Ethnicity, Inc.

自冷战结束以来，全球身份政治的复兴表现为大量的暴力事件。但它也有另一个方面：种族群体的行为越来越像公司，并推销他们的文化，这两个过程都深深地刻在了法律中。该项目的目标是调查各族裔群体在何种情况下寻求赋权，通过纳入自己的组织，为经济目的利用其主权法律地位，并将其文化实践、知识、设计、表演作为知识产权进行版权保护。为了实现这一目标，该项目对这一现象在美国、亚洲、欧洲和非洲的表现形式进行了广泛的、比较的文献研究，并在南非进行了两项深入的示范案例研究，该现象在南非发展非常迅速。所使用的方法结合了对世界各地选定案例的详细档案分析(使用大部分未发表的材料)和人种实地调查(基于参与者观察和广泛访谈)。这个项目试图回答的主要问题是：少数民族在什么条件下合法地成立自己并成为企业？他们通过什么方式和机制，无论是法律还是其他方式，开始这样做？诉诸种族事务与存在或不存在种族暴力之间是否存在明显的关系？文化产品和习俗的商品化对那些拥有文化产品的人的生活有什么影响？他们，行使对他们的权力，以及更广泛地说，关于族裔群体成员资格？简而言之，谁受益，谁损失？这项研究的预期重要性在于，它努力促进建立一个跨学科领域，专门对文化和特性政治经济学的新发展进行批判性研究。

Since the end of the Cold War, the global resurgence of identity politics has expressed itself in a great deal of violence. But it has also had another side: a tendency for ethnic groups to behave ever more like corporations and to market their cultures, both processes being deeply inscribed in the law. The objective of this project is to investigate the conditions under which ethnic groupings seek empowerment by incorporating themselves, by deploying their sovereign legal status for economic ends, and by copyrighting their cultural practices, knowledge, designs, performances as intellectual property.In order to achieve this objective, the project undertakes a broad, comparative documentary study of manifestations of the phenomenon, glossed as "Ethnicity, Inc.", in the USA, Asia, Europe, and Africa, and conducts two in-depth, exemplary case studies in South Africa, where the phenomenon is growing very rapidly. The methods used combine detailed archival analysis of selected cases from across the world (using largely unpublished materials) with ethnographic fieldwork (based on participant-observation and extensive interviewing). The primary questions this project seeks to answer: Under what conditions do ethnic groups legally incorporate themselves and become businesses? By what means and mechanisms, legal and other, do they go about doing so? Is there any discernable relationship between resort to ethnic business and the presence or absence of ethnic violence? What is the effect of the commodification of cultural products and practices on the lives of those who ?own? them, on the exercise of authority over them, and, more generally, on ethnic group membership? In short, who benefits, who loses? The projected importance of the study lies in its effort to contribute to the establishment of an interdisciplinary field dedicated to the critical study of new developments in the political economy of culture and identity.