We propose the concept plant-anthropo-genesis for the ways in which people and plants make one an... more We propose the concept plant-anthropo-genesis for the ways in which people and plants make one another, be it in the ancient earthly scenarios of species co-evolution, in the historical modalities of cultivation and care associated with agriculture, or in the modern capitalist plantation and its multiple aftermaths. With plant-anthropo-genesis we will enrich the land-capital-labor models by focusing both on the materialities of the social processes across scales and spatialities, and on the production of multispecies subjecthoods as related to human dispossession, displacement, enslavement, indenture and precarity. We suggest using this analytical tool to examine the ways in which specific crops and groups co-produce one another in the context of the racialized colonial plantation and their complex afterlives, including counter-plantation formations (e.g. maroon societies, regenerative agriculture). We will refer to the sugar formations of Guiana/Suriname and Hawaii and coffee/cocoa of S. Tomé, along with winegrowing regions facing climate change on both sides of the Equator.
Our chapters-one focused on the environment of pregnancy, the other on agricultural environments-... more Our chapters-one focused on the environment of pregnancy, the other on agricultural environments-share a concern with the role of nourishment in sustaining life. Both consider the thresholds beyond which organisms cease to thrive. And both recognize nourishment, as a practice of care, to be fundamentally ongoing. You don't just arrive at care and be done; it must be sustained. In eating, satiety is pos si ble, but it never lasts for long. In our chapters and the collection overall, three overlapping terms-care, sustainability, nourishment-share a commitment to an ongoingness, to duration. In Emily's chapter on the placenta, the language we have to talk about the directionality of relations fails us. One challenge presented by gestational diabetes is knowing how to parse harm from care. Even health experts hesitate to make a diagnosis because what is harmful might be good and what is good might be harmful. It would be too simple to say a parent's affliction is good for a fetus because harm to the parent extends outward, encompassing others. Health is not singular but is, as in this book's title, "beside ourselves. " Deborah's chapter on regenerative biodynamics also helps us to grasp the grounded, material implications of a relational understanding of health. The roots and rhizomes of grapevines make nourishment possible when life is under threat. The vines open up meaning's multidirectionalities, giving us a denser vocabulary to conceptualize relationalities, extending to vio lence as well as to care. Grapevines, like other photosynthetic plants, occupy a threshold, as entities that on the one hand derive nourishment from the sun and on the other both derive and provide nourishment beneath the soil, in the terrestrial realm. In The Life of Plants (2018), Emanuele Coccia refers to sun-loving plants, with their dual orientation, as ontologically amphibious. They are si mul ta neously one thing and another, and theirs is a central world-making role. emily yates-doerr / deborah heath
chapter seven Between Sky and Earth biodynamic viticulture ' s slow science deborah heath standin... more chapter seven Between Sky and Earth biodynamic viticulture ' s slow science deborah heath standing at the threshold between local rootedness and global expansion, grapevines portend changes in our shared planetary metabolism. Deep-rooted, long-lived perennials of the genus Vitis, grapevines can persist in place for centuries, with some surviving specimens as much as four hundred years old. Anchored in their par tic u lar locales, grapes are touted by wine connoisseurs as exemplary emissaries of terroir, the "taste of place" (Trubek 2009), expressing the particularities of the limestone, or clay, or volcanic soil where they grow. They also actively participate in the microbial terroirs of their soil microbiomes and of the native yeasts that live on grape clusters. Biodynamic viticulture nurtures these local biologies that are threatened by conventional agriculture's chemical inputs and capitalism's enduring extractivism. Domesticated for millennia, grapes, and the means to ferment them, have also traveled widely with their human companions, following the paths of Roman and Eu ro pean imperial expansion and carried forth by traders, missionaries, and settler colonists, taking root in temperate zones on either side of the equator. Grapes' noteworthy sensitivity to temperature variation has
Let us say that history, in its traditional form, undertook to 'memorize' the monuments of the pa... more Let us say that history, in its traditional form, undertook to 'memorize' the monuments of the past, transform them into documents...; in our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments. [Foucault 1972:7] Report of an interview with Walter Gilbert, Nobel Prize-winning biologist who has called the Human Genome Project the "holy grail of biology": [Gilbert] agrees that the genome project has a monumental quality to it. "But I don't see it as pyramid building," he insists. "I see it for the use to which it will be put." Pause. "To continue the pyramid analogy, while it's got an element of monumentality, it's not an empty monument." [Kanige11987:101I CON(SENSUS IN)SCRIPTION AND THE HUMAN GENOME PROJECT This article is a theoretical prologue for a long-term ethnographic study on the culture and politics of genetics. Ethnographic studies of science have given us a useful picture of the richly textured settings of laboratory life and scientific practice. A growing number of scholars have contributed to this field in the decade since the publication of Latour and Woolgar's (1986 [1979]) germinal work
Genetic nature/culture : anthropology and science beyond the two-culture divide / edited FIGURES ... more Genetic nature/culture : anthropology and science beyond the two-culture divide / edited FIGURES 2.1. The "Amish Madonna" / 47 2.2. A polydactylous dwarf / 52 7.1. Molecular homology / 142 7.2. Some diagnostic differences between human chromosomes / 144 7.3. Ape, fish, human comparison / 147 12.1. Models of recent human evolution / 240 12.2. Portrayals of human genetic distances / 243 12.3. Genetic distance and isolation by geographic distance / 245 TABLES 13.1. Selected high incidence of genetic disorders / 268 13.2. Ethnicities or groups primarily affected by disorders (U.S.) / 268 13.3. Ethnic or group variation with incidence of cystic fibrosis / 270 14.1. Anthropological applications of ancient DNA techniques / 280 i l l u s t r at i o n s vii x sydel silverman xii sydel silverman xiv sydel silverman xvi preface and acknowledgments preface and acknowledgments xvii On June 26, 2000, the rival scientific factions vying to complete the DNA sequencing of the human genome declared a truce. The race that might have been won by a single victor was set aside, and credit for completing a working draft of the sequence was to be shared by the Human Genome Project's international, publicly funded consortium and by Celera Genomics, a private company. At the press conference where this laying down of arms was announced, President Bill Clinton stood flanked by Craig Venter, the head of Celera, and Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health's Human Genome Project (HGP) in the United States. The sequence was front-page news; the top banner of the New York Times declared, "Genetic Code of Human Life Is Cracked by Scientists" (June 27, 2000). This very public and reluctant coalition of a government-sponsored, transnational scientific program and a biotechnology industry heavyweight is just one node in a wide-ranging, heterogeneous network of human and nonhuman actors that constitutes genetics-inaction (pace Latour 1987; cf. Flower and Heath 1993; Heath 1998a,b). The knowable, manipulable human genome also belongs to health advocates living with particular heritable diseases, who raise research funding and run on-line forums (Heath et al. 1999; Taussig, Rapp, and Heath, chapter 3, this volume). It belongs to scientists in Japan, China, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, as well as to DNA "donors" (voluntary or not) from Iceland and the Amazon. And it is the province of essential nonhuman players, from centralized sequence databases and their search engines to genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Genomes, human and other, are dynamic, emergent entities still under negotiation as territory, property, soul, medical resource, and national prize. Meanwhile, narratives of both technoscientific expertise and everyday life have come to be scripted in a genetic idiom deployed by laypeople and experts alike.
List of illustrations -- Foreword / Sydel Silverman -- Preface and acknowledgments -- Introductio... more List of illustrations -- Foreword / Sydel Silverman -- Preface and acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Anthropology in an age of genetics: practice, discourse, and critique / M. Susan Lindee, Alan Goodman, and Deborah Heath -- Pt. I. Nature/culture -- Sect. A. Human populations/genetic resources -- Ch. 1. Indigenous peoples, changing social and political landscapes, and human genetics in Amazonia / Ricardo Ventura Santos -- Ch. 2. Provenance and the pedigree: Victor McKusick's fieldwork with the old order Amish / M. Susan Lindee -- Ch. 3. Flexible eugenics: technologies of the self in the age of genetics / Karen-Sue Taussig, Rayna Rapp, and Deborah Heath -- Ch. 4. The commodification of virtual reality: the Icelandic health sector database / Hilary Rose -- Sect. B. Animal species/genetic resources -- Ch. 5. Kinship, genes, and cloning: life after Dolly / Sarah Franklin -- Ch. 6. For the love of a good dog: webs of action in the world of dog genetics / Donna Haraway -- Ch. 7. 98% ...
It is also possible that your web browser is not configured or not able to display style sheets. ... more It is also possible that your web browser is not configured or not able to display style sheets. In this case, although the visual presentation will be degraded, the site should continue to be functional. We recommend using the latest version of Microsoft or Mozilla web browser to ...
We propose the concept plant-anthropo-genesis for the ways in which people and plants make one an... more We propose the concept plant-anthropo-genesis for the ways in which people and plants make one another, be it in the ancient earthly scenarios of species co-evolution, in the historical modalities of cultivation and care associated with agriculture, or in the modern capitalist plantation and its multiple aftermaths. With plant-anthropo-genesis we will enrich the land-capital-labor models by focusing both on the materialities of the social processes across scales and spatialities, and on the production of multispecies subjecthoods as related to human dispossession, displacement, enslavement, indenture and precarity. We suggest using this analytical tool to examine the ways in which specific crops and groups co-produce one another in the context of the racialized colonial plantation and their complex afterlives, including counter-plantation formations (e.g. maroon societies, regenerative agriculture). We will refer to the sugar formations of Guiana/Suriname and Hawaii and coffee/cocoa of S. Tomé, along with winegrowing regions facing climate change on both sides of the Equator.
Our chapters-one focused on the environment of pregnancy, the other on agricultural environments-... more Our chapters-one focused on the environment of pregnancy, the other on agricultural environments-share a concern with the role of nourishment in sustaining life. Both consider the thresholds beyond which organisms cease to thrive. And both recognize nourishment, as a practice of care, to be fundamentally ongoing. You don't just arrive at care and be done; it must be sustained. In eating, satiety is pos si ble, but it never lasts for long. In our chapters and the collection overall, three overlapping terms-care, sustainability, nourishment-share a commitment to an ongoingness, to duration. In Emily's chapter on the placenta, the language we have to talk about the directionality of relations fails us. One challenge presented by gestational diabetes is knowing how to parse harm from care. Even health experts hesitate to make a diagnosis because what is harmful might be good and what is good might be harmful. It would be too simple to say a parent's affliction is good for a fetus because harm to the parent extends outward, encompassing others. Health is not singular but is, as in this book's title, "beside ourselves. " Deborah's chapter on regenerative biodynamics also helps us to grasp the grounded, material implications of a relational understanding of health. The roots and rhizomes of grapevines make nourishment possible when life is under threat. The vines open up meaning's multidirectionalities, giving us a denser vocabulary to conceptualize relationalities, extending to vio lence as well as to care. Grapevines, like other photosynthetic plants, occupy a threshold, as entities that on the one hand derive nourishment from the sun and on the other both derive and provide nourishment beneath the soil, in the terrestrial realm. In The Life of Plants (2018), Emanuele Coccia refers to sun-loving plants, with their dual orientation, as ontologically amphibious. They are si mul ta neously one thing and another, and theirs is a central world-making role. emily yates-doerr / deborah heath
chapter seven Between Sky and Earth biodynamic viticulture ' s slow science deborah heath standin... more chapter seven Between Sky and Earth biodynamic viticulture ' s slow science deborah heath standing at the threshold between local rootedness and global expansion, grapevines portend changes in our shared planetary metabolism. Deep-rooted, long-lived perennials of the genus Vitis, grapevines can persist in place for centuries, with some surviving specimens as much as four hundred years old. Anchored in their par tic u lar locales, grapes are touted by wine connoisseurs as exemplary emissaries of terroir, the "taste of place" (Trubek 2009), expressing the particularities of the limestone, or clay, or volcanic soil where they grow. They also actively participate in the microbial terroirs of their soil microbiomes and of the native yeasts that live on grape clusters. Biodynamic viticulture nurtures these local biologies that are threatened by conventional agriculture's chemical inputs and capitalism's enduring extractivism. Domesticated for millennia, grapes, and the means to ferment them, have also traveled widely with their human companions, following the paths of Roman and Eu ro pean imperial expansion and carried forth by traders, missionaries, and settler colonists, taking root in temperate zones on either side of the equator. Grapes' noteworthy sensitivity to temperature variation has
Let us say that history, in its traditional form, undertook to 'memorize' the monuments of the pa... more Let us say that history, in its traditional form, undertook to 'memorize' the monuments of the past, transform them into documents...; in our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments. [Foucault 1972:7] Report of an interview with Walter Gilbert, Nobel Prize-winning biologist who has called the Human Genome Project the "holy grail of biology": [Gilbert] agrees that the genome project has a monumental quality to it. "But I don't see it as pyramid building," he insists. "I see it for the use to which it will be put." Pause. "To continue the pyramid analogy, while it's got an element of monumentality, it's not an empty monument." [Kanige11987:101I CON(SENSUS IN)SCRIPTION AND THE HUMAN GENOME PROJECT This article is a theoretical prologue for a long-term ethnographic study on the culture and politics of genetics. Ethnographic studies of science have given us a useful picture of the richly textured settings of laboratory life and scientific practice. A growing number of scholars have contributed to this field in the decade since the publication of Latour and Woolgar's (1986 [1979]) germinal work
Genetic nature/culture : anthropology and science beyond the two-culture divide / edited FIGURES ... more Genetic nature/culture : anthropology and science beyond the two-culture divide / edited FIGURES 2.1. The "Amish Madonna" / 47 2.2. A polydactylous dwarf / 52 7.1. Molecular homology / 142 7.2. Some diagnostic differences between human chromosomes / 144 7.3. Ape, fish, human comparison / 147 12.1. Models of recent human evolution / 240 12.2. Portrayals of human genetic distances / 243 12.3. Genetic distance and isolation by geographic distance / 245 TABLES 13.1. Selected high incidence of genetic disorders / 268 13.2. Ethnicities or groups primarily affected by disorders (U.S.) / 268 13.3. Ethnic or group variation with incidence of cystic fibrosis / 270 14.1. Anthropological applications of ancient DNA techniques / 280 i l l u s t r at i o n s vii x sydel silverman xii sydel silverman xiv sydel silverman xvi preface and acknowledgments preface and acknowledgments xvii On June 26, 2000, the rival scientific factions vying to complete the DNA sequencing of the human genome declared a truce. The race that might have been won by a single victor was set aside, and credit for completing a working draft of the sequence was to be shared by the Human Genome Project's international, publicly funded consortium and by Celera Genomics, a private company. At the press conference where this laying down of arms was announced, President Bill Clinton stood flanked by Craig Venter, the head of Celera, and Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health's Human Genome Project (HGP) in the United States. The sequence was front-page news; the top banner of the New York Times declared, "Genetic Code of Human Life Is Cracked by Scientists" (June 27, 2000). This very public and reluctant coalition of a government-sponsored, transnational scientific program and a biotechnology industry heavyweight is just one node in a wide-ranging, heterogeneous network of human and nonhuman actors that constitutes genetics-inaction (pace Latour 1987; cf. Flower and Heath 1993; Heath 1998a,b). The knowable, manipulable human genome also belongs to health advocates living with particular heritable diseases, who raise research funding and run on-line forums (Heath et al. 1999; Taussig, Rapp, and Heath, chapter 3, this volume). It belongs to scientists in Japan, China, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, as well as to DNA "donors" (voluntary or not) from Iceland and the Amazon. And it is the province of essential nonhuman players, from centralized sequence databases and their search engines to genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Genomes, human and other, are dynamic, emergent entities still under negotiation as territory, property, soul, medical resource, and national prize. Meanwhile, narratives of both technoscientific expertise and everyday life have come to be scripted in a genetic idiom deployed by laypeople and experts alike.
List of illustrations -- Foreword / Sydel Silverman -- Preface and acknowledgments -- Introductio... more List of illustrations -- Foreword / Sydel Silverman -- Preface and acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Anthropology in an age of genetics: practice, discourse, and critique / M. Susan Lindee, Alan Goodman, and Deborah Heath -- Pt. I. Nature/culture -- Sect. A. Human populations/genetic resources -- Ch. 1. Indigenous peoples, changing social and political landscapes, and human genetics in Amazonia / Ricardo Ventura Santos -- Ch. 2. Provenance and the pedigree: Victor McKusick's fieldwork with the old order Amish / M. Susan Lindee -- Ch. 3. Flexible eugenics: technologies of the self in the age of genetics / Karen-Sue Taussig, Rayna Rapp, and Deborah Heath -- Ch. 4. The commodification of virtual reality: the Icelandic health sector database / Hilary Rose -- Sect. B. Animal species/genetic resources -- Ch. 5. Kinship, genes, and cloning: life after Dolly / Sarah Franklin -- Ch. 6. For the love of a good dog: webs of action in the world of dog genetics / Donna Haraway -- Ch. 7. 98% ...
It is also possible that your web browser is not configured or not able to display style sheets. ... more It is also possible that your web browser is not configured or not able to display style sheets. In this case, although the visual presentation will be degraded, the site should continue to be functional. We recommend using the latest version of Microsoft or Mozilla web browser to ...
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