In this article the author scrutinizes the application of a novel genetic technology within the context of the timber industry in Indonesia, a country suffering massive deforestation at the rate of 2.8 million hectares every year. It starts by providing a brief description of Doublehelix Tracking Technologies, the first timber accreditation body that uses DNA testing to ensure that the timber procured is from a “known” origin. The article also discusses the historical overview of the various schemes of timber verification practices from the New Order era up to the present day, providing the context in which the third-party verification technology emerges. Data were sourced from public documents and interviews. Drawing on concepts of governmentality and biolegality within Andrew Barry's framework of “technological society,” the author argues that Doublehelix constructs the sense and the importance of DNA technology as “the best possible governor” of timber logging in Indonesia and the problem of transnational timber smuggling. Moreover, the biolegal practice of the technology is revealed in the way it challenges the existing definitions of legality/illegality and constructs identities. Not only does it modify the governmental target (from a set of practices to the materiality of timber), it also creates identities of the timber, that is, which timber meets the criteria to be procured and which timber is of “unknown” origin and subject to further surveillance.
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1 March 2017
Research Article|
March 01 2017
In DNA We Trust?: Biolegal Governmentality and Illegal Logging in Contemporary Indonesia
Arum Budiastuti
Arum Budiastuti
Arum Budiastuti is a lecturer and researcher in social and cultural studies, with main interests in technoculture, environmentalism, critical theories, and consumption practices on the Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Airlangga, Indonesia. She continues to work on the concept of trust in her current research project, “Halal Food, Gendered Consumption, and Technoscience in Indonesia” with the support from the Indonesia Endowment Fund for Education (LPDP).
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East Asian Science, Technology and Society (2017) 11 (1): 51–70.
Article history
Received:
March 09 2015
Accepted:
April 28 2016
Citation
Arum Budiastuti; In DNA We Trust?: Biolegal Governmentality and Illegal Logging in Contemporary Indonesia. East Asian Science, Technology and Society 1 March 2017; 11 (1): 51–70. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/18752160-3641422
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