Anthropological Perspectives: On the Management of Knowledge Simon Harrison Anthropology Today, Vol. 11, No. 5. (Oct., 1995), pp.

10-14.
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further experience, however, more recent contracts take this into account, and so our unfortunate disjuncture need not be repeated, but it is a cautionary tale for any one contemplating the idea. We estimate this entire project to have cost somewhere in the region of $15,000, for example. This sum covered only the costs of research assistance, software and mastering, not computer hardware or basic video and sound studio equipment, scanners and the like. Looking back upon the process now, I realize just how radically it has altered my conception of doing ethnography, in a way I find both liberating and challenging. I do not, however, subscribe to the view promoted by proselytizers of the 'virtual campus' who maintain that the arrival of electronic publishing forecasts the end of the book as we know it. Joan Huntley and I agree that it is not necessary to think in eitherlor terms, but rather to divide the labour so that books do the work they do best, while multi-media interactive formats enrich the possibilities. If the results of scholarly production can be almost as multi-media as cultural events themselves, then conducting fieldwork with a C D ROM in mind means collecting data in as many forms as possible - video, sound tape, photographs, pictures, maps, drawings, songs, interviews - and imagining creative ways to re-present them, bearing in mind that the ethnography so produced will be struc-

tured somewhat differently each time, depending upon the inquisitive choice of the user. I find that exciting! To assist ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY readers reflect upon some of the advantages and disadvantages of the new technology from the perspective of teaching as well as research, Joan Huntley has prepared the table on page 7, in which a number of traditional and contemporary forms of representation and transmission are compared: a human lecturer; hardcopy print; film; videotape; audiotape; local digital (e.g. C D ROM), and distributed digital (e.g. Internet). Each possesses different strengths and weaknesses, advantages and disadvantages, but no one form is universally superior in all contexts. The major problem we were addressing in designing the W ~ Y U T A CD ROM, for example, was one of supporting motion analysis (in this case, Plains Indian Sign Talk) along with linguistic analysis in both aural and textual modes. Such material was particularly well suited to a CD ROM format. An additional consideration that relates as much to design and purpose as it does to physicalltechnical constraints is whether to provide a linear narrative or allow for interactivity. Narratives that tell a story from beginning to end (be it via live human, or movies on CD ROM) certainly have their place, but one can also support natural inquisitiveness and move from point to point.

Anthropological perspectives
on the management of knowledge
SIMON HARRISON
The author rs Reader rn Anthropology at the Universrty of Ulster, Coleraine,Northern Ireland, and was recently appornted Hon Edrror of the Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute (incorporating Man)

Introduction In 1973, Daniel Bell published The Coming of the PostIndustrial Society, in which he envisaged society moving beyond the industrial stage. He argued that an economy is emerging based less on the production of material resources than on the production of knowledge or information. An anthropologist might perhaps respond that there are, or have been, many societies - including some of a sort at one time called 'primitive' - in which the production and distribution of information were vital to the economy (Harrison 1990; Keen 1994; Lindstrom 1990). 'Information societies' have probably existed for a very long time. Information with economic value can become a focus of proprietary claims. The term 'intellectual property' refers to rights asserted in the products of the mind (Phillips 1986): in Western economies, these may include such diverse products as inventions, industrial designs, works of literature or art, trade secrets, commercial brand names, and even fictional personages such as Superman or Sherlock Holmes. To describe trademarks or cartoon characters as 'knowledge' may appear to stretch the meaning of the term. But the forms of knowledge I wish to discuss encompass any sorts of mental products that are, or can be, owned as values, assets or resources. The question I should like to pose is this: if knowledge is an important and valuable resource in many economies, and perhaps increasingly so in our own, what is the best way of managing it? In particular, how ought universities to manage the knowledge they produce? For of course, any answer to my first, more general question must depend to some extent on the

particular type of knowledge one is considering. Most of us would probably agree that the proper management of certain kinds of information involves restricting their circulation in some way. Confidential information of a personal nature, military intelligence, pornography, and commercial secrets are just a few examples of the sorts of information which, for one reason or another, are usually kept out of the public domain. At the opposite extreme, the management of other kinds of information seems to call for the greatest possible openness, publicity and freedom of access. At least since the seventeenth century philosopher Francis Bacon, scientific knowledge has been regarded as belonging to this category. The traditional assumption is that the interests of science, and of society, are best served by encouraging the freest possible circulation of ideas (see, for instance, Dicks 1865). This is, of course, a value system with which universities have often identified themselves. We might then imagine two extreme choices in the management of knowledge: on the one hand, the maximum regulation of the circulation of information and, on the other, the maximum deregulation of it. The first we might envisage as a system of rationing or sumptuary regulation in the field of ideas, with rigid controls on the distribution and consumption of information. The second alternative we could picture as an intellectual free market, a free-for-all struggle for survival between ideas, in which only those that are in some sense the 'best' will succeed and spread. I would like to suggest that choices of this sort are, at least in part, a matter of culture. That is, people may operate with contrasting theories of the correct management of

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Above: male dancer. clothed in a tunic of spider's web, with artificial hands and arms, as a ghost in a performance o f a high nalawarl (men's association) ceremony, Malekula, New Hebrides (photo by Bernard Deacon, c. 1920's, RAI photo archive no. 3851).

knowledge, and these theories are culturally constructed.

Models of knowledge-management Barth (1990), for instance, draws a contrast of a similar kind between two fundamentally different ways of managing specifically religious knowledge. One is exemplified by the Asian guru, or religious teacher. His role is to educate, e,xplain and instruct, and his status depends on this ability continually to dispense religious knowledge. The opposed mode of managing religious knowledge is exemplified by the Melanesian ritual adept, whose role is to initiate novices into the mysteries of secret cults. His status depends on his ability to withhold and conceal knowledge; here, the assumption is that 'the value of knowledge is enhanced by veiling it and sharing it with as few as possible' (Barth 1990: 64 I), not by broadcasting it. In an earlier work, Barth (1975: 217) shows how the Baktaman of New Guinea regard knowledge as worth something only if it is restricted to a select few, and assume that knowledge widely shared must have little or no significance. For the Baktaman, the value of any information is inversely proportional to the number of people who possess it. Moreover, the connection they posit between the value of knowledge, and its secrecy, scarcity or difficulty of access, works in both directions. Valuable information must be restricted because dispensing it freely would be a senseless waste of an important social resource. And conversely, to restrict information can in itself make it important and desirable. A Patrol Officer of Barth's acquaintance had tried

to introduce representative local government to the area, but with little success. His attempts to persuade the population of their rights to nominate, and vote for, representatives met with indifference because he made the mistake of giving this information to them in public. On Barth's advice, he adopted the tactic of divulging the workings of local democracy in great secrecy to a few selected individuals. Unfortunately, they regarded this knowledge as having so profound a significance, and kept it so secret, that elections became impossible anyway (Barth 1975: 217). Gregory Bateson carried out anthropological fieldwork in New Guinea in the 1930s, and made a similar observation of the Iatmul (1958: 231). The Iatmul assume that any knowledge disseminated in public must either be trivial or untrue. To be considered true, important or valuable, information must be conveyed in hushed tones in private. Bateson found that very little he himself said was taken seriously by any Iatmul individual, unless he imparted it confidentially as a weighty secret intended to create a special bond of trust. This, then, is a way that people in some cultures manage knowledge as a resource: namely, they seem to treat it as an almost concrete finite good, like an area of land or a sum of money. In this view, the more people it is distributed among, the lesser the value of each person's share. Knowledge distributed universally would be worthless; knowledge of any value is scarce and difficult to acquire. In such societies, information is a limited resource to be carefully conserved, hoarded, and dispensed parsimoniously. Let me try to contrast this with the other, opposed approach to managing knowledge. This seems to begin from the premise that something known only to a few people is inconsequential, an attitude exemplified by the Balinese guru who told Barth (1990: 641) that there is 'no merit from even the deepest religious knowledge unless you teach it'. Knowledge has to be shared in order to acquire value at all, and it grows in significance as more people share it. Actually, an unusual property of information, considered as a good or resource, is that one does not lose it when one dispenses it. After giving it away, the giver still possesses it (see Gambetta 1994a: 207). This seems to me to make the management of knowledge potentially rather different from the management of most other resources. In particular, knowledge is perhaps one of those few resources whose value to their possessors can actually be increased by conveying them to other people. An example is knowledge of commercial brandnames and products. A firm's brand-names and trademarks are an important part of its assets because they embody its reputation and 'goodwill', or attractiveness to customers. The value of these intangible assets can be maximized simply by maximizing their ppblic exposure and this is, of course, one important purpose of the advertising industry. The way that trademarks acquire value through publicity is illustrated by an intriguing case described by Gambetta (1991: 72; 1994b: 359360). In the late 1980s, a certain Italian television programme regularly featured a satirical sketch in which dancers performing a samba sang an advertising jingle in pidgin Portuguese, supposedly promoting a brand of chocolate called Cacao Meravigliao. This name was quite fictitious, and the aim of the sketch was simply to poke fun at commercial sponsorship. But as a totally unintended consequence of this publicity, the name Cacao Meravigliao began to acquire a very real commercial value to Italian chocolate producers. They started pressing the makers of the programme to sell the 11

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rights to the name, and a fierce competition erupted within the Italian chocolate industry to acquire the name of this non-existent but nonetheless highly prestigious chocolate. Although the name signified nothing, it became a valuable commodity simply by becoming well-known and highly publicized. I mention this case because it illustrates one approach to the problem of assigning value to ideas and information. In this approach, knowledge increases in value by being shared. In the other approach, exemplified by the tribespeople in New Guinea, it decreases in value by being shared. There seem to be two contradictory models here for managing knowledge, and two incompatible theories of its value.

Western and tribal systems of knowledgemanagement If one were to draw a broad distinction, as anthropologists once habitually did, between Western societies and the small-scale societies which they themselves traditionally studied, one might arguably discern a contrast of just this sort in the way they characteristically manage knowledge. For instance, let us take Morphy's (1991) discussion of the art of an Australian Aboriginal people called the Yolngu. The greater part of Yolngu art consists of relatively fixed designs owned by clans. These clan designs are considered so sacred that they can never be displayed in public, and they are produced and seen as paintings only by initiated men in the highly restricted context of secret ceremonies. In Aboriginal society, knowledge of important works of art is therefore confined to an elite of religious adepts. These objects and designs are simply too important and too sacred to be revealed to people at large. Morphy contrasts this with the underlying principles of the Western art world, where the fundamental assumption is that art is a public phenomenon. Museums and galleries seek to give their collections the widest possible public exposure; their reputations, quite possibly even their livelihoods, depend on disseminating knowledge of the objects they possess. In the West, the value of a painting is likely to depend on its fame, on how many people know it. In Aboriginal society, it may depend rather on how few people know it (Morphy 1991: 21-26). These differences between Aboriginal and European conceptions of the value of art often give rise to difficulties nowadays, because Aboriginal paintings are increasingly finding their way into the Western art world and are treated there as public objects. Aborigines may see their art as being thereby profaned and damaged. To them, its value is not enhanced by being exhibited in galleries, or reproduced in books, but harmed or even destroyed by this sort of public exposure (Moiphy 1991: 25). A similar contrast between Western and tribal societies might be made in the field of ethnicity, for cultural or ethnic identity can be viewed, from one perspective, as a particular problem in the management of ideas. In New Guinea, a group of islands called the Admiralties were populated in precolonial times by about twenty ethnic groups. Some of these groups were tiny, but every one of them assiduously guarded its own distinctive identity and uniqueness. The groups interacted with each other through trade, warfare and intermarriage, and shared many basic features of culture in common. One particular striking shared feature was their deep preoccupation with preserving their differences in language, ritual, art, architecture, craft specialisms and so forth. Many of these diacritical features might well have appeared unimportant to a de-

tached observer, but they were all intensely significant to the islanders as markers of identity. Each group treated its emblematic practices as precious possessions it jealously had to safeguard from being usurped or appropriated by outsiders (Schwartz 1975). These groups seem to have had much the same relationship with their 'cultures' that medieval craft guilds had with their trade secrets, or that biotechnology companies have with their innovations: namely, they treated them as intangible yet vital assets needing protection from piracy. An ethnic group 'owned' its culture as a kind of patented possession, its patent consisting fundamentally in the right to control its culture's diffusion. No group allowed outsiders to copy its special practices 'without securing the right to them through kinship, marriage, or some form of purchase or licensing' (Schwartz 1975: 117). There were cases in which the infringement of a group's proprietary rights - its right, for instance, to ornament the prows of canoes in a particular way - resulted in warfare (Schwartz 1975: 117). In the Admiralties, the power of a social group seems to have been imagined as the power to keep its cultural practices to itself; the test of a group's strength was that it could stop its customs from being stolen by outsiders. There is a radical contrast here with the West where, historically, the power and status of ethnic groups has often been measured by their success in spreading their beliefs and practices and forcing them on often unwilling recipients. The Admiralties exemplify the exact opposite of this sort of cultural imperialism: far from seeking to universalize their cultures or expand their boundaries, the islanders' attitudes to their cultures were highly proprietorial and exclusionary. In the West, dominant ethnic groups are those most successful at disseminating their cultural practices; in the Admiralties they were those most able to kecp others from adopting their practices. The contrast I am seeking to draw is perhaps particularly clear when we compare Western and tribal religions. Characteristically, a tribal religion altogether lacks the evangelical and proselytizing drive of religions such as Christianity or Islam. It does not seek to spread its message and gain new converts. On the contrary, it belongs to a narrow and exclusive social group whose members want to confine its perceived benefits very much to themselves. The preoccupation of such religions is more with keeping potential converts out, than with drawing them in. For instance, in many Melanesian societies, such as the Baktaman studied by Barth (1975), men have cults in which they are initiated during the course of their lives into a series of ritual grades. Women, children and other outsiders are strictly excluded. In their initiations, men are introduced to successively more secret, and more sacred, levels of religious knowledge. ,The mere public exposure of the mysteries of a religion of this sort can be enough to destroy it. This was a technique used by Christian missionaries to subvert and discredit the men's cults: they would take cult objects and sacra from their sanctuaries, and publicly expose them to the view of women and children (see, for instance, Tuzin 1988). These were fragile religions because they could be demolished just by being forced into the public domain. In some religions, the believers seem to treat their gods as virtually their property. They may keep the names of their gods secret (Cassirer 1953: 48; Frazer 1967: 342-345), for fear that outsiders who discovered the names could invoke or control these beings for their own ends and so, in effect, purloin them. The Romans,

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for instance, treated the god of their city in this way. Rome itself, as a matter of course, appropriated the gods of any cities it conquered, and its generals prepared for battle by calling on the enemy gods to turn renegade and defect to the Roman side. The Romans had a very real concern that their own god might in turn be stolen by their enemies through some similar perfidious means (Fustel de Coulanges 1963: 215). I seem at this point to have come full circle from my discussion of the non-existent Italian chocolate. The fictitious chocolate was an entity as imaginary as ancient Rome's god; both, after all, were nothing more than names. Yet both of these nominal entities were, in their own ways, highly sought after by many would-be proprietors. The radical difference between them lies in the way their value was created and maintained. One was a name made valuable by being publicly exposed; the other a name made valuable by being kept secret.

I would like to thank Dominic Bryan, Harvey Whitehouse and two anonymous referees for A.T. for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Barth, F. 1975. Ritual and Knowledge among the Baktaman of New Guinea. New Haven: Yale U.P. -1990. The Guru and the Conjurer: Transactions in Knowledge and the Shaping of Culture in Southeast Asia and Melanesia. Man (N.S.) 25(4): 640-653. Bateson, G. 1958. Naven. 2nd ed. Stanford: U.P. Bell, D. 1973. The Coming of the Post-Industrial Soc~ety: a Venture in Social Forecasting London: Heinemann. Cassirer, E. 1953. Language and Myth. New York: Dover. Dick, T. 1865. On the Improvement of Socrety by the Drffusion of Knowledge: or, an Illustration of the Ad~,anrages Which Would Result From a More General Dissemination o f

Universities, clans and software companies I have tried so far to draw a contrast between two opposed ways of managing ideas and information. One way seeks to generate value by restricting the circulation of ideas, and the other by promoting the circulation of ideas. Now, I want to suggest that this contrast is, in one sense, actually a false one because the management of knowledge always in practice entails - even in the cases I have just discussed - using both of these strategies in some kind of combination. In other words, the 'management' of knowledge is the complicated, precarious and difficult task of trying to operate with both of these two theories at the same time. For instance, let me point out some similarities - not, I hope, too far-fetched - between the behaviour of certain business corporations and tribal clans. In New Guinea, a people called the Manambu are divided into some sixteen clans, each of which owns a corpus of origin-myths, and other religious knowledge, concerning the acts of its ancestors, the creation of animals, plants and the landscape, and the proper conduct of ceremonies. These myths are largely secret, and are known in full only to a small handful of the clan's senior men. They cannot be openly disclosed to outsiders because, among other reasons, they are the basis of the clan's land-rights. If some other clan were to gain possession of these myths, it could use this knowledge to claim title to its land (Harrison 1990). Nevertheless, a clan cannot maintain too tight a grip on its sacred lore, and has to make its myths at least in part known to outsiders. It must do so, firstly, in order to have these outsiders acknowledge the legitimacy of its territorial possessions. They cannot give this acknowledgement unless they know something of the mythological justification of the clan's land-rights. Secondly, the clan needs to disclose its myths to some trusted outsiders as a way of insuring the myths against loss. Otherwise, it might only take the deaths of one or two of the clan's elderly men for all of its sacred knowledge to be lost forever. This would amount, in effect, to the catastrophic loss of all title to its land. It would therefore be an oversimplification to say that a clan restricts access to its religious knowledge. Rather, it tries to maintain a delicate balance between restricting it and circulating it. Too much openness, and too little, would both equally expose the clan to the risk of being dispossessed of its territory (Harrison 1990: 127- 132; cf. Morphy 199 1: 98-99). Seen in this light, there are instructive parallels between the behaviour of these clans, and the behaviour of corporations in the computer software industry. A problem that software companies face is that their pro-

ducts are vulnerable to reverse engineering; that is, no matter how technically innovative a product may be, competitors may be able to reconstruct its desigr? and so market rival versions of their own. Like Manambu clans, most companies pursue a kind of double-edged strategy. On the one hand, they try to protect their software by keeping secret much of their technology and also by safeguarding it with patents. On the other hand, many of them, particularly the most successful, have realized that it is very much to their advantage to release some knowledge of their technology into the public domain. Of course, a company too open and generous with its ideas risks having them stolen and its products pirated; but just as surely, a company too miserly and secretive risks marginalizing itself and letting its competitors take centre stage. Microsoft Corporation gained intellectual and market leadership of the software industry, and made many of its products into industry standards, by this sort of shrewd mixture of possessiveness and liberality with its inventions (Economist 1989). A Manambu clan and a software company are similar in that both are institutions depending for their existence on the successful management of knowledge and ideas, and both can perish if they fail to carry out this function adequately. Another institution in the same general category is the university. Universities too seem to show in their behaviour the same contradictory necessity of combining openness with protectiveness. The contradiction is perhaps particularly acute in the case of universities because they, unlike software companies or Manambu clans, are officially committed to an ideal of knowledge as public resource available for the common good. Inevitably, this gives rise to many conflicts between theory and practice. At one time, the ideals of knowledge as a collective human good were in contradiction with the actual restriction of university education largely to an elite. Nowadays, it is perhaps rather that universities are under conflicting pressures to make themselves accessible to an ever-wider public on the one hand and, on the other, to redefine education as a sort of merchandise they must market to consumers. That is to say, universities seem under expectations now to operate as though education were both a public good and also a commercial product or commodity. Clearly, these two requirements are in some respects contradictory. The growing involvement of the private sector in funding and controlling research gives rise to similar conflicts. This involvement may offer mutual benefits, but it is also raising concerns about its implications for academic freedom and impartiality, and appears also to be creating in some fields of research an atmosphere of commercial competition inimical to the free, circulation of knowledge among researchers, and therefore inimical to the long-term interests of research itself (Nelkin 1984). But my point is that all institutions producing and managing knowledge are faced with the same basic dilemma in one form or another. The dilemma is that they depend for their existence both on producing and communicating knowledge and on keeping this knowledge in some respects their property. To put it differently, these institutions seem in their behaviour to be trying to act simultaneously upon both of the two conflicting theories I outlined earlier. It is as though they must operate on the assumption that the value of knowledge increases with openness and accessibility, and also on the assumption that it decreases. The cause 13

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Rational and Screntific Information Among all Ranks. Glasgow and London: William Collins. Economist 1989. The Ideas Business: Economy of the Mind. December 23rd, pp. 109-112. Frazer, J.G. 1967 [1922]. The Golden Bough: a Study in Magrc and Religion. Abridged ed. London and Toronto: Macmillan. Fustel de Coulanges, N.D. 1963 [1864]. The Ancient City. New York: Doubleday. Gambetta, D. 1991. 'In the Beginning was the Word...'. The Symbols of the Mafia. Archi1.e~ EuropCennes de Sociologie 32(1): 53-77. -1994a. Godfather's Gossip. Archi1.e~ Europkennes de Sociologie 35: 199-233. ----1994b. Inscrutable Markets. Rationality and Socrety 6(3): 353-368. Harrison, S.J. 1990. Stealing People's Names: Hlstoly and Politics in a Seplk River Cosmology. Cambridge: U.P. Keen, I. 1994. Knowledge and Secrecy in an Aboriginal Religion: Yolngu of North-East Arnhem Land Oxford: Clarendon P. Lindstrom, L. 1990. Knowledge and Power in a South Pacific Society. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution P. Morphy, H. 1991. Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal System of Know~ledge. Chicago and London: U. of Chicago P. Nelkin, D. 1984. Science as Intellectual Property: W h o Controls Research? New York: Macmillan. Nuffield Council on Bioethics. 1995. Human Tissue: Ethical and Legal Issues. London: Nuffield Foundation. Phillips, J. 1986. Introduction to Intellectual Property Law. London: Butterworths. Schwartz, T. 1975. 'Cultural Totemism: Ethnic Identity, Primitive and Modem'. In Ethnic identity (eds) G. DeVos and L. Romanucci-Ross. Palo Alto: Mayfield. Tuzin, D.F. 1988. Prospects of Village Death in Ilahita. Oceania 59(2): 81-104.

of this apparent inconsistency is the underlying dilemma faced by all these institutions: namely, that their interests can be harmed by too much openness and by too little. The 'management' of knowledge seems therefore to consist in a sort of balancing act, in an attempt to function with some combination of two equally credible, but contradictory, models of the value of knowledge at the same time. Academic researchers, whose standing depends on the knowledge they produce and disseminate, may seem the diametrical opposite of Australian Aboriginal ritual leaders, whose standing in their society depends on the knowledge they withhold and conceal. The secretiveness with which a Manambu clan manages information may seem the complete reverse of the openness with which a university research centre does so. But it is more a matter of degree, a difference in the relative emphasis of two contrasting strategies, than a difference in kind. In neither situation is knowledge wholly privatized and restricted. And in neither situation is it wholly free and unowned.

The nature of ownership and the ownership of nature Universities and other organizations involved in research seem to be facing increasing difficulties with sustaining, even as an ideology, the Enlightenment conception of scientific knowledge as a universal free good. Rather, their existence is likely to become increasingly dependent upon their securing proprietary rights in the knowledge they produce and exploiting this knowledge commercially. If these organizations will in the future not just produce and disseminate knowledge but will inevitably be forced in some sense seek to exercise 'ownership' of it, let me ask what models of ownership they should employ. I pose this question because anthropologists have found that Western definitions of property rights are by no means universal. Let me give an example of how concepts of ownership can vary across cultures. Recent advances in biotechnology have led to the patenting of genetic material by private companies. A complex debate with moral, economic and other dimensions has arisen over the creation and ownership of life-forms by business corporations and, more generally, over the ownership of both human and non-human genetic information (see, for instance, Nuffield Council on Bioethics 1995). Let us try to clarify precisely what it means to describe as private property an organism whose genetic material is owned by some biotechnology company. To describe it as private property means, above all, that the patent holder has the exclusive right to exploit the organism commercially. In other words, the rewards of possessing these property rights are commercial profit. All parties to this debate, whether they argue that life cannot be owned in this way or that it can, seem to share this same assumption about the nature of property rights: namely, that to 'own' the genome of some organism means the entitlement to control its use for financial gain. In other cultures, people may make very different assumptions about the nature of ownership. The Manambu people of New Guinea, whom I referred to earlier, regard virtually every species of plant and animal known to them as belonging to one or other of their clans. For them, this means that the ancestors of that clan brought the animal or plant into existence in mythical times; that the clan shares kinship or substance with the species; that it owns the magic and ceremonies necessary for its growth, fertility and well-being; and

that it performs these rituals at the proper times for the benefit of all other clans (Harrison 1990). A clan has more than just ritual responsibilities towards the plant and animal species it owns, and looks after their welfare in quite pragmatically effective ways as well. It can interdict an area of land being overhunted, or an over-fished lagoon, laying a taboo on the land or lagoon until the stocks of game or fish are replenished. In Manambu society it is a serious religious offence to kill an animal without using it for food or for some other valid purpose, or to waste fish one has caught, or crops one has grown, letting them rot uneaten. It is treated as an injury against the clan owning the species concerned, and is called by a term which means to vandalize someone's property or treat someone's belongings in an insulting or threatening way. The clan owning the species would perform magic to make it scarce or, as the Manambu say, to 'send it away', until the wrongdoers have made amends. Of course, we know these beliefs are illusory; but they do shape the way that Manambu people exploit their natural environment, and therefore have entirely real consequences for their ecology. My point is that living species can rightly be described as property in Manambu society. The Manambu conceive of these property rights essentially as the guardianship of species, as the responsibility for their welfare. To 'own' some life-form is to be its steward or trustee on behalf of the community. These people have concepts of property that rest on assumptions of a custodianship of the natural environment quite extraneous to Western conceptions of private property. Their own property rights in living organisms, as the Manambu define them, do not yield commercial profit but other, more intangible and diffuse rewards such as status, respect and social credit, and their overall effect is to tie together the various groups in the community in a network of mutual indebtedness and interdependence. In short, these property rights have a moral dimension lacking from the Western law of industrial patents. For the Manambu, the ethical dilemmas that property rights in life-forms provoke in Western society do not arise because the Manambu do not have to choose between treating life as a commodity and treating it as a collective resource belonging to some universal entity such as society or the human race. Their concepts of property are framed in terms that do not give rise to these sorts of antinomies.

Conclusion I have argued that all organizations producing and disseminating knowledge inevitably seek in some sense to own, or protect, or restrict the use of this knowledge as well. I have also suggested, however, there is at least one matter in which they do have a degree of choice: namely, in the concepts of ownership they use. There is no necessity for them to employ the categories of contemporary Western commerce. Universities, for instance, are having to redefine their relationship with the knowledge they produce. This relationship will probably be more proprietorial than it was in the past. On the other hand, it is unlikely to be of the purely commercial sort characteristic of business corporations. Universities are organizations dedicated to innovation in ideas, and it would surely be appropriate for them to develop innovative definitions of the ownership of ideas. Here, perhaps, anthropologists might make an important contribution: namely, their own knowledge of the culturally diverse ways in which knowledge can be 'owned'.

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