A Panel of Scholars
The 107th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), to be held at the San Francisco Hilton and Towers, will have two panels that are connected to our event: "The Multispecies Salon II" and "Species at Sea: Anthropologies of Nonhuman Strangers and Companions." In addition to the formal presentations at the AAA, panelists and interested audience members will be invited to an informal workshop of the papers at the art exhibit site.
The Philippine Tarsier
Panel One: The Multispecies Salon II
Organizer: S. Eben Kirksey (Santa Clara U).Panelists: Agustin Fuentes (Notre Dame), Donna Haraway (UC Santa Cruz), Jake Kosek (U New Mexico), and Sarah Franklin (LSE)
Discussants: Geoffrey Bowker (Santa Clara U).
This is an invited session of the American Ethnological Society and the Society for Cultural Anthropology. It will take place on November 20th 2008 from 1:45 PM - 03:30 PM in the Hilton's Golden Gate Room 1.
Military and industrial initiatives are manufacturing a diverse array of new biotechnical assemblages. Cell lines, insects, and other living creatures are becoming agents of the state and of what Kaushik Sunder-Rajan calls biocapital. Laboratories all around the world are engaging in inter-species genetic manipulation in hopes of generating new technologies of regenerative medicine and life extension. What opportunities exist for appropriating, reconfiguring, and resignifying biotechnical assemblages? How do everyday infrastructures, technological artifacts, and market forces shape the encounters between diverse plants, animals, and microorganisms? What is at stake when bodies, cells, and ecosystems are preserved, cultivated, and engineered? This panel will consider how diverse memory practices—story telling conventions, databases, banks of living matter, and especially art forms—are being mobilized to produce modest sites of biocultural hope.
Our panelists—cultural anthropologists, a primatologist, as well as scholars of science and technology studies (STS)—have traced narratives about natural history that are circulating through multiple social and political worlds. The global itinerary of this panel starts in the wild country of Australia, where we find thriving naturaltechnical worlds despite the bad memories and troubled discursive practices of white settler colonists. Nearby, in Indonesia, the flourishing of human and primate worlds is tied to a trans-national conservation infrastructure that links together purloined databases, bureaucratic committees, and intensive field research. Next we visit the American Southwest where salvation is linked to the promise of ultimate destruction contained in nuclear weapons technologies. Here the Department of Defense is developing new surveillance programs involving honey bees (Apis mellifera). Our final stop is London, where under-privileged school children, participants in the Future Mix project, are questioning the promise of salvation contained in biocapital. These modest critics are teaching us to regard bioengineering ventures with a low level of ambivalence. Their cautious optimism and outright cynicism is a healthy antidote to miracle visions of technoscientific prophecy.
Our papers build on conversations begun at AAA in 2006—at a Presidential Session called "Speaking with/for Nature: Conversations with Biologists and Their Non-human Others" as well as a special off-site event at UC Santa Cruz called "The Multispecies Salon". By engaging and collaborating across subfields, and reaching out to other disciplines, we aim to generate new ways to approach "biological anthropology." The 2008 Multispecies Salon II will be linked to a special off-site event at a San Francisco art gallery, a contact zone of sorts, where our panelists will enter into dialogue with artists who work on intersections among human and non-human worlds. Bio-artists, who use living matter to create their work, will be invited to install naturaltechnical provocations.
Donna Haraway
UC Santa Cruz
“Speculative Fabulations for Technoculture’s Generations:
Taking Care of Unexpected Country”
When I first saw the Anglo-Australian Patricia Piccinini's art, I recognized a sibling in technoculture, a co-worker committed to taking naturecultures seriously without the soporific seductions of a return to Eden or the palpitating frisson of a jeremiad warning of the coming technological Apocalypse. Piccinini is a compelling story teller in the radical experimental lineage of feminist science fiction and speculative fabulation. Her visual and sculptural art is about naturaltechnical worlds needy for care and response, worlds full of unsettling but oddly familiar critters who turn out to be simultaneously near kin and alien colonists. These worlds require curiosity, emotional engagement, and investigation. Like me Piccinini is the offspring of white settler colonies, their frontier practices, their ongoing immigrations, and their bad memories and troubled discourses of indigeneity, belonging, appropriation, wastelands, progress, and exclusion. Piccinini seems to me to be proposing not another frontier, but rather something akin to a decolonizing ethic indebted to Australian Aboriginal practices of taking care of country and accounting for generations of entangled human and nonhuman entities. In this lecture, I will put Piccinini's art in conversation with the anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose's "What if the Angel of History Were a Dog?" in order to explore the chances for multi-species reconciliation in the face of ongoing practices of "killing generations." The point is to learn to take care of unexpected country by facing situated pasts so as to have something livable to bequeath those who come after.
Agustin Fuentes
University of Notre Dame
“Adventures in the In-between:
Lived Experiences of a Bio-Anthropologist Navigating the Human-Primate Interface”
Wild and tame, food and companion, diseased and martyr, savage and noble, neighbor and enemy, many primates exist in-between the perceived realms of domesticated and feral across a naturecultural realm confounding simplistic categorizations. As global and local anthropogenic ecologies shift and morph this space the human-non-human primate interface is ripe for anthropological analyses. This multispecies arena has become a site of biocultural hope. I have spent the last 19 years moving across and within this in-between space looking at monkeys, apes, people, societies, ecologies, biologies, and perceptions. This paper will reflect on the types of engagements, knowledges, and experiences that characterize this interface, the structures and pathways in which research is conducted, and the processes that constrain our envisioning of the in-between as a central arena of biocultural investigation and illumination. To do this I will draw on my experiences and research with human/non-human primate interfaces in Bali and the Mentawai Islands, Indonesia, and in the USA, on the practices of using primates to "model" human evolution and human disease, and the battle to bring a naturecultural or biocultural perspective into mainstream approaches in anthropology and primatology.
Jake Kosek
UC Berkeley
“Homeland Security Detective Devices:
On the New Uses of the Honey Bee”
This paper focuses on the rise of the honeybee as a tool and metaphor in the war on terror. At present the largest source of funding for apiary research comes not for the USDA but for the pentagon and US military as part of efforts to remake entomology in an age of empire. This funding is being used in three areas: first, to develop and train a new generation of bees to make them even more sensitive and to be targeted sensors of specific chemical traces-- everything from plastic explosives, to the tritium used in nuclear weapons development, to land mine detection. Second, to enhance bee's detection abilities through transgenic process and even the synthesis of new traits that would better design the bee for the task of detection and monitoring of weapons development. Finally, in an explicit attempt to redesign modern battlefield technique the Pentagon has return to the form and metaphor of the swarm to combat the unpredictability and de-centered approaches to battlefield tactics that define modern warfare. In these and other cases the bee is being enlisted in the war on terror as well as being remade in cultural and material form military purposes. I hope to explore the remaking of nature by tracing the changes to the hive and understandings of the bee in relation of the current fears and strategies of the war on terror.
Sarah Franklin
London School of Economics
“Future Mix”
This presentation will reflect on my participation in an art and science project based in a London community school involving a series of public events focusing on transgenic research, regenerative medicine, cloning, and synthetic biology. The project, which involved students, artists, teachers, and a prominent scientific expert from University College London, as well as an anthropologist, was intended to offer a "fresh approach" to the challenges of new regenerative biotechnologies under the rubric of "Future Mix". In reflecting on the experience of contributing to this hybrid effort to address "the significance and implications of inter-species genetic manipulation" and to explore "the boundaries between human and non-human, nature and artifact, science and art" I will explore in particular the constitution of futurity and hope often associated with this field, contrasting this with the associations of risk and exposure with which it is also frequently connected. By so doing I also highlight some of the conflicting perspectives and investments that shape technoscientific futures in "the age of biological control." Drawing on my experiences of working with students on this project I examine the kinds of "cultural capital" that go into the making of "biocapital" and its speculative futures.
Panel Two: Species at Sea: Aqueous Anthropologies of Nonhuman Strangers and Companions
Organizer: Stefan Helmreich (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)Panelists: Karen Barad (UC Santa Cruz), Stefan Helmreich (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Bill Maurer (UC Irvine), and Astrid Schrader (Brown University)
Discussant:Donna Haraway (UC Santa Cruz)
Time: November 20 2008 from 10:15-12
Anthropologists and other ethnographically minded folk have lately turned their antennae toward animal others, similars, and familiars, exploring how the human subjects of social science might be differently imagined and described in their encounter with stranger and companion species. Scholars on this panel take this recent "animal turn" underwater — as well as across phyla, kingdoms, and domains — entangling their ethnological investigations with such beings as brittlestars, extremophilic marine microbes, sea cucumbers, cowries, and dinoflagellates. Differences between life and death, time and space, land and sea, individual and dividual are set in motion by this heterogeneous collection of marine organisms, creatures united less by taxonomy than by their common medium, water. Such entities also often place the very notion of species itself in flux, a concept that, as Donna Haraway argues, is already "inherently oxymoronic," referring at once to logical types as well as to that which is relentlessly specific. A question arises of whether conceptions of water as context, medium, or milieu may themselves condition the sometime deliquescence of organism and species boundaries. Franz Boas's famous 1881 dissertation in geography and physics on the color of water, which prompted him to consider the role of qualitative, cultural forces in shaping classification and measurement, might provide one disciplinary touchstone for tackling this question, as might Alfred Kroeber's 1952 comparison of culture to a coral reef. What contributors to this panel add to these early anthropological meditations on water and vitality is an interest in how we might understand the notion of a "medium" as such — whether watery or cultural — and whether such understandings might transform our accounts of the outlines and substance of humans and their stranger and companion species.
Karen Barad (UC Santa Cruz)
"Boas, Brittlestars, and Birefringence: How Measurement Matters"
To some, the brittlestar, a brainless eyeless ocean dweller, is a primitive creature with a few rather more familiar kin like the starfish, sea urchin, and sea cucumber. But to R&D scientists at Lucent Technologies, the brittlestar is the sole proprietor of some very valuable trade secrets, including an uncanny ability to manufacture near perfect microlenses designed to minimize spherical aberration and birefringence. The brittlestar's lack of brain notwithstanding, this ophiuroid's ingenuity is being enlisted in teaching us a thing or two about sophisticated optical systems. The brittlestar's unique optical system is different in kind from the visualizing systems that many epistemologists, science studies scholars, and cultural studies scholars are fond of reflecting on. (What is at issue is not the geometrical optics model that positions culture/language/representation as the lens or medium that mediates between the object world and the mind of the knowing subject, a geometry of absolute exteriority between ontologically and epistemologically distinct kinds.) In this talk, I will place the brittlestar's optical enactments and experiments in conversation with Franz Boas' doctoral research investigations into the optical properties of water.
Stefan Helmreich (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
"Alien Ocean: The Symbiopolitics of Life at Sea"
A new generation of marine biologists, employing genomics and bioinformatics, is coming to see the sea as animated by its smallest inhabitants: marine microbes. Thriving in a variety of extreme conditions — from deep-sea volcanoes to methane-rich coastal areas to the open ocean — such microbes are becoming key figures in scientific and public debates about the origin of life, climate change, bioprospecting and biotechnology, and the possibility of life on other worlds. Such microbes are fresh, technoscientifically imagined tokens for the "life" the sea is considered to substantiate and symbolize. But research into marine microbes undoes some of the dearest categories of contemporary biology: chemosynthetic metabolisms breach boundaries between inorganic and organic, and lateral gene transfer among oceangoing microbes unravels steady conceptualizations of species. For evolutionists such as Lynn Margulis, who argues that evolutionary novelty emerges from symbiogenesis — the organic fusion of different kinds — such undoings implicate the microbial as a source of boundary blurring at all scales of embodiment (organic incorporations often permit not just lateral gene transfer, but lateral genome transfer across taxonomic domains). Drawing on anthropological work with marine microbiologists, I track how microbes are leveraged to think across scales, from genomes to biomes, complicating boundaries between species, ecologies, nature, and culture. In an age of a biological engineering that looks to extreme marine microbes as sources of evolutionary novelty, climate modulation, and biocapital, such rethinkings suggest we may be witnessing the rise of what I will call, fusing Foucault with Margulis, symbiopolitics.
Bill Maurer (UC Irvine)
"Specie at Sea:
Monetary Mashups, From Cowrie Shells to Cell Phones."
A mashup is a "derivative work," an unexpected conjoining of two or more separately functional entities to create something interesting, whether or not it is useful, exchangeable, or valuable. This paper argues that money is a mashup. In so doing, the paper works to set aside anthropological obsessions with value in order to more fully work through the money mashup's workings – which are also interesting, whether or not they are useful, exchangeable, or valuable. Based on being at sea in what finance natives call "the payments space" and on fieldwork about the reconfiguration of mobile phones as payment systems, the paper dredges up old debates over the reconfiguration of cowrie shells as money. Cowries and cell phones are each routed through the offshore, at sea in more respects than one.
Astrid Schrader (UC Santa Cruz)
"Toxic Waters and Turbulent Times: Red Tides, Dinoflagellates, and
Phantomatic Species"
The colors of water are changing. The familiar hues of blue and green of our oceans are increasingly interrupted by reddish and brownish tides. In 2006, the LA Times launched a five part series on Harmful Algae Blooms titled "Altered Oceans." Quoting a marine ecologist, the author of Part One affirms, "We're pushing the oceans back to the dawn of evolution … Fish, corals and marine mammals are dying while algae, bacteria and jellyfish are growing unchecked." The nutrient overdosing of our oceans that leads to oxygen depleted zones only hospitable to so-called 'primitive' organisms is rendered as cultural pollution reversing the natural 'arrow of time': "evolution [is] running in reverse." What conceptions of species and time drive such narratives? What role does time play in delineating the 'cultural' from the 'natural' in endangered ecologies? And, how does this affect possible intervention into blooms of toxic dinoflagellates? This paper explores how assumptions about an 'arrow of time' in evolution and technoscientific progress in the making and controlling of harmful algae blooms link to conceptions of species as autopoeitic (self-making) entities. For Lynn Margulis, the prokaryotic survivors in so-called 'dead zones,' would not qualify as species. Ongoing gene-swapping renders their types fluid. Such a 'lack of self' in species-beings is, however, not unique to bacteria nor can it be reduced to gene-swapping. In tracing some of the ecohistorical relations that toxic dinoflagellates may become, I argue for a move from fluid to phantomatic types, challenging the self-evidence of "our" time.