547CULTURE’S OPEN SOURCESPunt To CultureChristopher M. KeltyRice UniversityCreative Commons, MedCommons, the Connexions Educational ContentCommons, and the Biodiversity Information Commons are efforts to createcollectively managed systems of electronically available and legally re-usablecontent (music, texts, video, sound, educational materials, scientific data, med-ical data, etc.). All of them share certain imaginaries—small-scale society, shar-ing, community, openness, collaboration, and collective stewardship—but doso principally in the most high-tech, globally far-flung and legally arcane man-ner. All see themselves as inheritors of a tradition of the free exchange of ideasas the basis of scientific, technical, and economic progress. Most speak of infor-mation environmentalism, copyright conservancies and preserves, or open,free, and collaboratively managed repositories of intangible but valuable con-tent. None of them are anti-commercial, nor even anti-intellectual property—indeed, they all rely on the existence of intellectual property to create andmaintain the “commons” that are an inevitable part of their names, even asthey occupy a position of challenge or resistance to the dominant forms ofintellectual property in circulation today. Despite the fact that these people are elites, relatively affluent, highly tech-nically sophisticated people who are generally found at the centers of powerPunt To Culture548in the North and the West, they nonetheless share something with the NativeAmericans, Peruvian farmers, or diasporic peoples so commonly studied inanthropology: they seem vitally concerned with developing new strategies formaintaining a threatened “way of life,” which they see both as legitimate andas in need of innovative means of defense—it is their “culture.”At first glance, this comparison may seem absurd; I suggest it because these“commoners,” like many indigenous peoples, have an increasing tendency touse (some variant of) the anthropological concept of culture to defend them-selves, to agitate for rights or goods, to distribute blame and praise, to critiqueanthropology and even perhaps to explain themselves to themselves. MarshallSahlins, for example, suggests “this kind of cultural self awareness is a world-wide phenomenon of the late 20th century. For ages people have been speak-ing culture without knowing it: they were just living it. Yet now it has becomean objectified value—and the object too of a life and death struggle...” (Sahlins2000:297). It is specifically the second-order or re-doubled use of the concept of“culture” by the people I refer to here that justifies this comparison—and notany scale of oppression, imperialism, or entitlement. It is not first the articula-tion of culture I am interested in, it is its operationalization—the strategies bywhich various, overlapping, even contradictory, articulations of “culture” serveas strategies for changing particular technically, legally, and corporeally embed-ded practices. Such practices, seen from this second-order position may well belabeled “culture” by the anthropologist (indeed, Sahlins argues persuasively thatif they were so labeled and understood, “culture” could never be said to disap-pear), however to do so is a methodological nuisance. Articulation and opera-tionalization need to be at least provisionally understood as separate, in orderto make any practical headway out in the field. I suggest here that the lawyersand activists I study are both more savvy about the nature of such separations,and less hung up on them than anthropologists like myself tend to be. While cultural studies, literary studies, film and media studies, education,and the popular media continue to speak of “the culture of x” or the “culturallogic of y,” anthropologists increasingly disavow ownership of these theories—especially when they encounter them in transformed or re-appropriated forms.It is as if the theories had been renounced into some vast public domain ofideas, from which they have been transformed by various peoples into expla-nations, weapons, critiques, legal briefs, sacred rituals, and justifications.Anthropologists might denounce others for misunderstanding, but more often,they are broadsided by the unexpected interruption of these orphaned expla-nations. How should we approach these abandoned relics—as remnants, as549CHRISTOPHER KELTYvintage goods, refurbished or transformed into yet more valuable and fascinat-ing ways of narrating our existence? As a route to the hallowed “cultural” cri-tique, which some of us still see as the distinctive offering of anthropology tothe world? Or as an essential part of a continued but Sisyphean effort to out-line a theory of “culture”? The following story about Creative Commons is one I consider emblematicof this conundrum. The story concerns the uses of “culture” in legal practiceand reasoning. It suggests two things: first, that what we may have onceexpected lawyers, economists, or others to learn from anthropological or cul-tural theory in its myriad forms, they have in fact learned (or knew already);second, that, as a result, we may yet have something to learn from lawyersand economists about how methodology can be related to both the theory andthe practice of critique. It should be clear here that by methodology I meanmore than the practices of being in the field, taking notes, collecting stories,and interviewing informants (I would call these skills, not methods). The ques-tion of method I raise in relating this story concerns objectivity and explana-tion, which I turn to at the end. Creative CommonsCreative Commons was started in 2001 by lawyers Lawrence Lessig, JamesBoyle, and Michael Carroll; computer scientist Hal Abelson; publisher EricEldred and others with money from the Center for the Public Domain; spaceand facilities from Stanford Law School; and grants from the Hewlett andMacArthur foundations.1The project sees inherent value in the system ofintellectual property but wants to achieve balance in its real application.Lessig describes it as part of a two-pronged approach, the first being conven-tional challenges to IP law in the courts (such as the Eldred v. Ashcroft case)and the other, Creative Commons, an unconventional attempt to achieve sim-ilar goals privately (outside of the courts and legislature but within the limitsof existing law). As with its inspirational forerunner, the