Piracy and New Intellectual Property Debates in Latin America

Kedron Thomas has conducted extensive ethnographic research in Guatemala. Her research has focused on small-scale indigenous Maya manufactures who make nontraditional clothing for the Central American market. She has written about their use of unauthorized fashion brands on the clothing they make, a form of brand “piracy” that has recently been criminalized in Guatemala, as well as social and economic changes associated with neoliberal reforms and new forms of violence and insecurity that have taken shape in Guatemala since the end of the internal armed conflict.

Kedron (Ph.D. Harvard University, 2011) is now an assistant professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, where she teaches courses on legal anthropology, the anthropology of clothing and fashion, and intellectual and cultural property, with emphasis on case studies drawn from Latin America. 

Read more: http://anthropology.artsci.wustl.edu/thomas_kedron