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WORLD✒ EDITORIALABSURDITY:
The commodification of Indigenous cultures and traditions
Filed 51m ago · Via Global Voices · The Buffoon Desk
THIS STORY IS SCORED
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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0
Photo: European Parliament · CC BY 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
Global Voices' Indigenous Rights series lays out a pattern across Oaxaca and Guatemala: wedding planners sell packaged 'Oaxacan weddings' stripped of the Guelaguetza's giving-and-receiving ethic, while fashion houses like Isabel Marant and Antik Batik have lifted Maya and Mixe textile patterns without credit or payment.
In Tlahuitoltepec, community authorities formally accused Marant and Antik Batik of appropriating a graphic pattern tied to a specific community's identity, not just a generic design. Maya weavers in Guatemala are now pushing for legal recognition of collective intellectual property rights, an attempt to convert protection into something more durable than a press statement.
The full dispatch is available from the source below.
✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK
There is a difference between admiring a thing and taking it home in your suitcase, and the fashion houses in this story keep pretending they can't tell. A pattern that took generations to mean something doesn't stop meaning that just because a marketing department found it pretty. Good on the weavers for lawyering up, because apparently a strongly worded statement from the community wasn't going to cut it.
