Biotechnology and empire: The global power of seeds and science

Osiris

Volumn 21, Issue , 2006, Pages 273-292

  Jasanoff, Sheila ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33748542613     PISSN: 03697827     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/507145     Document Type: Article

References (108)

1. Influential contributions include Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 2001);
2. idem, Multitude (New York, 2004);
3. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford, 2003);
4. Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York, 2000);
5. Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London, 2003);
6. and idem, Colossus: The Price of America's Empire (New York, 2004);
7. David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford, 2001);
8. Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination (Chicago, 2002);
9. Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600-1850 (New York, 2003);
10. Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East (New York, 2004);
11. and Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton, 2004).
12. For one widely discussed example, see Michael Ignatieff, "The American Empire: The Burden," New York Times Magazine, Jan. 5, 2003, 22.
13. See also Charles S. Maier, "Forum: An American Empire?" Harvard Magazine 104 (Nov./Dec. 2002): 28-31. This is the topic of Maier's forthcoming book, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors.
14. American progressives would like to detach what many see as the illegitimate path of unilateral militarism from the legitimate, indeed desirable, path of economic and social globalization driven by the "softpower" of culture and markets. See Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York, 2004).
15. Celebrations of America's role in leading the world to free-market democracy include Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York, 1999).
16. Directed by George Lucas, the trilogy opened in 1977 with Star Wars, the film that gave its title to the series. It was succeeded by The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983). Appearing in the waning years of the cold war, the films exercised a particular influence on Ronald Reagan, America's first Hollywood president. The idea of a satellite-based missile defense shield was initially broached in the Reagan era, and the project, which remained mired in conflict during his presidency, was nicknamed Star Wars.
17. On this theme, see Tony Judt, "Dreams of Empire," New York Review of Books, Nov. 4, 2004, 38-41.
18. On these points, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2nd ed., rev. and exp. (London, 1991);
19. Sarah Radcliffe, "Imaging the State as Space: Territoriality and the Formation of the State in Ecuador," in States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial States, ed. Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat (Durham, N.C., 2001), 123-45.
20. Ann L. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, 2002);
21. idem, "Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-Century Colonial Cultures," American Ethnologist 16 (1989): 634-60.
22. See, e.g., the account of collectors and collecting in the eighteenth-century British and French proto-empires, Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850 (New York, 2005).
23. Thomas Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 (Baltimore, 1983).
24. 9/11 Commission, Final Report of the Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (New York, 2004).
25. This way of thinking about empires is consistent with contemporary work in science and technology studies. See, in particular, Sheila Jasanoff, ed., States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order (London, 2004);
26. Bruno Latour, "Drawing Things Together," in Representation in Scientific Practice, ed. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 19-68.
27. Richard Drayton adopts a similar perspective when he speaks of empire as "an ecological system," stressing the interconnections among politics, economy, and nature that define empires. See, particularly, Drayton, "Imperial Science and a Scientific Empire: Kew Gardens and the Uses of Nature, 1772-1903" (Ph.D. diss., Yale Univ., 1993).
28. For an argument that such demands are already being expressed through a tacit and unwritten form of global constitution-making, see Sheila Jasanoff, "In a Constitutional Moment: Science and Social Order at the Millennium," in Social Studies of Science and Technology: Looking Back, Ahead, ed. Bernward Joerges and Helga Nowotny, Yearbook of the Sociology of the Sciences (Dordrecht, 2003), 155-80.
29. Robert Bud, The Uses of Life: A History of Biotechnology (Cambridge, 1993).
30. The first Green Revolution was the introduction worldwide of high-yielding grain varieties pioneered by Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug and other plant biologists. Their work was sponsored in part by the Rockefeller Foundation. For accounts of the scientific and social dimensions of the Green Revolution, see Lily E. Kay, The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise of the New Biology (New York, 1993);
31. J. R. Anderson, R. W. Herdt, and G. M. Scobie, Science and Food (Washington, D.C., 1988);
32. P. B. R. Hazell and C. Ramasamy, The Green Revolution Reconsidered (Baltimore, 1991).
33. Hardt and Negri, Empire (cit. n. 1).
34. Contrast in this respect Hardt and Negri, Multitude,
35. with Slaughter, A New World Order (Both cit. n. 1.)
36. See also Thomas N. Hale and Anne-Marie Slaughter, "Hardt and Negri's 'Multitude': The Worst of Both Worlds," Open Democracy, May 26, 2005, http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-vision reflections/marx 2549.jsp.
37. Slaughter, A New World Order (cit. n. 1).
38. Consider, for example, the U.S. military's practice of "embedding" journalists with ground forces during the conduct of the 2003 Iraq war.
39. Michel Foucault, "Governmentality," Ideology and Consciousness 6 (Summer 1986): 5-21.
40. Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).
41. Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, Mass., 1999);
42. on the dynamics of bureaucratic expertise, see also Sheila Jasanoff, The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policymakers (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
43. On the processes of boundary work in the sciences, see Thomas F. Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line (Chicago, 1999).
44. On boundary work within government agencies, see Jasanoff, The Fifth Branch (cit. n. 21), 14, 234-6.
45. Damian Collins and Nicholas Bromley, "Private Needs and Public Space: Politics, Poverty, and Anti-Panhandling By-Laws in Canadian Cities," in New Perspectives on the Public-Private Divide, ed. Law Commission of Canada (Vancouver, 2003), 40-67. Under India's prime minister Indira Gandhi, in close association with her son Sanjay Gandhi, the slogan garibi hatao (eradicate poverty) became equated with a program of forcible slum clearance - in other words, eradicating not poverty but the visibly poor.
46. Laid out on modern lines in the 1950s by the French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier, at the behest of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the city of Chandigarh, the capital of Punjab and Haryana, accommodates a degree of traffic surveillance that I have not encountered in other Indian cities. Just over a hundred years before Chandigarh was inaugurated, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann substantially rebuilt Paris for Napoleon III, razing many old districts and replacing winding streets with broad boulevards so that the state could better control potential revolutionaries.
47. James C. Scott, Seeing Like State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, 1998), 2.
48. James Morris, Pax Britannica: The Climax of an Empire (London, 1979).
49. Anderson, Imagined Communities (cit. n. 6), 6.
50. The ten new members met the so-called Copenhagen criteria, according to which they had to "be a stable democracy, respecting human rights, the rule of law, and the protection of minorities; have a functioning market economy; and adopt the common rules, standards and policies that make up the body of EU law." See http://europa.eu.int/comm/ enlargement/enlargement.htm (accessed Nov. 2004).
51. On colonial histories of the human and natural sciences, see Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton, 1996);
52. Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographic Construction of British India, 1765-1843 (Chicago, 1997);
53. Kavita Philip, Civilizing Natures: Race, Resources, and Modernity in Colonial South India (New Brunswick, N.J., 2004). On the colonial origins of fingerprinting,
54. see Simon A. Cole, Suspect Identities (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 60-96.
55. John MacKenzie, ed., Imperialism and the Natural World (Manchester, 1990);
56. S. Ravi Rajan, ed., Imperialism, Ecology, and Politics: Perspectives on the Ecological Legacy of Imperialism (Delhi, 1996);
57. Peder Anker, Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895-1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).
58. Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost (New York, 1999).
59. See, e.g., Kavita Philip, "Imperial Science Rescues a Tree: Global Botanic Networks, Local Knowledge, and the Transcontinental Transplantation of Cinchona," Environment and History 1 (1995): 173-200;
60. Richard Drayton, Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the Improvement of the World (New Haven, 2000), 206-11.
61. Morris, Pax Britannica (cit. n. 26), 77-8.
62. Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge, 1995).
63. Ibid., 9-10,168-263.
64. Drayton, Nature's Government (cit. n. 32).
65. William K. Storey, "Plants, Power, and Development: Founding the Imperial Department of Agriculture for the West Indies, 1880-1914," in Jasanoff, States of Knowledge (cit. n. 11), 109-30.
66. William K. Storey, Science and Power in Colonial Mauritius (Rochester, N.Y, 1997).
67. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., an enthusiast for eugenics, wrote the majority opinion in Buck v. Bell, 274 US 200 (1927).
68. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Ithaca, 1991), 27.
69. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York, 1978).
70. For an account of the changing social contract among science, state, and industry with respect to the life sciences, see Sheila Jasanoff, Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States (Princeton, 2005).
71. Theodore Kaczynski, a mathematician educated at Harvard and the University of Michigan, conducted a single-handed letter-bombing campaign against representatives of various industries from his cabin in Montana between 1978 and 1996. These attacks killed three people and injured many others. He was caught when his brother recognized as his work a long letter he had sent to the New York Times. See Kaczynski, The Unabomber Manifesto: Industrial Society and Its Future (Berkeley, 1995).
72. Sanjeev Khagram, Dams and Development: Transnational Struggles for Water and Power (Ithaca, N.Y., 2004).
73. On transatlantic divisions over genetically modified crops and food, see Thomas Bernauer, Genes, Trade, and Regulation: The Seeds of Conflict in Food Biotechnology (Princeton, 2003).
74. See, e.g., Paul Slovic, The Perception of Risk (London, 2000).
75. Brian Wynne, "Public Understanding of Science," in The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Sheila Jasanoff, James C Petersen, Trevor Pinch, and G. E. Markle (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1995), 361-88.
76. For an elaboration of this argument, see Sheila Jasanoff, "In the Democracies of DNA: Ontological Uncertainty and Political Order in Three States," New Genetics and Society 24(3) (2005): 139-55.
77. Ned Stafford, "Uproar over German GM Corn," The Scientist, May 17, 2004, http://www.thescientist.com/article/display/22179/ (accessed Jan. 2006).
78. The Terminator gene would have disabled grain seeds from sprouting in consecutive years. Farmers who had routinely planted seed stored from the previous year's harvest would then have been forced to buy new seed each year. The coalition that forced Monsanto to abandon this technology, at least for a time, included both indigenous organizations and the influential Rockefeller Foundation. Jasanoff, "In a Constitutional Moment" (cit. n. 12), 171.
79. Roundup is a popular weed killer marketed by Monsanto, and Roundup Ready plants are genetically modified to withstand the use of that product. Many observers thought Monsanto's decision was motivated by opposition to GM crops in Europe and Japan. See "GM Wheat Put on Hold," NewScientist.com news service, May 11, 2004, http://www.newscientist.com/ article.ns?id=dn4977/.
80. Senator Christopher Bond, Annual Meeting, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C., Feb. 23, 2000.
81. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Annual Meeting, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C., Feb. 21, 2000.
82. Jasanoff, Designs on Nature (cit. n. 42), chap. 4.
83. Ibid., chap. 2.
84. Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission, Crops on Trial, Sept. 2001.
85. The most unprecedented feature of this process was a nationwide public consultation known as GM Nation? See http://www.gmnation.org.uk.
86. For details of the case, as well as an argument against the U.S. positions on science and risk assessment, see David Winickoff, Sheila Jasanoff, Lawrence Busch et al., "Adjudicating the GM Food Wars: Science, Risk, and Democracy in World Trade Law," Yale Journal of International Law 30 (2005): 81-123.
87. Monsanto Canada Inc. v. Schmeiser [2004] 1 S.C.R. 902, 2004 SCC 34.
88. Sheila Jasanoff, "Let Them Eat Cake: GM Foods and the Democratic Imagination," in Science and Citizens, ed. Melissa Leach, Ian Scoones, and Brian Wynne (London, 2005), 183-98.
89. Such ontological hybridity is taken as part of the order of things in the work of many science studies scholars. See, in particular, Michel Callon, "Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieue Bay," in Power Action, and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? ed. John Law (London, 1986),196-233;
90. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).
91. Hybrids complicate the clean separation that philosophers such as Ian Hacking have sought to draw between natural ("indifferent") and social ("interactive") kinds. Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (cit. n. 20).
92. Winickoff et al., "Adjudicating the GM Food Wars" (cit. n. 58)
93. See Jasanoff, Designs on Nature (cit. n. 42), on the relationship of risk assessment to political culture.
94. Latour, "Drawing Things Together" (cit. n. 11), 19-68.
95. Bill Hord, "The Road Back: Prodigene and Other Biotech Companies Are Moving Ahead in an Environment of Increasing Fear of Crop Contamination," Omaha World Herald, Jan. 19, 2003, 1(d).
96. "Volunteer" plants are those that emerge spontaneously, usually from a previous season's growth, in places where they were not intentionally planted.
97. See, particularly, the arguments on this topic by the well-known Indian author and activist Vandana Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology (London, 1993);
98. Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (Toronto, 1997);
99. Yoked to Death: Globalisation and Corporate Control of Agriculture (New Delhi, 2001).
100. Morris, for example, describes Victoria's jubilee celebrations in London as a crystallizing moment for the British Empire in 1897. Pax Britannica (cit. n. 26), 21-34.
101. See also the account of the Imperial Assemblage of 1877 in Delhi by Bernard S. Cohn, "Representing Authority in Victorian India," in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge, 1983), 165-209.
102. Jasanoff, "Let Them Eat Cake" (cit. n. 60), 190-4.
103. Gordon Conway and Gary Toenniessen, "Science for African Food Security," Science 299, no. 21 (2003):1187-8.
104. This system of distributed accountability has resulted in a union whose members have not equally bought into all aspects of the EU vision. Thus, Sweden, Denmark, and Britain have not adopted the single currency (euro); Ireland and Britain are not parties to the Schengen agreement on frontier controls; and Britain thus far has not adopted the Community Charter of Fundamental Social Rights for Workers.
105. See Why the European Union? http://europa.eu.int/abc/12lessons/ indexl_en.htm (accessed Nov. 2004).
106. Herbert Gottweis, Governing Molecules: The Discursive Politics of Genetic Engineering in Europe and the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).
107. Jasanoff, Designs on Nature (cit. n. 42), chap. 3.
108. Claire Marris, Brian Wynne, Peter Simmons, and Sue Weldon, Public Perceptions of Agricultural Biotechnologies in Europe, http://www.pabe.net (accessed Nov. 2004).