When Nature Goes Public

The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico

Cori Hayden

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691095578, 9780691095561
• eBook ISBN: 9780691216362
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Bioprospecting--the exchange of plants for corporate promises of royalties or community development assistance--has been lauded as a way to develop new medicines while offering southern nations and indigenous communities an incentive to preserve their rich biodiversity. But can pharmaceutical profits really advance conservation and indigenous rights? How much should companies pay and to whom? Who stands to gain and lose? The first anthropological study of the practices mobilized in the name and in the shadow of bioprospecting, this book takes us into the unexpected sites where Mexican scientists and American companies venture looking for medicinal plants and local knowledge.


Cori Hayden tracks bioprospecting's contentious new promise--and the contradictory activities generated in its name. Focusing on a contract involving Mexico's National Autonomous University, Hayden examines the practices through which researchers, plant vendors, rural collectors, indigenous cooperatives, and other actors put prospecting to work. By paying unique attention to scientific research, she provides a key to understanding which people and plants are included in the promise of "selling biodiversity to save it"--and which are not. And she considers the consequences of linking scientific research and rural "enfranchisement" to the logics of intellectual property.


Roving across UN protocols, botanical collecting histories, Mexican nationalist agendas, neoliberal property regimes, and North-South relations, When Nature Goes Public charts the myriad, emergent publics that drive and contest the global market in biodiversity and its futures.

PART ONE

Neoliberal Natures

Chapter 1

Interests and Publics:

On (Ethno)science and Its Accountabilities

What does it mean to conduct an ethnography of bioprospecting as an ethnography of science? In this chapter I introduce some of the theoretical approaches and conceptual concerns that run through this account, and that inform my interest in placing academic scientific research at the very center of my inquiry into the machinations and effects of bioprospecting. In particular, I lay out what I think a science studies-inflected anthropology can contribute to an understanding of bioprospecting—as well as some of the challenges prospecting poses for science studies.

I introduce two intertwined sets of concerns that run through this chapter and shape the book as a whole: interests and publics. By interests, I refer to the idea that knowledge and bioartifacts contain, reproduce, or represent people’s interests—a crucial claim for science studies that takes on new dimensions in the context of bioprospecting. Alongside this concern, I want to open up the question of the myriad publics that “science” and scientists produce and must answer to in the context of bioprospecting and beyond.

Both sets of concerns have everything to do with contemporary conditions of bioscience research, in which the “representative” work that science does has taken on some new and pointed significance. This chapter does double service then, introducing key theoretical questions and also charting some of the institutional shifts in the political economies of “knowledge production” in the United States, Mexico, and internationally, which have prompted me to shape my inquiry in the way I have. Central to the story is my situating bioprospecting (and the social studies thereof) in some distinctive institutional landscapes of academic knowledge-production, which are marked by the increasing prevalence of private-public “partnerships,” the development of new ethical codes for the ethnosciences, and the prominence of knowledge as a vivid site of struggle for indigenous peoples and southern and northern nation-states alike.

Science Studies: On Having Interests in Knowledge

As we will see in great detail throughout the rest of this book, central to the politics of bioprospecting is the question of who shall be able to stake a claim in knowledge or plants that are collected in the south and industrialized in the north. If this is very clearly a political question, it is also a theoretical one. We might, in this vein, pose prospecting’s central dilemma as a question of the capacity of knowledge and artifacts to represent interests: How do scientists, rural Mexicans, national governments, and corporations claim, activate, or deny interests (their own or others’) in knowledge and nature? These are questions with much resonance in science studies, an interdisciplinary field that has long-concerned itself with the question of the political and social interests that “reside” in knowledge and bioartifacts (among other things) (Latour 1987).

“Interest” is a term with a dense legacy in liberal theories of why people do the things they do. Arguably its most powerful association over the past one hundred and fifty years has been with economic (self-)interest, and the accompanying presumption that we are all rational actors whose behavior can be attributed to efforts to calculate and maximize our own gain (whether measured in the accumulation of capital, or in other currencies such as reward, reputation, or credibility). As Albert O. Hirschman argues in his Passions and the Interests (1977), this narrow notion of interest is a relatively recent achievement, but it has held remarkable sway, not just in political science and economics, but in social theory more broadly. This is certainly the case in some prominent strands of science studies, which have drawn extensively on the metaphor of interest (and its presumption of maximizing rationalities) to address its central concern: explaining the processes through which a fact becomes a fact. At their most iconic (and basic), interests, in the hands of Bruno Latour, work like this:

Suppose that . . . Boas, the American anthropologist, is engaged in a fierce controversy against eugenicists, who have so convinced the United States Congress of biological determinism that it has cut off the immigration of those with “defective” genes. Suppose, now, that a young anthropologist demonstrates that, at least in one Samoan island, biology cannot be the cause of crisis in adolescent girls because cultural determinism is too strong. Is not Boas going to be “interested” in Mead’s report—all the more so since he sent her there? Every time eugenicists criticize his cultural determinism, Boas will fasten his threatened position to Mead’s counter-example. But every time Boas and others do so, they turn Mead’s story into more of a fact. . . . By linking her thesis to Boas’s struggle, Mead forces all the other cultural determinists to become her fellow builders: they all willingly turn her claims into one of the hardest facts of anthropology for many decades (Latour 1987: 109).

Though I’ve chosen an example from the social sciences, the point remains the same for physics, biochemistry, and the rest of the hard sciences: what makes a fact authoritative is not merely its resemblance to “nature” but rather the robustness of the social interests that can be enrolled in its support (Callon and Law 1982; Latour 1987). It is with this notion in mind that science studies scholars have made one of their most iconic arguments: that (scientific) knowledge does not simply represent (in the sense of depict) “nature,” but it also represents (in the political sense) the “social interests” of the people and institutions that have become wrapped up in its production (Latour 1993; Callon and Law 1982). This argument, in turn, opens up a distinctive analytical mandate. The task for science studies becomes, in this view, to identify, uncover, or reveal the interests that are wrapped up in knowledge and artifacts.

There is, of course, a great deal in this approach that has drawn extensive critique: the view of scientists as rational actors driven in Machiavellian style by their interests (Woolgar 1981; Haraway 1997); the lack of attention to lexicons of identity, difference, and power that produce credible knowledge producers or “witnesses” in the first place (Haraway 1997); the extensive use of economics metaphors (scientists vying for reputational reward, credit, and credibility) in the service of an ostensibly and explicitly “non-economic” analysis (Knorr-Cetina 1982). Indeed, though oriented toward the accumulation of credibility and reputation rather than capital, this analytic framework is close kin to the rational actor model underlying the kind of conservation discourse that has given birth to bioprospecting; mainstream science studies and neoliberal biodiversity discourse share a fascination, it would seem, with Homo economicus and his rational, interest-maximizing behavior (see chapter 2).

My own interest in this genealogy of inquiry within science studies stems precisely from the ways in which science studies’ concern with knowledge as a repository of “interests” is explicitly writ both large and small within the world of bioprospecting itself. That is, I argue here that prospecting contracts (and their attendant controversies) themselves actively call up, animate, and lay bare for contest and debate the idea that knowledge and biological material are bevies of claims and interests.

These cominglings have some bearing on how we might think about the capacity of interests themselves to “explain” social processes. Anthropologist Sylvia Yanagisako has recently argued that the notion of interested subjectivity has remained woefully underexamined in anthropology and social theory; her work on family firms in Italy seeks to understand how certain values or actions come to be seen as “in the interest” of bourgeois actors in the first place (and to this end she proposes that we look to the productive capacities of sentiment; Yanagisako 2002).¹ Two decades ago, and in a very different way, sociologist of science Steve Woolgar also took some of his colleagues to task for their use of interest as a self-evident explanatory framework (Woolgar 1981). Woolgar argued that an unexamined notion of interest, impressively pedigreed though it may be in political-economic thought, is a far from transparent guide to understanding why scientists do what they do (and thus how facts get assembled as such). Unlike Yanagisako, Woolgar was not interested in the meaningful content of the term (nor in posing alternatives) but rather in its mobilization: he argued that the construction and use of interest, its attribution and anticipation, “demands treatment as a phenomenon in its own right” (Woolgar 1981: 371). “Interest-work,” he wrote, is constitutive of scientific practice.

Together, Woolgar and Yanagisako’s very different analyses set the stage for thinking about interest in the context of bioprospecting, not as an explanatory device but rather as an ethnographic object, or a term that does a great deal of work “on the ground.” Insofar as plant collections now come with benefit-recipients attached, prospecting agreements do some noteworthy things with the science studies axiom that “knowledge”represents both nature and the political and social interests of the people and institutions that are wrapped up therein. I’ll elaborate on this argument below, but I simply want to highlight my own point of entry here: my concern with the science studies notion of interests and representation does not lie in my intention to use this framework in any straightforward manner to explain (the construction of facts, for example). Rather, I am interested in the ways in which precisely this dual notion of representation—claims to and about biological material and knowledge—now lie explicitly at the heart of contemporary social imaginaries and practices of participation and marginalization.

If this is a concern that I draw, in somewhat oblique fashion, out of science studies, I take a cue here as well from anthropology, and particularly from the kinds of feminist kinship theory that have been so central in the development of the anthropology of the biosciences (see Franklin 1995).² One important focus of this work has been to understand biological material as a powerful and contested mediator of social relationships, broadly conceived. It is in this vein that I seek to understand bioprospecting in terms of how its managements of knowledge and nature mediate both new and old forms of relationship. I do not invoke relations in the strict familial sense but in the broader terms of inclusion and exclusion vis-à-vis new, intellectual property-mediated modes of laying claim to access to resources (see Strathern 1999b and c; Hayden 1998).³

In fact, broadly speaking, where science studies is concerned, the current prominence of intellectual property within the conduct of academic bioscience shifts the analytic and ethnographic terrain a bit—it both requires and produces new questions.

ECONOMIES OF KNOWLEDGE: SCIENCE AND SCIENCE STUDIES

Talk of the “knowledge” or “information economy” has become ubiquitous in popular, policy, and academic circles in Latin America, the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. In the words of two of the many chroniclers of the knowledge economy and some of its myriad effects, “the world economy has embarked upon a new stage of economic growth with knowledge and therefore intellectual property as the engine of industrial development, replacing traditional elements such as monetary capital, natural resources, and land as the driving force” (Etzkowitz and Webster 1995: 481). It is a commonplace and powerful formulation—not just that we live in a knowledge economy, but that in such an economy, the usual cumbersome sites and modes of capital accumulation have been supplanted by something a bit lighter on its feet, called knowledge or information. Among the many caveats we might want to add to these sweeping epochal characterizations, we might point out that “nature” does not disappear as a source and site of value, even as “knowledge” looms ever larger. The ostensible capitalization of knowledge instead has gone hand in hand with the capitalization of a new kind of nature: not the usual timber, land, minerals, or petroleum, but something that gets called “life itself” (Franklin, after Foucault)—DNA, genetically modified organisms, gene sequences.⁴

In the 1970s, the development of molecular biological techniques for recombining, “engineering,” and otherwise manipulating DNA opened up new fields of technological manipulation and effected some fairly noteworthy shifts in the imagined horizons of biomedical research and biological applications (Rabinow 1991 and 1996; Haraway 1997). Central to these seismic shifts in the field of the possible have been technical feats of much public fascination and chagrin—cloning, the Flav-R-Savr tomato, and OncoMouse^TM. Intimately related to these new developments have been crucial changes in the forms of life that the U.S. government, in particular, has been willing to consider as subject to patent claims. If patents are among “the traditional means of ’securing value’ from knowledge” (Etzkowitz and Webster 1995: 482–83), then, since the early 1980s, they have also been a key instrument for “securing value” from biological matter as well. As we shall see in the next chapter, patents are crucial to the imagination of biodiversity itself as a kind of nature that is specifically amenable to biotechnological enterprise; and not only that, but also to new kinds of participation for a wide range of knowledge providers and producers.

The participatory aspect of intellectual property rights (IPR) is a question to which I will turn later in this chapter; for the moment, let me say a bit about how intellectual property—in knowledge and nature—works. For now, IPR will look anything but inclusive. Patents, like other forms of intellectual property, are in fact meant to be tools of exclusion: they grant exclusive property rights of a particular kind, not to a thing but to an idea, technique, or process. (If you patent an elevator, you are granted rights not to an elevator itself but to the design or idea, which you are then entitled to license to whomever you wish; anyone who uses your design without your authorization will be subject to prosecution for patent infringement.) Granted and protected by the state, patents have always been tools not just for encouraging individual (and now, overwhelmingly) corporate reward, but for nation-building through the production and protection of national storehouses of intellectual capital and innovation.

The key criteria for issuing a patent—novelty, nonobviousness, and utility—give us a view of what is entailed in this modernist commitment to innovation and progress (Chon 1993): the idea in question must be new, and not a reiteration of an existing thought, or mere discovery of an existing phenomenon. Based on Locke’s Enlightenment notions of property in the self (the idea that one should benefit from the fruits of one’s labor), the kind of invention rewarded by a patent is figured as the mixing of the inventor’s creative, intellectual labor with something taken out of its “natural state.”⁵

We might note that while the trope of discovery has a potent and bloody history in the annals of conquest and colonialism, in the domain of intellectual property rights, discovering something formally earns an erstwhile patent holder no rights at all; it is a disabling concept. Like replication in the realm of copyright and written work, the mere discovery of existing ideas does not, ostensibly, merit the label of innovation, nor the reward of temporary monopoly. Not surprisingly, then, the boundaries between the appropriable public domain of the “already existing,” and the privatizable realm of novelty and innovation, are themselves heavily policed by corporate entities and hotly contested by their would-be challengers.

If this is true in most arenas, it is particularly pointed in the realm of biodiversity prospecting, where the lines between discovery and invention are the subject of powerful tugs of war among and within the UN, multilateral trade agreements, national laws, and civil society/activist mobilizations. Until the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992, for example, cultural knowledge and wild genetic/biological resources were among the many resources considered internationally as common heritage—a de facto part of the appropriable public domain, and thus, resources freely available to be taken out of their natural state, innovated-upon, and patented. But recent changes in the status of this common heritage, which I will outline in greater detail in the next chapter, have provided a basis for mounting counterclaims to corporate characterizations of just what should count as appropriable discoveries and privatizable innovations.

Consider the ways in which corporate patenting practices have recently run headlong into concerted resistance where cultural knowledge is concerned. Indigenous coalitions, joined by southern and northern NGOs and legal counsels, have mounted successful challenges to several corporate patents on chemical compounds that were derived from plants with well-established folk or indigenous uses. On May 11, 2000, the European Patent Office overturned W. R. Grace’s patent on a fungicidal compound from the East Indian neem tree, widely used by Indian farmers for this purpose among many others. The Office conceded that W. R. Grace’s neem patent was simply a repackaging of established knowledge—it was based on prior art, and not corporate innovation, as the company had argued (and with which the patent examiners had originally agreed, CSE 2000). On the same grounds and in the previous year (1999), a U.S. seed company’s patent, on a vine used by mestizo and indigenous communities in the Amazon basin to prepare the hallucinogenic beverage ayahuasca, was overturned by the U.S. Patent and Trade Office (PTO). As with the neem patent, this challenge was based on the argument that the patent contained no new innovation, but rather was based wholly on well-established knowledge. The fat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Author’s Note
• Introduction
• Part One: Neoliberal Natures
• Part Two: Public Prospecting
• Part Three: Prospecting’S Publics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index