2004; 2009), Hardt draws our attention to two very different notions of the commons that are currently witness to two parallel but paradoxical trends. One refers to the ecological systems that constitute our natural environment. The commons in this sense primarily include the atmosphere, the oceans, rivers, mountains, and forests as well as the forms of human and animal life that continuously interact with these natural systems. But as Hardt points out, a second notion of the commons refers to the shared products of human labor such as ideas, images, codes, and social relations. Interestingly, both conceptions of the commons, which have little in common, have increasingly become central to capitalist systems of production at the very same time as property relations under capitalism have led to the massive exploitation and degeneration of the commons (Hardt 2009). Hardt and Negri argue that a central task for critical theory today is to broaden our vision of political possibilities (Hardt/Negri 2009). According to these authors, the search for radical new alternatives must transcend the existing option between private or public (i.e. state) ownership in the governance of the commons. My own work as a legal and political anthropologist has focused on how the lines between public and private property are being redrawn today (Randeria 2007a; 2007b) and how they are being contested in ways that increasingly blur the distinction between nature and culture, between organic things and human artifacts or inventions. In my research on the new regimes of intellectual property rights, I have argued for the need to develop a mode of governance of the commons beyond the binary categories of the private and the public, which has been narrowly understood as, and reduced to, the state. This would among other things also mean transcending the opposition between nature and culture, which is pivotal to so much of modern Western thought. The universality of this distinction has been questioned in my discipline, social anthropology, by scholars like P. Descola and E. Viveiros de Castro based on their ethnographic research among Amazonian Indian groups. Rather than positing a single mode of relationship between humans and non-humans, which could serve as the background against which cultural variations across societies can be discerned, Descola has argued that there are not
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Shalini Randeria