#essm

Under the German occupation the French remained human beings. Under the French occupation the Garmans remained human beings. In Algeria there is not simply domination but the decision, literally, to occupy nothing else but a territory. The Algerians, the women dressed in hacks, the palm groves, and the camels form a landscape, the natural backdrop for the French presence.

In the context of the history of empire, the rise of invasive species discourse is particularly ironic. Even as colonialism had moved the world's biota and ushered in new landscapes of empire and new formations of naturecultures, with the advent of freedom in the postcolonies, nativist thinking reengaged the national borders in the west. Indeed, discourses of invasive species remain a prominent feature of the environmental afterlives of empire, as waves of nationalisms have consumed the postcolonial worlds and colonial nations have moved to secure their borders. In an ultimate act of botanical amnesia, after centuries of global expansion and ecological decimation, those very nations now insist on preserving the "new Europes" from newer immigrants from Asia, South America, and Africa. Tracking the histories of "invasive" rhetoric allows us to understand how plant and animal quarantine laws developed alongside national exclusion acts. Indeed, in the poignant cases of settler colonialism, national rewriting of history indigenizes the white settlers as the new "natives" that now relegate all others as foreign and undesirable.

Understanding the coloniality of power and gender, and their role in the formation of modern science, forces us to ask different sets of questions about dismantling the very rubric of sex, gender, and race. So, for example, instead of asking how we might accommodate the reproducing body in order to fulfill expectations of the ideal sciences, what if we questioned those very expectations? What if the ideal scientist were not expected to work unhealthy hours? What if we rewarded scientists who lived full lives, who spent time connecting with their communities, and who were good mentors? What if the workaholics were not heroes but pathological characters? What if we did not reward the production of (often mediocre) publications as a mark of excellence? What if we dialed down expectations of productivity? There are so many ways that we might reenvision what it means to be a good scientist.

We need something like a Copernican Revolution in the sciences of society and culture. I mean a shift in perspective from human society as the center of a universe onto which it projects its own forms - that is to say, from the received Durkheiman, Marxist, and structural-functionalist conventions - to the ethnographic realities of people's dependence on the encompassing meta-person-others [gods, spirits, ancestors] who rule earthly order, welfare, and existence.

DNA is constantly being represented to us as the secular version of our soul. It is depicted as that which is our essence and that which determines our behaviors, namely, our real selves. Dorothy Nelkin and Susan Lindee have called this our "sacred DNA." This genomic notion of individuality is the one that's being used by anti-abortion lobbyists, because if your genome is formed at fertilization, and if DNA is your essence, then fertilization has become the equivalent of ensoulment. Several anti-abortion websites each tell us, "and even more amazingly, intelligence and personality, the way you look and feel, were already in place in your genetic code. At the moment of conception, you were essentially and uniquely you." It was the message of the Republican presidential primary contenders in 2015 as well as the message of conservative philosophers: your DNA defines who you are. However, this alleged genetic basis of individuality is scientifically wrong. The symbionts are another mode of inheritance. Indeed, while humans have about twenty-two thousand different genes, the bacteria in us bring approximately 8 million more genes to the scene. We get our symbionts primarily by infection from the mother as we pass through the birth canal after the amnion breaks. These bacteria are supplemented by those from the mother's skin and from the environment.... Animals are not monogenomic organisms.

What, then, of physiological individuality? In theory, the organism is an individual whose component parts cooperate for the betterment of the whole. But the parts that cooperate can be other organisms living with it. Let us consider the milkweed bug Planococcus. This insect has a symbiont, Tremblaya, a bacterium residing within its cells. In turn, those bacteria have another bacterial symbiont, Moranella, inside of them. This set of symbionts, nested inside the other like a set of Russian matryoshka dolls, is necessary for the insect to synthesize several amino acids. For instance, Planococcus, alone, cannot make phenyalanine. Its genome does not contain the genes encoding the enzymes involved in its synthesis. The symbionts do. Phenyalanine synthesis starts in the symbiont, then it goes into the symbiont's symbiont. The product made by the symbiont's symbiont returns into the symbiont. Only the last step of phenylalanine synthesis is done by the enzyme encoded by the genome of the insect itself. The production of a single compound thus requires a threefold symbiosis... Symbiosis is the strategy that supports life on earth.

"What one can observe in the world, however, is that neither the state nor the market is uniformly successful in enabling individuals to sustain long-term, productive use of natural resource systems. Further, communities of individuals have relied on institutions resembling neither the state nor the market to govern some resource systems with reasonable degrees of success over long periods of time.