Creation and authorship in the traditional cultures from Historical-Cultural Theory

Abstract

The traditional cultural expressions are constantly subalternized by the colonialism and eurocentrism, that delegitimizes their knowledges, cosmologies and ways of being and living. One of this subalternizing practices is the impossibility of claiming intellectual property rights and copyrights, once these laws are based on the hegemonic idea of individual authorship. The hegemonic understanding of creation comes from the modern idea of individual. The objective of this paper is to propose, through the cultural-historical theory of Vigotski, a different approach of the creation process, outlining the perspective that a person and the social medium are an indivisible unity. The paper is a fragment of a theoretical doctoral thesis in Education, and focuses the discussion on the asymmetries between the individual authorship and the collective aspect of the creation act. It concludes that the review of laws is not enough, but there’s the necessity of inverting the logic of the hegemonic paradigm. The text proposes another way to understand creation and education, one that recognizes the authentic expression of the traditional cultural expression’s holders.