The perception that technology is everywhere — within and around us — comes from, among other places, the way modern people describe themselves. They (moderns of the Euro-American sort) run together all kinds of devices, examples of ingenuity and aids to living as though they had a total existence more powerful than any particular contraption could hold by itself. The conglomerate is glued together by two major assumptions. In everyday parlance, ‘technology’ points to what is contemporary and innovative about modernity; it also points to the creative inventiveness that brings itself into being. A substantial corpus of intellectual property rights, for instance, concerns itself with the producers of contraptions when the producers can also show that they were the original innovators and inventors. I wish to take advantage of the prevalent disourse of technology and the increasingly prevalent discourse of intellectual property to describe a part of our world not ordinarily brought within the range of these constructs. It creates an interesting context for a question. What is strange about technology that Euro-Americans should so insist on their familiarity with it? My toolkit is a couple of textbooks on intellectual property rights (IPR), an art catalogue from an exhibition of wooden sculptures and some anthropological reflections on enchantment.