ABSTRACT
In a chapter entitled ‘Databasing the World’, Geof Bowker (2005) urges us to look closely at contemporary memory practices, including the creation of biodiversity databases. The ‘miracle of memory in our time’, he suggests, is that ‘memory practices are materially rampant, invasive, implicated in the core of our being and of our understanding of the world’ (Bowker 2005: 136). Databasing the world is being done as a form of memorizing that world, archiving it, representing it and, it is often claimed, protecting it. Among myriad mundane archiving practices, we are banking seeds, databasing genomes and their DNA sequences, human culture (for example in the form of many indigenous knowledge databases), cloning and banking our pets, and creating vast material/digital biodiversity archives. Bowker calls this a ‘tumult of preservation’. This frenzy, or ‘archive fever’, shadowed by a quest for control or even immanence, treads a perilous line between preservation and loss (Derrida 1995; Serres 1994; Taussig 2004; Yussof 2010, 2011). Through such archives, we are also conjuring the world, suggests Bowker, ‘into a form that makes it (and us) manageable’ (Bowker 2005: 108). Remembering what (and who) we have excluded in this collective frenzy, may be a difficult, but essential, challenge.
