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yahtzee63 is gone, but her air conditioning karma lives on. After $250 for a visit, we had 12 hours of AC, then it cut out again, and it turns out that the problem is so extensive that we will have to spend a much larger amount of money to get it back on a regular basis. Homeownership is a neverending joy.

iocaste put me on to the NYT story about Florida purging its voter rolls of convicted felons, but only convicted black or white felons, not Hispanic. The fact that 90% of black Florida voters are Democrats but Hispanics are Republican by a smidge is just a coincidence, of course, as is the fact that the purge therefore got rid of 30,000 registered Dems but only 10,000 registered Republicans. When the story broke, Florida said it would reconsider. (For those who don't know her,

iocaste is a fun source for this sort of thing; she's also doing an interesting series explaining just what it was that Enron did wrong, in user-friendly language.) I don't much like Michael Moore's tone, but it's things like this that make me say: I'll stop being outraged when they stop being outrageous. Along those lines, Moore's interview in this week's Entertainment Weekly (content available online to AOL or EW subscribers) was bracing -- he won't apologize or back down for anything. He said two things that really resonated with me, the first about a Marine who came up to him and said that he'd booed Moore's Oscar speech, but he now knew Moore was right and he was ashamed of booing. Moore said he told the Marine that he should never be ashamed for believing his Commander in Chief. The other thing was that Moore said the difference between him and right-wing mouth-foamers was that he never said that the right-wingers were traitors; he never claimed they were happy about Sept. 11 And that's true; whatever one might infer from Fahrenheit 9/11, that Bush et al. were happy was not part of it, though they jumped on it as another reason to invade Iraq (and cut taxes on the rich).

Longish review ahead, another in a series of books relevant to my profession. Michael F. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture?: I read a shorter essay by Brown on this topic, which interested me enough that I got the book. Brown’s book provides detailed examples of the controversies over native culture in the US, Australia, and Canada, with some references to more global issues about who should control and profit from local environmental/medical knowledge.

Brown takes a skeptical attitude towards claims for “repatriation” of intangible cultural objects (stories, artistic techniques, medical knowledge), while maintaining respect for the real sense of outrage and loss felt by some in native/aboriginal cultures. The essential problem, even if you believe that knowledge should be owned by (the descendants of) its originators, is that what’s done is done, and measures like returning photographs of tribal activities to the tribe for destruction are not likely to change much. Brown has some sharp things to say about certain white Australians’ support for the claim that cultural intellectual property is about spirituality, which is more important than the money that may be lost if native claims are recognized. As he points out, most of these whites would fight very hard against mandatory Sabbath observance or Biblical creation stories taught as fact in public schools. They’re committed to preserving “a social world in which religion is undifferentiated from education, law, science, and art, so long as the burdens of that mystical oneness are borne by others.” A related phenomenon is that appeals to culture can posit the reassuring existence of a pure nativeness that is out of touch with the way most native/aboriginal people actually live today; in fact, the majority live in urban areas, and cultural mixing has produced a CD from Tohono O’Odham Nation (formerly known as the Papago) musicians featuring songs such as the “Juan Rios Mazurka.”

Among the American controversies Brown discusses are the failed lawsuit against Crazy Horse malt liquor and the public feuding over the use of Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming for Native American religious ceremonies – and here I will confess that I am no formalist, because keeping a sacred rock formation off limits to non-tribal members seems to me a lot less offensive than building a Christian cross on the same public land. I also learned about a fascinating episode in Australian politics, in which a proposed bridge was opposed by people who asserted that the island it would affect was sacred to certain Aboriginal peoples because of its connection to secret women’s knowledge. When this claim was made, however, a number of other Aboriginal women spoke up and said there was no such thing. The resulting brouhaha, and others like it, raised questions of who speaks for a culture and of whether communication across cultures is possible, or whether some values are simply inaccessible to cultural outsiders. To resolve such conflicts, Brown suggests we look at historical practice rather than statements of belief, as a more objective measure of what is culturally important, though he recognizes that this creates problems for peoples who were so forcibly suppressed that their practices were also destroyed. He also distrusts law, which makes long spokes of the short stakes of man, and prefers messier, more local compromises, which he thinks are less likely to harden into counterproductive bureacracy that will stifle culture and less likely to provoke backlash from members of the dominant group who see nothing wrong with their own dominance and who resent “special treatment” for minority groups. (As an example of the former problem, he points to the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990, which prohibited the sale of products falsely claimed to be made by American Indians or Alaska Natives. The purpose was good, but because the law had to define “American Indians” and did so, like many federal laws, by reference to registered tribes, many native artists steeped in native tradition were unable to claim their heritage.)

Brown is especially eloquent when discussing overstated claims for native culture, as with broad proposals that native peoples should control every reference to themselves in any context, which as he points out would be scary if they weren’t so infeasible. Although there are definite historical and political differences between groups, it can be hard to hold the line – if native groups have the right to define themselves and decide which representations are acceptable, why not the Sons of Confederate Veterans? I am perfectly happy to make the distinction, but there is no reason to think that American politics – which is more inclined to hand out something for everyone when the business of rights-creation starts up – would do so. “As a rhetorical strategy, a group’s insistence that it, and only it, knows its history may be useful; as public policy in a multicultural state, it is patently suicidal.” Moreover, as America’s “culture wars” demonstrate, no culture really owns itself. Brown recognizes that this is unfair, since some people do have more cultural power than others, but he persuasively argues that proposed legal solutions would be ineffective and positively counterproductive.

Overall, the book offers a well-argued stance against claims for cultural property beyond very limited bounds, while still arguing for respect for cultural variety.