Dissertation Research: Researching Present Futures: Neoliberalism, Laboratory Science, and Citizenship in Bolivia

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This NSF Science and Technology Studies Dissertation Improvement Grant, will support ethnographic field work at a specific laboratory located in La Paz, Bolivia, in order to examine how a research laboratory conducting investigations into the health and genetics of Bolivian populations is related to broader trends of neo-liberalism, citizenship, identity, and nationalism. This research laboratory is one of the laboratories in Bolivia that has been involved in the recent push over the past several years to increase scientific research conducted in Bolivia with Bolivian materials and personnel. This study thus asks why science has become important to influential Bolivians, why this is happening now, and what role the particular research projects being conducted -- which are rooted in the "cultural patrimony" of the country, a category that includes the genetic materials of Bolivian human populations and their specific attributes, such as adaptation to long-term residence at extremely high altitude -- have in the development of a Bolivian scientific research infrastructure and research agenda. These investigations draw upon specifically Bolivian materials for their objects of study, and the personnel involved in laboratory research conduct experiments utilizing, for instance, laboratory protocols tailored to the specific conditions of Bolivian laboratories. Furthermore, there is a relative lack of ethnographic studies on the growth of scientific research in developing countries, as well as a need for further investigation into how neo-liberal economic policies influence ideas of national identity that in turn shape specific political agendas. Therefore, this project will address issues and processes that have not been extensively studied, while drawing upon and making a contribution to both the science studies and anthropological literature due to the subject matter and methods of investigation. This research will illuminate how a national science infrastructure is developed, and how the research agendas guiding this development reflect and respond to global trends; in this case, the privatization of national resources. It will also show how biology, particularly human biology, is being used to justify certain claims about citizenship, nationhood, and identity by various interest groups. This project is thus more than an ethnography of Bolivia or a focused study of laboratory practices and their epistemologies, for it will speak to issues that are being confronted in increasingly strident, sometimes violent, ways throughout the developing world. In addition, this project will address how scientific research can figure into the framework of a nation and begin elucidating the increasingly privileged role that human biology has in national research agendas throughout the world. Furthermore, as discussed above, it will contribute to several bodies of literature simultaneously, while addressing a previously under-studied area of social life.