The Patent and the Malanggan

Abstract

How do we inhabit technology? This theme for a conference on the way in which technology (apparently mobile, rootless, individualistic) at once surrounds us and becomes part of our very bodies (becomes ‘inhabited’, with connotations of identity, community, locality) prompts reflections from Melanesia. If the concept of technology inhabits anything, it most emphatically inhabits our ways of speaking about ourselves, reifying many different projects as the extensions of one - an enchantment with creativity. The same language imagines ‘nature’ existing apart from human creations. It is clear that the life of these old Euro-American divisions is not over yet. Intellectual property protocols, notably patenting, foster the divide between ‘technology’ and ‘nature’ while presaging its collapse. This article points to some alternatives, incidentally offering a candidate for ‘habitation’ that has nothing to do with community or locality. © 2001, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.