UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Re-inventing Hoodia: Patent Law, Epistemic Citizenship, and the Making of Difference in South Africa A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Women’s Studies by Laura Ann Foster 2012 © Copyright by Laura Ann Foster 2012 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Re-inventing Hoodia: Patent Law, Epistemic Citizenship, and the Making of Difference in South Africa by Laura Ann Foster Doctor of Philosophy in Women’s Studies University of California, Los Angeles, 2012 Professor Sandra Harding, Chair This dissertation examines the patenting of biological materials derived from Indigenous San peoples’ knowledge of Hoodia gordonii in Southern Africa. Contributing to feminist science studies, transnational feminisms, and feminist socio-legal studies, this research asks how differences of gender, race, and indigeneity shape and are shaped by struggles over patent ownership, access and benefit sharing, and commercial bioprospecting. In particular, it conducts an ethnographic account of how Hoodia gordonii circulates and changes meaning through colonial botanical sciences, patent law rules, ethno-pharmaceutical research, and benefit sharing. This produces understandings of how Hoodia gordonii and Indigenous San peoples’ knowledge and identity are-co-produced, while new modes of citizenship are emerging. It argues that Hoodia patent law struggles produce difference and inequality, while engendering potential pathways for Indigenous San economic and political recognition, through two inter-related processes. One is through the oscillation of elastic nature/culture binaries as ii Hoodia (and San identities) are re-invented through various discursive formations. The nature/culture binary is an important conceptual analytic. Feminist scholars have shown how women, people of color, and Indigenous peoples have historically been constructed as closer to nature and thus excluded from culture. This project shows how individuals and groups making claims for rights (e.g., patent ownership, benefit sharing contracts, and bioprospecting permits) deploy, disrupt, and/or refigure nature/culture binaries through narratives of indigeneity, race, and gender. Second is through the emergence of new expressions of what I call “epistemic citizenship.” This refers to the ways in which privileges and responsibilities are being granted in unequal ways based upon whose knowledge matters most to neoliberal economies. To be sure, citizenship has always been linked to knowledge and power. Yet, this research contends that lines of inclusion and exclusion within the nation-state are being drawn in new ways through the expanding regulation and control of knowledge. iii This dissertation of Laura Ann Foster is approved. Richard L. Abel Carole Browner Christine A. Littleton Sandra Harding, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2012 iv DEDICATION PAGE This dissertation is dedicated to the many San men and women who continue to struggle for rights of self-determination. v TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................................ x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................................. xi VITA............................................................................................................................................ xiv Introduction..................................................................................................................................... 1 I. Inquiry and Synopsis ............................................................................................................ 3 II. Contextualizing Hoodia....................................................................................................... 6 III. Theoretical Interventions ................................................................................................... 8 A. Biopolitics ..................................................................................................................... 8 B. Difference.................................................................................................................... 14 C. Citizenship................................................................................................................... 20 IV. Dissertation Overview ..................................................................................................... 26 V. Locating the San................................................................................................................ 33 A. Practices of Naming.................................................................................................... 34 B. Colonial Representations............................................................................................. 36 C. Apartheid Representations .......................................................................................... 40 D. San Governance .......................................................................................................... 42 E. San Identity and Development .................................................................................... 46 VI. Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 48 Chapter One. Situating Feminisms, Patent Law, and the Public Domain .................................... 49 I. Conceptions of the Public Domain..................................................................................... 57 A. Open Public Domain................................................................................................... 60 B. Hybridized Public Domain.......................................................................................... 67 C. Protective Public Domain............................................................................................ 82 D. Egalitarian Public Domains ........................................................................................ 94 II. Situated Public Domains ................................................................................................. 126 III. Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 137 vi Chapter Two. Studying Hoodia: A Feminist Ethnographic Account of the Circulations of Hoodia gordonii.......................................................................................................................... 139 I. Multi-sited, Ethnographic Research of Circulations ........................................................ 144 A. Multi-sited Ethnographies and New Legal Realism ................................................. 144 B. Personal and Professional Circulations..................................................................... 146 C. Tracing the Circulations of Hoodia........................................................................... 149 D. Challenges to Conventional Ethnographic, Socio-legal, and Science Studies Methods..................................................................................................................... 150 II. Opening up the “Data” .................................................................................................... 166 A. Fracturing and Suturing Data through Coding Practices .......................................... 167 B. Memo Writing, Reflexivity, and Ethnographic Fieldnotes....................................... 169 C. Situational Maps........................................................................................................ 173 III. Theoretical/Methodological Frameworks...................................................................... 176 A. Science and Technology Studies–Feminist Science Studies .................................... 177 B. Socio-legal Studies: Critical Race Theory and Feminist Legal Theory.................... 182 IV. Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 201 Chapter Three. Encountering Hoodia: The Historical Construction and Classification of Hoodia gordonii in Relation to the San ...................................................................................... 203 I. Encountering Hoodia........................................................................................................ 206 A. Producing Colonial Science...................................................................................... 208 B. Co-producing Stapeliads and San Bushmen ............................................................. 212 C. Authoring, Discovering Hoodia ................................................................................ 215 II. Classifying Hoodia.......................................................................................................... 221 A. Recording the Hoodia Genus .................................................................................... 225 B. Expanding the Hoodia Genus.................................................................................... 229 III. Molecularizing Hoodia .................................................................................................. 236 A. Molecular Styles of Thought..................................................................................... 237 B.