Bioprospecting's representational dilemma

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to extend gratitude, first, to Claudia Castañeda, whose initiative in organizing a panel on Postcolonial Science Studies at the 2000 meetings of the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) was the original spark for this essay and for this special issue of Science as Culture. For their heroic editorial work thanks go to Maureen McNeil and Les Levidow; for comments and generative conversation, the author thanks Annelise Riles, Marilyn Strathern, Galen Joseph, and Catherine Alexander; and for their generosity and insights, a final thanks to the participants in the ICBG program, ‘Bioactive Agents from Dryland Biodiversity of Latin America’.

Notes

1. We might follow George Hartley and frame the ‘problem’ of representation via Marx and Gayatri Spivak (Hartley, 2003, pp. 247–252). Hartley notes that in Spivak's famous essay, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, she works through a critical engagement with the problem of colonialism, marginality, and academic knowledge production in part through an explication of Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire (Spivak, 1988). As Spivak reads Marx, representation takes on two meanings: as depiction, and as proxy. Representation works in the sense of a depiction, when, for example, peasant proprietors can form a picture of themselves as a class. We might think of representation as ‘proxy’, a mode of speaking for ‘interests’, when these same peasants fail to conceive of themselves as a class, and instead turn to someone else (in Marx's example, Bonaparte) to represent their interests for them (see Hartley, 2003, p. 248). A notion of the fundamental doubleness of representation—as depiction, as proxy, and often as both at the same time—matters a great deal to Spivak's notion of the politics of knowledge production, and, I suggest, it matters a great deal to an analytic project forged in the name of a postcolonial science studies, particularly in the case of bioprospecting.

2. As have, significantly, feminist technoscience studies. Donna Haraway in particular has pointedly remarked upon the gendered and race-d notions of agency and identity that underlie Latourian understandings of representation (Haraway, 1997, pp. 23–39).

3. As Spivak argues, if the subaltern subject is only knowable through the archives and traces of colonialism, then any effort to speak for the (interests of) the subaltern by speaking of (depicting) her runs into the fundamental problem that ‘knowing’ is to perpetuate a violence—thus all that is left to the intellectual is to ‘mime’ an act of unknowing (see Spivak, 1988; see also Hartley, 2003, pp. 235–259).

4. Beverly here draws on an unpublished paper by Alberto Moreiras from 1997, though the point is elaborated in various ways in other conversations in an emerging school of Latin American subaltern and postcolonial studies. See Moreiras's elaborations of a notion of negativity as a critical stance in Moreiras (2001); see also Rabasa (2001).

5. Michel Callon's well-known article on the agency of scallops has been a touchstone for science studies debates over how a ‘symmetrical’ approach to sociological analysis shall distribute attributions of agency among human and non-human entities (Callon, 1986).

6. A note on my use of the word ‘translation’ is in order here. A few readers of my work have (mis)understood my argument by assuming that translation must simply mean giving a different name to the ‘same’ substance or knowledge. To the contrary, I draw on work in both science studies and postcolonial and poststructuralist theory which holds that translations are always, necessarily, transformations.

7. In a longer discussion of this point (Hayden, 2003b), I discuss various modes of epistemological advocacy, and the difference it makes to make truth claims for indigenous knowledges and resource management strategies in the idiom of sustainability (see Posey, 1985), a structuralist interest in the fundamental similarities of ‘scientific’ and ‘traditional’ classification structures (see Hunn, 1999), or in the language of bioactive chemical compounds and their commercial potential (Schultes and von Reis, 1995; Plotkin, 1993; Balick and Cox, 1996).

8. See Warwick Anderson's fascinating account of the ways in which such moves of attaching and detaching shaped colonial clinical research in the ‘peripheries’ in an era in which the ‘benefit-recipient’ was not an operable category (Anderson, 2000).