ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

“Local contamination requires local metabolism”: The Making of Microbial Indigeneity

• In Event: Metabolic Frontiers: Transforming Matter and Energy in the 20th Century

English Abstract

Microbes increasingly serve as what scientists and policymakers call ‘sustainable technologies’ for decomposing recalcitrant pollutants and detoxifying the environment. Yet, as microbes move from laboratories into fields, their deployment raises questions about how people make sense of microbial metabolism, and what political arrangements of remedy such microbial enrollments enable or curtail. This paper examines late-twentieth-century experiments to delegate ecological remedy to microbial metabolisms on Jeju Island, South Korea, with particular attention to the shift at the turn of the century when microbes were recast as distinctively indigenous agents of soil remediation. By tracing how microbes, and the knowledges of their degradative capacities, travelled, settled, and were later uprooted, this paper interweaves post-imperial projects of environmental repair with provincial narratives that placed microbial indigeneity at the center of soil remediation to ask: how might metabolic processes come to be apprehended, mobilised, and refuted to negotiate histories of occupation and environmental remedy?

Author

• Danhue J. Kim, Massachusetts Institute of Technology