultural rights in this movement through a comparative analysis of how select A2K activists and sanyasi (spiritual ascetics) react to debates surrounding intellectual property claims to yoga. On the one hand, A2K activists, specifically leaders from the Creative Commons community, place primacy on democratic modern law as a principle of social ordering to theorize yoga‐as‐information, information‐as‐disembodied, and information‐as‐neutral. This framework produces an undifferentiated public domain within which the practice naturally resides. In contrast, expert yoga practitioners rely on an interpretation of the guru‐disciple relationship to theorize yoga‐as‐knowledge, knowledge‐as‐embodied, and knowledge‐as‐powerful to conceptualize its placement in a stratified commons. The juxtaposition of these two accounts adds to emergent debates around the construction and management of the public sphere and/or versus the cultural commons, as well as the possibilities and limits both present for community and identity politics. While the article is informed by a larger ethnographic project, it primarily draws from nine months of fieldwork with sanyasi (spiritual ascetics) of the Satyananda lineage as well as my own involvement in the A2K movement.