10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17182
application/pdf
2038-3460
17182
1
en
Giuseppina Pellegrino
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Claire Waterton, Rebecca Ellis and Brian Wynne, Barcoding Nature. Shifting Cultures of Taxonomy in an Age of Biodiversity Loss, Routledge, 2013
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
5
Book Reviews
2014-07-14
2023-06-13
2014-07-14
2023-07-24
219-222
TS
Giuseppina Pellegrino
2014/07/14
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17182
219
University of Calabria
2038-3460
1
en
222
Claire Waterton, Rebecca Ellis and Brian Wynne, Barcoding Nature. Shifting Cultures of Taxonomy in an Age of Biodiversity Loss, Routledge, 2013
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17182/16083
5
Book Reviews                                                             219
     In the last section, “Twelve Ideas to Avoid the Tragedy of the Shared
Knowledge”, Ortega and Rodríguez outline some ideas for tackling what
seems to be an inevitable and progressive abandonment of participation
in collaborative ventures. The authors point towards several potential ini-
tiatives, such as: redefining the notion of work in our societies and reduc-
ing the time devoted to it; dedicating released time to the common, such
as by creating shared knowledge; thinking differently and challenging the
dominant ideas of production and economic growth; facilitating universal
free accessibility to the Internet; encouraging, acknowledging and re-
warding collaboration with symbolic capital that can be converted into
other forms of capital; and organizing self-managed governance agencies
to promote, monitor and evaluate the involvement. Finally, the authors
include an appendix in which they provide an account of the methodolo-
gy employed in the investigation.
     Ortega and Rodríguez do an admirable job of attempting to under-
stand how a collaborative endeavour like Wikipedia operates. This book
could be very interesting for anyone aiming to understand the logics of
collective action and those concerned with new ways to manage the pub-
lic. Furthermore, it introduces new questions and touches upon issues of
interest in different fields. This investigation of the hybrid assemblage
known as Wikipedia could be a thought-provoking contribution not only
to STS scholars, but also to historians wondering about the origins of
practices, economists studying economic practices, sociologists dealing
with communities of practice, legal scientists examining questions of
property, anthropologists enquiring about the persistence of gift culture
and even political scientists captivated with the rebirth of the public
space. Lastly, the book is well documented and a valuable contribution to
the scarce scholarly literature on Wikipedia in Spanish.


                                   ***


Claire Waterton, Rebecca Ellis and Brian Wynne
Barcoding Nature. Shifting Cultures of Taxonomy in an Age of Biodiversity
Loss
London: Routledge, 2013, pp. 212

Giuseppina Pellegrino University of Calabria

    Making visible the density of the ongoing changes which articulate the
relationship between (techno)science and society is not an obvious task.
The three authors of Barcoding Nature. Shifting cultures of taxonomy in an
age of biodiversity loss succeed in such an enterprise, being participant ob-
servers and engaged witnesses of a complex turning point in one of the En-
220                                                            Tecnoscienza 5 (1)

lightenment natural sciences, commonly perceived as a ‘dusty’ and old
fashioned discipline (taxonomy). Waterton, Ellis and Wynne drive the
reader into the crisis of reputation and identity of a scientific community
and episteme in face of the encounter with the most promising and threat-
ening of the life sciences (genomics). Such encounter produces and shapes
the establishment of few interconnected projects aimed at extending the
DNA barcoding to all animal life forms constituting nature, forms put at
risk by the emergent and publicly alarming phenomenon of biodiversity
loss.
    However, Barcoding Nature is not only an accurate ethnographic ac-
count of the research fieldwork carried out at the Natural History Museum
in London over a period of six years, which comprised a research on con-
temporary taxonomy as well as the dawning and development of the DNA
barcoding for biodiversity, a project led by the University of Guelph (On-
tario). The book is also, and especially, a multifaceted, sophisticated travel
across ambivalences, ambiguities, (dis)continuities, and contradictions of a
powerful and ambitious knowledge infrastructure, aimed at matching the
quest for a new, more robust identity of the taxonomic discipline with the
universalistic promises of classification and recording enabled by the DNA
barcoding technique.
    Drawing on both STS – especially the infrastructural approach of
Bowker and Star as well as ANT and Fujimura’s do-able science – and an-
thropology of science – in light of Toulmin’s and Helmreich’s work – Wa-
terton and colleagues investigate the controversies which from 2000 on-
wards shook the taxonomists’ scientific community with the model of a ge-
nomic taxonomy. This model was based on harnessing and enhancing in-
dexes of the morphological Linnean tradition, through the construction of a
“barcode library” organized “around the identity-differentiation exhibited
by a single gene segment held constant across all species” (p. 34).
    Both simplicity and complexity, recording and forgetting, detachment
and re-attachment of information characterize the DNA barcoding project
investigated by authors, known as BOLI (Barcoding of Life Initiative) and
its main archiving infrastructure, BOLD (Barcoding of Life Data Systems).
All of the above categories constitute the poles of a continuous oscillation,
which conducts the project of genomic (or genomicized) taxonomy to go
beyond the promise of a revolution and the practice of a conciliation (cf.
chapter 2) inside the scientific community. Therefore, BOLI and BOLD
also embody and adhere to the endeavor of a therapeutic and salvationary
vision of science, what authors name as “redemptive technoscientific inno-
vation” (cf. chapter 7). Again, such a turn is neither univocal nor free from
ambivalences.
    While embodying the tension towards a new cosmology of connection
between mankind and nature to confront with the uncertainty due to biodi-
versity loss and the intangibility of an appeased future, genomic taxonomy
has been transformed through more local, user-oriented and commercial
applications (e.g. environmental bio-monitoring) enabled by bioinformat-
Book Reviews                                                                 221
ics. Such applications, however, seem to put at risk the primacy of taxono-
my as the discipline devoted to investigating and archiving diversity of life
forms.
     Indeed, ambitions of a universalistic approach to classify nature via a
technology imagined and designed as ubiquitous, pocketable and freely ac-
cessible (p. 66) represent a recurrent discursive frame in sociotechnical in-
novation – the so called ‘ubiquitous computing paradigm’ is a clear exam-
ple of such a frame in the design of information infrastructures, which are
very much part of the DNA barcoding project. In this project, the pursued
universalism of a global access to all forms of life though a micro fragment
of the DNA code materializes itself into technological artifacts shaped by
the mission of archiving diversity, which as usual, “enacts a very particular
kind of memory and indeed a particular kind of forgetting in making data
available and accessible for its potential users” (p. 109).
     While analyzing negotiations and conflicts, translations and misunder-
standings in the making of these technological artifacts, authors trace a fas-
cinating path to the expert reader – clarity of language stands out, but the
book is undoubtedly targeted to a specialized audience. They depart from
the microsequence of DNA barcoding which materially mobilizes and puri-
fies knowledge through extraction and amplification of a short fragment of
the genetic code (chapters 1-2). The path goes on detecting reactions, un-
certainties and aspirations of a relatively small, greatly disoriented, scien-
tific community (chapters 2-3), then deepening the redesign of taxonomic
culture via the BOLI/BOLD projects (chapters 4-5) as well as their care
and support to biodiversity archiving (chapter 6).
     As the ethnographic account proceeds depicting the multiple and di-
verse – often contradictory – faces of the encounter between ‘the old’ (tax-
onomy) and ‘the new’ (genomics), the sight and the focus of the narrative
broaden, embracing the issue of the public role of science and the ambiva-
lent motives and tensions of a universalistic cosmologic mission (chapter
7), though sensitive to more mundane and utilitarian values (chapter 8 –
again, a detachment and re-attachment of reach to the barcoding nature pro-
ject).
     This path ties together the very small to the very big, articulating the
micro and the macro as dimensions of a continuum, drawing on a STS per-
spective which combines, borrows and recounts philosophy (Benjamin and
Foucault), anthropology (Strathern and Verran), history of science (Bowk-
er). Such an integration constitutes the hallmark of Waterton and col-
leagues’ STS vision and ethnography.
     As a final note, the STS reader could be surprised by a missing refer-
ence in the bibliography. Given that the research carried out by Waterton
and colleagues took place at the Natural History Museum in London, the
connection with Star and Griesemer’ analysis of Berkeley’s Museum of
Vertebrate Zoology which baptized the concept of Boundary Object is not
extravagant. Ideally, a fil rouge ties the historical analysis of translation and
cooperation among Berkeley Museum’s scientists carried out by Star and
222                                                             Tecnoscienza 5 (1)

Griesemer to the taxonomists, bioinformaticians and molecular biologists
followed by Waterton, Ellis and Wynne at London Natural History Muse-
um.
    In the end, the need for classification and standardization of knowledge
is a master or grand narrative of science and goes hand in hand with the
resilience of infrastructures of and for science. Forms and networks which
comply with this need can be very diverse. This diversity is vital for
knowledge infrastructures, as much as biodiversity for life survival and de-
velopment. But more often than not, “what are really continuities in prac-
tice can appear and be claimed as dramatic innovations” (p. 39).
    This infrastructural inversion a la Bowker goes straight to the book final
concerns about knowledge ethics and politics. These concerns substantiate
the call for a modest, responsible and relational thinking on technoscience,
based on the awareness that the shifting boundaries and apparent inconsist-
encies of genomic taxonomy can serve - and become - different technosci-
entific articulations. These can functionally enroll scientists and their disci-
plinary scientific communities, but also embrace and enable public “poetic
sensibilities” (p. 177) towards the crucial and ambivalent relevance of
‘treating’ and ‘caring’ about global biodiversity.
    Indeed, the book final reflections go far beyond taxonomy and ge-
nomics, or genomic taxonomy: the current hype on ‘Big Data’ infrastruc-
tures ‘in an age of consistency and coherence loss’ (to suggest an echo of
the book subtitle) makes even more urgent the quest for new sensibilities,
to see contradictions embedded in the making, use and maintenance of
emergent sociotechnical arrays devoted to archiving and using myriad of
sensitive information set.


                                     ***


Jonas Löwgren and Bo Reimer
Collaborative Media. Production, Consumption, and Design Interventions
Cambridge MA: The Mit Press, 2013, pp. 198

Federica Timeto ‘Carlo Bo’ University of Urbino

    This book is based on the fifteen-year collaboration between an interac-
tion designer (Löwgren) and a media scholar (Reimer) at the School of Arts
and Communication and the Medea Collaborative Media initiative at
Malmö University in Sweden. Combining interaction design with media
and communication studies, Löwgren and Reimer’s approach draws con-
nections back to the main assumptions of cultural studies about cultural ar-
tifacts, and to Stuart Hall in particular, while showing an affinity with the
recent materialist turn of social sciences and its interest in the generativity
