American Ethnologist
Volume 30, issue 3
Foreword
Virginia R. Dominguez
Bioprospecting
Trees and seas of information: Alien kinship and the biopolitics
of gene transfer in marine biology andbiotechnology
Stefan Helmreich
Examining discussions of “lateral gene transfer” in marine biology
and biotechnology, I maintain that “natural” bonds between genealogy
and classification in biology may be dissolving. I argue that marine microbial
biology is good to think with about the rise of new kinships and biopolitics
organized less around practices of “sex” than politics of “transfer.”
I draw on fieldwork among academic and industry marine biologists to explore
implications of rhizomatic, informatic, watery articulations of “bare
life.”
[biopolitics, kinship, gene transfer, anthropology of science, maritime
anthropology, biotechnology]
From market to market: bioprospecting’s idioms of inclusion
Cori P. Hayden
In this article I explore how “community” and its foil, the (urban)
market, provide competing models for the market-mediated modes of inclusion
and exclusion on offer through bioprospecting agreements. Focusing on the collecting
strategies of Mexican scientists implementing one such agreement, I show how
community and market inform prospecting participants’ ideas not just about
(re)distributing benefits but also about managing the political liabilities
now haunting corporate resource extraction in the south.
[bioprospecting, anthropology of science, Mexico, Latin America, globalization,
intellectual property, indigenous rights]
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