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ARTICLE

Copyright 2005 SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com)

ISSN 1469-6053 Vol 5(1): 2551 DOI: 10.1177/1469605305050142

Reproduction, creativity, restriction

Material culture and copyright in Vanuatu
HAIDY GEISMAR
Program in Museum Studies, New York University, USA

ABSTRACT
Copyright legislation is often described in relation to a series of
abstract legal and economic constructs, without due attention to the
ways in which it may be constituted by the persons and artifacts that
it legislates over. In this article, I focus in detail on some ways in which
concepts of copyright are negotiated in the South Pacific archipelago
of Vanuatu. I analyze copyright in relation to the technical, social and
conceptual processes of copying, restriction and creativity, respectively, in order to draw out some of the diverse social and material
processes that are built into the legal category. I draw specifically on
my research with Ni-Vanuatu men and women using local resources
to earn money through the production of artifacts for the market
an exemplary context for the emergence of discussions about
indigenous copyright legislation. In describing copyright in one very
local context, I emphasize that focusing on the materiality of different
property forms can enable us to more sensitively understand the
differential constitution of intellectual property rights in an increasingly global arena.

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KEYWORDS
indigenous copyright legislation
materiality Vanuatu

intellectual property rights

INTRODUCTION
The indigenous people of the Pacific, particularly those in the region of
Melanesia, are renowned within ethnographic literature for the immaterial
(or conceptual) ways in which much of their formal imagery is preserved
over time, even in the face of radical social and political change. Notable
examples of this are the Malanggan funerary effigies of New Ireland
(Kchler, 2002), sand drawings of Northern Vanuatu (Huffman, 1996), and
Aboriginal Australian renditions of the dreamtime (Myers, 2002). In all of
these examples, remembered and inherited images, often signifying and
embodying vital acquired knowledge and social position, are momentarily
manifested in a variety of materials, varying from natural pigment on wood
to acrylic paint on canvas. Such diverse materializations of images connect
social processes of creativity and innovation to an ancestral and spiritual
domain of replication; a connection that may facilitate control over the
production and circulation of visual material in ever-increasing circles.
In this article, I discuss the amalgamation of diverse ideas about copyright a practical and material construct that legitimates formal reproduction in the Melanesian nation of Vanuatu (Figure 1).1 I describe the
different ways in which indigenous rules about permissible reproduction
are entwined with international notions of property rights and restrictions
on the sites of three types of artifact: baskets made by women from the
island of Pentecost, carvings made by men connected to rituals of status
acquisition from Ambrym island, and the work of contemporary artists
based in the capital of Vanuatu, Port Vila. In following the status of these
three genres of material culture as intellectual and material property, I
highlight the contextual complexity of copyright legislation. By emphasizing the capability of material culture to synthesize a broad range of ideas
and practices, I expose the ways in which dichotomies such as indigenous
and international are both reified and overwhelmed within the intermeshed processes of social and material reproduction.
The material emphasis of copyright legislation is a good place to begin
to unravel the tensions between conceptions of property as thing and
property as a series of rights directed towards things or a way of knowing
(Kirsch, 2001b) that permeates much of the literature about property and
property relations (Kirsch, 2001a; Leach, 2003; Marx, 1976; Spyer, 1998).
Recent theoretical discussions have highlighted both the importance of

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Figure 1

Map of Vanuatu

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material culture to the constitution of social relationships (Meskell, 2004;

Miller, 1987, 1998), and the benefits of utilizing an ethnographic perspective that takes into account the material as well as social world (Geismar
and Horst, 2004; Miller and Tilley, 1996). I aim to develop this perspective
in order to emphasize the importance of materiality in the forging of intellectual property rights and attendant political economies based upon reproductive restriction.
Throughout this article, I define copyright broadly as official injunctions
and restrictions that establish legitimate entitlement for individual or incorporated entities to circulate and profit at any particular moment from the
material reproduction of specified forms. Copyright may be seen to consolidate rather than divide indigenous, national and international political
economies, to incorporate diversity. Yet this process of consolidation is by
no means uncontested or unproblematic. The material productions that
emanate from such a compressed cross-cultural context still cause trouble
as they move across economic and cultural borders. This is most evident if
we glance at the myriad controversies raised over fakes, forgeries, and
issues of authenticity that emerge in these contextual cracks, for example
in the domain of Australian Aboriginal art production. There, nonAboriginal dealers and local artists alike have a hard time reconciling the
interface between complex social responsibilities and commodity market
mechanisms with the objects that they produce (Bowden, 2001; Merlan,
2001; Myers, 2004).
The work of anthropologists such as Marilyn Strathern may be used to
highlight the analytic potentials and pitfalls of treating Pacific practices,
productions, and reproductions as analogous, yet conceptually alternative,
to Euro-American ones. Intellectual Property Rights (a catch-all phrase
that, not unproblematically, unites a series of diverse ideas about property
and entitlement into a global category) have often been used as a prime
encompassment of such comparative alterity within these discussions
(Harrison, 1991; Pottage, 2001; Strathern, 1999).
In The Patent and the Malanggan, Strathern draws a parallel between
carved New Ireland funerary monuments and international patent legislation, emphasizing the power of each form to regenerate human creativity
and channel technological power (2001: 9). She criticizes the tendency of
anthropologists to read the reproductive restrictions around Malanggan
artifacts as a form of copyright. In light of the immaterial focus on knowledge in the minds of Malanggan producers, rather than on the artifacts
produced by that knowledge, she suggests that patents might be a more
appropriate form of comparison than copyright, the most material form of
intellectual property.
However, in the context of the intensification of cross-cultural debate
around the nature of property, international concern for the definition and
protection of cultural and intellectual property rights (abbreviated here as

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CIPR) has, in the present day, discursively situated the rights and
entitlements to the materialization of many ancestral images within the
domain of indigenous copyright. Following the encouragement of international bodies such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO)2 and World Intellectual Property
Organization (WIPO), international views of copyright have returned full
circle to localities in the guise of national copyright legislations, which
incorporate a plethora of material and reproductive entitlements under the
rubric copyright (Brown, 1998, 2003). While Strathern is at pains to point
out that New Irelanders do not think of Malanggan as inventions (application of technology) nor as describing the original inventive step (patents)
(2001: 15), copyright (and its neo-Melanesian transliteration Kopiraet) is
a term that has passed into common parlance throughout the Pacific islands,
even for some Malanggan producers (Gunn, 1987). Copyright is no longer
just a Euro-American concept, but one with a more global meaning both
an internationalist discourse and an important trope by which to distinguish
local specificity within an increasingly connected, global environment. The
gulf of ideological proportions Strathern describes (2001: 15) has, in this
case, been bridged both by ideas and by objects.

COPYRIGHT LEGISLATION IN VANUATU

During my main period of fieldwork in Vanuatu (200001), the term copyright had heightened resonance due to the passing of the Copyright and
Related Rights Act (hereafter Copyright Act) and its accompanying publicity. The Copyright Act was based upon international guidelines established
by WIPO using Australian copyright legislation of 1968 as a template,3 with
the addition of clauses dealing with custom. Working copyright legislation
is a prerequisite for entrance into the World Trade Organization and, as
such, national copyright acts are being adopted by many nations seeking
acceptance into this global economic regulator. While the Vanuatu legislation has been passed by Parliament, the Act still awaits gazetting.4
Despite internal legal organization around the enforcement of copyright, I
think it is fair to say that, at the time of writing, copyright injunctions are
more effectively enforced within Vanuatu than between Vanuatu and other
nations.
As well as having the potential to constrain the illegal reproduction of
video, music and software, the Vanuatu Copyright Act aims to incorporate
kastom5 entitlements into the national domain, delineating the conditions
of legitimacy for the broad circulation of expressions of indigenous
culture. Prior to this, there were no specific legal mechanisms for the
protection of Ni-Vanuatu CIPR, although there was some supporting

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internal legislation in place within the Vanuatu National Cultural Council

Act, the Preservation of Sites and Artifacts Act, the Island Courts Act, and
elements of the criminal code (i.e. on the desecration of graves). The
National Council of Chiefs and the Vanuatu Cultural Research Policy have
also initiated discussion about IPR, particularly in relation to kastom
(Bongmatur, 1994). In the past, kastom entitlement has been enforced in
local contexts by traditional structures of hierarchy (such as various ritual
ceremonial complexes, see below) and through the medium of village
meetings and local councils of chiefs local judiciaries that function with
variable levels of state sanction (Lipset, 2004: 6566; Rousseau, 2004: Chs
6 and 8). The Copyright Act thus marks one of the first times the state has
formalized traditional entitlement into an internationally recognized
language.
Within the Copyright Act, an expression of indigenous culture is
defined as: any way in which indigenous knowledge may appear or be manifested including all material objects; names, stories, histories and songs in
oral narratives; dances, ceremonies and ritual performances or practices,
designs and visual compositions; and any local specialized and technical
knowledge (Republic of Vanuatu, 2000: 5, authors emphasis). The aim of
such an extremely open definition is to create framework legislation that
can empower local constructions of indigenous entitlement in increasingly
generic circumstances (Wright, 2001: 5). This move follows the drive of
many advocates for indigenous IPR to incorporate sui generis (unique)
concepts into global systems of restriction, fighting a political battle by
offsetting one hegemonic legal structure against another, indigenous, one
(Commission for Intellectual Property Rights, 2002). The result of such an
intentionally loose framework is a series of potential cracks in the cementing of legal categories, especially in the definition of what an object, over
which legislation could be wielded, might be.
A major difficulty for any copyright act is enforcement across national
borders, especially by poorer constituencies that cannot afford extensive
legal support.6 It remains the case that for many people around the world,
international copyright prohibitions remain irrelevant (for example, those
who, with computers and high-speed internet access, download music will
be aware of the recent attempts of record companies to prosecute users,
but may feel fairly confident that they will not be targeted), or resonate
primarily in relation to more local systems of reproductive restriction (an
example more familiar to the reader than the prohibitions of Pacific
islanders might be plagiarism regulations enforced by universities).
Despite these potential pitfalls, economic interest in establishing a
working notion of copyright in Vanuatu is growing for many individuals.
With a population of only around 200,000 people, many of whom struggle
on a daily basis to participate in the cash economy, copyright is seen as an
important mechanism with which to regulate competitive economic activity

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between and within communities, and as a narrative trope that can affect
the material configuration of many kinds of social, political and economic
relationships. The passing of the Copyright Act, despite its current lack of
governmental enforcement, means that kastom entitlement and state
governance are increasingly intermeshed. The Copyright Act determines
that Ni-Vanuatu as well as foreigners who infringe national copyright legislation are potentially punishable with a fine of 1,000,000 vatu (approximately
US$8000, an unobtainable amount of money for most locals) and/or a year
in prison. By extension, the focus on indigenous injunctions may also be
seen as a legal validation of alternative mechanisms for enforcing copyright,
which range from the strictures of traditional ritual hierarchies to the application of sorcery. Not surprisingly, the threat of government prosecution
mixed with attendant grass-roots forms of enforcement has caused a great
deal of introspection and self-consciousness among almost all Ni-Vanuatu
who work making objects for their livelihood, most of them reliant on the
corpus of imagery and styles intrinsically connected to their locality. What
is at stake here is not only the articulation of economic imaginations, but
the very real right to materialize (and thereby control) vital connections
between persons and places, and to capitalize on the attendant profits that
circulating these materialized productions can afford.
The case studies I will now present highlight some ways in which copyright was talked about, and made, in Vanuatu in the wake of the Copyright
Act. It soon became apparent that engagements with copyright varied
greatly depending on who was making what and selling it where. In the
three examples below, I describe how different material forms engendered
very different types of politico-economic engagements with copyright
concepts. I discuss copyright in relation to three activities that crucially
intersect with the object world: technical processes of copying, political
practices of restriction, and liberating ideologies of creativity. By focusing
particularly on the relations between copyright and material culture, I
argue that copyright is not just an internationally oriented legal category,
but a context-sensitive narrative and a very material construct.

COPYRIGHT AND WRONG WEAVING BASKETS,

COPYING PAT TERNS
The reality in Vanuatu is that we live on copies.
(Musician commenting about copyright in the Vanuatu Trading Post,
25 November 2000)

Intrinsic to the formulation of copyright legislation is the basic assumption

that the exact material reproduction of a formal entity (from a song to a

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piece of software) could potentially be an economic threat to the primary

or entitled producer during their productive lifetime. In Vanuatu, as we
saw briefly above, national copyright legislation has been partially built
upon international legislative guidelines and partially on sui generis
mechanisms and ideas about reproductive restriction. In this light, the
comment above seems somewhat problematic. The commentator was referring both to kastom processes of the continued reproduction of ancestral
images and objects, crucial to the inventive production of indigenous
material, and the ways in which non-indigenous material has been drawn
upon by Ni-Vanuatu artists and musicians (see below). He intimates that
from the start, the continual, object-oriented dialectic between copyright
and copying is by no means easy to navigate.
It is easy to forget in concentrating on its official injunctions that copyright legislation focuses on the perpetuation rather than cessation of formal
reproduction. Copyright legislation is established in order to continue sanctioned processes of copying. For example, Microsoft prohibits users copying
software from one computer to another without each user having paid their
due, not to restrict the numbers of people owning the software, but to
monopolize potential profits to be made out of its circulation. Indeed, the
recent cases in the US law courts around the issue of monopolizing
computer operating systems with Windows software makes clear that a
primary aim of Microsoft is for their products to circulate as broadly as
possible. In opposition, the Free Software Movement sees itself as a fundamentally social movement, resisting the economic domination of multinational corporations in favor of an ethic of grass-roots sharing and
cooperation.7 In the following example, I describe a similar rejection of
socio-economic stratification by women weavers from the region of Central
Pentecost, working in the urban marketplaces of Port Vila. One of the main
arguments of the Free Software Movement is that focusing on Intellectual
Property primarily as an object forces political, economic and social
relations to be understood in consumer terms, with an emphasis on
commodity circulation rather than on social contract. Here, I want to
emphasize the importance of recognizing the inextricability of social and
material reproduction. The ways in which software is conceptualized as
immaterial (despite its dependence on access to a host of material forms
from computer hardware to telephone cables and modems) is akin to the
ways in which woven material in Vanuatu is conceptualized as a fundamentally regenerative, quasi-transcendent, social material.

Baskets from Central Pentecost

The women of the island of Central Pentecost are famed throughout
Vanuatu for their brightly colored, patterned baskets, woven from the
leaves of pandanus trees and colored using a combination of natural and

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synthetic dyes. While their vibrant patterns are seen very much as local
island resources, they circulate widely throughout Vanuatu and beyond.
Women in the island make baskets as presents to sell throughout the archipelago, often weaving the owners name into the basket rim. They also send
them to Port Vila, where their friends and relatives are dominant in the
outdoor and indoor marketplaces and where baskets are a commercial
mainstay. Many women from Central Pentecost living in town, often the
primary breadwinners of their household, make their living entirely from
selling baskets. This economic success, coupled with such validation as a
recent basketry research project mounted by the Womens Culture Project
of the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, has ensured that baskets are no longer
considered by Ni-Vanuatu to be a generic craft but are also understood as
important reifications of female identity, as cultural markers and makers.
The most popular kind of Central Pentecost basket is the handbagstyle, known generically as patterned basket (in the Apma language of
Central Pentecost, Matnangwatang). Women create a variety of designs,
using many different colors. Older patterns are gleaned from the outside
world incorporating natural imagery such as butterflies and breadfruit
leaves. These are increasingly combined with more modern icons such as
chicken wire, truck wheels, and razor blades (Figure 2). When I asked
weavers from Central Pentecost, both on the island and in Port Vila, about
the origin of the various basket patterns they were weaving, they either
pointed to a woman sitting nearby, or mentioned another woman from the
region by name. All newer basket patterns are explicitly associated with
individual women who in turn are inextricably connected to a precise place
within the region. For example, a woman from one village described to me
how she had discovered the particular breadfruit leaf pattern she was
working on, and how patterns on baskets move around Vanuatu:
[This design was] created by Chantal from the Catholic area [the east coast
region of Central Pentecost]. It is only a year or so that we have been
making this pattern here. The woman that started it married and moved to
the north of the island. I am making this for a man who requested it. In a
couple of days when I finish it, I will send it to him on Ambae, although I
usually send them to be sold in Vila. (Mary Mabon, Wutsunmel Village,
Central Pentecost, May, 2001)8

Despite the explicit linkage of innovative designs to individual women,

there has been no move to restrict their movements (and thus control the
potential capital to be raised by them) by galvanizing ideas about copyright.
Patterns transmit themselves freely from woman to woman by the
movement of baskets and therefore may be woven by any woman who sees
them. Women see and admire a pattern on a basket that someone is
carrying around and copy it, just as they might see something around them,
such as a truck wheel or some chicken wire, and create a pattern in the first

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Figure 2 Patterning in Central Pentecost baskets. Left to right: chicken wire,

football field, butterfly patterns
instance. In this way, patterns are reified as natural resources and used as
social mechanisms, facilitating connectivity between women and between
women and the world around them.
The fact that copying is viewed extremely positively by weavers from
Central Pentecost reflects the longstanding local practice of basketry:
weaving baskets together is one way that women can openly transfer knowledge and create social bonds. Teaching the younger girls stories, songs, and
implicitly, how to be a woman, is intrinsic to the process of learning how to
weave; accentuating a familiar metaphor that associates woven textiles with
the binding together of social relations (Bolton, 2003; Guss, 1989;
Mckenzie, 1991; Weiner and Schneider, 1989). Baskets are primarily used
in villages as containers for food, and are explicitly connected to ideas about
nourishment. Equally, learning how to weave baskets prepares a woman
for the weaving of mats, artifacts that are exchanged publicly at every
important life-rite on Pentecost and by people from Pentecost living in
town (Walter, 1996).
The close social relationships that are encapsulated by both the idea and
the practice of weaving (and exchanging) textiles are extended into the
overtly commercial domain of the Port Vila marketplaces, where women
from Pentecost gather daily to weave and plait baskets, raffia grass-skirts,
and plastic leis (Figure 3). Here, the act of copying (the exact reproduction
of material made by others) is actively not restricted with recourse to copyright, despite significant economic pressure and hardship for many market
traders. It is immediately striking how women in the Port Vila marketplaces
resist creating the economic and political hierarchies that copyright injunctions can facilitate, emphasizing instead an ethic of fairness and equality.
Every stall in the Port Vila marketplace run by women sells the same

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Figure 3 Women weaving together in the Port Vila marketplace. Left to

right: Marie Sisi, Alison Siveni and Esther. My sister here, she started her
market with only one basket, and then she started to sew dresses and sell
calico, and then she made enough money to buy a piece of land, and now she
has a big business from the market only, from one basket. (Jean Mana, Port
Vila, May 2001)
objects for the same prices. The open transmission of patterns on baskets,
and also on shell jewelry and other market goods, seems to be used as a
way of asserting a moral economic community, minimizing competition as
much as is possible. As Jean Mana, then head of the inter-island Womens
Outdoor Market Association, commented:
The market is for everyone all women and young girls can work at the
market. The market is good, if you dont have work, you can become a
stallholder. You can weave baskets anything you can make, you can come
and sell at the market, and earn some money. In my case, my husband
worked hard, but now he doesnt work, and I am the only one working. With
my small market I can feed me and my children, pay for our house, and buy
all the small things that we need for the house, I can look after my whole
family. Every day you have a little money for bread or what ever else you
want, kerosene. It is better than other kinds of work. (Jean Mana, Port Vila,
April, 2001)

The passing of the Copyright Act stimulated many traders to start thinking
about copyright, and it was immediately apparent that many women
considered copyright to be a potentially collective, rather than divisive,
mechanism. Jean Mana described to me how the concept of copyright was

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applied by women in the market to reify national borders as channels of

restriction. She commented:
Before, we didnt have a law in Vanuatu to protect our copyright. I think we
shouldnt show our custom and culture (how to weave mats or make things
that are special to each island) too much to outsiders. We dont have
factories to make things, and the kastom ways in which we make things are
important, we mustnt let all outsiders know about them because that is our
way of making money. For us, traditionally mats are types of money, the
ways of weaving baskets and weaving mats are almost the same, and if we
sold them to people from other countries, who know how to weave, they
could make them just like us and then we wouldnt be able to sell all of our
things like baskets, weaving and handicrafts, the things that belong to us.
(Jean Mana, May, 2001)

Jean Manas understanding of copyright is that it exists to protect NiVanuatu economic and cultural resources from being exploited, but not to
legislate between Ni-Vanuatu. With this attitude, open forms of copying are
permitted between local women: basket weaving is a collective practice,
to be protected only from other nations, rather than other Ni-Vanuatu. This
attitude is reiterated in the melting-pot that is the Port Vila central marketplace, where women from all over the archipelago share tables, mind each
others children, and watch over each others wares (and where women
from Pentecost comprise over 50 percent of the handicraft stallholders).
As I intimated above, in reference to the Free Software Movement, the
choice to actively reject the potentially discriminatory application of copyright legislation amongst one another is by no means confined to women
weavers in Vanuatu. For women from Central Pentecost, baskets are
conceived as a very particular type of substance regenerative, laden with
metaphors of sociality which in turn effects the ways in which they can
be conceptualized as property. As Marilyn Strathern points out, the definition of technology is in itself a delineation of the domain of nature, each
discursively dependent upon the other (2001: 4). In this way, we might draw
a comparison not only with computer software as it is conceptualized by
those in the Free Software Movement, where an innate immateriality is
emphasized in order to promote the model of shared ownership over that
of individualistic private property, but with natural objects (genes,
children) whose transactions cause discomfort to many when couched in an
economic as opposed to social discourse. All of these objects refuse in
some way to be wholly alienated from society, to become commodities in
the baldest sense of the term. Or perhaps they show us the flaws in models
of commodity exchange that deny the co-dependency of material and social
reproduction.
The keen awareness of women basket weavers that their resources must
be protected from external exploitation highlights the salience of concepts
of copying to the notion of restriction. As the Free Software Movement
advocates the open circulation of software with the proviso that its original

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creators must be perpetually acknowledged in social rather than economic

terms, women in Central Pentecost realize the importance of asserting a
more communal form of ownership of their local basket forms, in order to
exploit them more effectively in an increasingly international marketplace.
As well as selling to dealers and tourists locally, women attend trade fairs
in Australia, New Zealand and New Caledonia and are increasingly
involved in national economic development. Their viewpoints about the
restrictions of copyright thus have the potential to effect a more global
marketplace.

COPYRIGHT: A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF

REPRODUCTIVE RESTRICTION
For women weavers and traders, baskets, as socialized commodities, are
conceptualized as artifacts able to entwine ideas about individual possession and the right to circulate property for profit with a social concern advocating the communal benefits of collective ownership. This view, embodied
in the material form of baskets themselves, incorporates an attitude to the
open sociality of reproduction very different to the emphasis on reproductive restrictions in more conventional understandings of copyright, as found
in most academic and legal readings (Brown, 2003; Coombe, 1998). In my
next example, I will discuss some material that has come to be viewed as
archetypal in relation to copyright legislation in Vanuatu and which is used
explicitly to maintain a more restrictive economy centered on processes of
reproduction. Throughout Vanuatu, the classic understanding of copyright
is connected in both form and practice to the restricted circulation of
carved, wooden images between authoritative men from the northern
region of the island of Ambrym, North-Central Vanuatu (Figure 1).

Carvings from North Ambrym

In Vanuatu, the fusing of ideas about copyright with kastom entitlements
behind the drafting of the Copyright Act has been, to a large extent, precipitated by the success of men from North Ambrym in developing an international market for their carvings. Briefly stated, villagers from North
Ambrym have been exporting their carvings directly to dealers over the past
60 years, sometimes bypassing the middle grounds of the urban centers of
Port Vila or Santo with direct links to New Caledonia, France, and America.
Particularly lucrative are their large vertical slit drums, a prerequisite for
any ceremony, crowned with faces and wearing circular pig tusks as well
as figurative models associated with kastom rank (Figure 4). Small
drums and models of kastom figures, made primarily in response to the
market, are also sold (Figure 5). A growing consolidation of kastom

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entitlement has emerged within these

long-term
market
negotiations,
sparked by intense local competition
over such lucrative enterprise. The
formal delineation of traditional
ritual hierarchies in relation to narratives about copyright has been the
main method by which kastom entitlements are legitimated in this
context.
As well as being highly successful
commodities, the original models for
these figurative carvings are crucial
embodiments of male rank, and
should ideally be produced only by
those who participate in the hierarchical processes of initiation known
in Vanuatu by the generic name,
nimangki, and more commonly
described by anthropologists as
Figure 4 Chief Gilbert Bongtur,
graded societies (Allen, 1981). Allen
from Melbera Village, North
highlights some general characterAmbrym, June 2001, alongside his
istics of male-graded societies in
Mage rank of Maghenehewul,
Vanuatu: each ritual series consists of
carved out of black palm
a number of ranked grades achieved
by men by the ritual sacrifice or
exchange of tusked boars, the purchase of insignia and services, and the
public performance of elaborate ceremonies. Members of grades are
marked by sets of rights publicly materialized by emblems, figures, and
apparel as well as by constraints on eating, sleeping and other activities
(Allen, 1981: 24). These markings of entitlement are increasingly conceptualized using the rubric of copyright. As Huffman comments,
the copyright system recognises certain individuals, groups or areas as the
proper owners of cultural items, the rights to which can be purchased, sold
and resold over large areas in the perpetual spiritual and material drive
upwards and outwards towards increased social height, prestige, power and
influence in the world of the living and the world of ancestral spirits.
(Huffman, 1996: 1823)9

The substance of these ceremonial systems circulates widely across the

region: titles, songs, and images are passed between men, villages, and
islands, creating a coherent yet dynamic network. The anthropomorphic
carvings and drums, revealed ceremonially at the moment of grade-taking
and then left to stand in the sacred spaces of hamlets, are explicit manifestations of male status, conduits of power connecting ancestors to initiate.

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Each figure is named, its title corresponding to the name that a man will
take after passing through each requisite ceremony. The form of the figures
themselves reflects the structure of the
graded society: each rank has its own
figure, a personification of the man
who is taking the grade, and all of the
ancestors who came before him who
share his name. Figures may be differentiated by the arm and leg decorations that they wear, by being carved
from hard wood or from tree-fern,
even by being male or female.10
Despite the seeming fixity of ritual
hierarchy, the innovation of form in
the model figures made for the market
reflects a fundamental dynamism of
the system of status acquisition, which
has, in recent years, expanded to
include more secular activities, such as
the pursuit of wealth in the dealer
Figure 5 Commercial carvings
stores of Port Vila. It is increasingly
made by Bule Tainmal, of Fanla
the case that the model figures have
Village, North Ambrym, drawing
no actual life-sized ritual counteron kastom styles and designs.
parts. While retaining the reproducLeft: model drum crowned with a
tive restrictions, names, titles, and
head from the Rom secret
motifs of the graded society in their
society. Right: model Mage figure
production, it can be said that the
in the form of a woman
marketplace has become one of the
primary inspirations for innovative
production (Patterson, 1996).
Looking at how kastom and national copyrights are entwined in the ways
North Ambrym men talk about who has the right to carve and sell what,
highlights a contemporary contingency of kastom and the commercial, which
has been now reified within the Copyright Act. The regulation of the ceremonial acquisition of entitlement (commonly described in Vanuatu as a
copyright system11) also regulates a more general, island oriented, political
economy: the control by high-ranking men over transactions of pigs, yams,
and increasingly money, both in their island community and in Port Vila,
where significant numbers of men from North Ambrym reside (Rio, 2002).
Carvers from all over Vanuatu use the example of carvings made by
North Ambrym men as archetypal manifestations of the kastom copyright
that was translated into the white mans law in the forging of national copyright legislation. Indeed, reproducing an indigenous carving in material

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form is the sole tangible example used in the section on customary copyright within the Copyright Act (Republic of Vanuatu, 2000: 32). This
comparison emerges from the contrivance of a parallelism between the
exchange mechanisms controlled by the application of copyright legislation
and the rules of restricted ceremonial exchange within the graded societies
in both an individual must pay (either with pigs or money) for the right to
produce (carve or commission), manifest and circulate an image.
However, the link between kastom rights and copyright is more than just
an analogous one: North Ambrym men draw explicitly on the term copyright both in their dealings with the international marketplaces where they
trade their carvings, and within their participation in the graded society.
Men assert their high rank (defined in the form of access to control over
reproduction, increasingly coined by them as copyrights) in order to gain
control over the market and maximize their profits in a number of
spheres of exchange.
The passing of the Copyright Act and the increased awareness of the
economic potential of the legitimate production of kastom artifacts has
reinforced an underlying tension in North Ambrym around moneymaking from kastom material (Rio, 2002). In 2000, the North Ambrym
Council of Chiefs (the kastom arm of local governance) responded to the
growing competition from carvers who had not attained the requisite
kastom entitlements within the graded society, but were still trying to
carve the images associated with these rights, by calling a meeting at which
all high ranking men of the area convened. At the meeting, they transcribed the genealogies of their families participation in the local graded
society, known as Mage. The rights that had been ceremonially paid for
in the past by specific ancestors could thus be profitable to those who
could trace descent from them. It was intended that this local document
would ensure that each individuals family rights to carve particular
images would be made public knowledge, and by extension, become an
enforceable form of indigenous copyright legislation that could be used to
regulate the growing market for carvings. It was assumed that this sui
generis system would in turn be supported by the Copyright Act. The
meeting of chiefs was much discussed on Radio Vanuatu, and the
managers of the Vanuatu National Museum store and the only Ni-Vanuatu
owned dealership in Port Vila, Handicraft Blong Vanuatu, were waiting
for a copy of the document to be sent to them so that they could adjust
their buying policies accordingly. As Marie-Ange Osea, then manager of
Handicraft Blong Vanuatu, commented:
Copyright will give people back their sense of kastom. I really want every
island to write down what belongs to them, and give me a copy so that I can
know what is right to buy and what is wrong, what their kastom rights are,
what children have the rights to make, what family line has this right or that.
It is no good if I buy something and afterwards someone says, they dont
have the right to make this. I am waiting for this to arrive a black and white

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letter to tell me who has the right to carve what designs . . . Each decoration
belongs to someone . . . Copyright will stop people from making things
haphazardly, by only letting people with the right to carve, carve. (Marie
Ange Osea, Port Vila, 19 April 2000)

Foreign dealers were much less enthusiastic at this incursion of kastom

mores into the marketplace both expatriate dealers and carvers from
other islands are often fined, sued for compensation, and threatened or
even punished with sorcery by North Ambrym men for failing to comprehend the restrictive regulations governing the production and circulation
of material designated as kastom. Just after the meeting of the North
Ambrym Council of Chiefs, a prominent Chinese artifact dealer was threatened with both violence and sorcery after refusing to acknowledge kastom
proscriptions and payments around several North Ambrym drums erected
outside her private museum, and even the Mayor of Port Vila was obliged
to remove ceremonial figures he had commissioned to decorate the side of
Port Vilas main highway after North Ambrym elders asserted that their
makers did not have the right to produce them for this purpose.
In this way, carvings from North Ambrym embody an enforceable
system of restriction that enables multivalent understandings of copyright
to be crafted into an effective form of economic and political control. While
many commentators are fearful that international copyright legislation
enforces problematic, ethnocentric notions of property into other, less
powerful, cultural contexts (Brown, 1998), the case of both North Ambrym
men and Central Pentecost women shows how international copyright
mores can also be appropriated and successfully turned to local advantage.
Within these appropriations, the formal substance of the artifacts whose
economic potentials are both commandeered and contained plays an
important part in the constitution of property rights and can increasingly
conjoin divided spheres of interest.

COPYRIGHT AND CREATIVIT Y

I have shown above how different kinds of material are able to mediate
between divergent ideas about copyright and expectations about the potential freedoms and restrictions inherent in material processes of reproduction. By reproducing and transacting their kastom material, women basket
weavers in Central Pentecost try to organize the concept of copyright
amongst themselves in as egalitarian a manner as possible. In contrast,
carvers in North Ambrym have constructed a category of copyright around
the sale of wooden carvings that is starkly hierarchical, based around
complex stratifications of traditional rank and political authority. While the
concept of copyright in relation to both kinds of material focuses on a form
of perpetual replication, both object forms have also become grounds for

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a continual series of formal innovations. As we have seen, women weavers

integrate their new patterns into the socialized world around them, making
razor blades and butterflies analogous in the form of woven leaves. In the
same way, Bule Tainmal, a carver living and working in Fanla village, North
Ambrym, described how he has to establish legitimate (kastom) entitlement
for the new designs he carves, conforming to the expectations of graded
society leaders outlined briefly above:
Often, I have a new idea for a drum and I carve a small one first and show it
to my father before I carve a big one. When I carve a new face for a drum,
one that I cant buy from another man, I still have to make a kastom
payment to my [maternal] uncle out of respect. In the absence of another
man who owns the rights, you pay your uncles [mothers brothers], in respect
of where you come from [your mother]. Then it becomes official. I also pay
two chiefs from Fanla to claim the rights to the new drum. I had to kill two
pigs whose tusks had gone through their jaws and three more that had
almost gone round again, plus four small pigs and 40,000 vatu. (Bule
Tainmal, Fanla village, North Ambrym, June, 2001)

In response to the complex insider/outsider boundaries created by such

delineations of indigenous copyright, many of the established dealers in
Port Vila have abandoned dealing with kastom artifacts, focusing purely on
new traditions objects made explicitly for the market still considered to
be indigenous, but without overly strong connections to traditional practices. Such material is exemplified by the work of a growing number of
contemporary artists in Port Vila, the final body of material I will examine
here. Contemporary art in Vanuatu is produced almost entirely in a metropolitan, commercial context, yet contemporary artists rely heavily on kastom
imagery and iconography to carve out their unique identities. It is vital that
they successfully navigate the social obligations and reproductive restrictions that are so closely associated with indigenous material, while reproducing local imagery in a recognizable way. In order to do so, contemporary
artists explicitly utilize concepts of creativity in much the same way as other
artists around the world: as a liberating, individualistic discourse that enables
the free appropriation of style and image to be presented in radically new
environments and media (Geismar, 2004; Krauss, 1986). In this way,
creativity is constituted as a conceptual antithesis to the various social,
political and economic responsibilities engendered by copyright, and
contemporary art objects are freed of their reproductive shackles. In a sense,
this last case study is a way of understanding copyright from the other side:
a material zone within which copyright legislation is itself restricted.

Contemporary art in Vanuatu

The primary criteria of membership outlined by the Nawita association of
contemporary artists, the oldest and most established group of contemporary
artists in Port Vila, defines the contemporary explicitly against the concept

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of kastom and excludes those working with traditional media and traditional
principles (Regenvanu, 1996: 312). The division between contemporary and
kastom made by artists working in this context is fundamentally material,
kastom being tentatively (and somewhat ambiguously) understood in terms
of technological process and media. Ideas about copyright in relation to
contemporary art thus prohibit the exact physical reproduction of artifacts
designated as kastom. Contemporary artists can neither copy directly from
local resources (as in the case of Pentecost basket weavers) or call their innovative work kastom (as in the case of North Ambrym carvers); instead they
make recourse to a third discursive and technical strategy: creativity. The
creative use of kastom imagery or motifs using non-traditional media is
considered to be vital to the constitution of the identity of contemporary
artists. Making art thus becomes a careful accomplishment: to be indigenous, but not too traditional; to be contemporary, but not to lose touch with
a local corpus of objects and images. Artists in Vanuatu are able to delicately
balance between these categorical distinctions by virtue of an authentic
position of entitlement to creatively absorb and rework kastom material.
Without being indigenous, the entitlement to eschew restriction is less
legitimate. We have seen this in the case of the recent controversy over
Australian painter Elizabeth Durack, who on occasion, paints under the
guise of an Aboriginal man, Eddie Burrup (Myers, 2002: 32341, 2004), and
similar contestations have occurred in Vanuatu (see below).
The relationship between contemporary art and kastom material focuses
on complex criteria of the indigenous, which oscillate between the perpetuation of a paradoxically ahistorical vision of the past represented in
creative, dynamic, highly politicized and novel form, produced by persons
with incontrovertible connections to indigenous place (or blood-ties). This
may be exemplified by an incident that occurred in Port Vila, which was
described several times to me in 2000. Before any exhibition of contemporary arts, kastom representatives are invited to check that nothing on
display infringes kastom strictures. The only reported case of censorship
has been that of an Antipodean accountant, who painstakingly crafted a
miniature replica of the Pentecost land dive from matchsticks and won first
prize at a national art competition in 1995. Once his nationality was fully
realized by the chiefs acting as judges he was stripped of his award (Linda
Bayer, personal communication, October, 2000).
A contrast to this restriction of creativity (commonly glossed in Port Vila
contemporary arts circles as copyright) can be found in the work of
Juliette Pita. Pita is the only female Ni-Vanuatu member of the Nawita
association (although there are several female expatriate members). She
earns her living mainly by hand-painting designs on T-shirts and shirts to
be sold to tourists, and at the same time is building an international reputation through her work in tapestry. As part of a collection I made for the
Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, she
created a stylized sewn depiction of the Pentecost land diving ceremony

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Figure 6 Juliette Pita with Land Divers, Port Vila, May 2001. Wool tapestry
depicting the Pentecost land dive (Nangol), a precursor of the bungee jump
entitled Land Divers (Figure 6). In the tapestry, four men leap to the
ground, watched by the staring eyes of an Ambrym slit drum.
Pita is aware that she treads on sensitive ground here. When asked about
the motifs in her tapestry she commented: I havent made this exactly like
[people from] Pentecost or Ambrym, it is straight from my own ideas . . .
I have created everything that you can find in Vanuatu, if you just look with
your own eyes (Juliette Pita, Port Vila, May, 2001). As we have seen above,
making things already claimed by others using criteria of the indigenous
is considered in Vanuatu to be an infringement of copyright. At the same
time, contemporary artists are aware that this is at odds with the creative
possibilities of painting the world as you see it. During a conversation
about the copyright act, one Port Vila artist asked me what would happen
if someone painted something that they had witnessed, and it later proved
to be the same as an image circumscribed by kastom conventions. His
answer to his own question echoed the musician I quoted above: the reality
in Vanuatu is that we live on copies. This tension between creativity and
replication in depicting the experience of viewing both the social and

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natural world (which could involve the replication of viewed images) is by

no means unique to Vanuatu: to give but one example, look at the overt
challenge raised by American artist Sherrie Levine who has faithfully rephotographed a series of images by iconic photographer Walker Evans.12
Pitas appropriation of two kastom icons (Pentecost land diving and
Ambrym drums) shows that Ni-Vanuatu artists are in some instances able to
evade the increasingly sensitive issue of copyright through recourse to their
own (newly nationalized) indigenousness. Despite the predicament of the
expatriate accountant above, it is fine for Pita to create a stylized depiction
of the land divers, even though her natal affiliation is with the southern island
of Erromango, rather than Pentecost. However, such distinctions are also
becoming increasingly tenuous (Jolly, 1994). For example, it remains to be
seen how long women from Central Pentecost can hold on to Central Pentecost-style baskets in the context of the outdoor marketplace, where they
weave alongside women from throughout Vanuatu. When will their patterns
pass into the national domain as have the depictions of the Pentecost land
dive or Ambrym slit-drums? It seems to be no coincidence that the two
islands most adept at working the market for kastom should also be providing the symbolic imagery subject to national generification (Errington and
Gewertz, 2001; Myers, 2001). At present, such forms of material culture are
crucial grounds of political definition of what it means to be an indigenous
player in widening spheres of exchange. As this balance shifts between these
contexts, so do the attendant entitlements and property relations.
At this time, contemporary art objects still overwhelm the reproductive
restrictions of kastom copyrights through a sort of material sleight of hand.
Images are transformed into different types of object: from wood to paint,
clay to tapestry. This untouchable form of pure innovation is very much
in keeping with the rationale behind international CIPR legislation: that
ownership rights to objects are clearly defined by the very tangible (or
material) relations between persons (and increasingly by corporate entities,
whether they be companies or native collectives), and that their productions are constituted out of the originality and creativity of these individuals. While seeming to transcend the reproductive restrictions of
copyright, contemporary art objects may also be understood as a formal
basis for the philosophical perpetuation of claims to original entitlement.

CONCLUSIONS
Close analysis of the way in which copyright is both constituted and
enforced on the ground in Vanuatu as a legal category demonstrates a
contingency of processes of copying, a political economy of restriction, and
a rhetoric of creativity. The material world itself is vital to the formation of

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all three of these ideas in relation to over-arching copyright narratives.

Handlers assertion that culture does not reside in material things, it resides
in or better, is ceaselessly emergent from meaningful human interaction
(2003: 354), denies the crucial importance of materiality in the constitution
of concepts such as culture itself. As new objects are produced in Vanuatu,
out of the interaction of local mores with changing domains of social and
political experience, so too are new conceptions of entitlement emerging
that increasingly (re)define boundaries between nation-states as well as
islands, regions, or even villages. What is clear in all of the cases I have
described, is that despite the diverse ways in which ideas about copyright
are interpreted and implemented, legislating around copyright has become
an arena within which localized political and economic entitlements are
increasingly extended and contested in wider and wider spheres of interaction, as much as global, generic conceptions of IPR regulation are
extended into the locality. As Lipset comments, the law may not only be
used politically, but may also have rhetorical value, particularly in colonial
and post-colonial settings, where it may be deployed to represent and
convey ambivalent attitudes, not only about justice, but no less about local
constructions of personhood (2004: 634). In this way, Stratherns gulf of
ideological proportions may even be dissolved, rather than only bridged
by legislative acts and actions.
As well as being a mediator of contextual complexity, copyright may also
be understood as a narrative trope that articulates various kinds of political
and economic tensions and imaginaries: a discourse and a practice constituted in relation to particular kinds of object in particular contexts. For
women from Central Pentecost, handling copying and copyright in relation
to baskets is a way of creating idealized egalitarian economic and social
relations, and a way of organizing collectives both in island villages and Port
Vila marketplaces. For North Ambrym men, promoting national copyright
legislation is a way of extending idealized kastom hierarchies and political
authority from the island into the burgeoning international marketplace.
For contemporary artists, working with the ideology of creativity can aid in
navigating between creativity and kastom, transcending problematic
restrictions, as well as enforcing, through oppositional distinction, important definitions of indigenous entitlement.
I have tried here to describe the complex material world that facilitates
the forging of the descriptive categories that legislation relies upon. In
particular, I have emphasized the ways in which copyright legislation can
help people to think about the production and circulation of objects within
new domains of experience. Copyright, as a generic protective mechanism,
need not only lead to the promotion of only one set of idealized property
relations and attendant entitlements. In Vanuatu, the Copyright and
Related Rights Act has been interpreted, and implemented in grass-roots
practice, if not national law courts, differently in accordance with the types
of material that are being produced and reproduced. This has implications

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for how we understand the copyrighted material that surrounds us all on a

daily basis from computer software, to music, art, and digital reproduction. What I have underscored here is the capability of copyright legislation
to incorporate economic and social imaginaries, and its material and
malleable role within a political economy that balances processes of restriction and reproduction between persons and things.

Acknowledgements
This article has been drawn from doctoral and post-doctoral research conducted in
Vanuatu (20002001, 2003), supported by the Economic and Social Research
Council, University College London, the Cambridge University Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology, and the Vanuatu Cultural Centre. I am extremely
grateful to all of these organizations. I am grateful also to Barbara Bodenhorn, Lynn
Meskell, Ralph Regenvanu, Benedicta Rousseau and four anonymous reviewers of
this Journal, for editorial advice and insightful commentary and criticism. All photographs are my own.

Notes
1 Vanuatu is a country of 85 inhabited islands set in the Melanesian region of the
south-west Pacific. Between 1906 and 1980, it was governed as the Joint
Anglo-French Condominium. Upon independence, citizens of Vanuatu took
the description Ni-Vanuatu. Most inhabitants speak Bislama, the national
pidgin English (Crowley, 1990), alongside either French or English and their
local language, of which there are over 110.
2 http://www.unesco.org/culture/copyright/; http://www.unesco.org/culture/
heritage/intangible/html_eng/index_en.shtml and UNESCO (1970, 1999).
3 This has since been revised by law, number 34 of 2003.
4 As well as Copyright and Related Rights, Trademarks, Designs and Patents
Acts have also been passed by Vanuatu Parliament. As none of these acts have
yet been gazetted, they are not currently enforceable. While the Vanuatu
Government has long-term plans to join WIPO, and eventually the WTO, this
is unlikely to take place in the near future (Ralph Regenvanu, the Director of
the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, personal communication, 1 April 2004).
5 The term kastom, and its variants, has been galvanised throughout Melanesia
as an indigenous possession, conceived in direct opposition to the practices
and artifacts of the west or of white people. The concept reflects a complex
self-consciousness about history and development, for both indigenous
persons and foreigners. Throughout this article, I use the term to broadly refer
to the body of artifacts, practices, knowledge and representations that are used
to determine indigenous culture in Vanuatu, generally by building on a view
of a collective past in the present, seemingly bypassing the colonial period, and
working to establish the legitimacy of an indigenous political economy and
nation-state. For deeper discussion, both in relation to Vanuatu, and the region
of Melanesia, see Jolly and Thomas (1992), Keesing (1982), Lindstrom and
White (1994), Norton (1993), Otto and Thomas (1997, especially Jollys paper)
and Rio (2002: Ch. 4). For some examples of discussions about the more

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48

7
8

10

11

12

material aspects of kastom in Vanuatu, see Bolton (1994, 2003) and

Bonnemaison et al. (1996). Throughout this article, I use the term kastom in
lieu of traditional or customary, both in recognition of the terminology used
most commonly by ni-Vanuatu and to emphasize that the longstanding notion
of custom in law is not necessarily interchangeable with that of kastom. I
thank Benedicta Rousseau for drawing my attention to this distinction.
http://www.mq.edu.au/house_of_aboriginality/network.htm for an unusual
success story of copyright enforcement on behalf of Aboriginal Australian
artists.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html and
http://www.copyleftmedia.org.uk/
All interviews were conducted between 20002001, and translated by myself
from Bislama. I have used the real names of all interviewees, with their
permission.
The local, often ritualized, exchange of intellectual property has been well
documented in Vanuatu (Allen, 1981; Layard, 1942; Lindstrom, 1990), as well
as in other parts of Melanesia, predominantly Papua New Guinea (Harrison,
1991, 1993, 2002; Kalinoe and Leach, 2001; Strathern, 1988, 1999; Sykes, 2001;
Wagner, 1986). These exchanges have often been analyzed as indigenous
reckonings of cultural and intellectual property, including copyright. While
much of this literature discusses potential tensions around the cross-cultural
applicability of such terms as property and copyright, as a body, it
demonstrates that exchanges of knowledge and artifacts are unequivocally
intertwined and that the rhetoric of CIPR (of borrowing, purchasing, lending,
and other exchanges) has a longstanding history in the region.
Although the graded societies that Allen (1981) discusses are restricted to
men, they occasionally have analogous female institutions, and women often
follow their husbands into higher rank. However, on Ambrym, a man may
possess the right to carve a female figure, which could be representative of a
male grade, in a mythic acknowledgement that much of male ritual practice
was stolen from women. The current public controversies around copyright in
Vanuatu, such as those raised by the North Ambrym Council of Chiefs, all
focus, as far as I know, on the material culture made by men.
The Bislama translation of copyright into kopiraet (or kastom kopiraet in
reference to indigenous restrictive mechanisms) is widespread, but ideas
translatable into this term have a long local history. In North Ambrym, for
example, I was told that the local word namyelku (which was translated
literally for me as I buy possession) is also exactly translatable as copyright.
See www.aftersherrielevine.com for a virtual presentation of this issue, which
explicitly uses the open model of distribution encouraged by open-source
software.

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HAIDY GEISMAR completed her doctoral and post-doctoral research

in the Department of Anthropology, University College London and the
Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. She is
currently Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in the Program in Museum
Studies, New York University.
[email: haidy.geismar@nyu.edu]

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