When Nature Goes Public

The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico

Cori Hayden (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

312 Seiten

2003
Princeton University Press (Verlag)
978-0-691-09557-8 (ISBN)

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Focusing on a contract involving Mexico's National Autonomous University, this book examines the practices through which researchers, plant vendors, indigenous cooperatives, and other actors put prospecting to work. It considers the consequences of linking scientific research and rural 'enfranchisement' to the logics of intellectual property.

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.

Cori Hayden is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.

List of Figures and Tables ix List of Abbreviations xi Acknowledgments xiii Author's Note xvii Introduction 1 PART ONE: NEOLIBERAL NATURES Chapter 1: Interests and Publics: On (Ethno)science and Its Accountabilities 19 Chapter 2: Neoliberalism's Nature 48 Chapter 3: Prospecting in Mexico: Rights, Risk, and Regulation 85 PART TWO: PUBLIC PROSPECTING Chapter 4: Market Research: When Local Knowledge Is Public Knowledge 125 Chapter 5: By the Side of the Road: The Contours of a Field Site 158 PART THREE: PROSPECTING's PUBLICS Chapter 6: The Brine Shrimp Assay: Signs of Life, Sites of Value 191 Chapter 7: Presumptions of Interest 213 Chapter 8: Remaking Prospecting's Publics 230 Notes 237 Bibliography 255 Index 275

Erscheint lt. Verlag	16.11.2003
Reihe/Serie	In-Formation
Zusatzinfo	6 halftones. 3 line illus.
Verlagsort	New Jersey
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 235 mm
Gewicht	425 g
Themenwelt	Medizin / Pharmazie ► Pharmazie
	Naturwissenschaften ► Biologie ► Ökologie / Naturschutz
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
	Technik
ISBN-10	0-691-09557-4 / 0691095574
ISBN-13	978-0-691-09557-8 / 9780691095578
Zustand	Neuware