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VOLUME 12 NUMBER 1, 2013

The Political Economy of Hope and Authoritarian Liberalism in Genetic Research Mark Munsterhjelm University of Windsor

In his influential and oft-cited book The Politics of Life Itself, the British sociologist Nikolas Rose sets out a ‘cartography of the present’ focusing on what he terms advanced liberal democracies, in which the defining feature of contemporary biopower is governance through freedom within a political economy of hope. The semiotic square provides a way to map Michel Foucault concepts of sovereignty (make-die), biopolitics (make-live), necropolitics (not-make-live) and law (not-make-die). This mapping shows that Rose’s political economy of hope is focused strongly on biopolitical optimization and legal equality, but neglects the authoritarian liberal potential of sovereignty and necropolitics. In this paper, I will counterpoint Rose’s work by considering several instances of authoritarian liberalism in scientists’ conduct of genetic research involving Aboriginal peoples that differentially allocated rights, risks, duties and obligations, including racist stereotyping and mass violations of informed consent and dignity. These cases from the USA, Canada, New Zealand and Taiwan demonstrate how political economic pressures to commercialize research, patent law, and researchers’ effective legal impunity contribute to such violations. Rose overemphasizes the optimizing aspects of biopolitics and governance through freedom while neglecting aspects of necropolitics and sovereignty within the assemblages of genetic research.

Introduction

In his influential and oft-cited book, The Politics of Life Itself, the British sociologist Nikolas Rose sets out a ‘cartography of the present’ focusing on what he terms advanced liberal democracies, in which the defining feature of contemporary biopower is governance through freedom within a political economy of hope. He argues that eugenics, in the sense of genetically purifying and strengthening national

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populations (exemplified by the Nazi regime), no longer has any role in contemporary biotechnology. This demise of eugenics leads him to assert that the concept of race can be integrated justly and usefully into genetic research without engaging in discriminatory racism, despite it being socially constructed and having numerous problems.

A very significant problem arises in Rose’s analysis of race in contemporary genetic research, because of his focus on populations that are governed through freedom and his neglect of areas within advanced liberal polities that are ruled through authoritarian liberalism. He marginalizes authoritarian liberalism by mentioning it only in passing, such as saying that contemporary bio-citizenship is ‘differentially territorialized’ and not all are equal (Rose 2007, p.132). He contends that racism is not a major concern, because scientists who advocate overtly racist views are marginalized (Rose 2007, p. 167-8). However, Rose’s conclusion that racism is no longer practised to a significant extent in genetic research in advanced liberal polities must be qualified. For, as we will see in the second half of this article, genetic researchers and institutions have routinely subjected Indigenous peoples within advanced liberal polities to forms of racially configured authoritarian liberal practices.i

In this paper, I will counterpoint Rose’s work by considering several cases of authoritarian liberalism in scientists’ conduct of racist genetic research. These cases are not merely isolated instances. Rather, these cases have directly involved prominent institutions, well-known genetic researchers, and several thousand Indigenous people as research subjects. As well, by geneticizing disease and positing genetic predispositions to alcoholism and violence, these cases affect millions of Indigenous people within advanced liberal polities such as the USA, New Zealand, Canada and Taiwan, and in the Third World. In these cases, involved genetic researchers have organized assemblages that have variously differentially allocated and denied rights, imposed risks and extremely onerous obligations, contributed to racist stereotyping, and committed mass violations of informed consent and dignity. This analysis shows how Rose emphasizes the optimizing aspects of biopolitics and governance through freedom, while neglecting the more authoritarian liberal coercive aspects of necropolitics, law, and particularly sovereignty within the assemblages of genetic research.

Authoritarian Liberalism

Liberalism rests on a contradiction in which the exercise of freedom is based on the ability to exercise a sort of authoritarianism over the self (Valverde 1996; Dean 2002). At ‘the heart of the juridical and political notions of autonomy lies an ethical despotism prior to any division between those capable of bearing the freedoms and responsibilities of mature subjectivity and those who are not’ (Dean 2002, p. 46). This capacity for self-despotism is the basis of differentiation between those deemed self-governing self-actualizing subjects (who willingly

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follow their own ‘inner despot’) and those subjects who are deemed incapable due to lack of education, responsibility, some inherent capacity to self-govern, or those like Aboriginal peoples that impeded or resisted conquest and subjugation of territory (Dean 2002, p. 48-49).

Sovereignty and Biopolitics

In the following section, I will show how imposition of distinctions between those deemed worthy of self-governance and those who are not, involves the enactment of sovereignty, biopolitics, law and necropolitics through differentiating technologies of racism. Then, I will consider how these processes can occur within genetic research assemblages.

In the final lecture in Society Must Be Defended (2003), Foucault analyzed how biopolitics intertwined with sovereignty beginning in the 1800s:

And I think that one of the greatest transformations political right underwent in the nineteenth century was precisely that, I wouldn’t say exactly that sovereignty’s old right—to take life or let live—was replaced, but it came to be complemented by a new right which does not erase the old right but which does penetrate it, permeate it. This is the right, or rather precisely the opposite right. It is the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die. The right of sovereignty was the right to take life or let live. And then this new right is established: the right to make live and to let die. (Foucault 2003, p. 241)

In this passage, Foucault recognizes how the sovereign enactment, exemplified in public executions, was transformed through the emergence of science and other disciplines aimed at the optimization of life at the population level through disciplines such as medicine and sanitation. These disciplines greatly transformed society by increasing life expectancy, and by decreasing mortality and illness related morbidity. The emergence of biopolitics marks a significant new way of reordering society, which is distinct from, yet intertwined with the sovereignty/law axis (Foucault 1976). This reordering leads to a central role for science in enacting sovereignty, for part of its authority applies to the sovereignty/law axis, but is not reducible to it, since it functions largely through biopolitical normalization.

Foucault’s definition of sovereignty as take-life and law as let-live, biopolitics as make-live and necropolitics as let-die, can be mapped through the semiotic square, which is a heuristic device developed by AJ Greimas of the Paris School of Semiotics. The semiotic square is, ‘both a conceptual network and a visual representation of this network’ (Hebert 2011, p. 27). I suggest that the semiotic square is applicable based upon Foucault’s emphasis on the multiplicity of interrelations between these processes:

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rather than looking for the single form or the central point from which all forms of power derive, either by way of consequence or development, we must begin by letting them operate in their multiplicity, their differences, their specificity, and their reversibility; we must therefore study them as relations of force that intersect, refer to one another, converge, or, on the contrary, come into conflict and strive to negate one another. (Foucault 2003, p. 265-6)

This mapping allows us to conceptualize further the potential range of relations between the enactment of processes that we term sovereignty and law with biopolitics and necropolitics. The semiotic square involves two basic opposing or contrary terms A and B that can be variously negated and combined to generate ten different combinations (based on Hebert 2011).

Figure 1: Semiotic Square of Sovereignty and Biopolitics.

Foucault’s original formulation considers the opposition between P1 sovereignty as make-die and P2 biopolitics as make-live. He then uses negation to create distinctions within each term. First, sovereignty is negated into P4 not-make-die, which is equivalent to law or let-live, because law represents a restriction on the sovereign right to take-life. Therefore, we can view law in terms of the ‘different techniques of constraint that it implements’ (Foucault 2003, p. 266). Second, biopolitics (P2) as make-live can be negated into not-make-live (P3),

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which is equivalent to let-die (‘let’ is an active verb) or ‘disallow it to the point of death’ (Foucault 1976, p. 138). This negation of biopolitics as let-die corresponds to the politics of death, known as necropolitics or thanatopolitics, which Foucault considered the flipside of biopolitics. Negation is understood not only in its strictly logical sense, ‘but involves the connotations of denial, absence, and disregard’ (Peeters 1989, p. 121). Furthermore, the relationships between take-life and let-live, and also make-live and let-die, are not mutually exclusive or dichotomized; rather, these are graduated, and can all be present to varying degrees in different situations. We have to pay attention to how these processes reinforce or contradict each other depending upon the position.

Foucault addressed this apparent paradox at the centre of the fundamental opposition between sovereignty and biopower: ‘Given that this power’s objective is essentially to make live, how can it let die? How can the power of death, the function of death, be exercised in a political system centred upon biopower?’ (Foucault 2003, p. 254). Foucault argued that racism was the key to differentiating who lives and who dies. This concept of racism focuses on governance through discriminatory practices. Racism is, ‘in short, a way of establishing a biological type caesura within a population that appears to be a biological domain’ which allows power, ‘to treat the species, to subdivide the species it controls, into the subspecies known, precisely, as races. That is the first function of racism: to fragment, to create caesuras within the biological continuum addressed by biopower’ (Foucault 2003, p. 255). Within this fundamental set of relations, Foucault posited that racism, ‘is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die’ (Foucault 2003, p. 255). Critically, he argued that racism is central to how the sovereign function of taking-life is deployed within a matrix of biopolitical relations (Foucault 2003; Mills 2007). Racism’s role requires that we consider in more detail the interaction between these processes. Therefore, we will elaborate further on the above four corner semiotic square and consider the various combinations of terms.

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Figure 2: Metaterms of sovereignty and biopolitics.

The metaterms are combinations of P1, P2, P3, and P4:

P5: (P1 + P2): The combination of sovereignty as take-life and biopolitics as make-live creates an inherently contradictory combination of take-life/make-live, as Foucault describes above.

P6: (P3 + P4): This position is the combination of not-let-die/not-let-live, the opposition of necropolitics with law. Like P5, this is an unstable configuration.

P7 (P1 + P3): take-life/let-die is an intensified area of death. This position is where the distinction between necropolitics and the exercise of sovereignty in taking life becomes blurred (Agamben 1998; Mbembe 2003). This metaterm accords with conditions in which people have less access to the means of biopolitical optimization and their rights are derogated, which is further reinforced by sovereign take-life interventions.

P8 (P2 + P4): Make-live/not-take-life is an intensified zone of life that combines optimizing aspects of biopolitics and the protective function of law. This metaterm accords with the political economy of hope.

P9 (P1 + P4): Make-live/not-let-live is a boundary or zone of transition between sovereignty and law.

P10 (P2 + P3): Make-live/let-die is a boundary or zone of transition between biopolitics and necropolitics.

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Mapping the Political Economy of Hope

In The Politics of Life Itself, Rose charts out what he terms a ‘cartography of the present’ based around a political economy of hope. For example, citing case studies of Huntington’s disease, sickle-cell anaemia, and PXE, he considers how those affected by genetic disorders have actively constituted and mobilized these biological-based social identities, to deal with these difficulties within this political economy:

The ethos of hope links together different actors – actual or potential sufferers for a cure, scientists and researchers seeking a breakthrough that will make their name and advance their career, doctors and health care professionals wanting a therapy that will help treat their patients, biotech companies aiming for products that generate profit, governments looking for industrial and commercial developments that will generate employment and stimulate economic activity and international competitiveness. Hence, the term used by Carlos Novas: this is a political economy of hope. (Rose 2007, p. 14)

This formulation involves a high degree of inclusion within the polis of decision-making, because Rose considers that these disparate agents, including those affected by a disease, government, scientists, and capital, will all achieve to some extent their respective goals. There are implicit underlying notions of non-exploitation and non-repression. Particularly important is how those affected by disease are able to engage equitably in negotiations with scientists and government. This transformed power relation, Rose argues, distinguishes contemporary biopolitics from eugenics regimes.

The shift from the institutionalized racism of eugenics involves moving from the contradictions of P1-P2-P5 to the political economy of hope with its complementary configuration of P2-P4-P8. In the political economy of hope, citizens enjoy optimizing biopolitical measures (P2) and governance through freedom since they are protected and enabled by law (P4) and not directly subject to sovereign violence or necropolitics. Similarly, legal equality seems implied in the ability of biosocialities, such as those affected by genetic disease, to engage in negotiations with genetic researchers and government, and exert agency without entailing discrimination. For an important condition of the exercise of governance through freedom is that those who are affected by genetic diseases are also self-actualizing. For they are not only expected and obligated to, but also do so willingly and have the required resources to be able to engage with both their disease and in these negotiations (Rose 2007, p. 124-5). Overall, Rose’s formulation posits a highly inclusive political economy of governance.

In support of this formulation, Rose delineates a strong distinction between eugenics regimes of the early and mid-twentieth century and contemporary biopower. The old eugenics regimes sought to maximize racially configured fitness at a national level:

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Contemporary biopolitics in advanced liberal polities does not take the living body of the race and its vital components as resources whose fitness is to be maximized in a competitive struggle between states. And while the lives, illnesses, and troubles of many may be ignored or marginalized in contemporary political economies of vitality, to let die is not to make die—no “sovereign” wills or plans the sickness and death of our fellow citizens. (Rose 2007, p. 58)

As the semiotic square diagrams illustrate above, letting die (P3) is not equivalent to making die (P1), but they are complementary and in practice intertwined. For the sovereign decision on the application of law, particularly the differentiation of legal obligations (including onerous burdens), rights, benefits, and risks among involved disparate agents, along the P1-P4 axis works to contribute to letting die. As well, Foucault defined making-die (‘killing’) broadly. Under authoritarian liberalism, P1 take-life plus P3 let-die forms a complementary deixis. Together they create the metaterm of P7, an intensified zone where necropolitics and punitive sovereignty are dominant. Because of the graduated relationships, elements of biopolitics and legal protections may persist, but at a much reduced level or more repressive character. P1-P3-P7 together forms a range of marginalized zones where P1 sovereignty as take-life and P3 necropolitics as let-die tend to be complementary and mutually reinforcing. This complementarity is a key feature, as Foucault states:

If the power of normalization wished to exercise the old sovereign right to kill, it must become racist. And if, conversely, a power of sovereignty, or in other words, a power that has the right of life and death, wishes to work with the instruments, mechanisms, and technology of normalization, it too must become racist. When I say “killing,” I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some peoples, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on. (Foucault 2003, p. 256)

Hence, racism is central to the interweaving of biopower and sovereignty that constitutes and organizes those subjects and populations who are included within P2-P4-P8 and those who are excluded in zones outside.

However, Rose considers that racist discrimination in contemporary genetic research is not a major problem, arguing that those scientists who assert overtly racist hierarchies are considered outside the mainstream (Rose 2007, p. 167-8). He continues that in the 1970s, genetic concepts of race appeared to be on their way out as various findings showed humans and chimpanzees shared some 98% of their genetics and that genetic differences in DNA within groups were greater than differences between groups. ‘However a new molecular conception of population difference rapidly emerged out of genomic thinking,’ one that was distinct from eugenics-era ‘molar’ level concepts of race (Rose 2007, p. 168). For evidence of this, he cites the example of the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP). He

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quotes one of the arguments by the influential population geneticist L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, one of the HGDP’s original proponents, that the HGDP would increase knowledge of genomic diversity and thereby ‘make a significant contribution to the elimination of racism’ (Cavalli-Sforza quoted in Rose 2007, p. 168). Rose continues:

While there were many critics of this project, by 1991 it was “adopted” by HUGO, the Human Genome Organization, which provided US$1.2 million to set up workshops to develop the technical and organizational aspects of the project, to consider the social and ethical implications, and to conduct a pilot study. (Rose 2007, p. 168)

Rose only describes the project as having many critics and cites that new ethical frameworks were developed as part of his account of how conceptions of race have regained a role in genetic research. This brief summary does not acknowledge or consider how involved Indigenous peoples from many countries, including the USA and New Zealand, argued this project was a biocolonial violation of their sovereignty and dignity nor how their transnational organizing efforts over several years stopped the HGDP from progressing beyond its initial planning stages (Barker 2004; Harry and Kanehe 2006; Reardon 2001).ii

Rose uses the example of an African-American genetic database that has been set up at Howard University as evidence of how African-Americans are utilizing race as a social category, which nonetheless has biomedical utility (Rose 2007, p. 174-5). Therefore, he criticizes how many social scientists are still reflexively suspicious of how ‘race and ethnicity’ are transformed through the ‘geneticization of identity,’ quoting Lippman’s definition of geneticization (1992): ‘The individual affixed with a genetic label can be isolated from the context in which s/he became sick. ...The individual, not society, is seen to require change; social problems improperly become individual pathologies’ (Lippman 1992, p. 1472–73; as quoted in Rose 2007, p. 176-7). Citing examples such as African-Americans affected by sickle-cell anaemia and Ashkenazi Jews affected by Tay-Sachs disease, Rose argues that those affected by genetic disorders are not passive because they actively integrate such genetic information on risks and predispositions into new conceptions of personhood that are not individually isolating, but rather lead to new forms of biosocialization along racial lines:

And, in advanced liberal democracies at least, the biopolitics of identity is very different from that which characterized eugenics. The molecular rewriting of personhood in the age of genomics is linked to the development of novel “life strategies” for individuals and their families, involving choice, enterprise, self-naturalization, and prudence in relation to one’s genetic makeup. And these genetic practices of individuation provide new ways in which individuals are locating themselves within communities of obligation and self-identification delineated by race. (Rose 2007, p. 177)

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In this view, genetic identities that integrate race can no longer be automatically equated with racism as racial discrimination, at least in advanced liberal democracies. He cites the example of race being mobilized within healthcare including African Americans being targeted in a pharmaceutical corporation’s sponsorship of testing for glaucoma (Rose 2007, p. 181-2). In short, Rose contends that race can be translated into a non-discriminatory identification that can be mobilized by those affected by genetic disorders.

Rose mentions the ways in which Native American identity is integrated as a racial category into the US census and how such categories often problematically become reified in practice (Rose 2007, p. 172-3). In his analysis of racism and genetics, he renders genetic research of some Indigenous peoples being on the plus-side and others on the minus-side. On the plus side, he cites the example of how the Lemba of South Africa have used genetic testing to support their claims to Jewish ancestry. On the minus-side, he cites the example of the San and Koi Koi of South Africa rejecting genetic testing for a shared ancestry, due to their respective assertions of being distinct from and superior to the other. As well, he cites how the Lakota Sioux in the USA are concerned about migrations research undermining their claims to land by positioning them as merely the earliest settlers. He terms these minus-side examples ‘damage to identity,’ which ignores the sovereignty and legal ramifications of such representation (Rose 2007, p. 178-9). Rose argues it is not clear whether individual or community consultations and informed consent will be able to deal with the ways in which a small number of ‘determined individuals’ may provide samples that can be used to represent an Aboriginal people, so he concludes:

Inescapably, that is to say, the generation and diffusion of genomic styles of thought in the delineation of populations will challenge and sometimes transform the very ways in which individuals and groups come to understand their affinities and distinctions. Rewritten at the genomic level, visualized through a molecular optic, bound up with novel self-technologies, identity and race are both transformed. (Rose 2007, p. 179)

Rose does not investigate and analyse genetic research involving Indigenous peoples further, so his conclusion is little more than an overgeneralization that says some Indigenous peoples win while others lose when identity is rewritten at the genomic level.

At first, this conclusion appears consistent with the idea that attention must be paid to the individual cases and that such analysis reveals genetic research outcomes are not predetermined, and Indigenous peoples can use these to their advantage. In the remainder of this article, through an analysis of several cases, I will show that Rose’s analysis involves an underlying reification in how he does not seriously question the hierarchies of the political economy of genetic research on Indigenous peoples within advanced liberal polities.

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Rose marginalizes the importance of how genetic researchers organize and do most of this molecular-level rewriting within genetic research assemblages, both in doing the primary research and mediating public knowledge about research findings and their larger social significance. These cases suggest the following:

1. He does not discuss how genetic researchers who do the molecular rewriting consistently realize the gains from such research; whereas Aboriginal peoples are often forced to carry the risks and any damage including stigmatization and the geneticization of disease that is arguably rooted in social and political factors like poverty and systemic racism.

2. Genetic researchers view genes as causal agents, molecular manifestations of the state of nature whose detrimental agency is supposed to justify legally and morally the denial of rights, and the imposition of onerous obligations and risks in genetic research assemblages, all in the service of science and humanity.

Authoritarian Liberalism in Advanced Liberal Polities

In this second part of the article, I will consider cases involving authoritarian liberal practices by genetic researchers within four of the advanced liberal democracies, which are also settler states. Together these four settler states have a total of over 5.6 million Indigenous people: New Zealand (680,000), Canada (1,400,000), the United States (3,000,000+), and Taiwan (500,000+). My major focus here is not to contest Rose’s ideas about race potentially being used as an identifier by some groups within advanced liberal polities and the political economy of hope (P2-P4-P8). Rather, it is to understand how assemblages also based within advanced liberal polities conduct racially configured research that is authoritarian liberal in how it routinely imposes racially stigmatizing subjectivities, onerous obligations and risks upon involved Aboriginal peoples and violates their rights and sovereignty with impunity. Critically, these cases involve the enactment of racism as a technology of sovereignty within the assemblages based in advanced liberal polities and governed by its dominant values, norms and legislation. Involved researchers and institutions have engaged in their own sorts of racially configured authoritarian liberal practices when they have enrolled and become spokespeople for Indigenous peoples by constituting assemblages that articulate their institutions based in P2-P4-P8 with Indigenous research subjects within P1-P3-P7 zones. These assemblages impose strong differentials in recognition of rights, obligations, and risks. However, as the above case of the HGDP indicates, and we will see further below, involved Indigenous peoples’ organizing can disrupt and destabilize these assemblages by challenging scientists’ authority to represent Indigenous peoples.

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Aboriginal peoples and the State of Nature

During the early and mid-20th century, eugenics as a discourse, legislation, and governance practices was translated in various settler jurisdictions. Indigenous peoples were subjected to eugenics measures and attendant forced assimilation projects. This authoritarian liberalism was well summarized by Duncan Campbell Scott, head of Canada’s Department of Indian Affairs, who in 1920 stated his government’s infamous policy: ‘Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian department.’ Aboriginal peoples were identified as being wards of the state and subjects of settler societies’ fiduciary duty to ‘civilize’ the world. Aboriginal peoples’ inclusion within the Canadian body politic expressly required exclusion of their identity as Aboriginal peoples. Eugenics type thinking about purification and strengthening of the nation certainly informed such forced assimilation practices like forced adoption, and direct eugenics practices such as forced sterilization were also disproportionately targeted at Indigenous peoples in Canada and the USA (Ralstin-Lewis 2005). The cumulative goal of these programs was to forcibly assimilate Aboriginal peoples into the settler state, while those who failed to comply, particularly women who were deemed retarded or promiscuous, would be forcibly sterilized or otherwise controlled (Ralstin-Lewis 2005). Under eugenics, Aboriginal peoples were identified as manifestations of the state of nature, who were genetically incapable of direct inclusion in the body politic of the settler state, as long as they were unassimilated. These eugenics and forced assimilation practices continued in some settler jurisdictions until the 1970s (Ralstin-Lewis 2005).

Rose argues that the contemporary role of race in genetic concepts of disease and disorders in advanced liberal polities may place pressure on individuals from certain cultural or racial groupings to limit their risks of having children with genetic disorders associated with that grouping. However, race is used neither in ‘constituting and legitimating a hierarchy of differences’ nor in improving the quality of the population (Rose 2007 p. 161). Certainly eugenics-type policies for improving population quality are gone. However, there remains an underlying legitimization of hierarchies in how genetic research has consistently constituted Aboriginal peoples as the premodern Other, who continue to be disproportionately affected by their ancient ancestors’ exposure to death in a state of nature, experiences that are supposedly molecularly etched in their genetics. This type of research posits that Aboriginal peoples’ genetic inheritance is adapted to premodern ways of life and can adversely affect their abilities to adapt to rapid social change typical of modernity. In this way, genetic research attributes differences in health and social outcomes to these lingering traces of life in a state of nature, something that fits well with contemporary neoliberalism.

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Beginning in the 1980s, Aboriginal peoples were quickly redesignated as genetically predisposed to various diseases under modernity. This idea of Aboriginal peoples’ genes being shaped by their ancestors’ exposure to death in a state of nature is evident in the thrifty gene hypothesis. This hypothesis was originally first conceived in the early 1960s, and posits that Aboriginal peoples’ ancestors’ genetics were shaped by frequent famines and conditions of food scarcity, so they would put on weight during times of food abundance in preparation for times of food scarcity. However, today, the hypothesis contends Aboriginal peoples’ metabolisms have not adapted to modern conditions in which plenty of food is available and so they tend to develop diabetes (Poudrier 2007). After many years of research, genetic evidence is inconclusive and there are plenty of sociological explanations available, particularly the relationship between diabetes and poverty (Poudrier 2007). As well, anthropological studies of famine among existing hunter-gatherer societies suggest that famines were too infrequent to have any such genetic effect (Benyshek and Watson 2005; Poudrier 2007; Speakman 2006). However, the thrifty gene hypothesis has circulated widely in Canada and the United States gaining the status of fact, and has been translated in other countries. For example, in Taiwan it is used to account for rising diabetes rates among Taiwan Aborigines (e.g. Central News Agency 2004).

Alcoholism carries a powerful stigma and contributes to high levels of morbidity and mortality among many Aboriginal peoples. It is popularly viewed as a form of social weakness that leads to anomie, and a breakdown of society approximating a state of nature, replete with violence and death, a vice that signifies an incapacity for governing the self and justifies authoritarian liberal governance (Valverde 1996, p. 365). Eugenics-era genetic determinism influenced views that Aboriginal peoples were hereditarily predisposed to alcoholism have been reinvigorated and reconstituted by genetic research. These concepts of alcoholism being genetically determined have been translated in different settler jurisdictions. While Taiwan Aborigines, who today number over 500,000 out of Taiwan’s population of 24 million, were not targeted by eugenics-type regimes, these Aboriginal peoples were subjected to the colonial expropriation of their territories and forced assimilation under a succession of colonizers: the Dutch (1624-1661), Koxinga (1661-1683), the Ching Dynasty (1683-1895), the Japanese colonial regime (1895-1945) and the KMT Chinese nationalist dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek and his son, Chiang Ching-kuo (1945-1987). There were very low levels of alcoholism in the 1940s and 1950s among four Taiwan Aboriginal peoples studied by Rin and Lin, about 0.1 percent (13 of 11,442) compared to 0.01 percent among settlers (2 of 19,931) (Rin and Lin 1962, p. 138). It is possible to account for the rapid rise of Aboriginal alcoholism rates as a function of this history of social upheavals and losses of territory during the Japanese colonization and the intensification of exploitation by the KMT regime during Taiwan’s so-called economic ‘miracle’ after World War II (Munsterhjelm and Gilbert 2010; Munsterhjelm 2013). However, research articles published in Western and Taiwan-based

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journals began to speculate upon genetic factors in the mid-1980s, as there had been a rapid rise in rates of alcoholism among Taiwan Aborigines, variously estimated from 15 percent to 25 percent or more compared to about 1.5 percent among settlers (Munsterhjelm 2013). These explanations focused on the differences between Chinese settlers and Aborigines in the variants (alleles) of ADH and ALDH genes involved in the metabolization of alcohol in the liver (Munsterhjelm, 2005; 2013). For example, Hwu et al (1990, p. 378) argued that the approximately ten-fold difference in alcoholism rates was because about half of Chinese settlers in Taiwan have an inactive allele that predisposes them to flushing when they drink alcohol (commonly called ‘Asian Flush’), which they argued acted as a deterrence to alcoholism. In contrast, only about 5 percent of Taiwan Aborigines experience this unpleasant reaction (Hwu 1990, p. 378):

In summary, the difference in prevalence of rates of alcoholism in Chinese and aborigines may be explained by metabolic differences. The fast-flushing response because of deficient ALDH-I activity may be an effective aversive protective mechanism in Chinese against developing both AA [alcohol abuse] and AD [alcohol dependence] alcoholism. (Hwu et al 1990, p. 379)

Because of such research, by the late 1990s, differences in alcoholism rates between settlers and Aborigines were popularly ascribed to these differences in genetic factors (Munsterhjelm 2013). For example, a prominent researcher on Taiwan Aboriginal health, Ko Ying-chin was quoted in a 1998 Taiwan government mass media report that Aborigines were ‘genetically predisposed to alcoholism’ (Hsu 1998). Furthermore, Ko advocated interventions in Aboriginal communities by state institutions and other concerned groups to deal with the problem, so that genetic predispositions became premises for governance practices (Hsu 1998). Knowledge of this genetic research done on Taiwan Aborigines circulated in scientific journals and was translated by New Zealand settler scientists as a factor in high levels of Maori alcoholism (e.g. Atkinson 1998) (Munsterhjelm 2013). This attribution of differences in alcoholism rates between settlers and Aboriginal peoples to racial differences in alcoholism metabolism genes contributes to the justification of social hierarchy and geneticizes a historically recent social problem, something that contradicts Rose’s analysis.

In Taiwan, this genetic determinism contributed to settlers’ negative stereotypes of Aborigines: ‘the popular [settler] perception of Indigenous peoples is invariably in one form or another of social pathology in need of social relief at best, or to be condemned to their own miserable destiny resulting from genetic defects at worst’ (Shih 1999). In general, settler views were that Aborigines were at best capable of being trained, but at worst genetically damned. These concepts of Aborigines being genetically inferior even became part of political discourse. My search of Chinese language news reports on the Factiva database reveals that Ma Ying-jeou, who is now President of Taiwan (first elected in 2008), was quoted in news reports as

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publicly stating on at least 15 occasions between 2002 and 2007, a variation of a phrase that ‘Aborigines’ genes are not a problem, lack of opportunities is’ (Munsterhjelm 2013). Ma’s comments were sharply criticized by Aboriginal leaders as reproducing negative stereotypes by implying Aborigines might have genetic problems (Loa 2007). Ma only dropped this phrase after a major controversy in December 2007 over these and other condescending comments towards Aborigines (Loa 2007; Munsterhjelm 2013). Genetic research was readily integrated into settlers’ racist negative stereotypes about Aborigines.

Central to the practices of eugenics and forced assimilation was the racist construction of Aboriginal peoples as morally inferior, irrational and potentially violent threats to social order and well-being. A central rhetorical device in racist conceptions is the state of nature and its supposed manifestations. It is a shared mutual opposition to the state of nature that has shaped the definition of sovereignty and biopower. In semiotic terms, the state of nature is the anti-subject, the antithetical and antagonistic opponent that both sovereignty and biopolitics work against. The state of nature is a state of war, if not open warfare then its constant threat, for, ‘It goes on even when the State has been constituted, and Hobbes sees it as a threat that wells up in the State’s interstices, at its limits and on its frontiers’ (Foucault 2003, p. 90). These supposed manifestations of the state of nature include, for example criminals who are deemed at war with those they victimize, Aboriginal peoples who live as if in a war of all against all, and states who threaten the state (Foucault 2003, p. 90). In this way, the state of nature functions as the ever-present threat against which the assertion and exercise of sovereignty is ultimately and must be perpetually defined.

The sovereign in taking-life does so in opposition to the state of nature. Within the P1-P3-P7 complementary configuration, the law changes and becomes much more disciplinary, working more visibly in hand with sovereign-type powers, because of the supposed proximity to the state of nature, anomie, and chaos. The exercise of prerogative powers in genetic research assemblages fits with how, ‘the state of nature has been integrated into civil society’ for, ‘in a modern polity rule of law facilitates the suspension of law and thus prerogative (and the State of Nature) is inextricably linked to the rule of law rather than signifying its absolute negation’ (Arnold 2007, p. 23). According to Locke ‘where law was silent,’ provided the ruler is ‘wise,’ ‘prerogative is nothing but the power of doing public good without a rule’ (quoted in Arnold, 2007, p. 10). There is a distinction between those deemed fit for governance through freedom and those deemed as still affected to varying degrees by the state of nature were subject to coercive authoritarian liberal training, authoritarian governance or simply deemed beyond the pale:

Correspondingly, liberal democratic governance (guided by the rule of law) administers civil society and prerogative power (the suspension of law) is deployed in the State of Nature. Thus, as Giorgio Agamben (among others) argues, the State of Nature does

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not precede civil society but is internal to it. It would follow that those who would become objects of prerogative power domestically would be the disenfranchised, those who were conceived of as inhabiting the State of Nature. (Arnold 2005: para 55)

Under eugenics, the arrogation and exercise of prerogative powers by racial hygienists was justified by assertions that those with ‘defective’ genetic traits were manifestations of the state of nature that endangered the well-being of society and quality of the population. In contrast, today the global assemblages that span and articulate transnational biotechnology, genetic researchers, and settler state institutions seek out genetic manifestations of the state of nature, like the thrifty gene or alcoholism genes, as part of risk reduction-based governance of health and the self. But in doing so, these assemblages constitute Indigenous peoples as having molecularly etched manifestations of the state of nature in their genetics due to their ancestors’ constant exposure to death, manifestations that contribute to negative social outcomes.

These genetic etched traces were significant in how New Zealand-based settler scientists attempted in 2006 to attribute high levels of criminality and violence among Maori to an allele (variant) of the monoamine oxidase gene (MAO-A).iii Over 680,000 people in New Zealand identify as Māori, out of the total population of 4.4 million (Statistics New Zealand 2012). In a conference presentation abstract Lea et al state: ‘Historically, the New Zealand Maoris were extremely adventurous risk takers and fearsome warriors. A DNA repeat polymorphism in the neuronal Monoamine Oxidase (MAO) gene on the X chromosome is strongly associated with risk taking and aggressive behaviour’ (Lea et al 2006). This imagery of the ancestors of the Maori as fearsome warriors who settled the vastness of the Pacific involves an underlying imagery of the ancestors immersed in the state of nature, constantly exposed to death. They assert their research, ‘revealed [a] striking over-representation of the MAO repeat polymorphism in the Maori male population compared to Caucasian males’ (Lea et al 2006; my emphasis). For Lea et al, Caucasian males are the norm against which Maori males are assessed to be aberrant. These scientists recklessly mobilized the very controversial ‘warrior’ image of Maori popularized in films like Once Were Warriors, when they argued that the, ‘MAO haplotype is associated with the Warrior allele in Maori males suggesting that variation in the MAO gene has been under the influence of positive selection during the risky Polynesian voyages and wars’ (Lea et al 2006). Lea et al assert that positive selection had etched capacities for violence and risk taking in the genes of the Maori. According to the press conference that accompanied this presentation:

But he [Lea] said the presence of the gene also “goes a long way to explaining some of the problems Maoris have”.

“Obviously, this means they are going to be more aggressive and violent and more likely to get involved in risk-taking behaviour like

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gambling,” Dr Lea said before his presentation to the International Congress of Human Genetics in Brisbane. (Once Were Warriors, 2006)

This conference presentation led to a major controversy in New Zealand in which Lea and Chambers were sharply criticized for genetic essentialism, an unrepresentative sample size of only seventeen, and failure to consider the divisiveness and racist implications of their research (Mead 2007; Munsterhjelm 2013).

In response to the sharp criticism they received, Lea initially tried to downplay the significance of this allele in August 2006 media interviews (e.g. Lewis 2006). However, later in 2007 in an article in the New Zealand Medical Journal, these scientists tried to reassert the legitimacy of their research, saying they had been misquoted and misunderstood in the mass media, and by arguing their efforts were to bring ‘personalized disease treatments’ to the Maori (Lea and Chambers 2007, p. 4):

Indeed, ignoring evolutionary forces (such as gene selection), and assuming that all population subgroups have the same genetic background when designing diagnostic, prevention, and treatment regimes, is both unscientific and unethical and destined to do minority groups such as Maori a disservice in terms of health care. (Lea and Chambers 2007, p. 5)

Lea and Chambers essentially argue that they have a fiduciary duty to investigate these ‘evolutionary forces’ that supposedly contribute to Maori community violence or else the Maori will suffer. In terms of the semiotic square, both Lea et al’s original conference presentation and Lea and Chambers’ later response to the criticism constitute Maori in the authoritarian liberal zone of P1-P3-P7, outside of the political economy of hope due to Maori genes readily manifesting the state of nature. Critically, Maori did not have a direct role in initiating or overseeing this MAO-A research project, and the Maori as a whole were stigmatized by it. For Lea et al place a source of violence within Maori communities, a warrior gene within Maori biology—the state of nature etched within. Again, genetic researchers attempted to constitute an assemblage that imposed a racially hierarchical differentiation between settlers and an Indigenous people; however, the assemblage was destabilized by concerted Maori and settler supporter criticism (Munsterhjelm 2013).

Rose’s account of the political economy of hope considers that if a group or population in an advanced liberal polity is affected by some apparently hereditary disorder and approaches scientists for help, scientists will respect their rights and dignity in a reciprocal mutually beneficial negotiated relationship, one that is supported by various sorts of legal and ethical protections. Yet authoritarian liberalism is also evident in the actual practices of research. In particular, these research assemblages frequently try to exercise a sort of prerogative power in how they impose onerous obligations upon Aboriginal people

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that involved scientists can use their genetics in research that scientists deem serves humanity and the greater good. Furthermore, these scientists maintain that ‘excessive’ concern about Aboriginal rights will impede and harm scientific progress and Aboriginal peoples’ health. For example, in 1989 members of the Havasupai Indigenous people, who live in the Grand Canyon in Arizona, approached Arizona State University researchers for help in understanding the high incidence of diabetes among their people. However, though researchers quickly found no genetic links to diabetes and abandoned diabetes research by 1992, the Havasupai samples were used for research, first, on schizophrenia, which Havasupai viewed as stigmatizing and, second, human migrations, which undermined Havasupai origin stories (Bommersbach 2008; Harmon 2010). The Havasupai learned of these violations in 2003 and began to publicly demand the return of their samples and damages for these major violations. The lead scientist Therese Markow through her lawyer called the Havasupai claims about the case ‘hysterical’ (Minard 2005). Similarly, the prominent science journal Nature stated:

Some ethicists suggest that an obsession with the details of consent have caused research subjects to forget they have an opportunity to help not only their tribe, but all mankind. For Native Americans, this is a hard concept to accept. Having seen their people and cultures abused for centuries, they are understandably hypersensitive. But it could be a new form of empowerment for them to realize that their culture helped cure disease. (Nature 2004, p. 489)

The Nature editorial entitled ‘Tribal Culture Versus Genetics’ renders the dispute as Havasupai cultural beliefs clashing with genetics, and downplays the legal and ethical violations. Furthermore, it argues that the Havasupai are being ‘hypersensitive’ and have an obligation to contribute to humanity by cooperating with researchers in curing disease.

The Nature editorial criticized the Havasupai people’s actions as a violation of this obligation to serve as research subjects in a sweeping attack on what it considered to be Aboriginal peoples’ unwarranted litigiousness: ‘Gaming revenues provide better community services and chances to eliminate the sicknesses of poverty that for generations have plagued reservations. But too often this new-found economic clout is used to further litigation for tribal political purposes’ (Nature 2004, p. 489). The Havasupai do not have a casino, but received some funding from other Aboriginal peoples who do (Dalton 2004). The editorial contends that while revenues from gambling had enriched many reservations, such funding was being misdirected, because this court case was politically motivated, in effect rejecting that the Havasupai had a legitimate grievance. Furthermore, Nature said this litigation was also a threat to Aboriginal peoples’ health since ‘sensitive, caring scientists’ would avoid doing such research due to concerns over legal problems. The case eventually went to court and was finally settled in 2010 in an out-of-court settlement in which the

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samples were returned and ASU paid compensation of $700,000 to the Havasupai (Reardon and TallBear 2012). Researchers and their Indigenous research subjects are co-constituted in the organizing narratives of this genetic research (Munsterhjelm 2013). Involved scientists follow organizing narratives in which they co-constitute themselves as serving humanity by curing disease or understanding human evolution through their research and Aboriginal peoples’ genetics as manifesting the state of nature as predispositions to disease, so that Aboriginal participants also have a similar obligation to serve humanity (including themselves) by acting as research subjects (Munsterhjelm 2013).

These groups were only able to assert claims through the courts and extensive lobbying respectively. As the Havasupai case illustrates, some researchers will, in the name of science, reject repeated calls by Indigenous peoples for the return of samples, and continue to use the samples in whatever research they wish. Moreover, when they get caught committing violations, they often receive support from other scientific institutions. So in the case of the Havasupai, the prestigious journal Nature accused the Havasupai of litigiousness and giving excessive attention to their rights to the detriment of their obligations to serve the greater good of science.

Within these global assemblages of genetic research, scientists constitute traces of the state of nature etched within Aboriginal peoples’ genetics, which justifies them exercising prerogative powers by imposing obligations and attendant restrictions upon Aboriginal peoples’ rights in the name of science and the common good. In this exercise of authoritarian liberalism, involved scientists say they are serving humanity, which involves a form of self-despotism, and so they argue should Aboriginal peoples, something also evident in their actions.

Commodification and the Persistence of the State

The United States is the global center of biotechnology development, and certainly of genetic research in the political economy of hope. Rose asserts that very strong ethical impetuses guide the political economy of hope:

Additionally, as biotech companies seek to commoditize DNA sequences, tissues, stem cells, skin, cord blood and more, it is clear that “ethics” has a crucial function in market creation. Products that do not come with appropriate ethical guarantees, notably assurances as to “informed consent” of donors, will not find it easy to travel around the circuits of biocapital. (Rose 2007, p. 16)

This assertion that ethics are central to biotechnology markets implies ethics provides a market discipline mechanism, rather akin to ethical branding. Citing the case of a Swedish genomics firm that claims all of its samples have ‘... been collected with full informed consent,’ Rose contends that, ‘Ethics and biovalue are inextricably intertwined,

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contributing to the commercial value of products or demonstrating a commitment to the ethical values of the bio-citizen-consumer of health and his or her requirements for trust’ (Rose 2007, p. 153). Yet the above examples and following cases indicate that some of the most central institutions in the political economy of hope including the US National Research Institute, the US Patent and Trademark Office and researchers in prestigious universities readily engage in conduct that denies Aboriginal peoples’ rights and dignity based on racially configured differences in rights and obligations.

In the global assemblages of genetic research, scientists enrol Aboriginal peoples and translate them into samples and information, which are mobile, stable and combinable, and can be transported to what Latour terms ‘centres of accumulation’ (Latour, 1987). The US National Health Research Institute funded Coriell Cell Repository in New Jersey, markets a ‘Human Diversity Panel.’ Commercial and public researchers can add samples from various Indigenous peoples to their Coriell Internet shopping carts for $55 for a DNA sample and $85 for a cell line (Coriell Cell Repositories 2009a). These cell lines were established through a process called ‘immortalization’ in which cells are modified by infecting them with Epstein-Barr virus, so they will reproduce indefinitely. Once the cells have been immortalized, they are placed into a state of suspended animation by freezing them in liquid nitrogen. When orders arrive, some of the cells are thawed and grown in a solution of 37°C bovine (calf) fetus serum and various nutrients (Coriell Cell Repositories 2009b). Once the required number of cells has been grown, they are packaged and sent by courier to the purchaser. Now that these cell lines have been established, interested researchers do not have to travel to involved Aboriginal areas and try to gain their consent, because the samples can represent Aboriginal peoples in perpetuity. Scientists are able to use the samples as sources of data for research papers and commercial patent applications (e.g. Gabriel, Frudakis and Thomas 2008, para 52, 60, 62). In this way, Aboriginal peoples are excluded from the decision-making processes (P2-P4-P8) within the assemblages of genetic research.

The cell lines enter a state of bioservitude and exist as zoe (Agamben 1998), which accords with P1-P3-P7. In this sense, we find a different role from the glorious war dead, who are also granted a type of eternal life (c.f. Smith 2000). The eternal life that Aboriginal peoples’ cell lines have as zoe is at the behest of the cell line owner. In return, the cell lines will continue to work as representatives of the Aboriginal people, thereby allowing researchers to act as spokesperson for the Aboriginal people. According to a 1995 paper by Castiglone et al:

All these population samples exist as Epstein-Barr virus-transformed, lymphoblastoid cell lines (Anderson and Gusella 1984), most of which were established by us under approved human subjects protocols. The Coriell Institute for Medical Research (NIGMS Human Genetic Mutant Cell Line Repository) in Camden, New Jersey has available for distribution 5-10 cell lines

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from nine of the populations in this study: Ami, Atayal, Biaka, Mbuti, Druze, Han (S), Maya, Karitiana, and R. Surui. (Castiglione, 1995, p. 1448; my emphasis)

To exist has connotations of an ahistorical static situation; it is typical of Eric Wolf’s concept that colonizers view the colonized as peoples without history (Wolf 1982). The immortalized genetic samples exist in the service of the genetic researchers, who in turn are acting on behalf of and at the behest of humanity.

Once commodified in such ways, Indigenous peoples’ rights and claims are effectively removed. Samples taken in the late 1980s by the American anthropologist Francis Black from Karitiana Indigenous people in Brazil have been sold by Coriell since the mid-1990s (Rohter, 2007; Castiglione et al 1995, p. 1448). Coriell has dismissed the Karitiana’s repeated calls for the return of the samples (Rohter 2007). Coriell has also ignored the Brazilian government’s requests for the return of the blood samples and cell lines (Leahy and Osava 2004). As one of the Karitiana leaders stated:

“We were duped, lied to and exploited,” Renato Karitiana, the leader of the tribal association, said in an interview here on the tribe’s reservation in the western Amazon, where 313 Karitiana eke out a living by farming, fishing and hunting. “Those contacts have been very injurious to us, and have spoiled our attitude toward medicine and science.” (Rohter, 2007)

According to the New York Times article, ‘Judith Greenberg, director of genetics and developmental biology at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health, dismissed the Karitiana calls for the return of the samples, and stated that:

We don‘t want to do something that makes a whole tribe or people unhappy or angry. On the other hand, the scientific community is using these samples, which were accepted and maintained under perfectly legitimate procedures, for the benefit of mankind. (Rohter 2007)

Greenberg expressly denies and rejects the Karitiana requests, arguing that the Karitiana must continue to serve humanity. This is critical to the underlying mythos that is foundational to genetic research and its legal interpretation of who has what rights and obligations.

In addition to claims of serving humanity, Coriell justifies its actions in part by arguing such samples have been ‘de-identified’ and rendered anonymous by removing the individual identities associated with the samples (Coriell Cell Repositories 2011). However, the collective identities have been retained so they can be marketed as sources of diversity, i.e. Other. Effectively these samples are rendered as property that can be bought and sold by Coriell, who also denies

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Indigenous peoples’ rights. These property claims extend to how Coriell imposes use restrictions on any purchasers, such as purchasers being unable to subsequently sell or otherwise distribute cell lines bought from Coriell (Coriell Cell Repositories 2011). Indeed, serving humanity is deemed sufficient justification, while legal and ethical consent of the donors is not required. Therefore, we have the inclusive-exclusion of Aboriginal peoples as zoe, commodified forms of life in a state of bioservitude within the political economy of hope. Blood has powerful metonymic characteristics as a corporeal link to the incorporeality of the ancestors (Munsterhjelm 2013). Involved scientists’ ability to use this blood allows them to represent living and dead Indigenous peoples in scientific knowledge and in the polis of decision-making within the assemblages of genetic research. This ability to represent involved Aboriginal peoples within the polis is based on scientists’ ability to exclude Aboriginal people from participating in the polis.

Patents as Systemic Exclusion

As the above Coriell example illustrates, some scientists can and do maintain an implicit view of Aboriginal peoples’ samples as property. Such property relations are much more overtly expressed in patenting processes. A patent is a type of property right that excludes others from conducting a particular activity within a government defined market space for a duration of time (e.g. 21 years in the USA).

Often ethics only matters if donors have legal means to pursue cases in the courts or to publically shame violators; however, patenting raises further very strong state-sovereignty backed legal barriers to either of these ways of challenging violations. While European patent offices often have a morality clause, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) does not care about the provenance of any genetic samples. The USPTO is empowered by the US Constitution, and therefore its actions are those of a sovereign state. For example, in 1994, after NIH patent applications using genetic samples from Aboriginal peoples led to a controversy, the US Commerce Secretary stated in response to criticism by Aboriginal peoples and NGOs that the provenance of samples did not matter to the patent examination process (Mead 2007, p. 34-5). It was only through intensive lobbying by the Solomon Islands government, Indigenous organizations and NGOs that the NIH was finally pressured to withdraw patent applications involving Indigenous people from the Solomon Islands (Harry and Kanehe 2006; Mead 2007). Similar pressure caused the NIH to withdraw a patent and a patent application on cell lines from Indigenous people in Papua New Guinea and Panama respectively (Harry and Kanehe 2006; Mead 2007).

Ong argues that neoliberalism can be understood as a system of technologies that are locally and nationally adapted so that areas and often ethically defined populations can have different and varied connections to transnational capital accumulation and circulation

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circuits (Ong 2007). In Taiwan, this adaptation of biotechnology as a neoliberal form of governing technology is evident in the implementation of state economic development. This process involves the transformation of Taiwan’s population into a strategic asset that will not only provide economic value, but this production of value will be central to the political economy of health (Munsterhjelm and Gilbert 2010; Munsterhjelm 2013). This transformation is reflected in how the government has reoriented research funding and passed relevant legislation to push Taiwanese scientists involved in genetic research to produce commercial products (Munsterhjelm and Gilbert 2010; Munsterhjelm 2013).

There is a strong racial differentiation in how settlers and Aborigines have been incorporated into this biotechnology development (Munsterhjelm and Gilbert 2010; Munsterhjelm, 2013). Taiwan Aborigines have far lower socioeconomic status and are subject to systemic racism in Taiwan, like other settler-dominated states that are successors to earlier colonial governments. While Aborigines have made extensive progress in their political rights under Taiwan’s democratization since the 1980s, income inequality remains quite severe and today over 60% of Aboriginal households are in the bottom quintile of income (Council of Indigenous Peoples 2011). Today Aborigines are affected by a host of various serious public health issues including high rates of suicide, alcoholism, diabetes, gout, and preventable diseases such as tuberculosis, which contribute to life expectancies that are on average over ten years shorter than Chinese settlers (Wen et al 2004). Central to these efforts is the integration of scientific research and the national health care system (which covers 99 per cent of the population) with biotechnological industrial development strategies (Munsterhjelm and Gilbert 2010; Tai and Chiou, 2008). The neoliberal orientation of this project has tended to emphasize and reproduce existing settler stereotypes of Taiwan Aborigines as Other, in part through reference to the importance of ethnic differences in reactions to medicine and related concepts of ethnicity in shaping the individualized delivery of medical care (Tai and Chiou 2008; Tsai 2010). Modelled on the UK Biobank, the Taiwan Biobank is to become a 200,000-sample project that is representative of the country’s population. The Biobank reproduces Taiwan’s major ethic/racial categories: Mainlander (post-WWII refugees and immigrants from China), long-term settlers groups of Hoklo (originally from Fujian province in China) and Hakkanese (a Chinese minority group), and Aborigines (who are further subdivided into some 14 officially recognized and additional unrecognized peoples) (Tsai YY 2010).

In drafting plans for the Biobank during the mid-2000s, the planners also failed to consult with Aboriginal peoples. This led to a major dispute in 2006 in what Aboriginal and human rights activists termed a violation of Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples Basic Law, particularly Section 21 which requires consultations with Aboriginal peoples on any scientific research involving them (Munsterhjelm and Gilbert 2010; Tai and Chiou 2008; Tsai YY 2010). In addition to arguments

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that the Biobank would improve Taiwan’s health (including that of Aborigines), one of the key arguments used by its proponents was that these informed consent concerns created unnecessary barriers to Taiwan’s economic development, which would endanger the country’s ability to compete with other Asian countries (e.g. Chen and Shen 2006a, 2006b). These disputes have led to extensive consultations over the last several years to try to develop new protocols and systems of informed consent for Aboriginal peoples’ participation in the Taiwan Biobank. As a result, the implementation of the Biobank has been delayed.

The attempted imposition of intellectual property rights based on research involving Indigenous peoples was central to two recent controversial patent application cases in Taiwan involving over 1500 Atayal Aborigines.iv During the period 2003 to 2010, the prominent researcher on Taiwan Aboriginal health, Ko Ying-chin and a number of his colleagues filed a series of Taiwan and US patent applications for gout and hyperuricemia related genetic tests. These tests would assess the risk of individuals developing gout based upon familial associations (Ko and Cheng 2005a, 2005b). The first of these patent applications was rejected by the US Patent and Trademark Office in 2007 (Kapushoc 2007). A second US patent application (Ko and Tsai 2009a, 2009b) led to Ko coming under pressure from Aboriginal groups, Taiwan human rights organizations and international NGOs (Taiwan Indigenous Television 2009). When confronted over these violations, Ko argued knowledge about gout was ‘Taiwan’s gift to the world’ that benefited humanity and failing to investigate it would also interfere with Taiwan Aboriginal peoples’ health and welfare (Taiwan Indigenous Television 2009). In a December 4 2009 Taiwan Aboriginal News Weekly Magazine report, the news reporter Watan Baser (who is a Sediq Aborigine) questioned Ko about his failure to obtain consent to file the patent applications. Ko responded that no country, including Taiwan, had laws that required such consent (Taiwan Indigenous Television 2009). Later in January 2010, Ko said that he would withdraw the patent application (Taiwan Biobank 2010). However, it was only after a series of stories on the case appeared in March 2010 in the United Daily News, one of Taiwan’s major daily newspapers, which focused national attention and brought extensive public condemnation by Aboriginal groups and human rights organizations, that Ko’s law firm quickly filed the documents withdrawing the US patent application (Central News Agency 2010; Munsterhjelm 2013).

Taiwan’s own marginalized international diplomatic position (due to most countries recognizing People’s Republic of China sovereignty claims over Taiwan) became a factor in a 2011 controversy. Apparently undeterred by the above March 2010 public controversy, Ko and his colleagues continued with another patent application (Ko 2010a, 2010b). In June 2010, they filed a US patent application that added further data to an existing gout related diagnostic test patent application by including single nucleotide polymorphism data from not only over 1500 Atayal Aborigines but also additional data from 192

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Solomon Islanders (Ko et al 2010a, 2010b). These applications eventually led to another major controversy, this time in both Taiwan and the Solomon Islands in which the Solomon Islands ambassador to Taiwan and a Solomon Islands Indigenous peoples’ NGO became involved. The Solomon Islands is one of only 23 countries in the world that formally recognize Taiwan diplomatically, and Taiwan’s diplomatic relations with small Pacific island nations are under particular pressure from the People’s Republic of China, so the Taiwan government is extremely sensitive to any potential problems. Ko’s original 2006 authorization from the Solomon Islands government was strictly for medical research and did not cover any form of commercialization (Dr. Cedric Alependava, e-mail, March 9 2011). In a March 18 2011 e-mail to the ambassador of the Solomon Islands, Ko apologized for his errors and said he hoped they would not adversely affect Taiwan-Solomon Islands diplomatic relations; he also stated he would withdraw the patent application, which he did in April 2011. Later, he returned some 800 samples from Solomon Islanders that he had originally collected in 2006 (Tsai D, 2011; March 18 2011 and May 3 2011 e-mails from Ko to Victor Ngele, Solomon Islands Ambassador to Taiwan).

It appears that the Taiwan state revoked those powers that had been delegated to Ko to represent Taiwan internationally in its relations with the Solomon Islands. In both of these cases, Ko withdrew the patents under public and Taiwan and Solomon Islands government pressure. However, had he refused there would have been no legal recourse for the Solomon Islanders or the Atayal Aborigines to directly challenge the US patent applications or the Taiwan patent applications, for neither countries’ patent examination procedure considers the provenance of genetic samples used in applications. For within the global assemblages of these patent applications, Ko would have still been able to represent the Atayal Aborigines and Solomon Islanders.

Discussion

The equality of legal rights that underlies Rose’s formulations in the political economy of hope’s P2-P4-P8 would seem to imply that scientists would face major consequences such as incarceration for fraud. However, on the contrary, scientists and institutions can violate Indigenous rights with impunity, because they face little or no significant consequences. This indicates that scientists view Aboriginal peoples to be within the zones P1-P3-P7, in which paternalistic scientists themselves can and do decide on Aboriginal peoples’ legal rights and obligations. Ko may have been publicly shamed, but he has faced no professional disciplinary measures, nor any legal actions. Under authoritarian liberalism, ethics only matters to the extent that donors or their representatives are able to mobilize networks to assert rights or pressure institutions and scientists, and thereby gain some effective agency within the polis. In short, donors’ rights are not respected by default.

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There is now an extensive body of scholarship, guidelines, and international agreements on collective informed consent that seeks to deal with the hierarchies of power inherent in genetic research involving Indigenous peoples.v These have taken various forms. For example, in response to the Human Genome Diversity Project and biopiracy cases of the 1990s, in 2000, the Indigenous Peoples’ Council on Biocolonialism drafted a model ordinance called the Indigenous Research Protection Act protocol for Aboriginal peoples to use in genetic research (Indigenous Peoples’ Council on Biocolonialism 2000). One practice that came out of the controversial case of the sampling of 883 Nuu-chah-nulth people in Canada by Richard Ward (which Ward eventually parlayed into a prestigious Oxford University position) is called ‘DNA on loan’ in which Indigenous peoples retain ownership over the samples and control the use of any research findings (Arbour and Cook 2006).vi This concept has become the default policy position of the Canadian Institute of Health Research (Reardon and TallBear 2012). In Taiwan, the government in response to the Ko patent application controversies and other violations, finally passed legislation entitled the Human Research Subjects Act which includes fines of up to 1 million Taiwan dollars (around US$30,000) and research funding bans for violations of research ethics including informed consent (Human Research Subjects Act 2011; Shih HC 2011). This legislation includes a special provision requiring researchers not only gain collective informed consent from involved Aboriginal communities, but also these communities will retain a veto over any publication or circulation of the research findings and the option of withdrawing at any time (Human Research Subjects Act 2011; Shih HC 2011). In these examples, what we find is that research abuses have been severe enough to require extensive lobbying by affected Aboriginal peoples and human rights groups to push governments towards legislation covering abusive practices in research. This highlights the continuing significance of the state and the sovereignty/legal axis in genetic research. It also highlights what has been the de facto exercise of sovereign powers by genetic researchers in the legal voids that emerge in the wake of technological advances. These situations challenge Rose’s concept of populations as biosocialities being by default respected within advanced liberal democracies. Rather, what we find is that scientists in advanced liberal democracies readily engage in authoritarian liberal practices in genetic research.

There are important and growing systemic pressures to commit research violations. First, complying with open-ended long-term informed consent conditions requires extensive organizing and resources and thereby represents significant costs to researchers (Munsterhjelm and Gilbert, 2010). Hence, there is an incentive to minimize such costs. As well, researchers have expressed frustration with extended informed consent concepts as ‘censorship’ because it allows involved Indigenous peoples a type of veto over the publication and dissemination of research findings, and the option of withdrawing from research at any time (e.g. Dalton 2004). This places the researchers’ extensive investments of time and resources at risk,

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since open-ended Aboriginal informed consent introduces political uncertainty into researchers’ assemblages (Munsterhjelm and Gilbert, 2010). Austerity related cuts to research funding combined with the competitive pressure to publish or perish mean that such extended compliance can be a disadvantage in the marketplace for knowledge. Furthermore, there is the increasing emphasis upon research having commercial applications, which shapes the funding application process, the research process, and subsequent usage. Given these pressures, there are strong incentives for genetic researchers to interpret available legal regulations and ethical concepts in ways that derogate Aboriginal peoples’ rights and dignity. These interpretations are generally couched in terms of the progress of scientific knowledge and underlying mythical concepts of curing disease and understanding human origins, or economic policies like advancing national biotechnology development.

The political economy of hope involves a nearly exclusive focus upon the processes encompassed by P2-P4-P8 with the complementary deixis of biopolitics as make-live and law as let live. The state may no longer be the container within which the population of the nation is to be biopolitically optimized through various eugenics programs, but the state remains critical in the legal and sovereign aspects of genetic research assemblages, particularly through its delegation of sovereignty and attendant legal protections and capacities to genetic researchers. What we find in effect is that some laws, such as patenting, can protect genetic researchers against Aboriginal claims, such that researchers’ ability to represent Aboriginal peoples within P2-P4-P8 rests on their ability to exclude Aboriginal claims from this zone, a form of what Agamben (1998) terms inclusive-exclusion. Biotechnology development considerations are paramount and can trump Aboriginal peoples’ and others’ legal and ethical claims.

Such hierarchies of commerce over donors were evident early on in the 1990 Moore vs. the Regents of UCLA decision in which the California Supreme Court rejected the plaintiff John Moore’s claim over cancerous tissue from his body that his doctor had patented without his knowledge. In its reasoning, the court stated that in addition to impeding biomedical research, there were then some 350 biotechnology firms in the USA and donors’ rights over samples would unnecessarily complicate the commercial development of biotechnology (Moore v. the Regents 1990). This evaluation placed property and capital related rights above the rights of donors, with informed consent violations being considered little more than an issue of contract violations under civil law, so genetic researchers are effectively given legal protection to cheat.vii

One of the key problems of rendering such informed consent violations and other types of offenses committed by genetic researchers as matters of contract law is that it requires involved Aboriginal peoples to first gather the necessary legal resources to fight the battle in the courts. This restricts the ability of affected

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Aboriginal peoples to engage in legal action, by limiting it to those who are able to mobilize such large amounts of resources and are able to gain access to the courts. The Havasupai were able to in part because they received contributions from other Aboriginal peoples who had revenues from gaming facilities. The 2004 Nature editorial argued this litigation was an unnecessary politicization of genetic research, which interfered with genetic research involving Aboriginal peoples. The implicit norm here is that Aboriginal people have to put up with such research violations when they happen or else they will lose access to the benefits of such medical research.

Genetic researchers’ violations involve, in effect, a sort of enactment of sovereign violence, in the sense that though these research scientists have engaged in severe violations of Aboriginal peoples’ rights and dignity, they face no legal repercussions of any significance. While being publicly shamed, they nonetheless have been able to get away without any legal penalty, despite committing serious mass violations of Aboriginal peoples’ rights and dignity. Insulated by an array of institutional and legal barriers, genetic researchers often operate ahead of the law in a legal void. So in the effective absence of law, they exercise prerogative power based on a claim to act on behalf of the common good. By virtue of their mediating positions in organizing assemblages that span settler state government and private agencies, transnational biotechnology, and Aboriginal peoples, these scientists are able to arrogate sovereign functions, and thereby realize benefits through shaping and restricting involved Aboriginal peoples’ rights and obligations.

Conclusion

The underlying mythos and theological base for contemporary genetic research has shifted to a more universal set of organizing metanarratives: curing disease and understanding human origins. Therefore, in the assemblages that make up genetics research, these mythological values underpin the actions of scientists. This becomes apparent in these disputes, particularly how genetic researchers defend the legitimacy of their actions by dismissing Aboriginal peoples’ criticisms as ‘hypersensitive,’ even positing Aboriginal peoples’ objections as threats to their own health or a violation of their supposed obligation to assist scientists in curing disease on behalf of humanity. Fanon’s reinterpretation of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic in the context of colonialism is useful. In Hegel’s formulation, there is a type of reciprocity in which the master seeks and requires recognition from the slave, however Fanon asserts:

I hope I have shown that here the master differs basically from the master described by Hegel. For Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work. (Fanon 1986, p. 220)

In effect, in these cases, involved genetic researchers are laughing at the consciousness of affected Indigenous peoples, thereby excluding

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them from the polis. For the involved scientists want to be able to utilize the samples in order to act as spokespeople for the Indigenous people. When affected Indigenous people protest, withdraw their consent and seek to reclaim control over how genetic researchers represent them, in these cases genetic researchers have rejected these efforts, saying they serve the higher cause of humanity, and so should Indigenous peoples. In this way, scientists claim their enrolment of Aboriginal peoples as samples is done on behalf of and in pursuit of the quest given to the scientists by the universal macro actor of humanity. While Rose’s analysis sheds much light on contemporary biopower, his neglect of racism in authoritarian liberal practices of genetic research requires further consideration.

Mark Munsterhjelm teaches sociology at the University of Windsor. His current research focuses on the enactment of racism, sovereignty and biopolitics in transnational assemblages of genetic research and biotechnology development involving Indigenous peoples in Taiwan, the Pacific, and the Americas. He can be reached at: mark.munsterhjelm[“at” symbol]gmail.com. Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments. As well, portions of this research were funded by a Canadian Institute of Health Research grant ‘Justice for All’ (950-202186).

Notes

i While there are extensive debates over the use of these terms, in this paper I will use the terms Indigenous and Aboriginal interchangeably.

ii There is already an extensive body of research and analysis on the Human Genome Diversity Project controversy of the mid-1990s. Therefore, I have chosen not to address the extensive literature on HGDP in this article. Rather, I will consider other more recent or lesser-known cases.

iii Rose (2007) contains a chapter entitled “The Biology of Control” about debates over MAO-A and other genes in contemporary criminology. However, the chapter does not consider the issues of race and racism.  iv Professional disclosure: During my research, I found the US patent applications and I was involved in organizing the efforts that led to the withdrawal of two US patent applications and Taiwan patent applications in 2009-2010 and 2011.

v I will not deal with the extensive literature on Access and Benefit Sharing, which has been extremely controversial. ABS has been criticized as little more than a legal regime to ensure access by capital to Indigenous peoples’

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resources. For a critique please see Harry and Kanahe’s ‘The BS in access and benefit sharing (ABS): Critical questions for Indigenous peoples’ (2005).

vi In the early 1980s, Richard Ward, then a population geneticist at the University of British Columbia (UBC), took samples from 883 Nuu-chah-nulth Aboriginal people on Vancouver Island as part of a $330,000 Canadian government-funded arthritis study (Wiwchar 2004). Ward promised to give the Nuu-chah-nulth results back, but never did. Instead, after the arthritis research on the samples failed to yield any results, he continued to use the Nuu-chah-nulth samples. He left UBC and took the samples with him to the University of Utah and then to Oxford University where they were used for human origins research and other studies. These uses violated the original informed consent, which stated the samples would only be used for arthritis research (Wiwchar 2004). These samples were eventually returned to the Nuu-chah-nulth in 2004 after years of lobbying, but only after Ward suddenly died of a heart attack in 2003 (Wiwchar 2004). vii The researchers’ counter-argument is that this would send a chill through the research community, such as was made by various researchers when the Havasupai case gained attention in the US (e.g. Nature 2004).

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