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AbstractDrawing on the contributions to this special issue, this article offers a synthetic description of the principles of ownership, sharing, and reward that guide and stimulate the creative practices of contemporary dance. Irish traditional music is also considered. The article aims to contextualize creative practices within a series of concerns around the protection and perpetuation of valuable cultural and artistic practices. This contextualization establishes the relevance and interest of the contemporary dance for other domains and attends to the contemporary conditions of cultural production, including those of intellectual property law, commercialization, and community/commons formation. I show how this work offers an illuminating model of social process in which value created in common is linked – through reputation, attribution, recognition, and innovation – to people, without private property becoming the dominant mode of ownership.

AbstractThe aim of this special issue is the investigation and contextualization of specific arts practices for what they can show us about the transmission and ownership of knowledge. Our authors make explicit the modes of sharing that are part of the creative process in contemporary dance and in Irish traditional music and examine the principles of transmission and social mores that allow ideas to move between practitioners. This introduction sets out some context for the issue and our approach, which is to work alongside practitioners to understand and reveal the social principles and expectations of ownership that are part of the process of producing these art forms.

International audience ; In the wake of Ingold's critique of 'materiality', one that highlights the cosmological assumptions about spirit and matter that the concept inscribes, I examine 'material' documents that record custom and indigenous knowledge on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea. Documents and books have a history there bound up with colonial governance and with missionisation, thus a strong connection with imposed 'law' in local understanding, yet the production and circulation of documents have also been a site of resistance to the imposition of outside forms of politics, law, and 'knowledge'. Examining the documents they choose to make themselves makes us consider whether knowledge and law is something that exists 'to be' documented, or whether in fact, documentation (like initiation or gardening) may be where knowledge is 'immanent' (following Strathern's recent formulation). Their documentation is 'against' knowledge in the image of a transcendental and universal commons, or a private possession. Focusing on their modes of making knowledge appear leads to a consideration of the performance of knowledge, the time and manner of its revelation and concealment, and of how different (cosmological) conceptions of 'materials' and process can be of interest in shaping a 'legal materialist' approach without a transcendent image of law.

Slit‐gong drums, made and used as part of affinal exchange relations on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea, are considered to be a kind of person. They cannot be extracted from the kin formations in which they came into being because they are part of the transformed relations that their manufacture effects. In an unprecedented event in 2010, a large slit‐gong used by a local community school was attacked during a dispute. In light of this, I examine irreplaceability and substitutability in relation to persons on the Rai Coast and explore what the attack implies about the changing status of objects and things under new economic and social conditions.

Reite people on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea describe a large ceremonial drum (a garamut) as a man. In its construction, a garamut is the focus of a process which brings forth a form of social relations, as well as the object itself. I ask, 'What language might we use to describe such a creation?'. In recent discussions of art, the concepts of aesthetics and technology have been central. Drawing briefly on this literature, I approach an ethnographic description of garamut construction as revealing the particular way in which Reite people generate their social world. The construction is based upon mythic knowledge. This shapes the mode in which persons as gendered agents, and with particular identities, are made to appear. A specific 'aesthetic' scheme is thus apparent. The emergence of the garamut cannot be seen as the end of the process. The object has effect within and upon the relations given form by its emergence. Formation is ongoing, with becoming built in.