| This dissertation in cultural anthropology explores constructions of value, intellectual property, and local resources in a 1994 biodiversity prospecting contract between the University of Arizona and Mexico's National University (UNAM). In this agreement, Mexican researchers and their rural interlocutors provide plants and knowledge to two U.S. drug companies, in exchange for research funds and promises of pharmaceutical-derived royalties. As with many such agreements that have emerged in the wake of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, this exchange is meant to foster both drug development and southern nations' and communities' "investments" in biodiversity conservation.; In this work, I argue that ethnographic attention to scientific research practices is a crucial point of entry for understanding the modes of resource appropriation and participation that are mobilized in the name of bioprospecting. Scientific research strategies and plant collecting practices are powerful sites of negotiation: it is here, as much as in the contracts among nations and corporations, that we see the generation of lines of inclusion and exclusion that profoundly shape the constitution and flow of resources among rural communities, Mexican scientists, and U.S. universities and pharmaceutical companies. Drawing on one year of ethnographic research with participating Mexican scientists and the plant vendors, rural collectors, and community interlocutors with whom they work, I examine how social relationships, in the form of potential compensation claims, are written into and out of chemical compounds, bioassays used to test plants' potency, ethnobotanical knowledge, and the plants that circulate through urban markets and that are scattered along roadsides and highway shoulders.; If an ethnography of science can illuminate how bio-prospecting works in practice, an ethnography of bioprospecting also speaks critically to the anthropology and sociology of science. In tracing how UNAM scientists are engaged in determining the insides and outsides of this prospecting network, I present a distinctive topography of scientific networks. These are networks that are cross-cut and defined by shifting axes of power and marginalization across the U.S.--Mexico border; neoliberal understandings of knowledge as itself an economic resource; and competing nationalist and indigenous narratives about the histories---and the rights---inscribed in Mexican medicinal plants. |
