Pirekua, a type of Indigenous song from western Mexico, is a contested musical practice. It is claimed by the Mexican state as “national patrimony” and is recognized by UNESCO as “intangible cultural heritage of humanity.” At the same time, the Indigenous communities that perform this music understand some pirekuas as belonging anonymously to specific villages and others as being composed by specific individuals who may register their songs through official copyright channels. This is additionally complicated by a recent revision to patrimony laws that recognizes Indigenous collective ownership of such practices. But at the heart of these contestations are conflicting ideas over pirekua’s status as being either “alienable” and/or “inalienable.” In this paper, I mark pirekua’s transformations from sound to alienable object and from Indigenous song to inalienable national patrimony. Drawing from three years of fieldwork, I show that pirekua is recognized as inalienable property only after it is delimited, documented, and detached from Indigenous communities and composers. That is, patrimonial regimes protect pirekua’s inalienability by producing its alienability. On another level, however, I argue that pirekua illuminates a contradiction at the heart of patrimony. By putting aside a priori understandings of ownership (Graeber 2003; Strathern 1999; Weiner 1993), I trace pirekua’s movements through these legal spheres to understand how and when in/alienability materializes, and how and why it matters. This not only highlights the constraints of ownership as a model and a grammar, but reveals these movements to be the very moments in which in/alienability emerges.

U.S. liberal legality generally precludes the formal recognition of U.S. music as cultural heritage. When the state legal apparatus has been mobilized to resolve conflicts regarding the ownership of wholly or semi-traditional musical expressions, those conflicts have inevitably been styled in terms of the intellectual property rights of individual artist/collector-claimants or their heirs. This has had complex ramifications for African American genres like the blues, which partook of practices of collective authorship, even as it was imbricated from an early date in circuits of industrial exchange and copyright (e.g., Miller 2010). This paper examines these tensions with reference to litigation pursued by Bessie Smith’s adoptive son, Jack Gee, Jr., against her record label, Columbia, in the 1970s. Gee’s suit alleged that Smith’s property rights to her recorded performances had never been transferred to Columbia via a lawful contract, and that those rights had instead passed to him, as her legal heir. This paper uses the suit to show how recorded music’s intergenerational commodity circulation entails two partially overlapping forms of alienation: transfer via legal instruments like contracts and wills, versus the felt experience of severance from the musical labor of one’s kin (I term these “transfer-alienation” and “estrangement-alienation,” respectively). Attending to Gee’s formal property rights as well as extra-legal but, for all that, symbolically efficacious framings of the blues as Black cultural heritage, I use the double valence of “alienation” to read the case as an exemplary contest over the nature and scope of Smith’s “blues legacy” (Davis 1998).

The early 21st century brought to Bolivia its first Indigenous president, a new constitution, and a profusion of laws that recognized individual music and dance expressions as intangible cultural heritage. As part of a larger collaborative project, we question what motivated Bolivians into a heritage-making frenzy at this politically transformative moment. We pivot away from UNESCO-driven heritage debates to a different set of questions (what we call “heritage otherwise”) and focus on how citizens used law to frame expressive culture and to engage their relatively new state. This paper details a La Paz Department heritage law for the mohoseño flute, a case which was notable for its decolonizing dimensions and its complex interplay between insurgent traditions and a belief in the emancipatory potential of law. This heritage law referenced "rights of identity" and represented one political tool among others in the region’s longue durée anti-colonial campaigns. Heritage-making protagonists recognized the potential and lure of tourism—to support livelihoods in this remote area that is imagined to be favored with natural abundance—but also its dangers and the need for local control. In this heritage vision, they assembled an archive of Indigenous insurrectional heroes—ghosts spanning multiple centuries—who were etched into the landscape and activated through performance practices.