The Göttingen Research Group on Cultural Property has moved its blog to a new address and is as of now integrated with the group’s homepage at
http://cultural-property.uni-goettingen.de
This blog will no longer be updated and eventually be merged with the new homepage.
Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin, ed.
Göttingen Studies on Cultural Property, Vol. 2. Göttingen: Göttingen University Press 2011, 224 Pages, Softcover, 38,00 EUR
ISBN 978-3-941875-61-6
Der Band kann auf den Seiten des Göttinger Universitätsverlages bestellt werden und ist zudem unter einer Creative Commons Lizenz als PDF verfügbar.
Regina Bendix/Kilian Bizer
Interdisziplinarität ist nicht nur ein Etikett, das die zeitgenössische Universität, geprägt durch Exzellenzinitiative, W-Besoldung, leistungsorientierte Mittelvergabe und vielem mehr, nutzt, um sich auszuzeichnen als besonders fortschrittlich, weltoffen und -zugewandt. Interdisziplinär angelegte Forschung ist auch eine Herangehensweise an die komplexen Herausforderungen einer heterogenen, globalisierten Welt, und tritt dem Bild des Elfenbeinturmes, in dem sich seine WissenschaftlerInnen verschanzen, wirkungsvoll entgegen. Interdisziplinarität wird unterschiedlich theoretisiert; sie lässt sich gemäß der hier beigezogenen Analyse von Barry, Born und Wszkalnys als ein Kontinuum charakterisieren, das von Multidisziplinarität über Transdisziplinarität bis hin zur Interdisziplinarität im engeren Sinne reicht. Während ersteres ein Nebeneinander von Disziplinen meint, die am gleichen Themenkomplex arbeiten und einander punktuell zuarbeiten, adressiert Transdisziplinarität ein gesellschaftlich wahrgenommenes Problem und vermittelt bzw. kooperiert mit gesellschaftlichen Akteuren. Interdisziplinarität im engeren Sinne inkludiert eine auch methodische Zusammenarbeit, die die Grenzen zwischen den Disziplinen zumindest ansatzweise verschmelzen lässt. Diese Form der Interdisziplinarität ergänzt den methodischen und ideologischen Kanon der jeweiligen Disziplin, um das adressierte Problem einer besseren Lösung zuzuführen.
Dieser Beitrag untersucht, auf welche Weise Interdisziplinarität in der gesellschafts- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Forschung zu gestalten ist, um einen Beitrag zur gesellschaftlichen Problemlösung zu liefern. Dabei stellt er Defizite in der Vergabepraxis interdisziplinärer Verbünde insbesondere durch die DFG fest und entwickelt daraus Empfehlungen für die Fortentwicklung der Förderrichtlinien. Abschnitt 2 konkretisiert zunächst, warum Interdisziplinarität einen Mehrwert verspricht. Abschnitt 3 fragt nach den Bedingungen für das Funktionieren von Interdisziplinarität. Abschnitt 4 formuliert Empfehlungen anhand von Beispielen für die Förderung von Verbundvorhaben. Abschnitt 5 dient der Schlussbetrachtung.
Rather than summarizing the opposing points of view, let me point to the crevices of interdisciplinarity that become apparent in this debate: the social significance or even legitimacy of intellectual inquiry look very different for an economist’s and a cultural anthropologist’s point of view. The former has several decades of research experience and participation in endeavors that not only suggest but demand policy recommendation and he demands – not without caveats – that investigating the constitution of cultural property result in policy recommendations. Society as the client ultimately paying for our work might otherwise just decide that work such as ours might not be worth funding anymore. The cultural anthropologist in the process of finishing his dissertation delimits the boundaries within which he could permit recommendations. He draws on the foundational history of humanistic inquiry and updated stances of post-war critical theory. Both to him combine into a sufficient bulwark against forgetting the power asymmetries existing within the very problem that we investigate.
Are there possibilities to reach common ground – or at the very least productive cooperation – between disciplines as different as law, economics, cultural anthropology and ethnology? We would like to think or imagine that there are, and in the days ahead of us, we hope to illustrate where we have found the possibility of working in tandem or at the very least next to one another in addressing arenas within which cultural property is constituted.
On Friday morning, finally, we will return to this debate and further input on how this group has experienced interdisciplinary research between fields of inquiry not usually teaming up together and we will – this at least I would like to promise – seek to come up with policy suggestions for funding organizations and universities with regard to fostering interdisciplinary work.
The affirmative speaker rightly alluded to the question why society takes upon its shoulders the burden to finance and maintain the sciences. The obvious answer to this question is that the sciences are beneficial for society, and yet, in this constellation where technically speaking the maintaning society has an interest in maintaining, there is the problem of accountability and sometimes also that of transparency: how can we measure if what we pay to upkeep universities – let alone the humanities – is balanced out by the contribution the sciences make to society?
This notion of the relation between science and society as one between principal and agent as an ex-post-facto argument presupposes a crude historical understanding of the social functions of the university. One could, of course, with a coup de main swipe away the Humboldtian tradition within which European universities stand, and just as easily subordinate the sciences to financial calculation. But the way in which this question is posed misses the point, as it takes a symptom of post-modern society to be an universal and moreover primordial context of justification – a symptom that should rather be the object of investigation and scrutiny than be taken as a guiding principle. Horkheimer termed this the “critique of instrumental reason” – a social constellation where the effectivity of the means is valued more than the reasonability of the purpose; where the immediate – often monetary – gains trump the project of the enlightenment that has the flaw of the metaphysical.
Given its ubiquity, the doctrine of effectiveness and its materialization in the German university system can easily be understood as being without any alternative. From a pragmatistic point of view – think of LOM and third-party funding – this logic is efficacious indeed. Yet, if one subscribes to the notion of the sciences or scholarship as something that tries to think beyond the given, i.e. not within the socially inherent logics of effectiveness and not within a positivist scientific system, this approach has to be discounted as – in the last instance – uncritical, and thus not able to take into account social totality.
This coincides with an apparent different use of terminology and the interrelated conceptions of normativity and positivity. By no means are the disciplines described by the affirmative speaker as “positive” – specifically European Ethnology and Social and Cultural Anthropology – positivist in the way the term is used in the history of thought. These disciplines by no means shy away from the “normative sphere”, i.e. do not concern themselves with questions of normativity. It is rather the other way round, as their scholarship to a great extent combines descriptive and hermeneutic approaches with socially and culturally articulated norms and values – thus measuring ideational social values, standards and goals against their realizations. These disciplines well-nigh call for discussions of the normative; and the description of social grievances, problems, and inequalities is not not-normative when it does not propose normative guidelines and policies. Critique, to stress this term again, does in this sense not have to be constructive in order to be productive. It can well be only negative and acknowledge that there are certain situations where solutions to particular problems cannot be found on the level of the particular.
This is, in a way, the crux of modernity: that the bourgeois promises of freedom, equality and fraternity – at least for some – has been followed up on, and that in the same moment the individual is burdened by an enourmous bundle of constraints and grievances. Especially with regard to Cultural Property legislation, this void between the normative standards and their implementation (and realization!) is gaping so wide, that this inconsistency and asynchrony downright coerces the view away from the particular to the general. In the face of immense (global and social) inequalities, treating the Cultural Property conundrum as an isolatable phenomenon that can be solved for the better by adjusting exiting legal mechanisms and policies seems fairly optimistic. It neglects the fact that the best solution for Cultural Property rights reproduces social and political inequalities. The norms used as a tool to draft these recommendations are, after all, not manifestations of universal values without contradictions, but the result of social, political, and economic struggles.
Some anthropologists – among others – call the resulting social constellations asymmetric power relations, and they are one of the reasons why the market alone cannot really function properly. If asymmetric power relations exists – and they barely fail to do so – the task for scholarship should be to analyze these situations, point to inconstistencies, uncover problems, implications, broader contexts and social wrongs. This then is indeed normative as well, and it is indeed a valuable contribution to social problems. Yet, it differs from policy recommendations in the way that it acknowledges its limitations.
In his stance against policy recommendations Stefan Groth tries hard to end on a positive note: He sees a potential for the debate on cultural property to be placed within the greater context of societal problems and finds that this in itself is a form of recommendation. Apart from this, and he is making this very clear, there is no room for a “culture of recommendation”.
Do I disagree? Taking a holistic approach to the world will make it difficult for Stefan Groth or anyone else to come to a recommendation – I agree. Taking a holistic approach will make almost anything difficult, including a precise description. There are good reasons for being reductionist at times, and I myself find it difficult to walk on the fine line between being too holistic to say something meaningful and being too reductionist to not be trivial. From casual observation I feel, that economists are more often in danger of being too reductionist while anthropologists may be more at risk to be too holistic. But we clearly disagree on the scope for recommendations within social science.
Let me put in simple terms what Stefan Groth suggests: If we, society’s social scientists, make some finely tuned observations about how a conflict over something indefinable “cultural” in some equally nebulous social context such as an “indigenous society” or a “modern society” takes place, then policy maker’s time has come to make something out of it – or leave it be. In his perspective, I understand, policy recommendations are an accidental by-product of a scientific process aiming for something else. And ‘accidental’ he would understand rather in the sense of a casualty than a probabilistic event.
My point, by contrast, is that social scientists may aim for whatever they wish, e.g. understanding or enlightenment, but they must address in the end how societies’ institutions should or could be altered to bring about different outcomes. I am well aware that scientific progress is never quite as straightforward so as to end every paper with meaningful policy implications but we must grow with the challenge. I would like not merely to create a “culture of recommendation” but clearly demand that recommendations are understood as an ultimate test for the usefulness of a science project.
Most social science research I have come across starts out with some kind of a vague idea about a possible problem. Most academics are used to explain why their research is relevant to others and to society at large. Very few, me included, would expect large crowds to develop an interest in their issues, and are happy to find the few across the world who work on similar or related issues.
Putting the idea of the problem in words for a first time, as done by Regina Bendix in our research group on cultural property about six years ago, is equal to deciding on a lot of normative issues: On what do I place my attention? What is of interest to me? What do I accept as a problem? These are questions of enormous implications for the actual scientific process without being positive-analytical science.
I myself decide what is of importance to me. And I decide by pre-scientific standards, i.e. curiosity, reputation, conflict etc. The age-old debate over normative versus positive-analytic positions, so wonderfully summarized by Stefan Groth, appears of little importance in this respect: We are never non-normative however ‘Weberian’ we try to be in doing science. We are always caught by being and acting normatively within the science process. That is why it is so important to reflect one’s own normative viewpoint from the beginning to the end: From putting the research question into words to enunciating policy recommendations.
As we reflect our results on the basis of our prescientific and normative concepts we can grasp whether they can be accepted as universal results or whether they are merely based on our own normative predisposition. As social scientists, we try to build (or destroy) a stock of accepted knowledge in our field. To do so we all apply theories, build hypotheses, collect data, test hypotheses, falsify or accept them for the time being and suggest modifications to theories according to the data. But none of the theories are non-normative as they focus their attention already on certain issues: Political sciences frequently on power (Downs), justice (Rawls), economic theories on efficiency (welfare economics) etc. Across the disciplines we have many different forms of theories, we have different methods of collecting data and we may have different standards for falsifying hypotheses. The fine and elaborate description of what we find in the field is a necessary condition for scientific progress in all social science disciplines. But it is never a sufficient condition as the mere description does not test accepted knowledge against the empirical data.
I certainly agree with the notion of going only as far as an explicit model of assumptions, if-clauses and rigorous conclusions can take us. I also agree that we should be clear about our normative preconceptions which in earlier times might have been sufficiently labeled by “left” and “right” but which have grown much harder to make explicit nowadays. I also demand constant reflection of our conclusions and being open about the fact that our conclusions are contingent on ourselves and our normative preconceptions. But I clearly do not agree that we should accept diffuse concepts, nebulous arguments or, worst of all, no conclusions. For understanding as well as enlightening can only come from defining concepts clearly, arguing rigorously and drawing logical conclusions. In the process, we might still work on understanding theories; we might grow desperate over the lack of data or their inadequacy. We might grind our teeth to make sense of the data. But in the end we are called to add a piece of knowledge however small to our field which can be accepted as that by the community. If this piece of knowledge is added then we are called to check whether any conclusions must be drawn towards policy recommendations.
Let me exemplify my point: We could believe that many secrets of traditional knowledge will be never divulged for fear of being misappropriated. We could build a behavioral model addressing such choice problems and form respective hypotheses. Such a model would make use of already existing theoretical work. As economists we would be well advised to embed our analysis of the possibly individual choice into the social context within which the choice problem will be addressed. We would not only ask who keeps the secret, but also ask about the process of sharing knowledge, social sanctioning et cetera. If then we are successful in collecting field data or experimental data we can test our hypothesis, and reject or – for the time being – accept it. Let us say we accept our hypothesis that helpful traditional knowledge is kept a secret. From such research, we can draw conclusions: For example, we can provide a property right to such traditional knowledge to make it possible to share without having to fear its misappropriation. Of course, we should be careful about the policy implications as there might be adverse and non-intended effects which we did not address in our own research. But forming a clear policy recommendation enables our community to argue the point in question.
In my primitive functional model of society and science there is – even in its most elaborate form of principal agent models of politicians and social scientists – no place for hiding from or avoiding policy implications. There is plenty of space for debating the “best” regulatory choice or critical doubts about normative preconceptions, adequately collected field data, theories and disciplinary blindness to certain phenomena. But if you don’t even try to derive policy implications at any point of your own research, don’t be surprised if society feels that elaborate books whose authors do not feel it necessary to explain the social relevance of the issues investigated might not be worth the expense. Why, in a few words, should they pay for it?
The two parties have offered their first positions on the motion “This research group holds that scholars have a social/global responsibility to provide policy recommendations in contexts and negotiation bodies concerned with cultural property.”
I will begin by noting the conflicting or contradictory use of the term “positive” as employed by Mr. Bizer and Mr. Groth respectively. Mr. Bizer coins the notion of “pos-people” for disciplines engaged in documenting and interpreting what is there. Mr. Groth invokes the concept of positivist heuristics for an approach to research that allows one to ignore all the anomalies. One might then rephrase the players in the two groups as “positivist norm-guys” and “critically problematizing guys and gals”.
Both debaters invoke a scholarly past, but to different ends. Mr. Bizer, not without irony or perhaps longing, references a past within which scholarship faced less expectation. He observes a fundamental shift in the sociopolitical parameters within which social scientists work. Society no longer wants to support scholarship without immediately recognizable use, and Mr. Bizer points to the economic reality that society pays us to produce useful results. This change in parameters is due to distrust vis-à-vis what it is scholars actually do, and hence an effort to distribute funds in exchange for concrete and useful results. Society seeks guidance, he argues, and thus offers public funds to have groups such as ours offer guidance, in this case on an emerging issue such as a cultural property – which is by no means devoid of normative posts at the outset.
Mr. Groth evokes the longevity of a dispute once fought between critical rationalists and critical theorists and rekindled at between new camps motivated by new contexts but formulating an analogous opposition. Using Mr. Groth’s argumentation, and considering the research topic of cultural property, we are to face the impossibility of society’s demand for policy recommendations in exchange for research funds. To him, social phenomena are too complex and too contradictory for them to be harnessed in experiments capable of forecasting reliably the costs and benefits of a given course of action.
Yet the fact that Mr. Groth’s statement, too, is not devoid of irony would indicate that the state of affairs is not entirely pleasing. While Mr. Bizer chaves under the nature of newly introduced systems of measuring and paying academics, Mr. Groth refuses a service sector role for social scientists, but there would seem to be a certain longing behind the sarcasm of that expression, a wish to be able to do more than acknowledge the irresolvable nature of the cultural property conundrum.
Hence you are now both invited to respond to one another and further prepare the ground for our ensuing discussions.
The motion up for debate opens up references to a controversy that began more than fifty years ago. Indeed, the question how the social sciences and parts of the humanities, should relate to their subject of research, their slice of knowledge making, has not lost any of its topicality. This includes epistemological foundations, questions of method as well as the issue of how scholarship can contribute and is to contribute to solve societal problems – more precisely, which societal problems and contribute what kinds of recommendations at which level.
The controversy referred to as the “positivism dispute” was fought primarily between the representatives of critical rationalism and critical theory. One can safely claim that today, poststructuralist theory – which is in part still waging the stances of critical theory, yet for different reasons and with partly fundamentally different implications – and positivism oppose one another with largely incommensurable stances. With reference to a scientific pragmatism – or realism, if you will – and societal responsibility, those who do not regard policy recommendations as part of the service to be rendered by science and who thus negate the motion put before us, are reproached with the set phrase of the “ivory tower”. Or, to cite Georg Lukács, arguing from the vantage point of marxist political practice, with the metaphor of the “Grand Hotel Abyss”, inhabited by critical theorists focusing only on theory driven scholarship and – faced with society’s grave problems –, offering nothing other than diagnoses on the social totality and contributing nothing toward solving particular problems.
The arguments against the positive disciplines – „die Einzelwissenschaften” – and their heuristics are, however, lodged rather differently. They are not ignorant of Karl Popper’s dictum that “knowledge … does not begin with perception and observation or the collection of data or facts, but with problems”. The refusal to comment with advice and suggestions on problem solving processes on a global-social level is well founded; and one can illustrate the relevant differences in this “old” debate in a form that also does justice to the questions concerning cultural property. Allow me therefore to recall why the motion before us has different answers, and why the disciplines concerned with society can take more than one position vis-à-vis their subject – and why, which is important to state at the outset, this should be so.
We can begin with the critique of the primacy of scientific explanations. It is based on the deductive-nomological model – a model which assumes in analogy to the methods of the natural sciences that specific or particular societal phenomena can be explained via sets of quasi mathematical-logical sentences. Then there is the method of trial and error, that is, the effort to falsify via experimentation. In this practice we see an intrinsic methodological individualism that recognizes institutions, but addresses influencing variables only partially. Then there is the critique of nominalism which places the reflection of methodology ahead of the structure of the object to be researched – as is e.g. typical of a heuristical approach. This goes hand in hand with the tendency to block the metaphysical and thus the placement of the “positive” as the only relevant material within a scientific system – which, ironically, can only be done via acknowledging the metaphysical (see Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests).
The side taken here conceptualizes society as riven with contradictions, ripe with social antagonisms as well as unforeseeable contingencies, or in short, as the non-identical social totality. A string of logical sentences thus cannot explain a phenomenon that is so complex. The conjunction of individual and particular social phenomena is such that they can only be regarded as a whole and cannot be taken apart into separate factors – and this in turn challenges experimental research as well as the definition of single terms that neglects taking in account the additional structures of social reality (see e.g. Max Horkheimer, Traditional and Critical Theory).
These reservations against such a positive, or positivist approach – consisting of positively defining a particular problem like the one around Cultural Property, analyzing it with methodological and logical consistency within a seemingly given frame of reference, drawing conclusions from this heuristical approach, thus finding solutions on the basis of a social reality via logical operations, and then making recommendations for the better design of societal processes – these reservations have been proven to be prevailing and topical within the research carried out within this group. The question of how to optimally distribute bundles of rights and bonds (?) between the different actors involved, are a prime example why the positive analysis of particular aspects of social life has to miss the point of the problem at hand: the myriad of facets that would have to be considered as analytical categories for the elicitation of a better allocation relate to each other so contradictorily that the analytical gaze almost automatically averts from the particular to the abstract. from a confined problem to the total context. Trying to align the particular in face of this “bigger picture” must then seem like a farce.
These sets of old problems then increase in face of a global simultaneity. Relating to Cultural Property, one would for example have to refer to a twofold indeterminancy of the notion of culture that well-nigh forces the diagnosis on one that the problem in hand ist not unanimous, not simple, and at the same time rational and irrational. Most importantly, however, one would have to realize that the subject matter does not yield to the logic that positive heurisitcs try to impose on it – “the subject matter”, to cite Adorno, “resists the bare systematical unity of connected statements.”
Quite rightly, the question what culture, and much less what Cultural Property is, has not been answered within the research group and its sub-projects: a term cannot be identical with its object where there is a multiplicity of objects and terms juxtaposed in numerous discursive fields. The notion of “culture”, e.g., is twofold indetermined because neither is it secured knowledge what culture ist, nor is there a sufficient overview what culture can be in its various contexts and in relation to social totality. To define culture reductively; to elicit characteristics common to its specific manifestations; to determine their structure and functions (with good reasons functionalism and structuralisms have been critiqued in the humanities for their theoretical short-comings, especially as to their inability to theorize on inconsistencies, conflicts and inequalties!); and on the basis of this approach to make “recommendations” on how to define things the “optimal” way – this is indeed a spurious course of action that both elicits questions about the criteria of the optimal and – more importantly – about how such criteria can be thought so immediate, so identical, in face of social totality and cultural complexity. To phrase it differently: if the ideological pretence of society is multiplied by a global synchronicity, how then is it possible to define a best way without being apologetic of social conditions on a global scale?
In such contexts, the creation of typologies would inevitably results in enumerative definitions (cf. Amitai Etzioni’s theoretical reflections on these issues), the falsificatory drafting of recommendations would not result in a reduction of complexity, but rather in its increase: if there is no clarity about what the problem is, and if the falsificatory approach fails as early at its definition of its subject matter, then every attempt whatsoever at solving the problem is necessarily arbitrary because of its selective choice of reference points. The basis of the resulting analytical as well as of recommendatory work would presuppose a holistic and thus closed social system that can be described by a set of logical sentences, and that has a logic of its own that at the same time determines and is adopted by actors when making recommendations to reform a given situation.
A critique of this conception of a holistic and closed system with a logic of its own is in face of – among other factors – the multliplicity and synchronicity of contradictions, disparities and – in the last instance – logics of their own indispensable. (And such a critique has indeed been made repetetively, see for instance Alfred Schmitt’s work on epistemology, but also generally the anthropological critique of a holistic approach that finally – quite rightly – abandoned the concept of holism.) Given these aspects, a claim for a “culture of recommendations” has to be met with refusal if one is not to deny these differences, and if one does not want to contribute to a reductionist justification of the total context. This total context does, in relation to Cultural Property, indeed not prompt optimism. To end on a positive note, however, it should be noted that the explication and critique of procedures and structures relating to Cultural Property has the potential to analytically embedd particular phenomenons into larger contexts, to investigate the ideologies that interpretate these phenomenons; thus creating room for the articulation of resistances and unsolvable inconsistencies. In the last instance, this is a form of recommendating, too.
The following position argues in favor of providing policy recommendations in connection with cultural property. I will unfold this argument along two questions: First I want to ask, why society affords keeping up social sciences. Then I want to make a case for why society does so in the case of our research group.
Why do they pay for us? If you look at academia, social and natural sciences alike, don’t you ask yourself, why society pays for it? One of the obvious reasons is that schooling makes people more productive. Education increases individual (higher wages) and national welfare (higher GNP). But academia is more than education. Professors do research, write books and articles, meet each other around the world, and comment on each other’s work. But what progress is there in social sciences and how does it assist society?
Before I endeavor to answer this question let me reflect the crucial point of this paragraph: My argument is a functional one. Society appears as a principal which engages science as an agent. This agent is paid for his work, but society cannot closely observe the effort of the agent. Economists call this asymmetric information, and it is one of the reasons why the market alone cannot really function properly. If asymmetric information exists, principals will avoid contracts with agents because they will pay without really knowing if they get something.
But let me come back to the question: What fruits can society harvest from the tree of the social sciences? For a long time the classic answer was that society desires to have someone who has time and resources to think deeply about society, about life, at large. Apparently this has changed. Society has lost faith in academics to just spend time and resources to come up with critical thoughts. And thus, (German) society invented a new paying scheme for professors (in Germany, this is the W-pay-scale); it channels resources according to publications and research grants (so-called LOM) and makes universities vie against one another in the national competition for excellence. Of course, All of these instruments are highly disputable, but it is beyond doubt that they reveal a deep mistrust of academia and its potential to bring about gains for society at large. With other words: They are due to asymmetric information and society’s lack of control in terms of what academia does with its resources.
Within this functional perspective, academia and especially the social sciences are supposed to provide assistance to design and redesign societal rules in order to satisfy more of the needs of the population. To many social scientists, this is ‘social engineering’ and connected to a relatively simple and frequently mechanistic understanding of social actors and rules. But I would like to stress the point that social sciences are diverse enough to show how difficult it is to form a common understanding of the functioning of a rule. It is by no means trivial to gain a perspective on how to change which rule in order to achieve a certain objective from the insights of as many disciplines such as economics, political science, sociology, ethnology and anthropology, law et cetera. To make this attempt and to actually try to find analytical approaches for the design of institutions is what makes social sciences worthy of the resources society provides.
The German Research Foundation (DFG) provided funds for our interdisciplinary research group on cultural property. The DFG prides itself in funding basic research. This research group started its work with the discussion of the obvious conflict between normative and positive sciences. Let us assume that there is a clear divide between the normative disciplines (law, economics: the norm-guys) and the positive sciences (ethnology, anthropology: the pos-people). The norm-guys always want to find out how things should be. The pos-people are happy if they accurately describe how things are – and why. While the former acknowledge the importance of positive work as well as normative work, the latter disregard normative concepts as non-scientific, inconclusive and a general “no go”. The norm-guys will, however, not give up trying to convince the pos-people of venturing into normative discussions.
Why new institutions for Cultural Property? Cultural Property is an emerging field: Most people agree that many aspects of cultural property are not covered by classic intellectual property rights such as patents (cultural property is rarely new) or copyright (cultural property is frequently produced by many not one). As technological possibilities arise, cultural property is increasingly misappropriated – at least that is the claim of many NGOs and some governments. But neither have an idea what type of property rights should be brought into existence. Nor do they know about the intended consequences and non-intended effects.
In such a situation the pos-people observe the process of national and international bargaining, of the diverse arenas for consultation, and the various intertwined processes by which groups attempt to influence the results in the WTO, WIPO or CBD. They identify actors within the field, analyse communication, interests, legal positions, economic successes and shortcomings. But in the end they tell a tale about what is – and how the existing circumstances led to a specific outcome. This will lead us to better understand discursive processes, it will help to enlighten the role of NGOs in international bargaining, and it will enrich the academic debate. But will it provide assistance in how to design cultural property rights?
Of course, a proposal for a design of property rights will be based on normative assessments. And such assessments are pre-scientific. We have formed them either long before we started working as social scientists or they depend on all kinds of different characteristics beyond and outside the inner science arena. But still society will want to know what is the best (or the better) design for property rights. Can the norm-guys help? Yes, because in most cases, normative values are not kept a secret. Constitutions and their interpretation are full of normative concepts – the declaration of human rights at an international level. And politics provide us with many normative decisions. All such normative decisions we can take as a starting point: We can analyze normative positions and develop adequate instrumental designs for which we simulate on the basis of the best available data intended and non-intended effects. But we can also develop a competing normative basis which may reveal that other effects are possible. Occasionally, there will be instrumental choices which are better than their alternatives in all aspects. Then it is easy to decide normatively which instrument to implement. But in most cases instrumental choices will be better in some but not all aspects and then only the public or their policy makers can decide – not, of course, social science.
In such a scenario, the norm-guys meet societies request for guidance. They help to ease society’s problem of asymmetric information because the effort of academia to help out is visible. To do so requires plenty of positive-analytical work beforehand which is jointly provided with the pos-people. But the pos-people themselves should not stop with describing and analyzing but make use of their expertise and contribute to the normative decisions.
For the conference “The Constitution of Cultural Property: Interim Conclusions” in June 2011, two members of the DFG Research Group on Cultural Property engaged in a discussion on the relation between scholarship and policy recommendations.
The debate centered around the following motion:
This research group holds that scholars have a social/global responsibility to provide policy recommendations in contexts and negotiation bodies concerned with cultural property.
In the upcoming couple of posts, the contributions for the motion – by Prof. Dr. Kilian Bizer (Economics) – and against this motion – by Stefan Groth, M.A. (European Ethnology) – as well as the moderator’s comments by Prof. Dr. Regina Bendix (Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology) will be reproduced on this blog for further discussion.
January 24, 2012
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