"Global Intellectual Property Law, Indigenous Knowledge, and Indonesian Art "

Lorraine Aragon, Adjunct Associate Professor of Anthropology

Lorraine Aragon is a cultural anthropologist and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Anthropology at UNC. She began studying Indonesian regional art practices in the mid-1980s, and participated in a 2005-2007 multinational research project to consider the possible impact of new copyright and cultural property draft laws on Indonesian artists such as weavers, carvers, musicians, dancers, and puppeteers. Her subsequent research aims for a better examination of the real-world interstices between Euro-American assumptions of an individual creator's agency, Foucault's "authorship," and the presumed opposite: "communal folklore," which often is described legally as eschewing original, independent contributions in favor of an inherited group repertoire.