Stefan Helmreich

Species of Biocapital

Several scholars in science studies have lately sought to theorize the contemporary join of capitalism and biotechnology. A variety of terms have been forwarded to name how ‘life’ in the age of genomics, stem cell research, and reproductive technology has become enmeshed in market dynamics, and no term has become as prominent as biocapital. This article offers a classification of articulations of this concept, arguing that definitions of biocapital centre (with varying emphasis) on two transformations: in biotic substance and in economic speculation and sentiment. Experimenting with ways of representing diverse species of biocapital, this essay offers a timeline of intellectual history, a genealogy of scholarship, and a theory worksheet, which last the reader is invited to use to generate their own accounting of the bioeconomy.

The Anthropology of Potentiality in Biomedicine An Introduction to Supplement 7

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, potentiality serves as a central concept in the life sciences and in medical practices. This special issue of Current Anthropology explores how genes, cells, bodies, and populations as well as technologies, disciplines, and research areas become imbued with potential. We suggest that anthropologists of the life sciences and biomedicine should work reflexively with the concept of potentiality and the politics of its naming and framing. We lay out a set of propositions and emphasize the moral aspects of claims about potentiality as well as the productivity of the ambiguity involved when dealing with that which does not (yet and may never) exist. We suggest that potentiality is both an analytic—one that has appeared explicitly and tacitly in the history of anthropology—as well as an object of study in need of further attention. To understand contemporary meanings and practices associated with potentiality, we must integrate an awareness of our own social scientific assumptions about potentiality with critical scrutiny of how the word and concept operate in the lives of the people we study.

The perils and promises of microbial abundance: Novel natures and model ecosystems, from artisanal cheese to alien seas

Microbial life has been much in the news. From outbreaks of Escherichia coli to discussions of the benefits of raw and fermented foods to recent reports of life forms capable of living in extreme environments, the modest microbe has become a figure for thinking through the presents and possible futures of nature, writ large as well as small. Noting that dominant representations of microbial life have shifted from an idiom of peril to one of promise, we argue that microbes – especially when thriving as microbial communities – are being upheld as model ecosystems in a prescriptive sense, as tokens of how organisms and human ecological relations with them could, should, or might be. We do so in reference to two case studies: the regulatory politics of artisanal cheese and the speculative research of astrobiology. To think of and with microbial communities as model ecosystems offers a corrective to the scientific determinisms we detect in some recent calls to attend to the materiality of scientific objects.

What Was Life? Answers from Three Limit Biologies

This paper grew from a presentation at “Vitalism Revisited: History, Philosophy, Biology,” at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory, Duke University, 22 Mar. 2008. I thank Barbara Herrnstein Smith for inviting me. The paper went through revision for “Extreme: Histories and Economies of Humanness Inside Outerspaces,” at the American Anthropological Association meeting, 2– 6 Dec. 2009. I thank Debbora Battaglia, Valerie Olson, and David Valentine, session organizers. I also thank Donna Haraway for an early conversation about the shape of the argument. The research on which this paper is based, which reaches back to 1993, was funded by National Science Foundation grant SBR–9312292 (1993) and by Grant #6993 (2003) from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research as well as monies from Stanford University, New York University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A 2010 Distinguished Fellowship at Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study provided time for revision. I am grateful to Marilyn Strathern for giving that revision a thorough combing through. Tim Choy, Joe Dumit, Cori Hayden, S. Lochlann Jain, Jake Kosek, Hannah Landecker, Hélène Mialet, Natasha Myers, Heather Paxson, and Sophia Roosth provided essential prods toward sharpening the arguments. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 1. See Marilyn Strathern, Reproducing the Future: Anthropology, Kinship, and the New Reproductive Technologies (Manchester, 1992); Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, ed. Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (Berkeley, 1995); Valerie Hartouni, Cultural Conceptions: On Reproductive Technologies and the Remaking of Life (Minneapolis, 1997); Cyborg Babies: From Techno-sex to Techno-Tots, ed. Robbie Davis-Floyd and Joseph Dumit (New York, 1998); Reproducing Reproduction: Kinship, Power, and Technological Innovation, ed. Sarah Franklin and Helena Ragoné (Philadelphia, 1998); Susan

Digitizing ‘Development’: Balinese water temples, complexity and the politics of simulation

This article examines a recent use of computer simulation in modeling the ecological dynamics of a rural indigenous community. It takes as its central example anthropologist J. Stephen Lansing’s models of irrigation patterns and practices in Bali. Lansing first put together computer simulations of Balinese water temple networks to demonstrate the wisdom of traditional modesof organizing agriculture and to draw attention to the folly of Green Revolution development projects. Lansing argued that his modeling could provide a tool for more culturally appropriate development, but I argue that his project may continue some of the neocolonialist premises of development programs more generally. As it turns issues that are very complicated politically, economically and socially into bounded technical problems amenable to computational solution, it erases internal community politics and ignores the local and global political economic context in which communities exist. Lansing’s simulation accomplishes this in part by reviving the premises of an ahistorical cultural ecology in which communities are conceptually collapsed into ‘nature’ – where nature is understood to be a system seeking homeostasis. This article examines the claims Lansing makes for his simulations and locates these within a political economy in which imperialist and neocolonialist domination has often been serviced by control over technologies of representation. After discussing Lansing’s work, I comment broadly on the trend toward using computer simulation in social planning, and reflect on what this might mean for continuing projects of ‘development’.

Blue-green Capital, Biotechnological Circulation and an Oceanic Imaginary: A Critique of Biopolitical Economy

Examining the rise and fall of a public–private marine biotechnological enterprise in Hawaii, this article analyses how promises to make products and profits from marine microbes in archipelagic waters drew upon peculiarly American sentiments about the sea as a politically uncontested treasure-chest of biodiversity. I argue that attention to the material process by which lab and legal instruments are calibrated to one another to generate biotech exchange-value must be joined by consideration of how scientists and their interlocutors imagine the meaning of biology—as discipline and as corporeal substance and process. Without such symbolic analysis, theorizations of biocapital remain incomplete. To discuss the genre of capitalism evidenced in marine biotechnological endeavors in Hawaii, I develop the concept of blue-green capitalism, where blue stands for a vision of the freedom of the open ocean and for speculative sky-high promise, and green for belief in ecological sustainability as well as biological fecundity. I show that this vision, dominant in industry–university settings, ran into direct conflict with Native Hawaiian legal epistemologies of the sea.

Sounding the limits of life : essays in the anthropology of biology and beyond

List of Illustrations vii Sounding Life, Water, Sound ix CHAPTER 1 What Was Life? Answers from Three Limit Biologies 1 CHAPTER 2 Life Forms: A Keyword Entry (with Sophia Roosth) 19 CHAPTER 3 An Archaeology of Artificial Life, Underwater 35 CHAPTER 4 Cetology Now: Formatting the Twenty-First-Century Whale 44 CHAPTER 5 How Like a Reef: Figuring Coral, 1839-2010 48 CHAPTER 6 Homo microbis: Species, Race, Sex, and the Human Microbiome 62 CHAPTER 7 The Signature of Life: Designing the Astrobiological Imagination 73 CHAPTER 8 Nature/Culture/Seawater: Theory Machines, Anthropology, Oceanization 94 CHAPTER 9 Time and the Tsunami: Indian Ocean, 2004 106 CHAPTER 10 From Spaceship Earth to Google Ocean: Planetary Icons, Indexes, and Infrastructures 116 CHAPTER 11 Underwater Music: Tuning Composition to the Sounds of Science 137 CHAPTER 12 Seashell Sound 155 CHAPTER 13 Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies (with Michele Friedner) 164 CHAPTER 14 Chimeric Sensing 173 Life, Water, Sound Resounding 183 Acknowledgments 189 Notes 195 Index 283

Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies

ABSTRACT Sound studies and Deaf studies may seem at first impression to operate in worlds apart. We argue in this article, however, that similar renderings of hearing, deafness, and seeing as ideal types—and as often essentialized sensory modes—make it possible to read differences between Sound studies and Deaf studies as sites of possible articulation. We direct attention to four zones of productive overlap, attending to how sound is inferred in deaf and Deaf practice, how reimagining sound in the register of low-frequency vibration can upend deafhearing dichotomies, how “deaf futurists” champion cyborg sound, and how signing and other non-spoken communicative practices might undo phonocentric models of speech. Sound studies and Deaf studies emerge as fields with much to offer one another epistemologically, theoretically, and practically.

Waves: An anthropology of scientific things (The 2014 Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture)

Transcript of the Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture given on October 22, 2014

The left hand of nature and culture

Comment on Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond nature and culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd with a foreword by Marshall Sahlins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.