Her exploration will search at the strategies in which laws handle and shield regular beliefs, tales and cultural thoughts.
Alison Dundes Renteln gained a Fulbright Professional System award and will journey to the College of Iceland to take a look at how intellectual home regulation applies to foodways. (Composite: Letty Avila. Picture Sources: Peter Zhaoyu Zhou iStock.)
The legal security of folklore and its implications for particular branded merchandise, together with “Skyr” yogurt, will be the focus of the analysis of Alison Dundes Renteln, professor of political science, anthropology, community coverage and legislation at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, when she goes to the University of Iceland by a Fulbright Expert System award this May.
Renteln will collaborate with Valdimar Tr. Hafstein, professor of folkloristics/ethnology, and his colleagues on a undertaking titled “Cultural heritage, cultural regulation, and human legal rights,” which examines how intellectual residence regulation applies to foodways. For social science students, foodways are the cultural, social and financial tactics relating to the output and usage of foods.
Renteln reports worldwide legislation, human legal rights and comparative authorized methods and is an expert on cultural legal rights, a topic she writes about in her forthcoming ebook, Worldwide Human Rights: A Study (Cambridge University Push, 2022), co-authored with Cher Weixia Chen of George Mason University in Virginia.. Her exploration challenge in Reykjavik combines her scholarship in law with a further lifelong enthusiasm, foods, a subject that she says is dear to her due to the fact of her upbringing in Berkeley, California, known by many as a food mecca.
“It was the metropolis of the ‘gourmet ghetto,’ Alice Waters, and global cuisines,” Renteln claims. “My father was a professor of anthropology and folklore, and my mom was keenly interested in gastronomy. She gathered cookbooks from her travels with my father to distant lands.”
Renteln will appear at how regular Icelandic yogurt is marketed and offered below the Skyr identify, which carries with it connotations of a thousand decades of cultural heritage. As well as involving lawful battles more than trademark and patent in the international dairy marketplace, she says, it also falls underneath “the IPR jurisprudence of geographic indications,” which regulates how regular merchandise, such as meals, can be named primarily based on exactly where they are made. A famous example of this is the rule that only glowing wine from the French location of Champagne may well have the eponymous title.
“Since graduate college, I have been intrigued by the legal safety of numerous sorts of society, this sort of as folk medicine, people songs, people art and recipes,” Renteln describes. “I’m intrigued by the question of why foodstuff items were being regulated so that only items that were being manufactured in specific destinations could use unique designations — tequila, Parma ham, feta cheese, etc. It is curious that the national identification of international locations depends, to some diploma, on the popular delicacies from the area cuisine.”
Renteln is a single of a lot more than 400 United States citizens who share expertise with host institutions abroad through the Fulbright Expert System each and every year. Recipients of Fulbright Specialist awards are picked based mostly on educational and professional achievement, shown management in their industry and their probable to foster extended-time period cooperation amongst establishments in the U.S. and abroad.
