Calculating life

In recent decades, nation-states have become major stakeholders in nonhuman genetic resource networks as a result of several international treaties. The most important of these is the juridically binding international Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), signed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 by some 150 nations. This convention was a watershed for the identification of global rights related to genetic resources in recognising the sovereign power of signatory nations over their natural resources. The book is an ethnographic work addressing the calculation of life: practices of identifying, evaluating, and collecting nonhuman life in national genetic programmes in Finland. The core of the study is about observations made within the national programmes in 2004–2008, gathered via multi-sited ethnography and related methods derived from the anthropology of science. The research explores the problematic relations of the communal forms of human and nonhuman life in an increasingly technoscientific contemporaneity – the co-production and coexistence of human and nonhuman life in biopolitical formations called nations.