Doctoral Dissertation Research: Counterfeit goods, the state, and intellectual property: An ethnography of legal consciousness in post-socialist China

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

China, upon its accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, became obliged to abide by multilateral agreements that protect intellectual property. The concept of private ownership embedded in intellectual property rights, however, contrasts with vaguely defined local property relations and contradicts practices of reciprocity common in China. Through an ethnographic study of two distinct markets in the Yangtze River Delta, this project investigates the emergence and formation of a legal consciousness of intellectual property rights in a context where legal reforms enforce private ownership even as long-practiced customs of reciprocal exchange continue. The researcher will examine how retail shopkeepers, sales staff, and owners of legitimately registered brands in the two markets experience, interpret, and negotiate changing copyright and trademark laws, private ownership of ideas, and property in general as they sell counterfeit goods and build local brands. During twelve months of fieldwork, the researcher will employ a combination of three methods: participant observation, semi-structured and life history interviews, and public text collection. This project is the first empirical study to examine legal consciousness of intellectual property rights in a society undergoing a post-socialist transition. Revealing the power and limits of Euro-American legal categories as mediated by the Chinese state and local cultural practices, this research advances law and society research, the anthropological analysis of property, ethnographic approaches to the state, and the cross-disciplinary study of intellectual property rights as part of globalization. More broadly, the findings will enrich public understandings of how emergent property regimes are shaped by everyday practices of underrepresented groups. With a better understanding of the conditions of differently positioned market people and the options available to them, policymakers at both national and international levels can design policies that are more culturally appropriate and equitable.