Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Present day narratives on and around cloning are often embedded in the polarized narratives of, on the one hand, a dystopian future of excessive social control and, on the other, a benevolent future wherein human suffering is alleviated through new kinds of therapeutics. As different as these may appear, both use the same narrative structure in which technoscientific objects are projected into a predetermined - and often remarkably socially familiar - future. Both narratives make the consequences of cloning for human futures central. In turn, animals become representatives of the consequences cloning may have for humans. In turn, cloned animals are deemed de facto as unproblematic. In order to both problematize this discourse and think about alternative ways to conceptualizing the meanings of cloning(s), this paper employs the symbolic interactionist concepts of “social worlds” and “situational maps” to explore the humans, nonhumans, sites, institutions, epistemic communities, practices, and discourses that converge when animals of endangered species are cloned. I contend that the stakes of cloning can be alternatively articulated when this practice is conceptualized as situated action. Specifically, I show how the endeavor to clone animals of endangered species is made possible by transposing the “technical mediations” used in one type of human-animal relations to another, which links up heterogeneous human and animal ontologies in complex ways. I position these connections as important junctures that illuminate the kinds of stakes that various humans and nonhumans have in cloning endeavors.