Nicole Aylwin

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

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.