Extimacies of Cell and Soil: Genomic Science & Insecurity in the Making of Colombia's Post-Conflict

• In Event: Toxic Subjects: Historical, Legal, Occupational, and Medical Perspectives - II

Abstract

My paper brings investigations of the life scientific production of macroscopic insecurity across feminist and decolonial STS (Lyons, Roberts) to bear on studies of the politicization of genetic data in post-plantation societies (Nelson, Benn Torres) in the name of historical repair and reconciliation. Emerging out of my participation in a set of land restitution claims in the maroon treaty town of San Basilio de Palenque, I trace my palenquero interlocutors’ theorization of technoscientific genetic ancestral analysis as an instrument which both produces and elides their proximity to toxicity. These evidentiary practices are instrumentalized by state organs to claim that the debilitating effects of increasing industrialized palm oil emulent pollution are merely genetic traits resulting from endogamous sexual selection. Intimacies with debilitating forms of toxicity are thus equated with two temporal of post-conflict securitization: 1. the historical repair of past harms emerging from postcolonial military conflict; and 2. the juridical denuding of potential future risks associated with a mobile rural population of internally displaced persons.

I thus argue that both molecular and macroscopic examinations of life and its various borders (especially as they are produced through sexual selection) immanently co-constitute the borders of the non-living world, or the geography through which endurance, insecurity, and obligation are subtended. In so doing, I make the case for a critical interface between STS and Security Studies which remains attentive to extimate (Lacan), or non-dialectically but coevally obligated, contradictions emerging between macroscopic and microscopic scales of governance.


Works Cited
Benn Torres, Jada. “‘Reparational’ Genetics: Genomic Data and the Case for Reparations in the Caribbean.” Genealogy, vol. 2, no. 1, 2018.
Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII. W.W. Norton, 1997.
Lyons, Kristina. “Decomposition as Life Politics: Soils, Selva, and Small Farmers Under the Gun of the U.S.-Colombia War on Drugs.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 31, no. 1, 2016.
Nelson, Alondra. The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome. Beacon Press, 2016.
Roberts, Elizabeth. “What Gets Inside? Violent Entanglements and Toxic Boundaries in Mexico City.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 32, no. 4, 2017.

Author

• Kasia Kalina, University of Chicago, Department of Anthropology