Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Whatever the specificities of their creation and maintenance, political
borders and boundaries can speak powerfully to the broader field of analysis
that Jones advocates. We can inquire into whether bordering and bound-
ing in other arenas share similar characteristics. For instance, how common
is it to encounter categorical and practical distinctions that prohibit trans-
gressions as rigorously as officials at the North Korea-South Korea border?
Likewise, who or what is able to move across less solid boundaries of vari-
ous kinds and what exclusions, if any, attach to these (seemingly) permeable
divides? We can also inquire into whether and how categorical distinctions
made in specialist discourses (administrative, legal, scientific and so on)
achieve a spatial expression akin to political borders or boundaries. And
we can search too for borders and boundaries that are as overtly politi-
cised as, say, the Golan Heights, which Syria has long wished to reclaim
from Israel. In each case, we can look for four things:
what
separations are
made (semantically and practically),
where
are the divisions applied 'on the
ground',
how
(strictly) they're enforced, and
who
(or what) is most affected
by acts of bordering and bounding? What's more, we can look for substan-
tive connections (not mere comparisons) between erstwhile different cases,
and attend to the individuals, groups or institutions that engage in - or,
In the rest of this chapter, I will explore three very different cases where
the borders and boundaries of the natural are delimited by different epi-
stemic workers (in two cases legal professionals and career politicians, in the
third case political activists). This involves creating conceptual quarantines
for nature understood in three of its four meanings (I don't consider 'univer-
sal nature' for obvious reasons, but do include nature's collateral concepts
for equally obvious reasons). It also sometimes involves the geographical
expression of semantic differences, recalling the discussion of 'the spatiali-
sation of nature' in
Chapter 1.
To avoid any confusion in what follows, I
use the term 'borders' to refer to the line
between
what's said to be 'nature'
and not-nature, while I apply the word 'boundaries' to divisions
within
the
realm of what's considered to be natural.
FROM NATURE TO ARTIFICE: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND
BIOLOGICAL INVENTION
Patents and biotechnological manufactures
Businesses the world over have long claimed, and sought to enforce, prop-
erty rights in what they take to be the unique or distinctive aspects of the
commodities they sell. These property rights are prescribed in national legal
systems and breaches of rights may be redressed through prosecutions and
monetary charges against any offending parties. Though firms claim prop-
erty rights over the
physical
commodities that they make and market (up
until the point of sale), the key underpinning legal right is often purely
