Patents, Travel, Space: Ethnographic Encounters with Objects in Transit

Abstract

In this paper, an ethnographical take on objects in motion, I follow the travel of patents from their places of origin in the Western world of technoscience to newly developing worlds. I argue that not only does the influx of patents and patent systems change the sociotechnical configurations in which they emerge; the patent itself—or so I claim—changes with its travel as well, and so it is a different thing in different places. I thus link the nature of things with the places in which they operate, and frame the patent as both a changeable object and an agent of change.