1 Chapman, Susannah and Rosemary J. Coombe. “Ethnographic Explorations of Intellectual Property.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Oxford University Press. Article published August 2020. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.013.115. Finished version retrievable at: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.013.115. Ethnographic Explorations of Intellectual Property Susannah Chapman and Rosemary J. Coombe Summary Ethnographic research into intellectual property (IP) gained traction in the mid-1990s as the scope of such legal protections expanded and international trade agreements mandated minimum IP protections during the same period that international indigenous peoples’ human rights were negotiated. Anthropologists considered IP extension in terms of the new processes of commodification the law enabled, the cultural incommensurability of the law’s presuppositions in various societies, the implications of these rights for disciplinary research and publication ethics, and the modes of subjectification and territorialisation that the enforcement of such laws engendered. Recognising that IP clearly constrains and shapes the circulation of goods through the privatisation of significant resources, critical anthropological examinations of Western liberal legal binary distinctions between public and private goods also revealed the forms of dispossession enabled by presupposing a singular cultural commons. Ethnographers showed the diversity of publics constituted through authorised and unauthorised reproduction and circulation of cultural goods, exploring the management of intangible cultural goods in a variety of moral economies as well as the construction and translation of tradition in new policy arenas. The intersection of IP and human rights also prompted greater disciplinary reflexivity with respect to research ethics and publication practises. Analyzing how IP protections are legitimated and the activities that their enforcement delegitimates, anthropologists illustrate how the law creates privileged and abject subjectivities, reconfigures affective relationships between people and places, and produces zones of policing and discipline in praxes of territorialisation. Keywords: biotechnology, branding, commodification, cultural circulation, denominations of origin, geographic indications, intellectual property, moral economy, patents, pharmaceuticals, piracy, subjectivity, territorialisation, trademark, tradition,