The anthropology of art and craft has been reinvigorated by new theoretical approaches to materiality, creativity, and skill. While this research has been connected to larger political economic processes such as nationalism, identity, and consumerism, these approaches have not been wholly brought to bear on questions of labour. Based on ethnographic research in San Martín Tilcajete, a woodcarving village in Oaxaca, Mexico, this essay shows how labour is made in artisanal workshops through the social and material relations that take place within them. I argue that rather than ownership of the means of production, in San Martín relations of labour are generated by the intermingling of the art world's ideology of ‘authorship’ with the intimate relations of kinship. The art market locates the production of value in the work of those who are recognized as authors, eliding the labour of many of the workers who produce the carvings. Labourers who work for family members struggle to establish themselves independently in this market because of the multiple and socially salient relations of obligation and respect that are central to kinship and because their own creative work becomes subsumed into the general style of the workshop where they are employed.

Based upon ethnographic research with woodcarvers in Oaxaca, Mexico, this paper investigates the role that aesthetic practices play in economic competition in cultural markets. I explain how one family has become the most successful artisans in their village by aesthetically referencing the indigenous art that is highly sought after by the North American ethnic art market. By reformulating Bourdieu's analysis of artistic fields, I argue that aesthetic competition should be theorised at the level of genres, which allows insight into how individual aesthetic innovations may transform the fields in which art is produced and circulated. I show that by referencing indigeneity, this successful family not only accesses a new market, but also renders their work more authoritative than the carvings of their neighbours, which aesthetically reference Mexican "artesanías" (craftwork). In so doing, they not only earn more money, but also change the ways that Oaxacan woodcarvings are valued in general.

This essay examines the tensions between participatory ethnographic research methods and newly emerging legal regimes of data protection and privacy. Drawing on the example of recent grant-funded research in Mexico, the essay charts how the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation impedes the practices and ethos of participatory research in significant ways. In particular, new legal requirements about data collection, access and storage, and "the right to be forgotten," effectively preclude integrating community members into research planning or data collection. As countries around the world move toward more robust and comprehensive data protection and privacy laws, the issues raised in this essay are likely to become more pressing in many different research contexts in the future. [Mexico, data protection, participatory research, privacy laws]. I n t r o d u c t i o n S ince at least the 1990s, developing participatory research methods have offered anthropologists an avenue through which the power hierarchies inherent in traditional ethnographic research may be destabilized. As many of the contributors to this collection show, by inviting research participants to take an active role in the development of research questions, activities and outcomes, participatory research has enabled anthropology to expand its practice, both conceptually and ethically. In addition to these disciplinary achievements, participatory research also aims to enable marginalized people to transform the conditions of their lives and communities by giving them research skills that they can use to work toward their own goals (Park 1993; Hurtig 2008). As Little and Rees (this issue) suggest in the introduction, participatory research is not only a methodology, it is also a political stance that seeks to place community members on equal footing with the researcher and their institution's interests and agendas. On the ground, participatory research spans a spectrum of practices. These may be primarily community-focused, such as formal skill-building at local levels through workshops and training sessions (Batallan, Dente, and Ritta 2017). Researchers may also make themselves useful to the people with whom they work by contributing their time and expertise to community-led projects during the research period (Taylor this issue; see Simmons 2010). Other practices are more concerned with bringing participants into the research process itself. This may include involving participants in the development of research questions and data-collecting activities, including interviews and

This article considers the establishment of a collective trademark by Mexican artisans which occurred in response to the discovery of industrial replicas of Oaxacan woodcarvings, and it suggests that artisans’ appeals to intellectual property cannot be readily understood as resulting from the economic or cultural threat that the replicas ostensibly pose. By bringing an analysis of aesthetics and the desirability of art into anthropological discussions of intellectual property, I argue that intellectual property is appealing to cultural producers in such contexts because it seems to offer an opportunity to stabilize the ambiguities concerning the relationship between authorship and the allure of artworks within competitive cultural markets. I conclude that in this case, claims to intellectual property reveal concerns that are more about local practices than about foreign production.

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