Moral Rights, MRK II

I received some great news the other day. BC Studies has a revised author's publication agreement that no longer includes a moral rights clause. Progress is possible!

The celebration was short lived.
Truth is the revised clause is arguably worse than the original one.

• The original clause: "The Author hereby also expressly waives, to the fullest extent permitted by law, all moral rights which the Author may now or in the future have, with respect to the Work."
• The replacement clause: "Before and after publication the Journal has the right, at its sole discretion, to edit, translate and reformat the Work, including the right to digest, abridge, adapt, index, add to, delete from, alter and/or otherwise combine the Work with other content in any manner and in any media whatsoever." [emphasis added]

The replacement clause is, at least, specific in detailing the rights that the author gives up. That said it expressly and explicitly requires the author to hand over all discretionary rights and enables the journal to essentially do what ever it wishes with the author's work without having to consult with the author, ask the author's permission, or consider the author's interests in any way shape or form.

Hubert Lai (UBC Legal Counsel) patiently explained to me that: "Without an express waiver of such moral rights, UBC's journals could therefore face the risk of possible legal claims for infringement of an author's moral rights.  For example, such claims could be alleged to arise from a journal's:

• ordinary editing of the author's (or authors') manuscript for publication 

• reformatting of the published work for publication in other media; or

• digesting or précising of the work for an index or for archival purposes.

Furthermore, it is also possible that an author's moral rights could be asserted to inhibit a journal's ability to publish a formal correction or retraction in connection with a previously published work. This could be of particular concern in cases where the published work has more than one author.

 No academic author is seriously concerned about a journal being able to carry out normal editorial decisions and practices. Copy editing, correcting errors, digesting for index or archival purposes are are reasonable expectations on the part of a journal.  However, the replacement clause created by UBC Legal Counsel goes way beyond that normative model.  The replacement clause in fact is makes no material difference for an author, except to make very clear that UBC is more interested in taking proprietorial control over an author's work and to grab all of the legal rights they need to act with impunity and without care or attention to an author's interest.

What a way to support academic freedom.

Gossip: The Stuff Anthropologists Study

"Gossip is the stuff anthropologists study."

Yup, we study it, but we don’t do it. Or do we?

Well, I’m not so sure. I guess it depends on what one means by gossip. Most people consider gossip to be half truths or stories that are less than news but more than fabrications. A lot of people think gossip is motivated by meanness (think of the popular tv show Gossip Girl). Gossip is also a kind of social knowledge, independent of it’s content, that maps out social networks and connections. It’s an activity of group formation and exclusion.  Gossip is thus also a cover word for the sharing of social information that knits people together, builds alliances, firms up bonds and excludes others.  To be included in the gossip network is to be part of the group. Exclusion from the network is also a mechanism of social marginalization. Someone telling you a piece of gossip is as interested in establishing and maintaining a relationship as they are interested in the content of the gossip itself.  

In this sense anthropologists track through these social networks asking questions about people, beliefs, and things. This is what I mean when I say anthropologists study gossip. Gossip - social knowledge, perception, and believe- lie at the core of anthropological practice.

It is one thing, however, to study gossip. It is quite another thing to be the subject of gossip (especially malicious gossip).  Gossip seem to flourish in work place settings and small group politics. It seems that in these environments gossip acts as a form of coercive control, a type of peer pressure to constrain and manage the behaviour of group members. 

The academic work place, especially as it has evolved in the context of the university of excellence, is a star-system zero-sum game. Rewards are handed out to some and not others and the process often feels opaque. The academic workplace may at times require collaborative work but reward systems are all individualized. This of course mirrors the mainstream economic and cultural practices. However, in the academy we find an extreme example of individualism in practice. In this kind of work place stray thoughts and angry comments can have a lasting trace in the gossip network that are hard to eradicate.

Gossip spreads through the utterance of an intemperate remark, a poorly phrased fragment of speech, a feeling, or even a stray thought half expressed. These notions become the kernels of stories that take on their own lives, desires, and even a sense of presence. This is a problem, especially if one didn't pay much attention to the thought and its after life at the moment of utterance.

So the task is to find a way to disempower those wayward stories that live in the shadows of our formal, technical communications.

In much of my earlier work (and my more recent work) I delve directly into these types of narratives. In Stories from Home (AE 1994), for example, I pull out the shipboard racism of the men I grew up and worked with.  In that paper I try to understand, without justifying, their colonial folklore. We need to pull these narrative up and into the open in order to disempower them.  In my more recent work I examine the ways in which similar types of colonial folklore lurks within the quiet spaces of our ow academic practice (see REVISITING “DM SIBILHAA’NM DA LAXYUUBM GITXAAŁA) and as an Indigenous person I feel I have no option but to speak back.

It is important to me that I also consider how the contradictions of my own social location also complicates they ways in which other people hear me; how they locate themselves in relation to me; how they imagine me as a holder of power or authority in some way. To simply say, that I have no real power is to fall prey to a classic trope of denial.  I do have some power: power to assign grades, power to evaluate students and, in certain cases, the power to evaluate colleagues (though all of these are mitigated by the power of others). So I must take seriously this power that adhers to my social location even as this same power is in fact undermined in this dominant society institution by my Indigenous identity.  

I want to return now to gossip as a focus of study. Many years ago I had a mini-epiphany. We were overhauling a salmon seine in the lead up to the fishing season.  It was getting on in the day so we were taking a break in the netloft lunch room.  My father, a couple other skippers, and our crew were gathered around the lunch table. They were telling stories of big catches, lost sets, and old skippers long departed when it hit me.  These men were linking each of these different fishing events with the marital foibles, breaches, elopements, and flirtations of other men in their social network. Each fishing moment was tied to when "Jake's wife ran off with so-and-so," or that big set happened the week after Bob had found his wife in bed with Joe. And on it went. Some of the stories involved the men in the room directly, others didn't. No one seemed to care.  They laughed, they yelled, they cursed, they argued.  They had fun. That's gossip worth studying.

You Don't Look Indian

Detail of Painting by Greg Deal.

During the recent American Anthropological Association meetings in Denver (Nov. 18-23, 2015) I took some time to visit the Denver Art Museum.  Leaving aside the touristic complements - it is a great museum- I was struck by the Native American art section, tucked discretely to the edges of the main complex. It is striking in its breadth and force of the works on display.

What caught my eye was the active installation by Greg Deal. He wasn't there during my visit but the studio and works underway touched on troubled issues of identity and who is the arbiter of our Indigenous identities.  This was an installation that gave me serious pause for thought.

All throughout my personal and professional life matters of my own social identity have lurked and disrupted. What child wants to be confronted with racialized slurs on the playground? More disruptive are the stories in families hidden in the background. It is as though they wait, like a malevolent being, for that moment to derange our sense of well being. Most people are familiar with these sorts of stories. Yet there is something about racialzied stories that intersect with and become entangled in the struggles of working class lives that feel heavy, they adhere to our own lives even as those childhood memories fade. One can close our eyes to these injuries but they adhere nonetheless.

It wasn't until I was in my late teens that my mother told my why it had been important to my father that I participate in Scouts. She told me this after some friends and I challenged what we felt was a racially discriminatory plan by our Scout Group's advisory committee.

My father sat at the dinner table saying nothing as my mother said "When your father was a boy his father took him up to the church to sign up for Cub Scouts. But within a few minutes of arriving your grandfather stormed out and took your father home saying that was  waste of time."

"Didn't want any half breeds," my father said.

"That's why we wanted you join Scouts," my mother said.

That was it. That was the story. There is so much more.  If only racial violence and discrimination was about joining or not joining Boy Scouts. As I grow older I have been able to review in my mind the many stories told to me, the things I have witnessed, the half finished accounts, the fragments of thought and see in them the violence of self doubt and self hatred engendered by the settler. Writing about this past, especially as it intersects with my present, is one way to excise the ghosts of racism and violence.

Several decades later I was sitting down with an uncle of mine. We were working together on a project concerning aboriginal rights and title in the Prince Rupert area. In preparation for a series of interviews with elders and hereditary leaders we were discussing the various questions we wanted to ask, how to best phrase them in our Indigenous language, and what issues best left to another time.

"Can you think of any special places, areas of town important to know about?"

"Well, my father always told us that when we got off the boat here at Cow Bay, to walk straight up town along 3rd. He told us about places not to go, where we need to keep away from. Some parts of town you had to stay away from. It wasn't safe."

From a conversation about traditional territory we shifted seamlessly to a story about navigating a dangerous settler landscape and keeping safe.

Racism is more than discrimination, it's a transposition of the landscape that we have sprung from. Racism is about challenging our right to name our places and to name ourselves. In the same manner that a new grid of markers and names have been laid overtop of our Laxyuup (land/home), so too settlers are constantly trying to lay new names and markers upon our very bodies.  "You don't look Indian. . ."

Greg Deal's art confronts playfully, sarcastically, pointedly, ironically, the hypocrisies and violence of the settler and their society.  Coming across his installation in Denver was a breath of fresh air that took me away from the injuries of race and class and allowed me to laugh with him at this common pain we feel as Indigenous people today.

NWC Diorama Denver Art Museum