Bio-economies: Bio wealth from the inside out
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Book Review
Bio-economies: Bio wealth from the inside out When nature goes public: the making and unmaking of bioprospecting in Mexico Cori Hayden, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2003312 pp. $18.95 paper ISBN 0 691095574. $57.50 cloth. ISBN 0 69109556 6. Trading the genome: investigating the commodification of bio-information Bronwyn, Columbia University Press, Parry NewYork 2004 352 pp. $41.50 cloth. ISBN 0 23112174 1. In the context of increasing attention by world leaders to ‘debtfor-equity’ exchanges, and economic restructuring that will both repair and redress the increasing stratification of world trade, two questions become especially prominent: how can past exploitations be repaid, and how can their reproduction be prevented in the future? As argued in a recent Channel Four documentary, ‘The Empire Pays Back’, a considerable proportion of the wealth and wealth accumulating enterprises which account for the global economic privilege enjoyed by modern nations such as Britain derive, historically, from vast appropria-
tions of resources, often from tropical, colonial territories. A major worry in the context of the new ‘bio-economies’ of the post-genomic ‘race’to gain global market shares in new industries such as recombinant DNA technologies is whether yet another chapter in the ‘voyages of discovery’genre is already under way. These themes have been explored at a very general level in popular recent books such as Patricia Fara’s Sex, Botany, and Empire, (2004) which revisits the work of scientists such as Joseph Banks as essentially entrepreneurial. Similarly, Richard Drayton’s (2000) historical account of what he names the ‘agrarian view of empire’ demonstrates the often under-appreciated significance of agricultural technology and engineering to early definitions of ‘bio-wealth’. These accounts, alongside Londa Schiebingers’s Plants and Empire, (2004) chart a kind of ‘hidden history’ of resource extraction, often described as ‘bioprospecting’. It is therefore highly significant that Bronwyn Parry’s Trading the Genome and Cori Hayden’s When Nature Goes Public bring the debate about biological extraction into the contemporary frame, through detailed empirical studies of how new ‘biologicals’ are being stabilized, denominated, stored, accumulated, distributed, and turned into new forms
of property. Indeed, if one of the most important contemporary questions of political geography is that of how the biological is being given new form, then these two books are critical places to look both for how to research this question, and, in part, how to answer it. Cori Hayden’s anthropological monograph takes us on a tour of Mexico, where for 18 months she conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the nature-culture of the new biologicals, that is, in pursuit of patentable biodiversity, or commercially viable biological action, or simply indigenous biowealth. Following this ethno-botanical action around takes us to unexpected places ^ to remote markets in Northern Mexico filled with savvy vendors of dried yerbas ^ yer
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