Scenes from the Colonial Catwalk: Cultural Appropriation, Intellectual Property Rights, and Fashion
2002; Indiana University Press; Volume: 3; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1537-7873
Autores Tópico(s)Art, Politics, and Modernism
ResumoINTRODUCTION In 1907 the English manufacturer Royal Doulton introduced porcelain featuring a design called Art: cups, saucers and plates glazed with red, black, and white to reproduce a suite of interlocking patterns that are generically known as From the 1930s similar patterns have appeared on New Zealand postage stamps, and the koru is currently employed in a decorative border on the two-dollar coin. Since the 1960s Air New Zealand has ferried people around the country and the globe, a koru design on its tail and until the late 1970s plastic tiki given to every passenger. In 1985 packets of New Zealand butter included a small graphic which told consumers a portion of the purchase price was going to support the America's Cup Campaign in Freemantle, Australia. That graphic was a blue and yellow triangle containing a series of alternating bar-stop figures derived from the mature style of the modernist New Zealand painter Gordon Walters; his style, in turn, was based on a geometric version of the koru. Currently, numerous Government departments have stylized koru or Maori weaving-derived patterns in their letterheads, and tourists clamor for Maori art products made both in New Zealand and overseas. Fashion houses, both at home and abroad, have appropriated Maori design as modish. It appears painted on the faces of famous men adorning the covers of fashion magazines, or as part of a global advertising campaign for a sporting goods manufacturer. It enters the world of the pop music market through a tattoo on Robbie Williams' left shoulder by Maori tattooist Te Rangitu Netana. Maori intellectual property would seem from this to be global--certainly it is more widely and more casually received than it has been in the past. In this same year, 2002, Te Waka (the Maori-funding arm of the national arts funding agency) launched Toi Iho a Maori-made mark, which is intended to function as a mark indicating Maori authorship of products and as a quality mark. In addition, the Waitangi Tribunal (the national body established to hear claims arising out of New Zealand's 1840 Treaty of Waitangi/Te Tiriti o Waitangi signed between the Crown and many Maori iwi) is still hearing evidence in one of the most complex claims likely to come before it: the Wai.262 claim on Matauranga Maori (knowledge) and Taonga Maori (treasures). Unlike previous claims, which have focussed on real property or specific resource rights, this claim focuses on the intellectual resources of Maori. The mark and the claim are indicative of the currency of the issues raised in this article; they also register the reality that contemporary indigenous peoples continue to engage with these issues and to develop new strategies in order to shape the manner of the reproduction of indigenous cultural heritage. In the broadest sense, this article sits in a similar time and space inasmuch as it is a discussion of some of the ways in which Maori design has been copied and utilized by non-Maori. Its predominant focus is drawn from two fields of inquiry: cultural appropriation as this has been figured in art history and cultural studies, and the law pertaining to intellectual property. These are, of course, enormous fields in themselves, so to try to come to a closer focus, the article seeks to analyze one part of Maori intellectual property rights, those pertaining to graphic works, and position this analysis in relation to one aspect of their use, the fashion industry. In doing so I register that such a division of cultural terms (intellectual from cultural, taonga from Matauranga Maori, graphic from performance) is, in some sense, artificial, for Maori culture is informed and strengthened by the interaction of its many facets. I declare, at the outset, that I am not Maori myself but claim pakeha identity--which, for me, is a specific identifying nomenclature given by Maori to people who, like myself, are of nominally European, predominantly British descent. …
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