Francis, Sabil --- "Who Speaks for the Tribe? The Arogyapacha Case in Kerala" [2009] ELECD 531; in Haunss, Sebastian; Shadlen, C. Kenneth (eds), "Politics of Intellectual Property" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2009)

Book Title: Politics of Intellectual Property

Editor(s): Haunss, Sebastian; Shadlen, C. Kenneth

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848443037

Section: Chapter 5

Section Title: Who Speaks for the Tribe? The Arogyapacha Case in Kerala

Author(s): Francis, Sabil

Number of pages: 27

Extract:

5. Who speaks for the tribe? The
arogyapacha case in Kerala
Sabil Francis1

Current attempts to ensure that indigenous people are given their rightful
due in the intellectual property rights paradigm fail to address the actual
impact of benefit sharing agreements on notions of identity, commu-
nity, and the nation state. Do current narratives of intellectual property
rights, by framing the question of IPR in an either/or manner, ignore the
complexity of actors in the ownership of traditional knowledge and its
dynamic nature? Is the idea of benefit sharing agreements itself rooted in a
modern, Western-oriented approach? Can historically marginalized tribes
become active players in the process of the commodification of knowledge,
and adapt to a knowledge society that is marked by the owning, control-
ling and managing of knowledge? And finally, who speaks for indigenous
people in a knowledge society?
These are the key questions that this chapter will address. Previous
research has investigated the link between intellectual property policy,
innovation, trade and economic policy (for example, Helpman, 1993;
Andersen, 2006; Hope, 2008; Cook, 2005; Karani and Ojwang, 1996; Etro,
2005) And though the literature on IPR is large, there has been a lack of
focus on specific case studies that study the impact of efforts to accommo-
date differing conceptions of intellectual property rights within the exist-
ing paradigm, especially on tribes, non tribals, the state, the nation and the
interaction between all these.
At present, most of the literature is on the well-known case ...