A Comment on Evelyn Fox Keller's 'Cognitive

INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS 2020, VOL. 45, NO. 3, 446–458 https://doi.org/10.1080/03080188.2020.1794382

Not a metaphor: a comment on Evelyn Fox Keller’s ‘cognitive functions of metaphor in the natural sciences’ Stefan Helmreich Anthropology Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS This article examines the strategies that Evelyn Fox Keller has Metaphor; genetics; employed to analyze the work of metaphor in the language genomics; decolonization; and practice of science, particularly in biology. It offers that zeugma; material-semiotics; the rhetorical device of zeugma –‘the use of a word to transbiology; informatics modify or govern two or more words usually in such a manner that it applies to each in a different sense …’ (Merriam-Webster) – is worth leaning upon to further open up the linguistic operations Keller identifies as animating scientists’ talk of genetic codes and programs. Inspired by Indigenous and trans scholarship on the limits of metaphor, the piece argues for reinvigorated conversation about the politics of analogy in biology.

In ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor’ Eve Tuck (Unangax, enrolled Aleut) and Wayne Yang argue that decolonization is ‘about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life’ (2012, 1), about territorial and physical liberation from settler- colonial appropriation and occupation, in places such as those that, these days, are commonly known as the United States of America, Canada, and Aus- tralia. Decolonization, they urge, should not be used as a metaphor for other projects of social justice or civil and human rights. Thus, to speak of ‘decolonizing education,’ or ‘decolonizing the mind’ is to turn ‘decolonization into an empty signifier to be filled by any track toward liberation’ (2012, 7). It is to tarry, they argue, with equivocation, to traffic in words with double meanings and to do so with the effect of leaching from the words those political circum- stances and stakes that have animated them. In another domain of discussion, transwoman Julia Serano has written on how often ‘trans people are depicted as merely symbols or metaphors,’ a move that may deflect attention from embo- died transgender priorities and situated lives (2016, 220). Putting a point on it, an online critic of the Japanese anime Wandering Son (放浪息子 Hōrō Musuko), a hugely popular graphic novel about trans kids, goes after allegorical readings of

CONTACT Stefan Helmreich [email protected] Anthropology Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, USA © 2020 Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining Published by Taylor & Francis on behalf of the Institute INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS 447

the text as about gender in general, writing, ‘Trans is not a metaphor.’1 These cautions about the extended use of metaphor are not against metaphor as such, but rather against the extension – the thinning out – of word-concepts through their rhetorical rarefaction in ways that may not only breeze to the side of specific grounded political investments, but also may mute or appropriate them, shoring up, for example, self-congratulatory white settler liberalism or complacent cisgender reflexivity.2 Think, at least to start, of Evelyn Fox Keller as having offered her philosophi- cally and politically game-changing examinations of the use of metaphor in the biological sciences in a complementary mode. Keller has pointed out, for example, that genetic information is a metaphor, that gene action is a discourse – observing as she has done so how the discursive and ideological power of cano- nical bioscience has depended on occluding its metaphor-reinforced scaffolding (Keller 1995). In her early work, Keller was concerned to call attention to dominant metaphors about nature, bodies, and gender, and specifically those that figured the aims and practice of science as calculatively masculine while rendering nature as passively feminine (see e.g. Keller 1983, 1985, 1992). She was keen to make clear the work these metaphors did to buttress the patriarchal frames of reference that made them seem natural, inevitable, rational, or just. Thus, as she recounts in her piece in this issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, she took aim at framings of science as ‘a chaste and lawful marriage between Mind and Nature,’ at descriptions of DNA as ‘the master molecule of life,’ and more. Keller became ever more interested, after her foundational critiques, in how metaphors might, even as they obscured some processes, also point to unexpected dynamics or operate in more underdetermined ways than advertised, opening up space for multiple lines of reading and re-reading (Keller 2000, 2002; see also Doyle 1997). ‘Information,’ for example, oscillating between senses as meaning and measure3 might, in resonance and dissonance with the idea of the ‘program’ (Keller 2000, 81–82), sometimes offer novel ways of thinking about the processual character of organic formation (and see Oyama 1985). And once dominant genderings of science as heteronormatively masculine were made explicit (in works such as Harding 1982; Keller 1983; Bordo 1983; and Haraway 1988, to take early examples), it became possible to see how, within the always present constraints of power, gender could be upended, turned inside out, appropriated, revalued, and more.4 As Donna Haraway noted, gender was ‘a concept developed to contest the naturalization of sexual

1See ‘Stay Away from Canon Trans Characters,’ https://protect-wandering-trans-kids.tumblr.com, accessed 7 June 2019. 2In ‘Disability Is Not Just a Metaphor’ (2014), an article in The Atlantic about abled actors playing disabled characters, Christopher Shinn lays out kindred arguments about the abstracted politics of treating physical disability as a metaphor for the challenges that ‘all of us’ face. 3In the information theory of mathematicians Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener, ‘information’ came to refer to the content of a message as well as to a quantitative measure of the linear complexity of a message (see Hayles 1999; Kline 2017). 4On the notion of ‘making explicit,’ see Strathern (1992). 448 S. HELMREICH

difference’ (1991, 131; see also Keller 1992, 17) and that contestability made gender a concept not to be abandoned, but rather, perhaps, refigured and remixed, while never letting go of its politics. Tracking the ongoing de-essentia- lization, at least in some quarters, of genes and genders, Keller thus became interested in the simultaneous limits and affordances of metaphors. Differently from Tuck and Wang – and very much because, in the case of genetic metaphors, the politics of the metaphors Keller went after were so different, so glued, at least as she first found them, to structures of power (rather than, as with ‘decolonization,’ about critiquing power) – she came to welcome the extension of metaphor, in part because of the unexpected and possibly productive ways it could wrinkle and warp as it was stretched. In so doing, Keller built upon and offered correctives to Mary Hesse’s work in her landmark 1963 book, Models and Analogies in Science. There, Hesse argued that understanding unfamiliar phenomena scientifically was often aided by analogy – electricity is like water, gas molecules operate like billiard balls, light is like a water wave. Hesse named three species of analogies: positive, in which the structure of both the source and target domain are well characterized; negative, in which there is a discrepancy between domains, with one side radi- cally under-understood; and neutral, in which the positive or negative disposi- tion of an analogy is not known. A famous example of an initially neutral analogy suggested that light worked analogously to a water wave, with scientists committed to that analogy searching for a medium in which light might propa- gate, which they called a ‘luminiferous ether.’ Light, the tale goes, turned out not to need a medium for travel. The light-wave analogy was positive in some regards, negative in others. The difficulty with this model, of course, is that it assumes that there is a rhetoric-free way to get at the reality of things – that is possible to describe light as a wave without any recourse to … description. Evelyn Fox Keller’s approach to metaphor avoided this trap – as well as one that opened up beneath some parts of Lakoff and Johnson’s famous Metaphors We Live By (1980), which fell for another kind of literality, positing an unme- diated universal human bodily experience undergirding all metaphor (for a critique from symbolic anthropology, see Howe 2008; for a critique from disability studies, which marks Lakoff and Johnson’s analysis as able-ist, see Vivaldi 2010). Keller instead centred attention on how language – with its ambiguity and multiple meanings – inescapably conditions scientific theory all the way through. Metaphors may come alive, bust open with contradiction, collapse into the dead literal, and or may even operate in a kind of rhetorical oscillation akin to zeugma –‘the use of a word to modify or govern two or more words usually in such a manner that it applies to each in a different sense …’ (Merriam-Webster). Literary theorist Gillian Beer (1996, 298) offers a famous example of zeugma from Charles Dickens: ‘Miss Bolo … went straight home in a flood of tears, and a sedan chair’ (Another example comes from Groucho Marx, from the movie Duck Soup: ‘You can leave in a taxi. If you can’t get a INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS 449

taxi, you can leave in a huff.’). These are examples in which a phrase – here a verb plus the preposition ‘in’–vibrates between two meanings, one literal, the other figurative, destabilizing what was thought to be literal in the first place. The uneasy laughter generated by many examples of zeugma, meanwhile, indicates the affective valence of language, and, more, emphasizes the politics of situated meanings – and in ways that resonate with Tuck and Wang’s call for an atten- tiveness to the politics of metaphor. As Haraway (2016, 4) has lately put it, ‘It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties.’ It matters what metaphors motivate what metaphors. It matters what concepts are yoked together by zeugma, and how.

Genes and genomes as material-zeugmatic things Zeugma is a good candidate for describing some of the linguistic elisions that Keller writes of in ‘Cognitive functions of metaphor in the natural sciences.’ Somewhere along the way between the framing of 1940s information theory and the opening of the Human Genome Project at the end of the twentieth century, the notion that genes were ‘programs’ took hold as a kind of governing metaphor for understanding the power of the hereditary material. But here, meanings of program as fixed code-script (or blueprint), entered into zeugmatic tension and hybridity with meanings of program as a conditional if–then structure (Keller 2000). Keller’s TABLE ONE in ‘Cognitive functions,’ in which she lays out double meanings of key words in genetics, is a compelling catalog of such zeugmas. To take one of Keller’s examples, code is at once a ‘mechanism for translating nucleotide sequence to amino acid sequence’ and a ‘mechanism for translating DNA sequence to phenotype.’ And zeugma has been intriguingly generative – as the metaphor of program, argues Keller, extending arguments in The Century of the Gene, began to open itself up into forms that might be inter- preted as active, as elements in a reactive system. It has not been by language or rhetoric alone that such work has been done, of course, as Keller underscores in Making Sense of Life (2002), in which she joins attention to metaphor with analyses of models and machines. As a range of phi- losophers, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists of biology have argued, the material culture of laboratories – centrifuges, PCR machines, more – has offered an additional network of articulations and non-human grammars that have reshaped dominant scientific understandings of genes and genomes.5

5The list is long. See, at least, Abu Al-Haj (2007); Bliss (2012); Fortun (2008); Franklin and Roberts (2006); Fullwiley (2011); Gibbon and Novas (2007); Goodman, Heath, and Lindee (2003); Hammonds and Herzig (2008); Jackson (2015); Kahn (2006); Koenig, Lee, and Richardson (2008); Myers (2015); Nash (2015); Nelson (2016); Ong and Chen (2010); Pálsson (2007); Reardon (2001); Richardson (2013); Roosth (2017); Stepan (1991); Stevens (2013); Taussig (2009); Thurtle (2007); Wailoo, Nelson, and Lee (2012); Whitmarsh and Jones (2010). 450 S. HELMREICH

Inspired by Keller’s attention to the multiplicative effects of metaphor, I wish to think of the articulation of gene talk (cf. Nelkin and Lindee 1995) with the material culture of laboratories in ways that I will call material-zeugmatic, offering this phrase-concept as a subgenre of the material-semiotic, that phrase-concept that Haraway (1989, 172), in diffractive alliance with science studies writers in actor network theory, early on offered to describe those processes that ever entangle the worlds of matter and meaning. In Toward a History of Epistemic Things (1997), molecular biologist turned post-structuralist historian of the life sciences Hans-Jörg Rheinberger forwards a vision of labs as experimental systems ‘in which the scientific objects and technical conditions of their production are inextricably interconnected’ (2), ‘within which the signifiers of science are generated’ (3). He offers that technoscientific objects (e.g. genes) often come to life as mixtures of epistemology and technique; the ‘epistemic thing’ is that entity that scientists do not yet know and the ‘technical object’ that entity that has become a settled fact. The two sorts of entities emerge in oscillating relations of inscription. Think of how physical traces of RNA (once epistemic things, later technical objects) emerged through the technological mediation of and residual materials produced by ultracentrifuges, and through the trained reading of electron microscope images. Through such lab practice, Rheinberger writes, ‘scientists create spaces of representation through graphemic concatenations that represent their epistemic traces as engravings, that is, generalized forms of ‘writing’’ (3). In other words, metaphor and other rhetorical energies take shape not just in language, but also, as Donna Haraway (1989) has suggested, in ‘hardware.’ I suggest that material-zeugmatic action operates in the genetic lab, a mode by which an epistemic thing may be made to refer to two or more graphemic concatenations in an experimental system. For example, the word ‘gene’ may be made to refer at once to the inscrip- tions produced by electrophoresis as well as to sequences of letters standing for nucleotides in a digital database as well as to the biochemical material of nucleotide chains. The ‘gene,’ then, does not belong only to the realm of metaphor (as a genre of representation) if by metaphor we mean a species of ‘a figure of speech,’ but is rather, in an expanded zeugmatic sense, a figure of speech, lab, and machi- nic writing. Molecular biological experimental systems, these days, thickly enlist compu- ters in the form of bioinformatics infrastructure. The logic of the ‘program,’ then, is no longer only resident in the metaphors used to describe such forms as ‘gene action,’ but is rather part of the grid within which, as Rheinberger would put it, ‘the signifiers of science are generated.’ Thus, software scholar Adrian Mackenzie (2015), in ‘Machine Learning and Genomic Dimensionality: From Features to Landscapes,’ argues that ‘Genomic infrastructures – the ensemble of software, hardware, algorithms, networks, and repositories that handle sequence data and other biological data – tell us something of how genomes come to be what they are’ (73–74). What they tell us, he continues, INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS 451

is that genomes, ‘traversed, shaped, and partitioned’ (76) through machine learning algorithms, are becoming things/objects that bear the imprint of this media-informatic technique. Mackenzie puts it bluntly: ‘Highly leveraged infrastructures for access to biological data reshape what counts as a genome’ (81, emphasis added). The data-driven ‘segmentation’ of human genome data, for example, eventually comes to texture how biologists working with such tools understand genome function itself: ‘Using segmentation as the basis of its description, [the Encyclopaedia of DNA Elements] ENCODE begins to recon- ceptualize genomic ‘function’ as segmentation’ (96, emphasis added). Operatio- nalizing in databases the notion of ‘genome space,’ in other words, may suggest that the correlations found in that space are real – or, more to the point, as Mackenzie argues, ‘Machine learning in genomics might produce a ‘self-organizing map’ that poses questions following the ‘landscape of settled interests’ or status quo’ (100). One might think here of pharmaceutical or genetic ancestry companies’ investments in commercially pitched readings of genetic and genomic diﬀerence. What does all this mean? It means that metaphors have many determinations, some of which are ‘outside’ language – in media and technological artefacts or in political economy, for example. Keeping an eye on how these operate material- zeugmatically can provide a tonic against accepting the metaphorical collapse of machines and bodies into one another and may also supply a tool for revealing what sorts of realities such coordinations produce.6

Decolonizing genomes? Take, for example, genome sequences linked to human ancestry projects. In many cases, these shore up dominant notions of race-as-heredity that have been embedded in projects of colonial governance and subordination. Kim Tall- Bear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate), in Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (2013), argues that the use of DNA profiles to adjudicate Native American tribal belonging by tribal outsiders often recapitulate ‘blood quantum’ systems that have systematically rendered Native peoples into ever-fractionating, ‘vanishing’ peoples. Grappling with the range of corporate, university, and settler-state institutions within which genetic ancestry technique operates means working to prevent metaphors of race and heredity from aiding in conflations that perpetuate legacies of inequal- ity, colonial dispossession, and more (and see Walajahi, Wilson, and Chandros Hull 2019; see also Nelson 2016). It means, to stay in the linguistic domain for a moment, to understand such commercial-technological promises as finding one’s ‘AncestryDNA® Ethnicity,’ through AncestryDNA®, a for-profit genealogy

6Lily Kay (2000) argued that genetic information was a catachresis, with information an ‘application of a term to a thing which it does not properly denote’ (OED). I am suggesting thinking about zeugma as a way of keeping catachresis suspended, available for query. 452 S. HELMREICH

company based in Utah, as, against its advertised claim, a zeugmatic promise, with ‘DNA’ modifying both ‘ancestry’ and ‘ethnicity.’7 It means, moving into the realm of material infrastructure, to track how ‘ethnicity’ is concretized in the bioinformatics algorithms that the company uses to divide people into ‘genetic populations’ in the first place, making the zeugma of race zigzag from rhetoric to software and back again (and, on thinking against population more generally, see Clarke and Haraway 2018). Recognizing the material-zeugmatic character of ancestry tests and their racial charge may contribute to what Norbert S. Hill (Oneida) and Kathleen Ratteree (2017)havecalled‘the decolonization of biology and demography.’ At the same time, mindful of Tuck and Wang’s call for caution around the travel of the word ‘decolonize,’ it is good to be clear about what work the concept may or may not do. Juno Salazar Parreñas, in Decolonizing Extinc- tion,arguesthatthinkingcomparativelyacrosscallsfordecolonization– considering calls that emphasize transforming language, taking up habits of resistance, and methodological reorientations toward indigenous needs (2018,192,fn20)– keeps a range of histories and demands in view; Parre- ñas’sethnographiccontextofSarawak‘differs from decolonization based on autochthony’ presenting a case in which ‘indigeneity … is based on centuries and millennia of migration’ (10). And, as Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (2017) argues for the North American case, thinking about the making of Blackness and Black bodiedness in coordination with plantation slavery, ‘Wealth in the Americas is not only rooted in the land but is fundamentally dependent on the exploitation of human beings in order to convert the land into wealth.’ Which decolonizations and anti-colonialisms are at issue conditions the con- texts within and across which metaphor might or might not usefully move. Not all calls for decolonial efforts that issue from thinkers in former, post- or present colonies have land-fixated settler-colonialism as their target, especially those from outside North America; notions of ‘decolonizing the mind,’ for example, many of which are inspired by Frantz Fanon’sfounda- tional work on decolonization (1961)andfind elaboration in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s ‘decolonizing the mind’ (1986), Kwasi Wiredu’s ‘conceptual decolonization’ (1995), Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s ‘decolonizing methodologies’ (1999)andAnibelQuijano’s ‘epistemological decolonization’ (2000)offer sig- nificant interventions into rethinking the multiple legacies of colonialism and empire.8 Still and all, it may sometimes be that ‘decolonization’ is not always the right tool for the critical job. Tuck and Wang’sinjunction,then,maythus also be read as an appeal for more and other metaphors

7Fans of the ﬁner (but never quite clean) distinctions in classical rhetorical terminology may wish to call this syllepsis. 8Thanks to Jia Hui Lee and Rodrigo Ochigame for pointing me to these sources and for aiding my thinking on these matters immensely. Thanks also to Heather Paxson, Sophia Roosth, and Daniela Gandorfer for vital conversations on all of the topics here. INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS 453

Transbiology In 2006, anthropologist Sarah Franklin offered the word ‘transbiology’ to refer to ‘a biology that is not only born and bred, or born and made, but made and born,’ referring here to processes unfolding in stem cell research, cloning, and trans- genics more generally. In forwarding the term, she drew upon Donna Haraway’s (1997) physics-and-chemistry-inspired meditation on transuranic elements and Haraway’s ‘introduction of trans- as the exception or rogue element’ (171). Judith (Jack) Halberstam (2012) brought the word-concept closer toward thinking about transgender embodiment – indicating that making analogies, com- parisons, and offering metaphors motivated by figurations of trans- may be part of a politically generative strategy, not only for undoing gendered divisions and hierarchies, but also for motivating companion projects of thinking and acting across categories. Mel Chen, writing on transgender theory, argues that ‘trans- is not a linear space of mediation between two monolithic, autonomous poles … I wish to highlight a prefixal trans- not primarily limited to gender’ (2012, 136–137; emphasis in original). Lindsay Kelley (2014), writing in Trans- gender Studies Quarterly – and building on work with Eva Hayward (2009) – describes species-, sexuality-, and semiosis-crossing creatures as ‘tranimals.’ These writings on transbiologies resist the argument that ‘trans is not a metaphor,’ even as they seek to be mindful of where and when it might travel. Consider the work of ecologist Cleo Woelfle-Erskine (2017), who in ‘The Water- shed Body: Transgressing Frontiers in Riverine Sciences, Planning Stochastic Multi- species Worlds,’ extends transness into his thinking about river ecology in the Pacific Northwest, in Klamath and Kanuk territory. Wolfle-Erskine argues that the Colum- bia River tributary in which he worked as an ecologist might be engaged as itself a kind of trans body, writing ‘As with the project of coming into one’sown trans body, the trans move of coming into a transfigured watershed body happens with others, never finished, always relationally, and always challenging the fixity of categories.’ The rhetoric here opens with a zeugmatic move –‘coming into’…‘one’sown trans body’ and ‘atransfigured watershed body,’ but then continues on to make that zeugma create a resonance across scales of experience and physical presence. Wolfle-Erskine, summarizing an argument he developed with July Cole, expands: ‘trans, as we theorize it, is a collective move to negotiate gendered movement through society that can accommodate many evolving expressions and categories of being,’ continuing, ‘Iaimtosketchoutatranspotentialforscientistsand others who work for watershed recovery but do not necessarily identify as queer or trans. I want to explore what such people’stakingupoftransmovesortranspoli- tics might do for watershed science and for trans theory.’ Wolfle-Erskine, then, seeks to move explicitly away from what Keller diagnosed as the long historical reach of science defined as ‘achasteandlawfulmarriagebetweenMindandNature.’ Here, for Cleo Wolfle-Erskine, we might speak of a queer and trans encounter between multispecies allies and accomplices.Wolfle-Erskine, as a settler-descendant, is also alert to 454 S. HELMREICH

the indigenous politics of PacificWestrivers,workingtobeingoodrelationwith Karuk-led projects on the Klamath river to ‘decolonize riverine relations,’ relations that include not only humans, but also such agents and salmon and beavers (and see Todd 2014 on decolonial more-than-human work that involves fish and Paula- tuuq waters). That work, of course, may be just as winding as a river – and as freighted with unresolved histories and poisonous presents. To take just one example, look to the case, examined by anthropologist Teresa Montoya (Diné) (2017), of toxic acidic mine waste fluids flowing into the Animas and San Juan Rivers, which move across the Navajo Nation, pointing to the necessity of thinking of Indigenous land and life as suffused and animated by water (see LaDuke with Lit- tleRedfeather 2019 on the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipe- line), too often compromised and contaminated by the more-than-human forces of oil companies and their settler-regulatory apparatuses, which zeugmatically seek to blur the distinction between corporate and public interest. It may seem that by now, at the end, I have gotten far from the genes and genetic discourses at the centre of Keller’s paper. Returning, however, to my organizing intent – to juxtapose Tuck and Wang’s injunction that ‘Decoloniza- tion is Not a Metaphor’ and claims that ‘Trans is not a metaphor’ with Keller’s attention to the ‘question of how the particular metaphors scientists invoke shape our scientific view of the world’–I hope to have offered a meditation not only on what Keller helpfully calls the ‘cognitive functions of metaphor,’ but also on the ‘political functions of metaphor.’ Or better, on the political stakes of metaphor – being eager, however, to undo the zeugma that would read ‘having a stake’ as pointing simultaneously, synecdochically, to (1) that piece of wood used to mark a settler-colonial land claim and to (2) that post on which a wager is placed in order to indicate putting something of conse- quence at hazard. Emphasizing the second meaning – the one to do with risk – may help to refuse the politically neutralizing notion of the ‘stakeholder,’ which tends to erase the political and historical inequalities that shape arenas of participation. The stakes of metaphor in classical and developmental genetics and, more recently, in epigenetics and genomics, turn out to place at risk easy assumptions of linear causality; the task, as Keller so compellingly reminds us, is to be awake to the transforming grounds of discovery and justification within which those risks take shape in the lab, in the computer, and in society – in, that is, the ever-changing material-zeugmatics of nature and culture.9

Land acknowledgment I end by acknowledging that the land on I wrote this response is the traditional territory of the Massachusett, the peoples encountered and dispossessed by

9For arguments that call for continued nuance in the deployment of ‘culture’ as an explanation for scientiﬁc and technical questions and outcomes, see Chemla and Keller (2017). INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS 455

English and European settlers beginning in the seventeenth century. The Mas- sachusett, an Algonquian group, today include the Ponkapoag, the Natick, and the Mattakeesett, and have also included the Pawtucket, Wampanoag, and Nipmuc, who have suﬀered and struggled greatly on this land and today work for recognition of their history and sovereignty. The name Massachusett in the name of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that institution by which I am employed, is just one sign of the ongoing appropriation of Indigen- ous land and language.

Disclosure statement No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor Stefan Helmreich is Professor of Anthropology at MIT. He is the author of Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (University of California Press, 2009) and Sound- ing the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2016). His essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Representations, Public Culture, The Wire, Cabinet, and Boston Review.

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