SEITEL

 Traditional Knowledge

 In this conceptual system, traditional knowledge is the knowledge (composed, like culture, of categories and manipulations of them) that both underlies and is increased by traditional processes. Traditional knowledge informs traditional practices by guiding their practitioners. By enacting these processes, the practitioners also elaborate and augment traditional knowledge. The products of traditional procedures are not only the material and spiritual cultural artifacts needed by a particular group of people. The procedures also produce new knowledge. Traditions are valuable both because they enact knowledge that can meet current community needs and because they develop new knowledge that can adapt to changing conditions and/or refine a practice to better serve the community. In this conceptual system, traditional knowledge and traditional culture are both composed of categories and manipulations, but they differ in their distribution within a particular 6 society. Traditional knowledge is shared and developed among practitioners of particular traditions, whereas traditional cultures are more widely shared. One might divide traditional knowledge into categories of instrumental knowledge and ethical knowledge. The former is composed of knowledge of how to do various things, while the latter is composed of ethical and spiritual values that inform social action. The two are not always easy to separate, but both are sustained, increased, elaborated and adapted in the exercise of traditional processes. The products of traditional processes are useful to the communities defined by traditional cultures, but they may have utility for people outside those traditional cultures. Healing drugs - products of traditional medical practices - may be taken into a globalized pharmaceutical industry. Designs that are the products of traditional artistic or religious practices may be useful for a globalized textile industry. Music and song that are products of traditional performance practices may be absorbed into the aesthetic mix of a global entertainment industry. This use of the products or expressions of traditional processes by a larger, often international, commercial system can be called commodification, in which products or expressions developed in a local cultural system of exchange are used by a wider commercial system of exchange. Legally, this process involves intellectual property rights, and, thankfully, \VIPO seems to have become more active in developing an international system to defend them. The products and expressions of traditional processes are unfortunately subject to another kind of use that usually happens on a national scale. Often the appearance and behavior of members of traditional cultures are exoticized -- selected and transformed so as to appear very different, without a rational meaning, and above all aimed at creating the sensual-intellectual attraction of being intriguing. Another form of this kind of distortion of the products of traditional processes is "folklorization" - the re-stylization of traditional expressions so that they become less complex aesthetically and semantically. They thus reify the notion of a dominant culture (the one whose knowledge informs and is developed by official administrative and educational institutions) that folklore is not as complex or meaningful as the products of high, elite, or official cultural processes. Legally, I believe, this kind of distortion involves moral rights in artistic production, and WIPO should be encouraged to protect these as well.

Peter SEITEL