The Multispecies Salon 2008 is available now
Speaking With/For Nature:
Conversations with Biologists and Their Non-Human Others
Thursday, November 16, 2006, 10:15AM - 12:00PM
A Presidential Session at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting
San Jose Convention Center
Chair: Donna Haraway (UC Santa Cruz)
Organizer: S. Eben Kirksey (UC Santa Cruz)
Introductory Remarks (5 min): Donna Haraway (UC Santa Cruz)
Kimberly Tallbear (15 min) “Native American DNA: Biological Entrepreneurs and the Making of Identity” (Arizona State University)
Paige West (15 min) “Making Value, Tracking Meaning: The Politics and Ecology of Tree Kangaroo Conservation” (Barnard College/Columbia University)
S. Eben Kirksey (15 min) “Foam Frogs and Eco-Tractors: Voices from a Neotropical Swamp” (UC Santa Cruz)
Stefan Helmreich (15 min) “How the Ocean Got Its Genome” (MIT)
Discussant (15 min): Jonathan Marks (UNC-Charlotte)
Discussant (15 min): Donna Haraway (UC Santa Cruz)
Discussion (10 min)
Session Abstract
Bruno Latour recognizes a kinship among “spokespersons”, people who speak for other people as well as people who speak for nature. Dangerous issues linked to the possibility of democratic representation parallel issues of re-presentation in visual, auditory, textual, and epistemological domains. Our panelists will be asked to situate some of nature’s different spokespersons—researchers, activists, economists, and entrepreneurs—within networks of power and meaning. The art of translation, the negotiation of the form and content of meaning, figures prominently in the processes we will describe. We aim to go beyond anthropocentric notions of speech to understand the full scope of semiotic traffic between humans and non-human others. Focusing on the roots/routes of genes, individual organisms, and populations will enable us to rethink issues relating to race, relatedness, the environment, and the politics of speaking. In other words we will trace how discoveries about nature are being used to transform human social systems and cultured landscapes.
This panel will showcase new approaches to “biological anthropology” that deal with critical intersections between culture and nature. We will import theories from cultural anthropology to understand phenomena that have conventionally been restricted to domains of biological science. Our methods vary—some of us have done “conventional” participant observation in genetics labs, zoos, and at tropical biology field stations. Other participants have been speaking with biologists in more direct, if not confrontational, encounters.
Drawing on innovative scholarship across disciplines (geography, museology, literature, environmental studies, and STS), we ourselves will also become spokespeople for nature. Departing from Timothy Mitchell’s provocative question, “can the mosquito speak”, we will be attentive to the surprising ways that non-human agents interrupt, limit, and enable human affairs. In the early 21st century, an age of planetary mass extinction, it is important to search for locations of bio-cultural hope. Our panel will seek out post-industrial, post-colonial, and post-imperial stories of survival that complicate essentialist depictions of pristine nature and fixed indigenous identity. The paper presenters are emergent voices. As we draw on a number of distinct intellectual traditions, our aim is to rethink the possibilities of engagement with biological anthropologists.
