I am getting over a virus. By Dan Duffy. Address:
[email protected]. Distributed January 2008. I am getting over a virus that I may first have noticed in June, when the secretary at the tech firm I manage pointed out that I wasn't making sense. Making sense is my job, sending lawyers and engineers out to evaluate the intellectual property in software developed with open source components, and making sure that what they come back with adds up. If I had to explain why I'm able to do this, I'd say that anthropologists work in interdisciplinary teams at multiple sites to explore globalization, that is, capitalism. Law is the special province of socio-cultural anthropology and I am particularly grounded in the liberal ideology behind IP. I am further skilled in the utopian traditions OS comes from, and my bases in linguistics and archeology and evolution, as well as ethnography of science and medicine, help in dealing with engineers who don't think I'm a technical person. Fieldwork experience enables me to relate to the executives of multinationals, each a nation in itself, who we service. But no one asks, as long as I make sense. That week I wasn't, after I ran out Monday to bring in the hay from the back field at the farm I live on. The farmer is an old man with a bypass and the hired man was busy with his own share. Jumping in and out of a truck, climbing stacks with a bale, keeps me relaxed and happy.