[Athena] Séminaire Gouverner le vivant avec Nancy Lee Peluso, 18 novembre 2013

[Céline Vaslin <celine.vaslin AT cnrs.fr>]

Séminaire Gouverner le vivant 2013-2014 – Séance 3

Frontiers of Commodification: State Lands and their Formalization
Nancy Lee Peluso (university of California - Berkeley)
Discutante : Monica Castro (Université de Lausanne)

Date : lundi 18 novembre 2013 (14h00-16h00)
Lieu : Amphithéâtre de Paléontologie, MNHN, galerie de paléontologie, 2 rue Buffon, 75005 Paris. Métro: Gare d’Austerlitz.

    Abstract : Land formalization is the practice by which state administrators and managers of land document, legalize, register, title, and assign property rights in land through bureaucratic means. Whatever "kind" of property rights are established—private or state; common or individual—the process generates authority and power for the formalizing body—an agency of the state—and for the state as a governing institution as well. Formalization serves the purpose of making land, its uses, its claimants, and its transactions more visible, legible, and controllable to state authorities. Formalization is also a critical step in the production of a market society, in which nearly all social relations and socio-natural relations are commodified, and market relations subsume virtually all social relations. Formalization and its effects are important to understand needs because formal property rights are integral to nearly all global and national scale land transactions, and a prerequisite to international institutions’ recognition of any state, private, or non-profit land holdings.
    This paper argues that state land formalization is located precisely at the intersection of national state power and a still-emerging global market society and lays the foundations for the opening of new frontiers of commodification, power, and dispossession in a world of market triumphalism. State territories are a relatively new frontier in this dynamic, globally uneven process of commodity production; many state lands are no longer spaces of rule and sovereign power but state property for commodification and investment.  State agencies and actors are turning state territories into new commodities, sometimes even transferring them to capitalist enterprises to benefit foreign, not domestic, interests. Using examples of state land transformations in Ethiopia, Cameroon, and Indonesia as case studies, we explore how different historical trajectories and moments of state land formalization have enabled contemporary commodifications and transfers of rights and access to state land.

La communication se fera en anglais et français, la discussion et les débats en Français.

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À noter dans vos agendas
Séance 4 de Gouverner le vivant le jeudi 28 novembre 2013, 10h30-12h30, MNHN, bâtiment de Chimie, salle Gay-Lussac, 63 rue Buffon

“Classer le vivant” : autour du livre Barcoding Nature (Routledge, 2013)
Claire Waterton (Lancaster University)
Brian Wynne  (Lancaster University]         
Discutant : David Dumoulin (Institut des Hautes Etudes de l’Amérique Latine- Paris 3)

    DNA Barcoding has been promoted since 2003 as a new, fast, digital genomics-based means of identifying natural species based on the idea that a small standard fragment of any organism’s genome (a so-called ‘micro-genome’) can faithfully identify and help to classify every species on the planet. The fear that species are becoming extinct before they have ever been known fuels barcoders, and the speed, scope, economy and ‘user-friendliness’ claimed for DNA barcoding, as part of the larger ferment around the ‘genomics revolution’, has also encouraged promises that it could inspire humanity to reverse its biodiversity-destructive habits.
    This book is based on six years of ethnographic research on changing practices in the identification and classification of natural species. Informed both by Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the anthropology of science, the authors analyse DNA barcoding in the context of a sense of crisis – concerning global biodiversity loss, but also the felt inadequacy of taxonomic science to address such loss. The authors chart the specific changes that this innovation is propelling in the collecting, organizing, analyzing, and archiving of biological specimens and biodiversity data. As they do so they highlight the many questions, ambiguities and contradictions that accompany the quest to create a genomics-based environmental technoscience dedicated to biodiversity protection. They ask what it might mean to recognise ambiguity, contradiction, and excess more publicly as a constitutive part of this and other genomic technosciences.