REGULATING SIGNIFIERS: COLLECTIVE TRADEMARKS AND ARTISANSHIP IN MEXICO

This process explores the public policy implemented in Michoacán, México, that consisted in the registration of over 45 collective trademarks (CT) for artisanship products. This process in Michoacán placed CTs at a crossroads between cultural policy, Intellectual Property (IP) and cultural rights, creating an explicit legal framework for culture that is informed by cultural notions shaped through history and current economic agendas. Focusing on this experience, this research analyses how this legal framework for culture was designed and instrumentalised in Mexico, in the context and challenges of a diverse society in which indigenous peoples have had a complex historical relation with a dominant mestizo culture. The notion of culture’s legal framework refers to the interactions of three different but intertwined legal regimes, which are directly meant to address a peoples’ culture: IP, cultural rights and cultural policies. Since culture’s legal framework is as wide as it is complex, it is necessary to establish some kind of focus, so I have selected a specific public cultural policy, which is the CTs project in Michoacán. The CTs exemplify the interactions within a legal framework of culture which, in turn, depends on the practices of state agents as political class, and in particular their conceptions of the indigenous in the context of globalization.