Bordering Diversity and Desire: Using Intellectual Property to Mark Place-Based Products

Abstract

Marks indicating conditions of origin-geographical indications, appellations and denominations of origin, as well as collective and certification marks-are legal vehicles increasingly common in global commerce. Although it is necessary to explore the legal, political, and economic conditions under which they have become newly popularized as vehicles of global capital accumulation, it is also important to consider ethnographic studies of the work they do in reconfiguring social relationships and their salience in local worlds of meaning. We argue that these marks of distinction have become important means for securing monopoly rents at the same time that they have become means to express identities and desires so as to project alternative assertions of value in commodity circuits that traverse sites of production and consumption. They create new borders around newly valued forms of cultural difference, producing places, and constituting borders of identity, while potentially linking producers and consumers in new relationships of identification.

Geographical indications and upgrading of small-scale producers in global agro-food chains: A case study of the Makó Onion Protected Designation of Origin

“…Barham, 2003;Coombe and Aylwin, 2011) and developmental perspectives (Kizos and Vakoufaris, 2011a;Profeta et al, 2010;Rangnekar, 2011), and amongst the many cases analysed, insights have been revealed into the processes of negotiation around Codes of Practice (e.g. Bowen, 2010;Mancini, 2013;Tregear et al, 2007), power relations between actors (Kizos and Vakoufaris, 2011b;Mancini, 2013;Rangnekar, 2011) and the consequences of varying actors' strategies (Bowen, 2010;Bowen and De Master, 2011;Dentoni et al, 2012).…”

“…For example, Coombe and Aylwin (2011) argue that GIs 'enable producers to circumvent mass commodity markets' by exploiting growing niche markets (p. 2029) and can further 'local farmers' dignity and autonomy ' (p. 2038) while Rangnekar (2011) writes that GIs offer 'a remarkable opportunity to resist the erasure of place and participate in social movements of place ' (p. 2057). In EU agro-food policy, GIs are regarded as fundamental to supporting 'a quality orientation' (European Parliament and the Council of the European Union, 2012) with the two most important certifications being the Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) and Protected Geographical Indication (PGI).…”

Uprooting “Indigeneity” in South Africa's Western Cape: The Plant That Moves

“…The place‐based quality of geographical indications emphasized the fact that products should not be estranged from their rightful territory. In their discussion of GIs, Rosemary Coombe and Nicole Aylwin () describe how GIs in Europe fostered “place‐based foodscapes” to counter brand‐based placelessness that led to the alienability and unaccountability typically associated with commodities (see also Besky ). What is significant in the rooibos context, however, is that it was not so much other countries that rooibos farmers worried about—although there were certainly concerns that French, U.S., and Chinese producers were trying to “steal” the tea.…”

The narratives of geographical indications

“…According to this vision, GIs would represent something which is, at the same time, external and internal to the fabric of a place, as well as of the community living in that place. Such a vision is clearly grounded in the recognition that ‘law shapes the social realities it purports merely to represent’ (Coombe and Aylwin, 2011, p. 2029), i.e. that it is endowed with constitutive force.…”

“…7–8). For Coombe and Aylwin (2011, p. 2030) GIs ‘are essentially marketing vehicles: they enable conditions of production to be communicated and the value of the meaning of such conditions to yield economic returns’.…”