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- Convenors:
-
Roberta Raffaetà
(Ca' Foscari Venice University)
Alexander Mawyer (Director Center for Pacific Islands Studies)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Networks:
- Network Panel
Short Abstract
As ecological crises deepen, “planetary biology” emerges—driven by AI and sequencing that reveal new life patterns across scales. This mapping of oceans and mountains exposes tensions between scientific exploration, extraction, and renewed (neo)colonial and ecological anxieties.
Long Abstract
As the planet faces an unprecedented ecological crisis, a new concept is taking shape — that of planetary biology. Still a moving target, it is driven by sequencing technologies and cutting-edge algorithmic power, including AI, which enable scientists to identify novel biological patterns through unexpected correlations across places and samples. To make this possible, scientists feel an urgency to sample and map the entire planet, crossing and aggregating conventional disciplinary and geographical boundaries and blurring distinctions between biomes and “anthromes.” Planetary thinking resonates with social science efforts to decentre the human and its anthropocentric gaze. Yet, the technologies that sustain it — many of which originated in military research — reveal “family resemblances” and deep anxieties about control and domination, both over humans and the environment, as well as new configurations of what Ann Laura Stoler calls “imperial formations” which raise the spectre of new forms ecological imperialism and (neo)colonial entanglements. With this panel, we aim to ethnographically account for and anthropologically theorize how this planetary mapping of data unfolds in different sites through a shared logic of extraction. In particular, we focus on two interconnected yet seemingly distant ecosystems: mountains and oceans — on the frontlines of current planetary challenges, where glaciers are melting and oceans are rising. We also wish to explore the interconnections between these charismatic, rural or para-urban environments from Europe to the Pacific as sites where competing conceptions of Indigeneity, locality, and place are (re)emerging, offering a lens to think beyond polarizations and reactionary (mis)recognitions.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Singapore, this investigation explores how native butterflies have been entangled with infrastructures of environmental data. The multispecies ethnography traces the frictions arising between local stakeholders and large-scale technoscientific data extractivism.
Paper long abstract
The Common Rose and the Common Birdwing have emerged as symbols for nature conservation in Singapore in recent decades. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Singapore’s forests, parks and community gardens, this investigation explores how local butterflies have been entangled with infrastructures of environmental data. Amid anxieties about sea level rise in Singapore, local nature enthusiasts and biologists advocate for a green pathway (Jalan Hijau) towards a sustainable future by conserving wildlife in multispecies landscapes. This investigation foregrounds how they observe butterflies, gather data about their life cycles, and document endangered species in checklists. Traditionally, knowledge about vulnerable local butterflies was recorded in the Red Data Book, but the global rise of biodiversity platforms such as iNaturalist has accelerated the gathering of species data. The multispecies ethnography seeks to assess the role of data infrastructures in Singapore’s biodiversity conservation agenda and traces the construction of butterfly habitats in para-urban settings. Emplaced within tropical vernacular architecture, such habitats mitigate the extirpation risk for butterfly species in Singapore. The investigation demonstrates how nature conservationists appropriate mobile apps to document butterfly species in Singapore’s multispecies landscapes. Users of these mobile apps are drawn into the dynamics of a technoscientific data extractivism, entangling information about breeding and nectar plants of butterflies with data infrastructures and AI technologies for identifying and analysing vulnerable species. Finally, the paper illuminates the postcolonial politics of knowing nature, providing ethnographic insights into the future of biodiversity conservation in times of global warming.
Paper short abstract
Parallel sampling, interpretation of large datasets and synchronous reading of ecological heterogeneous data are discussed referring to a recent fieldwork in Antarctica. The extreme context provides the conditions for a multi-scale temporal analysis of ice samples as anthropo-environmental markers.
Paper long abstract
The work on large multidisciplinary datasets represents the late frontiers of anthropological analysis, as the strategies of data collection diversify and multiply in eco-logical research, and while the algorithms of data and text analysis gain more and more momentum in the social sciences. The increasingly accessible ways of processing very large datasets, mainly AI driven processes, boost and justify strategies of large scale data extraction, opening questions on the effective interoperability of the data deriving from heterogeneous sources and on the epistemology of crossing methodological boundaries.
The paper draws on the multidisciplinary fieldwork I developed in Antarctica in the fall-winter 2024-25. The confined and extreme Antarctic context provides a unique observatory on the practices of multi-disciplinarity in environmental research. Located on the converging lines of glaciers’ and sea ice’ melting frontiers, the collected samples produce sets of simultaneous and parallel data, aiming at representing the glaciers’ complex dynamics, and providing a large scale and to-date picture on the ice-melting global threat. Anthropic, climatic, geological and biological and markers are scanned simultaneously in the samples, requiring a multidimensional time analysis and the rethinking of chronological drivers in the development of interpretive models. The discussion unfolds around the role of the human time scale in the production and selection of interpretative models, on the epistemic relevance of human-made data selection a process and, ultimately, on the elusive boundary between data-driven and interpretative-driven results.
Paper short abstract
This presentation interrogates how marine bioprospecting operations are stimulating visions of deep-sea ecosystems as standing-reserves of resources, and analyses the new High Seas Treaty as codifying a regime of genetic extractivism in the deep sea.
Paper long abstract
In the last decade, bioprospecting expeditions have started to reinvent the ocean as a global site of public and private practices of genomic extraction. Genomic and metagenomic data has been informing both marine science and marine conservation, and its relative importance is only increasing with recent studies calling for increased use of genomic studies of ocean biodiversity in planetary governance. Yet, the practice of genetic prospecting at sea is mediated in complex ways by unequal power relations. Operations of genetic prospecting of the global oceans increasingly contribute to the formation of a planetary biology, but by whom and for whom? The paper analyses recent shifts in the global regime governing the distribution of economic value resulting from growing operations of genetic prospecting in the high seas. Through a close analysis of diplomatic negotiations on the BBNJ, it examines how the uneven geographies of genetic prospecting have shaped the contours of the new legal regime, its conceptual foundation, and its constitutive ambiguities and contradictions. On the basis of this analysis, the ongoing push towards a planetary mapping of the ocean genome appears poised to further corporate concentration of resources and corporate control over global ocean and climate action. Despite the codification of limited benefit-sharing mechanisms, long-standing tendencies towards corporate concentration are unlikely to be reversed. Ultimately, the regulatory regime emerging from the BBNJ Treaty reinforces ‘genetic extractivism’: a global regime based on a financialised and instrumental vision of life, and infrastructures of rent-extraction centred on corporations in the Global North.
Paper short abstract
Planetary biology abstracts land/sea-scapes into mappable data, erasing more-than-human cultures. Drawing on Tsing's “friction” to overcome the local/planetary dichotomy, the paper combines multispecies ethnography, STS and decolonial theory to argue for accountability to more-than-living lifeworlds
Paper long abstract
Planetary biology hinges on a particular kind of abstraction rendering land- and sea-scapes as continuous, mappable, and legible to algorithms. This requires a systematic erasure of non-human and more-than-human cultures and histories, more-than-living relationships and modes of being. The very practice of encoding biodiversity, deciding what counts as life, what is sampled, what is measured, embeds choices that have profound consequences for more-than-human lifeworlds.
Aiming to overcome the local vs planetary dichotomy, and instead drawing on Anna Tsing's concept of friction (Tsing 2005), I argue that genuine accountability to earthly multiplicity demands taking seriously the cultural and relational dimensions of more-than-human lifeworlds. To that end, the paper proposes a transdisciplinary approach, building on multispecies ethnographic work with the lifeworlds of macaques in Bali and urban pigeons in Warsaw, critical STS-minded ethnographic work with biologists and comparative psychologists, and a theoretical reframing of non-human cultures informed by the decolonial and more-than-human turns in anthropology.
Quantitative, planetary-level studies can be necessary in pursuit of multispecies justice (Chao et al. 2022), but they defeat their purpose unless accountable to particular, situated lifeworlds. A non-extractive (Neimanis 2023), naturecultural approach to biodiversity requires acceptance some things are not mine to be known. Where planetary biology sees populations and genomes, multispecies ethnography reveals beings enmeshed in complex networks, territorial knowledges, and forms of collective agency, living in rhythms and histories that resist sampling. Their identity is constituted through relations and cannot be limited to taxonomy, to the kinds of bodies they have.