When Nature Goes Public The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico

About this book

Bioprospecting - the exchange of plants for corporate promises of royalties or community development assistance - is lauded in certain quarters. But can pharmaceutical profits really advance conservation and indigenous rights? The first anthropological study of the practices associated with bioprospecting, this book focuses on a contract involving Mexico's National Autonomous University, in which researchers, plant vendors, rural collectors, indigenous cooperatives and other actors become enmeshed.

Contents

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

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Biography

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